I bet you can’t guess what song has been stuck in my head since Saturday. Go ahead, guess. In the meantime I will gently suggest that our million other frontpagers post more with this video. The Zep will continue until morale improves.
Open thread.
by Tim F| 152 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I bet you can’t guess what song has been stuck in my head since Saturday. Go ahead, guess. In the meantime I will gently suggest that our million other frontpagers post more with this video. The Zep will continue until morale improves.
Open thread.
by Tim F| 69 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, General Stupidity
Spend some time following internet conversations about your liberal cause of the day (global warming, racial injustice, etc) and eventually someone will get to the nut of why the issue pisses many people off: they think activists want them to feel guilty and they don’t want to feel guilty. That’s pretty much it. A huge part of our failure to do anything about the climate disaster or racist asshole cops comes from people protecting their delicate ego.
Take for example the reaction when Mark Lane, an apparantly wonderful guy and excellent dad who runs Poppa’s Fresh Fish Company in San Diego, took in a Guatemalan family of four who had been processed by ICE while they looked for family with whom to live until their court appearance.
Through the immigration advocacy group Border Angels, Mark Lane — a fishmonger by trade — and his family took in a Guatemalan family of four, who had recently fled violence. After the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency processed and released the Guatemalan family with notice to appear (NTA) slips, Border Angels founder Enrique Morones placed a call out to the organization’s advocates to find hosts for the family until they could make their way to a relative on the East Coast to await their immigration court hearing. “This is a matter of people taking in families and refugees,” Morones said, recalling to ThinkProgress that Lane was one of 20 eager volunteers. One Guatemalan family member reportedly stayed at a 24-hour money order business for nine days before Border Angels found out about her story and took her in. She was also allegedly raped several times during their journey to the United States and again at a shelter. The mom and three children (one daughter and two sons) are currently occupying one of two spare rooms in the Lane family home. “This family suffered trauma,” Lane explained. “They were so scared they piled into the same room. I let them bond with my wife in the first few days.”
[…]Since the Guatemalan family came to stay with the Lanes four weeks ago, they went from being “hollow-eyed and watching me” to becoming “more animated, more relaxed. They’re in a safe environment and it kind of feels like bringing home a baby from the hospital.” He recalled that the mother was anguished when he used Google Earth to pull up an image of the Guatemalan city they had fled from. She told him, “That’s where I should die a normal death, but we can never go back there. If we go back, we will get killed.”
Even if you despise everything about immigrants coming to this country without filing papers, every detail in this story looks above board. The family has been processed by ICE and needs a place to live until their court date. You would hardly expect conservatives to celebrate forcing people into government centers or on the street or to criticize private charity when it literally complies with the most restrictive possible reading of our immigration laws. It goes against the sort of things that conservatives usually celebrate, and in return all you get is gratuitous cruelty and extra crime as desperate people try to not starve to death. And yet.
[W]hen word spread that Lane was hosting the family, people viciously attacked him online with a Facebook page calling for a boycott of his business, Poppa’s Fresh Fish Company. One commentator on the now-defunct Facebook page recommended that he “needs a serious beating in front of his customers. But then he serves crap food. His establishment is rat infested and smells like raw sewage.” Lane said that he and his family have been also receiving death threats, which he said he has now reported to the local police department’s hate crime division and even the Department of Justice.
It seems senseless and stupid to hate this guy for what he did. But you can imagine how it would feel to have a guy’s humanity, compassion and basic courage reflect on the small, scared hateful way some people live their life. If a large fraction of folks will choose a painful shock rather than sit alone with their thoughts, imagine what people will do to avoid shame.
Give the guy some support and a little business if you pass through San Diego.
I hate you for making me feel like a jerkholePost + Comments (69)
by Tim F| 58 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
Today in science explained by Tim F, a breaking study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[A]ll mammals above 3 kg in weight empty their bladders over nearly constant duration of 21 ± 13 s.
They went to a zoo and watched animals piss. It takes the same time because larger mammals have larger urethras, more help from gravity and less viscosity to slow down flow.
This has been another edition of science explained by Tim F.
***Update***
If you see an impossible headline in an original research journal that you want to see me [attempt to] explain with simple words and inappropriate analogies, feel free to email me. There is a non-zero chance that I might give it a try.
by David Anderson| 73 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, Tax Policy, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It), All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Meth Laboratories of Democracy, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right
I was lucky as a college student. I lived and fell in love with Paris for six months.
