Open Note to Retailers...Dedicated to Guitar Center

So, it appears in our spare time (between 2-3a), we're going to take up electric guitar. We decided that Guitar Hero is an absolute waste of space, we can push buttons, let's learn a craft. T has an old one that's he's taken apart and is going to need a lot of work, and I don't have one at all, so we decided to do our homework and get some gear.

Imagine the glee when we found that Guitar Center is running tax day specials, (since we'd have to purchase, at minimum 2 guitars and an amp) that we could get up to $100 off our order, because hobbies ain't cheap, bitches. Well, decent musical instruments aren't anyway. I played bassoon for over a decade; ever price one of those things? Hint: you could buy a car.

Note to retailers, if you run a sale, then exclude everything from such sale, it's not a sale, but a gimmick. Exactly ONE of my items qualified. They had a note on their website that if you had exclusions, call them. So, I'm thinking, given the size of this order since this stuff is excluded, you might cut me a little break, yeah?

HELL NO. Basically, the Customer Service Rep told me that once she keyed in everything (manually), there might be specials that aren't online advertised. So, I asked, "you're not going to make me redo this order manually with you, and spend 20 minutes out of my life before you tell me there are no special deals, when I can just do this one I've already got online in a couple of minutes?" She assured me, "defnitely not", that there are deals that they can't run online.

The short of it, is that she lied. I spent 20 minutes doing a phone order, there were no special deals, and the thanks I got was some nice young lady trying to upsell me on extended warranties. No little 5-10% discount or whatever because the order was a biggun or anything. Just a "fuck you very much, what's your credit card number?" Actually, she was totally nice, I'm just pretty dissatisfied with Guitar Center right now.

So, what was on special? Well Roland (excluded) would allow some obscure synthesizer to be sold on the promotion. Basically, a lot of back stock shit nobody wants is on sale. They're running a deceptive special and I just wanted to take my 5 minutes and let people know.

Try Musician's Friend (their tax day special is a bit of a gimmick as well) or One Music Square. The latter is a small town shop out of Huntsville who will match any advertised price. Anything but Guitar Center, because right now, as far as I'm concerned, Guitar Center is stupid and sucks balls.

Crumbling Grandeur

Detroit has some really neat architecture that is currently falling into ruins. Volumes can be written about the collapse of the American auto industry and it's former leading city. On other days I could work up a few hundred words on my speculation as to the causes and conditions that led to the problems, but today I just have pictures.

Boom

65 years ago today, we unleashed the power of the atom. We remain the only country to have turned our enemies into radioactive ash.

So much for all the post-apocalyptic sci-fi. Piggy's a middle manager at a bank, Heiro is probably taking his ass down to the Quickie Mart for a slushie, Leibowitz toils away dutifully on his military engineering, Vault-Tec went bankrupt back in the 60s, and here we all are.

Doesn't mean it still can't happen, though.

Location, Location, Dislocation

So the .gov has been running ads about flood insurance. Perhaps you've seen them? Some guy stands there with a roof floating over his head and explains how he's a home, and homes need flood insurance, and you should buy some flood insurance.

I'll be honest. Flood insurance infuriates me. Well, flood insurance in the abstract doesn't bother me a bit. The National Flood Insurance Program disturbs me greatly. Here's how it works. You pay a pittance to the feds to insure your house. When your house floods, the feds write you a check. This would be all well and good except the premiums the fed takes in don't cover the checks the feds have to write. The advertisements are so the feds can drum up new revenue sources to help cover the losses instead of robbing the general revenue.

I'd be in favor of the program if it were actuarially sound. It's not. Insurance rates aren't based on risk, they're based on politics. Flood insurance rates are set artificially low. Apparently, pricing the insurance accurately would lead to people moving or not getting flood insurance. Either one works for me if we don't bail people out when bad shit happens. Unfortunately, we do.

Any insurance that is subsidized by the government leads people to make stupid choices. In this case, building houses in floodplains. If Joe and Jane Homeowner had to bear the real cost of their flood insurance themselves, we wouldn't see many houses built below sea level in a swamp.

