Tag: NSA

Links 2016-9-7

Living in the Age of Outrage. Maybe we’ve surpassed the point at which additional connectivity and interaction will continue to benefit the human brain.

The NSA spying on us is now officially putting us all at risk. Written by Bruce Schneier whose blog you can find in the sidebar.

Cool post on taking back the word “neoliberal”. More from a British perspective than American, but same idea I think as this blog and neoclassical liberalism.

Duke Professor Michael Munger (blog linked in the sidebar) gave a short talk about different healthcare systems, and some of the problems in the American set up.

An interesting healthcare idea mentioned in the last link, and discussed at length in this Cato paper. An idea I had previously thought about what having insurance cover increasing progressive percentages of healthcare costs as your costs went up. This is essentially like a high deductible plan, but perhaps you pay for 100% of your first $1000 healthcare costs, 50% of your second $1000, 25% of the next $2000, and so on. However, high deductibles don’t really work for low income individuals. Instead, this paper proposes that for very expensive procedures, the insurance company would pay the patient an amount to forego the procedure. If it’s just something they are considering, they will just take the money. If it’s really required, they’ll go through with it. It’s true that more low income individuals will forego the procedure, but if we argue that shouldn’t be allowed, we are arguing they shouldn’t be allowed to get free money. Not very ethical.

Paid parental leave isn’t a free lunch. Author is a blogger at EconLog, linked in the sidebar.

Interesting point by Bryan Caplan on a “reverse Animal Farm” situation. In the Soviet Union, Pravda would talk about how much better things were while things were actually awful; today, the media focuses on how terrible things are despite us being in an unparalleled era of peace and prosperity. Weirder still, Pravda was a propaganda outlet, but our media is competitive meaning that they are spouting what we want to hear. Of course, that also explains lots of overly emotional happy stories of dogs being rescued or clickbait listicles, so it’s not all doom and gloom as Caplan says.

The reasonableness of radicalism. An good read from Libertarianism.org that makes you think about the historical context of various beliefs. By historical standards people today are radical democrats, radical egalitarians, and radical libertarians. Therefore, we can justify beliefs thought radical today by asserting future societies would find those beliefs obvious. Of course, the author largely ignores that we could guess the wrong direction the world moves in; many left-wing intellectuals (and others) in the early 20th century thought it was obvious that communism or at least socialism was the future. They believed their support of overthrowing the bourgeoisie was the right way to approach things. Communists today are a bit wacky. Perhaps it would be safer to just argue for incremental changes in the right direction.

When you change the world and no one notices. Apparently it took about five years for the anyone to notice the Wright Brothers had already invented fixed-wing flight. Someone even predicated flight was a long way off a year after the Wright Brothers had flown at Kitty Hawk.

Last week had an excellent episode of The Fifth Column (podcast website). I recommend skipping the first 20 minutes unless you’re really interested in the Colin Kaepernick debate. Michael Moynihan makes a great point which is that Donald Trump is a pussy. He did talk about the border wall with Mexico’s president, but when asked about it, he said they didn’t discuss it. Then later when he was safely back in Arizona, then he said Mexico would definitely pay for the wall. But when actually in Mexico, he chickened out and avoided the subject. It’s remarkably politician-like and unpresidential. The whole rest of the episode though is great.

In the quest to get more people to know about Gary Johnson, BalancedRebellion.com has an amazing video from “dead Abe Lincoln” to let people know they can use the website to find another voter who would otherwise vote for the “other candidate”, and together they can both vote for Gary Johnson like they want to without the risk of accidentally helping to elect the person they hate more.

Comment on Reddit.

Links 2016-03-24

Scott Alexander has a new post on happiness and economic growth. There must be a name for this paradox, because it’s blindingly obvious if you think about it: Right now, compare your life to the life of 100 years ago, given your current standing in society. Your life right now is way better, you have time to spend on internet learning and debating about ideas in ways you couldn’t dream of 100 years ago. You have better food choices, longer life expectancy, better pop culture, more stimulating interests, far easier communication with distant relatives, and so on. And yet, the exact same thing will be said about our lives compared to the lives of those who live 100 years in the future. Sure, those lives will be better, but I don’t know how much that bothers us today unless we really think about it. Most people are pretty excited to live today at the frontier of human knowledge, and we don’t see it as a loss that we don’t have cheap self-driving cars and instant delivery groceries for low cost.

