The 2012 "October Surprise" Has Already Arrived...

...and it's not good for Barack Obama.

I know you may be thinking "what the hell are you talking about"?  I'll bet that you haven't heard anything about it via the so-called traditional news outlets, and haven't read anything on your regular Internet news feeds either.  I know that I read a lot of news on a daily basis (much more than I write obviously), and I've seen nothing about it.  But guess what, boys and girls?  The much ballyhooed "October surprise" is here, and for those of us still employed and who have employer provided/subsidized insurance, we know exactly what it is.

It's our health benefits annual enrollment. 

For those of you who work part-time, as contractors, or who don't work for employers who provide benefits, I'll provide a bit of a primer.  Every year about this time, most of us who have the more traditional, employer provided health insurance and other benefits plans (FSA, HSA, etc.) receive a notice from our employer which instructs us to advise our HR departments how much in deductions we want to allow for our FSA/HSA plans next year.  It also informs us of any changes in our health insurance plans.

We're all learning, right now, first hand, how much Obamacare is going to screw us.  Surprise!

While "the media" is sitting around speculating what will be the great "October Surprise", those of us who are still blessed enough to have jobs are seeing the increases in premiums, decreases in coverage, and/or the reductions in our prescription coverage...all thanks to President Obama and the Democrat party.  Also, FSA limits are now capped at $2,500 (for the individual and $5,000 for dependents), and people looking at stocking up on over the counter drugs, so they won't lose what's left of their 2012 FSA, will learn that their FSA doesn't cover any of that anymore, so they may lose their money.  As a further note, many people use their FSA (or HSA) as a tax-deterrent means to pay for out of pocket costs for regular medication and/or for expensive out-of-pocket costs for special needs children.

Surprise!  Not as much anymore, chumps.  No more slight discount on that special program for your autistic kid, you "top 1%er" who makes $50K a year.  Obama and his enormous soul eating leviathan government needs your money to "build that" food stamp program for your neighbor's 27 year old "child", Jaeyden.  You've met him a couple of times, he's the one who with the $125K in student loans for his "Wymyns' Studies" degree who just moved back in with his parents.  He's sitting on his ass playing X-Box all day while claiming for Mom and Dad's benefit to be "starting his business" selling artisanal suburban organic wasabi honey mayonnaise on Etsy.

So, while 30 year old "law student activists" are screaming at you about trying to kill them because you're cruel enough to actually believe that if they can afford things like 9 years of Georgetown Law School, business managers, iPhone plans, and flights across country to "rally" 10 other unemployed morons, certainly they can find $9 somewhere to buy themselves some birth control pills...you're being denied a tax benefit for the the ability to use more of your own money to pay for your own actual health care and/or the health care of your family.  And while you're paying more for gas, groceries, and everything else, you're about to get absolutely gored on your health insurance.  I hate to ask, but how long ago was your last pay raise?

So enjoy your October surprise, workers of America, and go on out there and vote for the party of  the high cost of everything (except your paycheck) and especially, "universal healthcare." 

Genre Confusion

As a quick reminder of how you got screwed by "affordable" health care, here's a list of new taxes before tomorrow, when YPS will officially become unhinged over taxes for the day.

Anyhow, I was amusing myself looking for new music on the web the other day. I have come to the conclusion that sites which use social recommendations, like amazon, or have some kind of similarity engine, like Pandora, are really your best bet. Genre labels in the new millennium are, broadly speaking, next to useless.

The larger, overarching categories still have some use. If somebody tells you a band or artist is country as opposed to rock or pop, that has some small measure of validity. I say small because the three categories I just mentioned are bleeding into each other rather seamlessly. Turn on GAC or CMT and see if the music you hear would be out of place on a Top 40 or Alt Rock station. From my admittedly jaundiced perspective, I can't see much difference.