So what do we get instead? We subsidize flood insurance to make it cheaper to build houses on floodplains. So more people build houses on floodplains, thus ensuring more losses when the inevitable flood happens. We've created a lovely feedback loop of bad decisions. When the program blows up fiscally, do we ever start to rethink the initial bad decision of subsidizing insurance? Nope. Our legislators and bureaucrats tweak the margins in a perpetual attempt to keep the game going. Revisiting the initial assumption of providing subsidized insurance never enters the debate.

If you look around, you can see plenty of examples of similar dynamics at work in a lot of federal programs. So we keep throwing money down ratholes, and we're rapidly going broke. I wonder why?

Zombocalypse

So, in regards to the zombie apocalypse advice I passed along earlier, I would like to note that May is apparently Zombie Awareness Month. I only ask that you don't put a ribbon on your car for the occasion, since ribbon proliferation has run amuck and should be stopped. I hesitate to say force is necessary to stop the scourge of cause ribbons, but it may yet come to that.

Anyhow, Tam is back on Zombie Apocalypse this morning, and the good folks at Zombie Squad never leave the subject.

H/t to one of the others for the notification of Zombie Awareness Month.

Preparedness

Tam sums it up nicely:

If you are prepared for the dead to walk the earth in search of human brains, then a hurricane or attempted mugging is no big deal.

I'm more prepared for a hurricane than the living dead, but I should be okay for a while in either event.

And while you're preparing, here's a handy tip. We used dimes in the Army. Somebody says quarters are harder. Now I'm wondering what the physics implies.

ObamaCare Supporters Are The 3/5ths Who Shouldn't Vote

Well, I think I’ve calmed down enough to have this post not be just an endless tirade of profanity. What the hell, even the morons at io9 have chimed in on health care and how it will prevent possible future dystopias. If they can chime in with their completely asinine nonsense, I figure I’m entitled. However, if you, for whatever misguided reason, supported this monstrosity, you need to shut the fuck up. This is my little lesson to you and why, exactly, you bought a bill of goods with money that wasn’t yours and that you had no right to spend. More importantly, you won’t get what you want and it’ll cost even more than you were told.

So, what shall we tackle first? Let’s try an easy one. All you morons who thought this bill was “revenue neutral” or would reduce the deficit, raise your hands. Got them high up in the air? Good. Now bring it back down, as hard as you can, on top of your pointy little skull. Stings a bit, doesn’t it? It’s only what you deserve for being gullible. The bill will cost more than projected, which means it will be neither revenue neutral nor deficit reducing. I predict this with absolute certainty based on the knowledge that every other national health care entitlement in this country has done so. So, if we’re only off on the cost by as much as we were with Medicare, this goatscrew will cost us all a mere $8.6 TRILLION over the first ten years. Oops. Of course, if we did better on the math this time around, it might only cost us $1.8 trillion. I feel so much better about fiscal responsibility already, don’t you? The cost could be anywhere from double all the way up to 17 times the estimates, based on historical data. I don’t see any deficit reduction with those kinds of errors.

So, let me ask another dumb question. We’re going to give everybody insurance and then we’re going to make preventative care visits free for everybody. So, one might reasonably conclude the demand for health care will go up. That’s usually what happens to the demand for goods when the price drops, in case you were wondering how I deduced this. Is all this extra health care going to magically appear from nowhere? I don’t see any incentives in the bill to provide health care, and I certainly can see more than a few disincentives. So, if your head isn’t still sore from your self-administered beating in the last paragraph, can somebody who supported this crap explain where the actual health care to meet all the new demand is going to come from? I don’t mean the magical insurance talisman you managed to get everybody to pay for, I mean the actual doctors and nurses and facilities and equipment. Any provisions in the bill to address this minor, almost petty, issue? Any at all? Hmm. This might could be a problem.

