4/28/2011
4/26/2011
Women Surpass Men In Advanced Degrees For First Time
WASHINGTON -- Census figures show women outnumber men for the first time when it comes to finishing college and holding advanced degrees.
The findings released Tuesday come amid record shares of women in the workplace and a steady decline in stay-at-home mothers.
Among adults 25 and older, 10.6 million in the U.S. who earned a master's degree or higher were women, compared to 10.5 million men. Women, however, still lag men in subcategories such as business, science and engineering.
In terms of finishing college, women surpass men in earning bachelor's degrees, by 1.5 million.
Demographers say the educational gains are part of a decades-long trend that is reshaping the workplace and what it means to be a stay-at-home parent.
4/25/2011
Terrific Video: Beastie Boys: Fight for Your Right (Revisited)
via hulu.com
This is a very entertaining, very inspired "sequel" to the Beastie Boys' video for their massive early hit "Fight for Your Right to Party".
If you haven't seen it, check out the original first:
What's after Facebook, Part 2: Incliq and Secret Social
Incliq was founded by Zach Nelson and calls itself "social networking that doesn't suck. I agree with them in general that the Facebook model of social networking is awful, but since there's more than one way to "not suck", lets have a look at their vision. Their view about what makes the typical social network so bad is twofold:
1) "social overload" - too much information from too many people you don't really know or care about and
2) middlemen - using a third party to store and transmit your information
Put simply, Incliq's goal is to minimize your social spam and eliminate the need for a third party
As they put it, the way Facebook is set up benefits Facebook, not you. You can't really organize the people you socialize with to control what info is available to them or from them. And everything you put on Facebook literally sits on Facebook servers for as long as they want. AND third party apps like Farmville also get access to all your data.
Incliq is set up so nothing of yours is ever transmitted to or stored on Incliq.com servers. You may ask, if my pics and messages don't exist on their servers, whose servers does it exist on? Their answer is it doesn't exist on any one group's servers. Instead, in a way it would exist - encrypted - on the computers and connections of numerous people you connect to. They expect you'll agree - and its hard not to - that this is preferable to having it in the possession of a "shadowy corporation" who sells it to whomever they want.
Instead, your info flows across a "mesh" to the people you want to share with. I'm not a computer scientist, but I'll try to briefly explain what this "mesh" is.
A mesh network is the opposite of a traditional network. In a traditional network, a bunch of people log in to a central connection and can interact through it. Imagine if there's one cell phone tower or internet provider in your town - if you call, text or IM with someone, you are connecting through the central hub. In a mesh, everyone is a hub and there is no 'center'.
As different people link up, they each serve as another path through which connections can travel. If any one drops out, there are plenty more connections through which you can send info and interact with people. Ideally, you can trust the other people-hubs in the mesh because you know them. However there is also data encryption that would most likely keep all but the very curious and very computer-literate from thinking twice about "peeking" in on you.
The Good:
I'm very happy with the second core idea behind Incliq - organizing your acquaintances. Like Hibe and 6d, Incliq gets that Facebook is a disaster as tool for interacting with the different types of people in your life. Incliq allows you to organize your friends, family, acquaintances, etc into different groups or 'cliqs'. They don't go into much detail on just how it will work, but one imagines its a set of lists of people, organized around various key concepts or aspects of your life or personality. I look forward to hearing more about how they will impliment this functionality.
The Bad:
I agree and am very happy that their system would ease social overload and basically stop the sale of your data for advertising. However, I'm concerned that certain 'cliqs',especially those composed of people I know or trust less, would be highly worrisome in terms of privacy and security. Perhaps if I knew more about the security I wouldn't be as worried. But given what I understand about "mesh", it seems like the possibilities for viruses, hackers, and just plain mischief is there. I could see this particularly being a problem for the high school set, where actual cliqs can be pretty rough on eachother and their members. It could also be a problem for groups of coworkers for similar problems.
One last thing, though its less important - I'm not thrilled with the name "Incliq". 'Clique' can have a negative connotation and coupling it with "in"seems to highten the negative aspects of the term. But that's just me.
Hopefully it won't do damage to the network because there's a lot of good here and I wish them success. It will be interesting to see how they stack up against Hibe, 6d and Diaspora. At the very least, I'm certain they'll be a much better option than Facebook.