Of course, I listen to a lot of Metal and Industrial. Even these labels aren't much use, since there are a lot of bands that don't fit neatly into one category or the other. So in an attempt to differentiate between sub-classes of each, people have invented a bewildering variety of categories that are, frankly, completely meaningless except to the three guys who came up with them while arguing over music late one saturday night.

One band I was looking up was listed in the following "genres":

• Metalcore
• Thrash Metal
• Groove Metal
• Death Metal

Aside from the fact that I don't even know what some of these are, (groove metal? WTF?), if your genre labels have 4 different possibilities for one band, they're not much good. Another band was described as "a mix of progressive metal, grindcore, and hardcore". Umm. Yeah. Does that mean something to somebody, or is some music nerd with a journalism degree trying to justify his existence? I mean, I've been listening to metal in various incarnations for 25 years or so now, so I think I've got a decent grasp on the music. The labels? Not so much.

This is where Amazon, allmusic, and Pandora come in handy. I don't want to spend my time figuring out what all these bullshit labels mean. I want to listen to some good new music. Amazon tells me what CDs people who bought my CDs also bought. allmusic tells me what bands are similar to bands I like. Pandora, through the magic of their genome project, just plays music at me their engine figures I'll like. All three work pretty well, but the radical profusion of genres and sub-genres and terminology isn't real useful.

Anyhow, since writing about music is like dancing about architecture, here's a tune I found in the process. Perhaps you'll like it.

Lamb of God - Set To Fail (Official Music Video)

On the other hand, if you don't like it, you now know I am not a reliable source for music recommendations for you. Perhaps there's some websites that might be able to help you...

Why Congress Is Stupid

Actually, Congress is an emergent system which, by definition, can’t be stupid as it has no consciousness. However, as our fearless congresscritters and other functionaries in and around DC try to manage the business of a vast, unimaginably complex collection of disparate individuals, it’s important to consider the limits of their knowledge. Congress may not be stupid, but Congress does make bad decisions.

One of the reasons why was explained 65 years ago by a guy named Freidrich Hayek. The short version (long version here) is coordination of any complex system requires too much information for any one individual to collect and process in time to make rational decisions which will affect the system. Computers, strangely, made this problem worse because the guy trying make decisions is going to be overpowered by the multitude of computers everywhere else. He can't possibly keep up with the data. It's a simple truth, but one that everybody ignores.

As recent events have proven, Congress can't even keep track of their own information, much less any other information. Congress just passed a 2,300 page bill none of the members had read in its entirety. What effect the bill will have on the 266 volumes of federal law and regulation, nobody yet knows. So, once again, I have to ask: in what universe was passing this bill a good idea?

No Mo' Mittens

Well, Mittens and his magic underoos might as well figure out something else to do beside try to be President. Since Mittens wants the job so damn bad, he's obviously not the right guy to have the job. However, most people think political ambition is a good thing, despite all the countervailing evidence, so that won't kill his chances.

On the other hand, the ongoing "fiscal train wreck" he bequeathed the state of Massachusetts is something most voters will care about, especially in two more years.

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.

Fraud

Let us suppose, gentle reader, that you are beset by various maladies and afflictions which pain your every waking moments and even made the surcease of gentle slumber unavailable to you. You are, in short, ill and looking for a cure.

Let us further suppose that I have a cure available for sale. You, being ill, ask me about my cure. I respond with enthusiasm and assurances that my cure will fix what ails you. My cure is most wondrous and will restore the sparkle in your eye and the vigor in your step. My elixir will cure whatever ailment you may have, for my cure is the stuff of legends.

You are somewhat skeptical. My cure sounds entirely too good to be true. You would like to see my cure, and perhaps get some independent assurances that my cure is effective. Alas, I am unable to even permit you a glimpse of my famed elixir... until you buy it. Upon the exchange of monies, you will have all you require and more! I will provide you with instructions, data, testimonials, and double-blind trial results. I will provide everything necessary to convince you of the efficacy of my most amazing potion once you cross my palm with silver.