Now, let’s be real about what this bill does. It’s a huge, brazen attempt to shift the cost of providing health care to anyone but the people actually receiving the care. Why anybody thinks this is a good idea is beyond me, since this usually means otherwise productive resources get wasted. One of the issues here, since a bunch of people apparently spent years taking the short bus to school, is transaction costs. Passing the money around from you to the insurance company to the doctor incurs costs every time the money changes hands. Add the government into the mix, and there’s at least another set (or twelve) of hands the money has to pass through before it gets from you, the recipient of health care, to the doctor, the provider. So, if we initially had a hundred dollars of purchasing power to spend on health care, by the time the money passes through all the hands in a complicated dance of regulatory legerdemain, how much is left? Here’s a hint: less than a hundred dollars.

How much less is the question, isn’t it? Who here thinks throwing government into the mix is going to raise the amount money that actually gets spent on health care? No, instead the money will go to pay salaries of GS-7s to shuffle around your doctor’s request for reimbursement and some other random pieces of paper until they’re all neatly paper clipped together and sent to finance where some other overpaid fed drone will enter the data into the system to send a check for the wrong amount to a different address. All of this activity, by the way, will be lumped under “health care’ in the budget, so “health care” spending will have gone up, despite you actually getting less health care for the same budget.

As an aside, I may start a tattoo shop that tattoos TANSTAAFL and Somebody always pays on peoples’ foreheads. I figure if you dolts see it enough, sooner or later it might just sink in. I figure if you supported the health care reform, you’re almost certainly not imbued with enough understanding to figure out why paying to get self-evident truths tattooed on your forehead is a bad idea. Really, you’re the perfect audience if I could just get a government subsidy for you to give me.

Now, let’s cover a few facts about insurance. This bill includes a version of shall-issue coverage. This means no matter what is currently wrong with you, an insurance company has to issue you a policy if you can pay the premiums. (If you can’t pay, you’ll get a subsidy, so don’t sweat it.) The insurance companies are not allowed to deny you coverage because of your medical history, gosh darn it! Because insurance is vital! And a right! Or some such bullshit. I admit, I don’t understand the deranged fantasy economics that make this a good idea. There’s also no lifetime limit on coverage. So, in our brave new Obamanation you can obligate some company to unlimited expense by buying a policy from them. Now, in a world where ignuts didn’t try to repeal the law of supply and demand, this would mean your insurance would be pretty damned expensive. Right? If I could obligate you to unlimited expense by writing you a check, that check would be pretty substantial, wouldn't it?

Now enter the notion of community rating, which is also in the bill. The insurance company doesn’t get to charge premiums based on the risk of something going wrong with your health. They are forced to charge the same premium to everybody. So if somebody has a really expensive policy while most people have much less expensive policies, guess what happens? The premiums level out until the same amount of money comes in to the insurance company. So for most people, the premium will go up. How special! But that’s okay, because you’ll get money from the gummint to pay for the premiums if you can’t afford them! How much money will this cost the government? Nobody knows! However, I’m going to boldly make a prediction it’ll cost more money than anybody projected, and will break the federal budget. At least, it's working that way in Massachusetts so far, so I've got a pretty good data point for my prediction.

Of course, maybe if we weren’t spending all our money on insurance, maybe some of the money could go towards the actual provision of health care. But I’m guessing none of you supporters understand the concept of opportunity costs. I recommend a primer that can be found here. I think the pull quote is right up front in the third paragraph:

the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil

Substitute “politician” for “economist” and the result is much the same. Seems like we got a bunch of bad politicians and shitty economists around here setting policy, doesn’t it?

Of course, that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. Short-sighted legislators made a bunch of bad policy decision, and kept piling on more in various misguided attempts to fix the unintended consequences. This kept up until all y’all fools felt Obamacare was somehow a good idea and not a clusterfuck. Let’s review the first law of holes, shall we? If you’re in a hole, stop digging. Likewise, if your well-intentioned, well-meaning government regulations are causing a problem, don’t add on more regulations. You just get more problems. Did this simple concept ever occur to any of you as the administration and his enablers in Congress led you by the nose towards disaster?