The basic idea is that if you start a conversation on, e.g., Twitter, whether a friend or someone you just met, you can move it to secretsocial and keep it going for up to one week in complete privacy. Once you end the conversation, nothing is saved on their servers. Since you are talking on their servers, once its gone its pretty much gone. (This is an interesting alternative to Incliq's embrace of mesh networks to secure privacy.)
I think the benefits to this are mostly clear. However, I do have some worries, and a few I think are pretty serious. The question is, does their belief that "social is not another word for public" lead them to go too far? I totally agree with them in theory, but just what have they created here?
Is SecretSocial just a safer way to flirt and hook up? I mean, are people going to use this to conduct business? I keep thinking about The Wire and how hard it is for police to get wires on cell phones (sometimes this is a good thing). Well, with SecretSocial, it would simply be impossible to tap in to a criminal operation's private communications. And there would be no text messaging transcripts to look at either. So it seems that this service would be *ideal* for people who actively wanted to do things like cheat or organize illegal activities.
That alone is definitely not a reason to kill SecretSocial or even for you to not use it for normal purposes. Or even for naughty-but-not-criminal purposes. But its something to think about. The funny thing is, SecretSocial really seems to be a bit of a 'bonus' or extra feature to the company's bread and butter, Civiguard, which is supposed to help organizations such as municipal police departments or first responders organize their assets.
Conclusion
1. Hibe
2. 6d
3. Incliq
4. SecretSocial
4/22/2011
4/19/2011
What's After Facebook, Part 1: 6d and Hibe
Regardless of mobile-related plans, 6d's goal is to let people who want total control of their content - photos, thoughts, etc, - build their online identity. The person / persona can then chose to share with whomever they want in whatever fashion they want. Or they can just keep everything organized and not share at all.
They seem to think in terms of a person having one online identity, establishing it, and cultivating it with the app. The driving force behind that view is something I certainly sympathize with; if you are using a free service such as Facebook to 'be online', you're actually the product. Facebook uses whatever you contribute, be it a pic, a link, a like, a friend list, a list of favorite movies, etc, to make money for itself. If you didn't give it "you" it would not have anything to do. In exchange it makes it relatively simple for you to access your friends.
But as I've discussed in previous posts, Facebook can't make any money unless they find more ways to use you. To make a crude analogy, Facebook wants to be as efficient and profitable with you as hog farmers are with their pigs ("you can use every part of a pig except the squeal" is the old saying). But hey, the hogs get a constant food supply, room to roam around, and a cozy place to sleep so its a pretty good deal. It sure beats foraging!
If you don't feel real good about that, you should ask yourself why you're doing it.If you want total control of your "personal brand" or online identity and the ability to grow it over time, perhaps you should look to 6d for an alternative.
As excited as I am about 6d, I'm even more thrilled with the idea of Hibe. The reason being it explicitly goes beyond the idea of sharing or even curating one identity and begins with the idea that in fact your identity is made up of numerous smaller contexts.
You can choose to share the same things with all those groups, but you certainly aren't forced to default to that level of sharing. Their point is that the fact that Facebook does force that on you means you can't really be yourself with anyone.
So their work gears around fine tuning a way for you to create your online presence while still managing different parts of yourself. To do this you create multiple 'contexts' that you can group people and pics and ideas around, and manage them that way rather than Facebook's way which makes it nearly impossible to keep everyone you know from seeing it all.
I've already signed myself up for an account on this platform and in the next 2-3 weeks I'll definitely update here often regarding my thoughts on whether it is user friendly, labor intensive, etc and most of all, whether it works. But from the outside looking in, this seems extremely promising. Be sure to check out their video on their website.
Later this week we'll take a look at Incliq and Secret Social.
4/18/2011
Why 'Business' is an awful major
PAUL M. MASON does not give his business students the same exams he gave 10 or 15 years ago. “Not many of them would pass,” he says.
Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. “We used to complain that K-12 schools didn’t hold students to high standards,” he says with a sigh. “And here we are doing the same thing ourselves.”
That might sound like a kids-these-days lament, but all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.
Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major.