You, not being a complete ignoramus who is innocent of the world, might suspect that my motives are less than pure and that my medicine is not all I claim. Truthfully, I respect all my readers, all both of you, far too much to try to bamboozle you with such an obviously flawed pitch.

The Right Honorable Speaker of the House of Representatives, one each Nancy Pelosi (D-Botox), on the the other hand must think we're all morons who fell off the turnip truck yesterday:

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.

So buy this product, and once you've bought it, we'll explain just what it is you've bought.

I think there's a word for this when it's a commercial transaction. Somehow, when politics gets involved, the word no longer applies. I wonder why that is?

Why Government Doesn't Work, Part Umpteen-Million

So, you poor suckers are gonna get "health care reform". It has nothing to do with health care, and it won't reform a goddamn thing, but you're gonna get it anyway. Tom Harkin (D-Out Wandering) openly admits any bill that's passed will be subject to mission creep almost immediately.

In the future, amending it and changing it isn’t going to be as tough as passing it in the first place.

So, he and his compatriots will continue to tinker and screw around with your health care if they can get it passed. Yay.

Of course, it's not all bad. Depending on where you sit, it may be a great bill.

The health-care industry has captured the regulatory process, and it has used that capture to eliminate any real competition, whether from the government, in the form of a single-payer system, or from new and more efficient competitors in the private sector who might have the audacity to offer a better product at a better price.

Me? I work in the oil industry, so all I can see is a giant screwing coming along.

Finally, I will ask a question that is somewhat antiquated in the modern era. Where, exactly, in the Constitution did we delegate the authority to Congress to require us to buy insurance? I'm just not seeing it anywhere in my copy of the document.

A Short Note On Health Care

The issue concerning me right now is this bizarre assumption in the debate that insurance magically equates to health care. This is not now, nor has it ever been true.

What most people apparently want is the government to magically shit them healthcare without charging them anything. I am reminded of the old joke about going to heaven: Everybody wanst to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Similarly, everybody wants to go to the doctor but nobody wants to pay. Somebody has to pay. Somebody always pays. We are not yet living in the magical post-scarcity universe posited by Iain M. Banks or Charles Stross, and we should all know what that means. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

So, let’s ask the question everybody wants to dance around. Why should someone else pay for your health care? Given that health care isn’t a true public good, why is it even the government’s business? If somebody could answer these two questions, I’d appreciate it.

Burden of Consciousness

I'm tired and feel much like hungovr cat. Whatever the hell bug I had two weeks ago has returned with a vengeance. I spent most of yesterday in bed asleep. I am mobile, but just barely. Work has done an excellent job of kicking my ass. So in lieu of substantive comment on Obama's speech, (Racism is bad, mmmkay?), I offer skulls. No deep hidden meaning unless you choose to ascribe one from the depths of your tortured unconscious.

Sickness And Health

I don’t often get cranked up about health care issues, because it’s not my primary field of expertise. Of course, my primary field of expertise is mechanical systems and design and I don’t talk about that much here either, so what the hell.

One of my biggest fundamental problems with the current health care debate in this country is assumption of a positive right. You do not have any claim, moral or otherwise, to anyone else’s time and effort and to advocate otherwise is to advocate for slavery. If you indeed had the right to “health care”, someone is then obligated to provide you with medical care. If they do not do so willingly, the gummint will, through threat or application of force, make them give you health care. I just mentioned the word for forcing someone to work for the benefit of another through the threat of force. If I recall my history correctly, we settled that issue definitively, along with several others, on April 9^th, 1865.

Ergo, you have no right to receive medical care. This is to some a cold and heartless proposition, but life often is. Nothing in what I have said implies that if private citizen Bob, in his capacity as kind-hearted philanthropist, decides to treat indigent sufferers of his own accord he should not be afforded the freedom to do so. There is, as I have pointed out in the past, no moral good in forcing people to charity. If you remove the faculty of choice, there is no moral calculus involved for the person being forced.