Finally, I’d just like to add one more thought: FUCK YOU. You’re so damned terrified something bad might happen and you might have to pay for your own medical care that you feel you have carte blanche to make the rest of us pay for your insurance. You think your desire for something is enough justification to get the government to take it from the rest of us. If the idea that you, and not me, and not the government, are responsible for your life, your health, and your destiny terrifies you that much, go get a lobotomy and have yourself institutionalized. You don’t deserve to walk the earth pretending to be a citizen of a free country. You think like a slave and you act like a slave and you want your master, the government, to protect you from the imagined horrors of the world. Well, guess what? Some of don’t think we’re incapable of facing the world without the government telling us how to manage our lives. Some of us don’t want the shackles you would so willingly place on yourself and everybody else. More to the point, we’re not going to wear them. Don’t think this over. You haven’t won a damned thing.

Think Happy Thoughts

So, I'm trying to keep my mind off of the disaster the donks foisted off on an unsuspecting public last night. It gets me a bit peevish and irritable, which is never good on a Monday morning. Here's what I'm reading that has absolutely nothing to do with monstrously bad policies and blatantly unconstitutional power grabs by a pack of syphilitic dog-felching statist bastards.

Ahem. Anyhow, I have been amused lately by Nairn and his attempts to learn the art of cookery through random items chosen from BBC cookbooks. It strikes me as akin to learning by using a Time-Life series. If you're like me, and have more cookbooks than you can work through in your lifetime with his methods, you might find it especially amusing. Good fun, albeit very British at times.

I've also been browsing Morbid Fashion and The Courtesan Macabre. Lots of shiny pretty pictures of pretty things, useful for not thinking too hard. Not always as pretty, but still cool is the collection of things showcased at Street Anatomy.

When I can post with it being a transcription of someone with Tourette's, we'll get back to health care reform.

More Mortgage Messiness

Johnny L. continues his quest to point out how stupid policy contributed to the mortgage crisis.

Ken Lewis isn't going to go gentle into that good night, either. I can't say as I really blame him, either. He got strong-armed into the Merrill Lynch deal and now they're going to try to bust him for it? I'd go scorched earth on Treasury and the Fed in a heartbeat.

Thoughts On Disaster

So, once again, the US military is called upon to be among the first responders to an emergency elsewhere in the world. This annoys some of my conservative and libertarian acquaintances. The general feeling is the US military should be not be acting as a kind of global "Meals on Wheels". While I sympathize with this viewpoint, there's one glaring problem with it.

There are very few organizations that can mobilize as quickly and effectively as the US military. If you want to put boots on the ground fast, anywhere in the world, and have the people there with enough equipment and support structure to do any good, you really don't have a lot of choices.

Let's look at what diaster relief really takes. First off, you need to transport a sizable amount of people and material to wherever your disaster might be. Once they get there, you need them to have a plan, some organizational structure to carry it out, and the communications capability to coordinate all this activity. In the middle of all this activity, you also have to make sure your people have site security, food, water, toilets, and a place to sleep. Keep in mind all of this capability, once you leave an industrialized 1st world society, has to come in with you since there isn't going to be any of the stuff where you're going. Now, imagine you want all these things to happen in less than 72 hours.

I'm not aware of any private organizations who have the resources to do this on the scale that's necessary when a disaster like the Haitian earthquake hits. Frankly, I'm not sure any other country has the military capability, either. If you want to put people and equipment anywhere in the world starting from scratch and have the capability to help other people, you need the US military. We're the only game in town. Yeah, it's not the core competency of the military. The main job is still kill people and break things. But in order to do the killing and breaking, we've had to get good at the logistics and C3. It's a nice bonus that can be put to use.

Now, I have some sympathy for the argument saying it's not our responsibility and we shouldn't spend the resources. I understand that point of view completely, and 99 times out of 100 I'll endorse it. Shit, two days ago I was bitching about coerced charity. So why is this different? Because there isn't anybody else. Those people need help, and they need it now, not in 2 weeks or a month or whenever the international aid bureaucracies can get off the dime and get moving. If there was any NGO that could do what needs to be done, I'd point you at them and say donate. In the absence of said NGO, somebdoy needs to step up, and if it isn't America, it won't be anybody. My friends who tell me we have no obligation to help are absolutely correct, just as you are under no obligation to help when you see someone drowning. However, if you have the capability to help and you don't, you're a sonofabitch.