This is not a small corner of academe. The family of majors under the business umbrella — including finance, accounting, marketing, management and “general business” — accounts for just over 20 percent, or more than 325,000, of all bachelor’s degrees awarded annually in the United States, making it the most popular field of study.
Brand-name programs — the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business, and a few dozen others — are full of students pulling 70-hour weeks, if only to impress the elite finance and consulting firms they aspire to join. But get much below BusinessWeek’s top 50, and you’ll hear pervasive anxiety about student apathy, especially in “soft” fields like management and marketing, which account for the majority of business majors.
Scholars in the field point to three sources of trouble. First, as long ago as 1959, a Ford Foundation report warned that too many undergraduate business students chose their majors “by default.” Business programs also attract more than their share of students who approach college in purely instrumental terms, as a plausible path to a job, not out of curiosity about, say, Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm.
“Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters,” says Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School who is a prominent critic of the field. It’s an attitude that Dr. Khurana first saw in M.B.A. programs but has migrated, he says, to the undergraduate level.
Second, in management and marketing, no strong consensus has emerged about what students ought to learn or how they ought to learn it. And finally, with large student-faculty ratios and no lab equipment, business has historically been cheaper to operate than most departments. Cynics say many colleges are content.
“At the big public universities, the administrations need us to be credible, but I’m not sure that they need us to be very good,” says J. David Hunger, a scholar-in-residence in the management program at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University, in Collegeville, Minn. “They need us to be cash cows.”
Read the rest here: nytimes.com
A fascinating, lengthy article on how business students are finishing college learning nothing.
4/17/2011
Facebook sucks, but what would good social networking be?
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you know I’ve been pretty critical of Facebook. In fact, I started my Posterous blog in order to have a place to publish the types of links I used to share on my Facebook feed after I quit Facebook.
I quit Facebook on May 1st, 2010 and that week I wrote a post explaining my reasons. The basic point was that being on Facebook is a business. They provide a service in exchange for a fee and the service and fee changed significantly from when I started on it. I reviewed what I was getting from them (connections to people I know) and what they were getting from me (free content and troves of data on me and my friends and family). I decided it was a really bum deal, so I quit.
Around that time I also thought a lot about what good social networking would be. My main point was that real communication between people – or even between a ‘brand’ and a consumer – depends on what I called “tethering”. If you’re talking to someone you don’t care about, the things you talk about float away and you don’t bond. Friends bond when they spend time together, even when they talk about nothing. And people who identify with a product or service bond when they honestly interact with it.
The question is whether and to what extent Facebook allows that. Imagine a person’s social networking self as comprised of three rings radiating outward:
What a good social network service would do would be to allow you to grow and cultivate these three rings without forcing you to merge them, and without forcing you to go crazy balancing
them.
I was originally attracted to Facebook by the opportunity for core-building. It was better than Myspace just because you could establish and solidify your core, and simultaneously connect to and have some distance from your extended network. MySpace was too open, exposing your core to the world of strangers, with a very low payoff.
But Facebook’s business model has turned out to be getting a person’s core ring and their extended network of rings mushed together in the name of aggregating data to eventually sell.
Inspite of Facebook’s growth over the past year, I remain convinced that the wheels have already come off this business model.
Which brings me to my real point of this post – “anti Facebooks”.
The core ideas behind ‘anti Facebooks’ are that
1) You should be able to create a social media self or presence that works in the way the real life you works – sharing different aspects of yourself with different people, without fear of “killing independent George”.
2) You, not the platform, should own your content
I am 100% behind these goals and will sing the praises of anyone who can deliver them.
Over the last year, there’s been some hype about one such possible service, Diaspora*. They have gotten serious seed money, discussion in the New York Times and throughout the blogosphere, and a lengthy profile in New York magazine. I’m all for them and I hope they launch with success.
I quit Facebook on May 1st, 2010 and that week I wrote a post explaining my reasons. The basic point was that being on Facebook is a business. They provide a service in exchange for a fee and the service and fee changed significantly from when I started on it. I reviewed what I was getting from them (connections to people I know) and what they were getting from me (free content and troves of data on me and my friends and family). I decided it was a really bum deal, so I quit.