But yet, when you do think about it, we hate sitting in traffic or having to go to the store to pick something up, and we wish we had technologies that could get rid of those inconveniences. Yet, I bet people in the future will just have other errands they hate doing just like we hate sitting in traffic. But they will be inconveniences for future people who are tolerating them so that they can do even more awesome things that we can’t imagine, just like people 100 years didn’t sit in traffic because they didn’t own cars at all.

It’s very confusing. On a personal scale, obviously it would be ridiculous to complain about your current standing, because future technologies haven’t been invented yet. So of course everyone is pretty satisfied with what technology level they live in. Yet, our lives are obviously better for having these technologies. How do we reconcile this?

In the last month, I’ve often thought that the closest president we’ve had to Donald Trump is Andrew Jackson; Trump is a loud-mouthed, populist who falls outside of the mainstream party system, yet has significant support from non-elites and were despised by the elites themselves.  This is also the perfect description for Andrew Jackson, who was so successful in this movement, he founded the Democratic Party. David Friedman comes to the same conclusion via a different route.

That last link caused me to run into a real problem with Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson grammatically. One subject is dead and one is alive, so what is the proper verb tense to use? Stack Exchange suggested this, which is honestly kind of lame.

Scott Sumner discusses socialism and France. He makes a short argument that France sounds like a pretty good model country for modern socialism: high amount of skilled civil servants, broad support for socialist policies, a willing government to implement them, and a modern, developed economy.  Yet, Bernie Sanders supporters often reach for the Nordic countries rather than France as the big-welfare state (“socialist”) ideal.  Why is French socialist policy somewhat of a political flop, while Nordic countries are idealized? And would a Bernie-America look like Denmark or maybe better, or perhaps more like France, or even worse? Given the size and diversity of America’s population and economy, France seems closer than Denmark, although both are closer to each other than the US. The only socialistic countries of comparable size seem to be the China and the Soviet Union which have forms of socialism even Bernie Sanders would abhor. Mostly.

Do you have no friends? Never fear, it’s because really, really smart people are better off with few friends.

Bryan Caplan’s model of the Right and Left, and how it’s oddly doing well this election cycle.

Overcoming Bias discusses the cost and benefits of voting. How much would you pay to have your vote count more? His conclusion is that we don’t vote to change the outcome of the election.

Surprise! NSA data will soon be used for routine policing! Coverage from the New York Times, and the Massachusetts ACLU as well.

Bryan Caplan also has a good discussion of libertarian critiques of welfare.  Matt Zwolinski has a good counter post. I like the idea of bleeding heart libertarianism, or market liberalism or whatever, so I think Caplan’s critiques are pointed at exactly what I believe, which is excellent! You always want to have your beliefs critiqued by smart people. I think Caplan is right on many of his points, but I feel like my views are more politically practical. Voters obviously want some form of welfare for the poor, and at least that part could be done more efficiently with my ideas.

This is a good write up on the decentralized crypto-currency-ish entity Ethereum; Reason also did a recent video on it.   Very soon I’ll be able to explain to people what it actually does. Right after I’ve figured out how to install it.  If you want to learn about it without me, here is Ethereum’s website.

Fact checking Trump on trade. Why do we talk about trade deficits? I have no idea why they matter.  Is it a problem if I buy a phone from Apple and I live in New York instead of California? Is there now a trade deficit between New York and California since I sent money out of my local community? No, nobody cares. And for the US, it’s even less relevant, since those dollars that US citizens spent have to come back to the US to be redeemed for goods and services. It would be like if I paid for my iPhone in New York dollars that had to come back to New York. I’m a free trade proponent, but I’m not deaf to some concerns people might have about trade, but this is one of the worst anti-free trade arguments you could make.