Having said all that, I will also say that the military role in cases like Haiti should be as a stopgap. Get in there, get on the ground and get things organized so the nice folks at International Red Cross or Caritas or OxFam can show up and start getting to work. Once that happens, the military should pull out and regroup and get back to their real jobs.

Similar thoughts can be found over here.

CRA In Mind-Numbing Detail

I feel compelled to link to Johnny Longtorso's post on the CRA for two reasons. One, it's a fairly complete refutation of the idea that the CRA played a minimal role in the housing market meltdown. I won't go so far as to say the CRA is the problem, but it was definitely a major contributing factor. Two, from my perspective this was an attempt to shut one individual up on the topic. It didn't work, but it's a hell of a thoroughly sourced try.

Madness, Redux

So, back when the whole housing crisis started to implode in late 2007, I offered some advice. With the benefit of crystal clear hindsight, we can now see my advice was not followed.

Anyhow, somebody else thinks we shouldn't have done a damn thing and the .gov should probably stop doing the myriad idiot things it's doing to "help". Obviously, this man is a genius and you you should dote on his every word. He agrees with me, and what more proof do you need of his genius? However, he has rather better academic credentials than me on the subject and argues more eloquently and with less use of profanity. You should go read the whole thing.

Cash Only, Please

Banks won't be taking the IOUs California is giving out. Kinda puts a kink in the works, doesn't it? I can't say I'm sorry to see this happen.

A Little Light Lunchtime Reading...

Apparently, Teh Barackulous' transition rejected a proposal from the Bush folks to publicly join forces in setting tough conditions on GM and Chrysler in return for money to "survive". Not that I agree with or endorse any of this mess, but it should put to rest the kvetching by his majesty's minions that they unknowingly inherited this mess.

Kwame Kilpatrick, former mayor of Detroit and convicted felon, is getting some new and improved subsidized housing. What I want to know is how do these guys find people who are willing to give them these high paying lucrative jobs and pay for their housing without providing sexual favors or anything else in return? I am in the wrong business.

Thomas Sowell discusses the varieties and ramifications of doing nothing. Kind of an interesting analysis.

Apparently there's a firestorm surrounding some ignunt filming drunk kids doing what they do: shooting off at the mouth. This time they’re in Jerusalem and they're talking about Obama. I think the biggest problem here is that journalists are pissed that these kids are talking trash about their holy messiah.

Another Day, Another Disaster

Seriously, who here thinks the possibility of a law named after everybody's favorite tumor-ridden drunk being actually worthwhile or constitutional is greater than zero? Anybody?

Well, good to see we're not teaching the slow class today. I refer, of course, to the recently signed and enacted Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. The act authorizes the spending of 5.7 billion dollars to train bartenders in the proper mixing of a scotch and soda. Oh, wait, I am apparently mistaken on the meaning of serve in this context. Given the association with Teddy, it was a natural mistake on my part. It has nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with encouraging volunteerism by handing out oodles of federal money. Personally, I think training bartenders might be more useful. In any event, Nick Gillespie has far more to say about the crapulence than me, and is a wee tad bit more eloquent besides.

The news comes out about the same time as the shocking... wait, that's not right. Need a little more emphasis here. The SHOCKING! news states are not actually able to track the stimulus money being thrown around so casually by the n00b and his enablers in Congress. So the obvious solution is more money. That's right, MORE MONEY! As much as I disliked Matthew Lesko and everything that led to his scam, he's definitely a small time carny fleecing the rubes in Flyover Country compared to this lot. My hero has the best take on it all.

I Have No Idea

It's 4/20, bitches! Toke up!

In celebration, I'll remind you of the price we all pay for the endless and futile War on Drugs. Your government is killing innocent people who have no connection to illegal drugs or the drug trade to stop people from getting high. Really sounds worth it, doesn't it?

Not No, But...

I'm going to gnash my teeth and pull my hair out if this craptacular excrescence manages to pass the Senate. Others have done the heavy lifting on this one to point out how vile this piece of legislation is.