Around that time I also thought a lot about what good social networking would be. My main point was that real communication between people – or even between a ‘brand’ and a consumer – depends on what I called “tethering”. If you’re talking to someone you don’t care about, the things you talk about float away and you don’t bond. Friends bond when they spend time together, even when they talk about nothing. And people who identify with a product or service bond when they honestly interact with it.
The question is whether and to what extent Facebook allows that. Imagine a person’s social networking self as comprised of three rings radiating outward:
1) Their core: close friends, family and the activities and brands they identify themselves with and are strongly tethered to,
2) extended networks of acquaintances and their interests, such as exist almost exclusively on Facebook or LinkedIn, which provide on occasion some interesting new item or experience,
3) strangers, brands and activities that exist on the periphery; things they may have seen or heard of in passing but paid no attention to.
What a good social network service would do would be to allow you to grow and cultivate these three rings without forcing you to merge them, and without forcing you to go crazy balancing
them.
I was originally attracted to Facebook by the opportunity for core-building. It was better than Myspace just because you could establish and solidify your core, and simultaneously connect to and have some distance from your extended network. MySpace was too open, exposing your core to the world of strangers, with a very low payoff.
But Facebook’s business model has turned out to be getting a person’s core ring and their extended network of rings mushed together in the name of aggregating data to eventually sell.
Inspite of Facebook’s growth over the past year, I remain convinced that the wheels have already come off this business model.
Which brings me to my real point of this post – “anti Facebooks”.
The core ideas behind ‘anti Facebooks’ are that
1) You should be able to create a social media self or presence that works in the way the real life you works – sharing different aspects of yourself with different people, without fear of “killing independent George”.
2) You, not the platform, should own your content
I am 100% behind these goals and will sing the praises of anyone who can deliver them.
Over the last year, there’s been some hype about one such possible service, Diaspora*. They have gotten serious seed money, discussion in the New York Times and throughout the blogosphere, and a lengthy profile in New York magazine. I’m all for them and I hope they launch with success.
But I’m going to take the time over the next week to write about four other possible contenders that I find very interesting and promising.
I’ll begin with the first two tomorrow.
Five myths about how to save gas in your car
With global turmoil continuing to threaten higher gas prices — especially with the summer driving season just around the corner — it is little surprise that many people are looking for ways to save money on gas.
Indeed, as gas moves toward the $4.00 per gallon level that many think is inevitable, increasing fuel economy becomes even more important. We want to be able get the most for our gas station dollar. It is tempting to believe that you can do a few simple things and then find yourself raking in the savings. The truth, though, is that some “conventional” wisdom about saving money on gas is outdated. Or even downright false. Here are five gas saving tips that probably won’t do much in terms of saving you money at the pump:
1. Add a “Special” Device to Your Fuel Line
If you look online, you can find any number of products that claim to improve your fuel efficiency. All you have to do is install some device in your fuel line or other part of your care, and then watch as the “miracle” saves you money. Unfortunately, few — if any — of these devices actually work. The Federal Trade Commission makes it clear that there are no “gas saving” devices endorsed by the government. Watch out, too, for false claims that EPA testing has been conducted and that the device has been “proven” effective.
2. Pour Additives into Your Gas Tank
On top of adding special devices to your car, there are some claims made that you can dump a bottle-full of some special fuel additive to increase your fuel efficiency, or clean the insides of your car to make it more efficient. Others claim that you can use oil additives to help increase fuel efficiency. It doesn’t appear that these additives are likely to help you any more than adding a special device to your car.
3. Switch Out Your Air Filter
It’s true that properly maintaining your car can help it run better and more efficiently in general. In the past, recommendations were made that changing your air filter could help matters. Ditto for a high performance filter. However, if this were true in the past, it isn’t now. Consumer Reports points out that computerized cars have other ways to compensate. Changing your air filter is unlikely to do much on its own. Instead, you will need to develop an overall habit of better car maintenance to get as much as you can for your money.
4. Fill Your Tank When The Air Temperature is Cooler
I remember being told that the best time to fill your gas tank is in the morning. The air temperature is colder, so fuel is denser. I remember someone telling me that warm air will help the gas expand later, so you get less taking up more room in your tank. The truth, though, is that it probably doesn’t matter enough to make an appreciable difference. In fact, think about where the gas is stored: Underground. It’s already at a cooler temperature — no matter how hot it is outside.
5. Don’t Turn Off the Car When Running Errands
It used to be that the conventional wisdom was that you should keep your car running if you were just running errands. Whether you were visiting the bank, or just chatting with a neighbor, turning off the car was a no-no. You might remember hearing that it took more gas to start your car than to just let it idle. Perhaps this was true in the past. However, the miracle we know as fuel injection has changed things. Idling your car really does use up more gas than starting it. It’s also a myth that modern cars need to “warm-up” for a few minutes before driving them in winter.
What gas saving myths are you surprised that people believe?
(mwichary)
{ 28 comments, please add your thoughts now! }
Related Posts
4/15/2011
Siren Fest Cancelled! New Village Voice Music Festival Coming To Seaport: Gothamist
via gothamist.com
I enjoyed the Siren festival down at Coney Island several times. I'm sad to see it move since I find it so difficult to get out to Coney otherwise. But I'm excited that the new festival will be that much closer to home.
GOP Budget Plan Very Unpopular
People do pay attention. And people are NEVER going to be for gutting Medicare/Medicaid. Never. And - surprise? - very few want to give tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires. People don't really believe its 'right' or practical, or that it would grow the economy.GOP Budget Plan Very Unpopular
A new Democracy Corps poll finds the Republican deficit reduction plan gets only 48% support, "but when voters learn almost anything about it, they turn sharply and intensely against it."
Key findings: "When the budget is described -- using as much of Paul Ryan's description as possible -- support collapses to 36% with just 19% strongly supporting the plan. The facts in the budget lose people almost immediately -- dropping 12 points. Putting the spotlight on this budget is damning. A large majority of 56% oppose it, 42% strongly. The impact is much stronger with seniors where support erodes from 48% to just 32%, with 57% opposed. Support with independents drops from 55% to 43%."
But Republican lawmakers will continue to try every few years. It would allow them to return even more money to the very wealthy.
4/14/2011
Facebook's 'Previous Status Updates' Bring Back Unwanted Memories - The Consumerist
via consumerist.com
Hahhaha. Facebook. They seem determined to find a way to alienate their subscribers. Its as if they've never heard the expression "let sleeping dogs lie". I'm looking forward to the day when people wake up to what a mess FB has become. I think there will be some interesting "anti facebooks" popping out this summer.
4/13/2011
Another victory for Pres Obama: Budget Deal Actually Cut Less Than $15 Billion
Looking for a political job? Start your search at Political Job Hunt.
April 12, 2011
Budget Deal Actually Cut Less Than $15 Billion
The full extent of the budget deal reached late Friday did not become clear until today "after congressional aides worked all weekend and all day Monday to shape a detailed spending plan based on the framework that Obama and congressional leaders agreed to Friday," the Washington Post reports."In several cases, what look like large reductions are actually accounting gimmicks."
National Journal: "The specifics show that finding nearly $40 billion in cuts during the 2011 fiscal year required clever accounting and, for the White House, a willingness to concede on rhetoric to find gains on substance. For example, the final cuts in the deal are advertised as $38.5 billion less than was appropriated in 2010, but after removing rescissions, cuts to reserve funds and reductions in mandatory spending programs, discretionary spending will be reduced only by $14.7 billion."
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To Obama critics on the left - When are you going to learn? Please refrain from the histrionics and doom and gloom while actual work is being done.
4/12/2011
Voters Sour on House Republicans
Voters Sour on House Republicans
A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that House Republicans "have fallen so far out of favor with the American public that it's entirely possible Democrats could take control of the House back next year."Key findings: 43% of voters think that House Republicans are doing a worse job now than the Democrats did, compared to only 36% who think the GOP has brought an improvement while 19% think things are about the same.
Stunningly, independent voters now say they'd vote Democratic for the House by a 42% to 33% margin, representing a 28 point reversal in a span of just five months.
Not surprising at all. There never was a conservative wave. People were just tired of government. If there was a third party they would have gotten elected. Well. That's sort of what happened isn't it.