Once again, I have the problem that my representative didn't vote for it. Some of you, however, need to beat your congresscritter up.

Cassandra Politics

So, one of the fun benefits of being a libertarian is the almost universal dislike in which the majority of the political classes hold your ideas. Right now, a whole bunch of us are looking at the stimulus and saying "This won't do what you want, and has a whole host of bad effects you don't want." Is anyone paying attention? Not so much. The ignuts are fixing to screw us all, and when it all fails spectacularly, some of us can say "Told ya! Sure did." Whee! It's a very small consolation prize in lieu of a limited government and an unfucked economy.

What's even more dispiriting is the current rush to worship at the altar of government intervention. Oh, noes! Something bad happened! The gummint must fix it! Never mind that in many people's opinions (mine included) the ham-handed attempts to micromanage bits of the economy caused the problem in the first place. So, a crisis caused in large part by government intervention will be solved by government intervention? Hmm. New crisis in 3... 2... 1...

Finally, I'll also point out the two most important words in Latin: caveat emptor. A whole bunch of people bought a whole bunch of weird derivatives and mortgage backed securities without understanding what they were buying or how the whole thing worked. Quite bluntly, I should not (nor should the rest of you taxpayers) subsidize someone's incompetence. If you bought a bunch of dodgy financial instruments and are now going bankrupt, so sorry, sucks to be you, make better choices next time. Similarly, if you signed up for a mortgage you didn't understand and can't afford, so sorry, sucks to be you, rent an apartment and move on with your life. Learn from the experience and grow into a financially responsible young butterfly, caterpillar.

Anyhow, mark me down for one "not gonna work" prediction entree with a side dish of "horrible unintended consequences". If my orders fail to materialize, I'll roast up the crow and get to eatin'. But I'm confident my dishes will arrive.

Vote Or Stay Home

Election tomorrow, in case you happened to have just crawled out from under your rock after a period of hibernation. I'd tell you how to vote, but you won't listen and will perpetuate the problem.

On the one hand, we've got a guy who has been in the Senate for a lifetime and was a career military man before he got elected. He's a part of the establishment with every fiber of his being. Don't expect novel solutions and out of the box thinking. The campaign he ran should be ample proof.

On the other hand, we've got a guy committed to ideologies which have been proven to fail spectacularly. He also has a distressing lack of experience doing much of anything.

There are some other choices available on the ballot, but they won't win, so who cares.

A friend asked me this morning if I don't trust the American public to pick a competent leader. If there was a competent leader on the ballot, that might be an issue. But there isn't, and I don't. This election may be the final proof I need to confirm a suspicion I have. I suspect, in the aggregate, we're too goddamned stupid to handle the running of a constitutional republic. If that's the case, let's burn it down and start over.

Fuck the Free Market

So, the bailout plan proposed by Henry Paulson, et al.? Give us a whole pile of money to spend and let us be completely unaccountable in doing so. Don’t believe me? Here’s the relevant subsection:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Excuse me, what? We’re talking about spending $700 billion here. That’s $700,000,000,000 dollars that have to come from somewhere and these ignuts want the decisions to be unquestionable? If you have any kind of a brain in your head, you should realize the magnitude of the colossally poor decision being discussed here. It should concern anyone with functioning brain cells when the government tells you it wants to spend this kind of money and avoid answering any questions about the details.

Let’s review: a bunch of dumb people borrowed money they couldn’t pay back from a second group of morons. Somehow, the poor decisions by the collective idiots in the crowd means we, collectively, have to pony up the entire GDP of the Netherlands or Turkey. Instead, we could buy Vietnam 10 times over.

I’d also like to note the proposal came from the efenants in DC. Let me quote you some choice tidbits.

Republicans will attack wasteful Washington spending immediately.

If billions are worth spending, they should be spent in the light of day.

Congress has a fundamental duty to conduct meaningful oversight on the effectiveness of government programs

We believe government should tax only to raise money for its essential functions.

We do not support government bailouts of private institutions. Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself.

All of these quotes are from the RNC Platform. I guess Paulson and Bernanke didn’t get the fucking memo, huh?