Ikea: Workers' complaints surround Ikea's U.S. factory
Here's an excerpt:
"Laborers in Swedwood plants in Sweden produce bookcases and tables similar to those manufactured in Danville. The big difference is that the Europeans enjoy a minimum wage of about $19 an hour and a government-mandated five weeks of paid vacation. Full-time employees in Danville start at $8 an hour with 12 vacation days — eight of them on dates determined by the company."
I admit I like Ikea on a visceral level and I've enjoyed a lot of their products. But
as much as I hate it when I hear how 'American' companies who let foreign workers be treated like garbage, Gap, for example, I hate it even more when companies who trade on good reputations treat American employees worse than those in their homelands.
Just because the state of Virginia doesn't care about workers doesn't mean you get to follow suit.
Ikea, you are about to tarnish your brand, which up to now has been just as good looking - and a lot sturdier - than your furniture and glassware.
4/11/2011
46% of Mississippi Republicans think Interracial marriage should be illegal
Against Loving In Mississippi
PPP parses a disturbing new poll:
We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal.
Palin's net favorability with folks who think interracial marriage should be illegal (+55 at 74/19) is 17 points higher than it is with folks who think interracial marriage should be legal (+38 at 64/26.) Meanwhile Romney's favorability numbers see the opposite trend. He's at +23 (53/30) with voters who think interracial marriage should be legal but 19 points worse at +4 (44/40) with those who think it should be illegal. Tells you something about the kinds of folks who like each of those candidates.
I"d bet dollars to donuts that 100% of the 46% are Birthers and call themselves Christians.
4/09/2011
My Posterous blog's performance in year one
I signed up for Posterous in mid-December of 2009, but I didn't really start posting until January 28th, 2010. So its been just over a year since I've really been active on this blog.
I started the blog because I wanted to quit Facebook and still have a way to share the sorts of stuff I was sharing on my FB feed. I didn't like the idea that I had a 'captive audience' because
1. I didn't want to impose on my friends and acquaintances,
2. I felt I was providing FB with free content for little in return and
3. I felt I could reach a broader audience outside of FB.
I decided to run some analytics on the blog's usage and I found some kind-of-cool info that I'll share with you below. Looking over these stats, I think I hit all my goals pretty well.
The basics of it are that people tend to come to my blog either looking for me or pretty randomly. They typically only look at the one post they land, so they don't stay very long and explore.
This means either they found exactly what they wanted, got it and left, or they found nothing at all of use and left.
If I want to grow my blog, I either need more friends who want to look for me or I need to find a way to make content related to my visitors more visible to them with some sort of keyword filter.
Overall, though, I'm pretty pleased with the year one and am excited about year two.
From Posterous' analytics:
- 383 Posts
- Average of 26 posts per month
- 27,051 site loads, for an average of 71 views per post (according to Posterous' very liberal standards)
- Most popular post: 1,372 views
Google Analytics (since March 28, 2010)
- 1,647 visitors
- 1,326 unique visitors
- 2,748 pages viewed
- 80% new visitors, 20% returning visitors
- Visitors from 47 countries
- Top Countries:
- USA - 1,338 visitors
- Canada - 65
- Greece - 46
- UK - 37
- India - 20
- Netherlands -17
- Brazil - 13
- Australia - 12
- Germany - 11
- France - 7
- Top US States
- New York - 532
- California - 101
- South Carolina - 71
- Texas - 64
- New Jersey - 62
- Massachussets - 58
- Pennsylvania - 48
- Florida - 38
- North Carolina - 31
- Illinois - 30
- Top post: 257 views
Statcounter (since January 31, 2011
- 353 page views
- 310 unique visitors
- 83% new visitors, 17% returning visitors
- Most popular page: 65 views (homepage)
- Top Countries
- US - 71%
- Canada 7%
- India 5%
- UK 3%
- Top States
- New York
- California
- New Jersey
- Florida
- Texas
- Pennsylvania
- Virginia
- South Carolina
- Massachussets
- Illinois
4/06/2011
The Absolute Moron’s Guide to Paul Ryan’s Budget Plan -- Daily Intel
There's going to be a lot of talk now and in the future about exactly what Republican congressman Paul Ryan's plan to reduce the national debt would entail and the consequences of such policies. Since it's no fun listening to conversations you don't understand, we've put together an FAQ for those of you who are not just kind of confused, but utterly, hopelessly clueless about what Ryan's proposals are about.
...So how does Ryan want to change this "Medicare"?
Under Ryan's proposal, starting in 2022, the government would no longer insure your medical care, but instead provide you with a subsidy to help you pay for insurance from a private carrier. In essence, instead of saying, "Here is some health-care insurance, elderly people," Medicare would be saying, "Here is some money, elderly people, use it to buy health insurance."
Tomato, tomahto, right? This is controversial?
Yes, because while it would save a ton of money for the government, there could be consequences for the elderly. The government is helping them get insurance, but no longer guaranteeing it. If Medicare enrollees can't afford the insurance they desire with the subsidy they've been given, that's too bad. They have to spend more of their own money, or, if they don't have the money, buy a lesser plan or even possibly forgo care altogether.
I also heard that Ryan's plan would alter Medicaid, which I'm pretty sure is a robot.
It is not a robot. Medicaid is the government health-care program for the poor, and under Ryan's plan, it will switch to a block grant system.
So the cash will be stacked in a more efficient rectangular shape, saving on shipping costs.
Sort of, but not really, at all. Currently, the federal government matches the money that states spend on Medicaid, so as states spend more, the federal government spends more. Under the block grant system, the federal government would just send a defined chunk of money to the states.
And that matters because ...?
If the federal government gives the states less money for Medicaid, the states, already cash-strapped, could find themselves in trouble. As seventeen Democratic governors recently wrote in a letter to congressional leaders, "We strongly oppose a congressionally-mandated block grant of federal Medicaid spending, which would shift costs and risk to states. Such a cost shift would severely undercut our ability to provide health care to our residents and adequately pay providers."
But doesn't reducing the debt mean making sacrifices? Everyone doing their part? For example, I'm going to stop brushing with toothpaste.
That's very noble of you, but personally saving money will not help reduce the debt. And while you're right that scaling back government spending should require everyone to sacrifice, this plan isn't asking for everyone to sacrifice. For example, changes in Medicare will only affect people currently 55 years old or younger. Everyone older than that — people who vote a lot, coincidentally — doesn't have to worry about affording health insurance.
Nevertheless, surely rich and poor alike will have to sacrifice.
Actually, no. As part of the tax-reform part of the plan, the tax rate for corporations and the top income bracket would be lowered from 35 percent to 25 percent, while the lost revenue would be offset by ending various deductions, exemptions, and credits that save money for the middle class. According to the Center for Tax Justice, taxes for the poorest 90 percent of Americans would rise under this plan.
But doesn't the middle class need money more than the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans?
They do. As Jonathan Chait writes, Ryan's plan includes "a huge tax cut for people who don't really need it." But Republicans believe that after giving more money to rich people, it will trickle down to the rest of us eventually. It's called trickle-down economics.
Right. At least Ryan has produced a solid proposal that stands up to the close scrutiny it was inevitably going to face.
Not really. Internet sleuths have quickly picked away at some of the plan's underlying assumptions. For one, it assumes that medical spending will rise at the rate of inflation, when in reality it will almost certainly rise much faster than that. In addition, Ryan's plan is apparently supposed to herald in an unheard-of unemployment rate of 2.8 percent, which the country hasn't seen since the early fifties. As Paul Krugman writes, "If Obama tried to claim that his policies would achieve anything like this, he’d be laughed out of office."
via nymag.com
Which Airports Have the Most Unfair Fares?
Alas, my hometown has one of the most overpriced airports in the country. And regional options are just as bad. Maybe I'll start driving when I go visit?
4/05/2011
Target beating Wal-Mart on prices
via money.cnn.com
Not that I'm a huge proponent of Target - I've seen good ones and bad ones, and the one in Manhattan left me kind of 'blah' - but I don't do business with walmart. I've tried for years to keep my mom from going there with economic arguments but she likes the convenience of the one near her house and believes the prices are better than the local grocery chain. Hopefully this will help.
4/04/2011
Goldman Borrowed From Fed Discount Window at Least Five Times, Data Show - Bloomberg
via bloomberg.com
Looks like they just plain lied when they said "“we used it one night at the request of the Fed to make sure our systems were linked with their systems, and it was for a de minimis amount of money.”
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