I remember the first day I had recovered from my jet lag walking from a friend’s apartment to the half a dozen eighth floor walk-ups that I could afford to rent. My mouth was gaped, my eyes opened wide and my steps slow and deliberate as I soaked the city in. I breathed in the patisseries, I inhaled the smell of fresh baked bread, and I began the very deliberate inventory of the best crepe stands (my preference was the green crepery at the Metro station Ste. Germain des Pres).
I lived, I worked, I studied, I fell in love in Paris, and it was a Paris in which I walked everywhere. It was not too hard for me to walk eight to ten miles in a day as I woke in the 16th Arrondisemonth, walked across the Seine for morning classes, met up with a professor to assist him in his research, grabbed a bite to eat in the late afternoon, and hurried over to meet a lover for dinner in the 4th before heading back to her place in the 7th or mine in the 16th. It was an amazing time.
I could have afforded the Metro, I could have afforded to take cabs, I could have afforded to not wander anywhere near as much as I did, but Paris is a city that screams “Walk Me”. New York, Boston, Montreal, Washington D.C. also are cities that scream “Walk Me”. I would walk to a friend’s building and we would have seven choices of good coffee within three blocks, so we would eventually try them all. I would walk down the Quays to watch the bustlers and hustlers, or hear street jazz near the Latin Quarter. I walked to breathe the city. I would take a right down Rue de Colonel Combes instead of staying on Avenue Bosquet merely because it was there, and I knew I could eventually get to the Moosehead for my Sunday night Simpsons.
Urban design made me want to walk. It helped me lose my freshman fifteen and more while my resting pulse dropped to under 50. And then I flew back to my parents’ house where the closest walkable cup of coffee was a mile away. Walking became exercise instead of the way I navigated for my daily life. I drove or bummed a ride for the rest of winter break.
Urban design influences our trip taking and our trip choices. It influences our health as well as the Atlantic clearly lays out:
They looked at the three fundamental measures of street networks—density, connectivity, and configuration—in 24 California cities, and compared them with various maladies. In the current Journal of Transport and Health, Garrick and Marshall report that cities with more compact street networks—specifically, increased intersection density—have lower levels of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. The more intersections, the healthier the humans.
“It might not be common for people to explicitly contemplate health when selecting a place to live,” Garrick and Marshall write, “but this research indicates it is worth considering.”…
They also found that wide streets with many lanes are associated with high rates of obesity and diabetes….
The obesity epidemic is becoming a national crisis, but almost nobody connects that with neighborhood design. The connections we’re making there are all about food and exercise. But if we build neighborhoods where exercise is part of people’s daily routine, you would think that could go a long way.”
This makes sense. Walking as part of daily living is far easier than walking as exercise, and a built environment that facilitates walking as a part of life instead of as a seperate activity in a segregated space and time should encourage more walking.
Health insurance is important for better health, but the best medical care is only a minority determinant of health outcomes on average. Most of the determinants are public health measures (clean water is an amazing public good), and personal fitness which is determined by daily choices. Tilting a built environment towards a sedentary lifestyle will lead to a certain choice set, while tilting the built environment to casual, barely thought about activity produces different choice sets. Our national policy for the past seventy years has been to create a built environment that enables sedentary lifestyles with attendant health problems. If we want to think about health policy, we need to think about health financing and delivery sytsems, but also our built environment, our societal stressors and numerous other things that don’t scream “medical” to address our health problems as a society.
Walking or why health insurance is neccessary but insufficientPost + Comments (73)
by David Anderson| 24 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, C.R.E.A.M., Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Glibertarianism, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
One of the key components of policy analysis is to figure out when something is a cost savings where there are a net reduction in expenditures from a wide scale perspective on a given activity to cost shifting where the total resources being used for an activity is the same but the contribution of different entities changes. This distinction is important to remember when reading through Avik Roy’s healthcare reform as he primarily engages in massive cost shifting as he has identified as one of his primary objective functions the minimization of federal expenditure in order to minimize high income taxation. That is what he values, and that is what his plan would achieve. There were elements of cost savings (bundled payments, hospital consolidation trust busting) but those were secondary to his primary means of “saving” money. I disagree with his value judgment
When you read any policy analysis or proposal that explicitly states that it is attempting to optimize on a single category of expenditure reduction (in Roy’s case federal) and there is an explicit statement of a five trillion dollar gap between current and proposed, ask whether there are actual cost savings involved, or massive cost shifting:
Over a 30-year period, we estimate that raising the eligibility age for Medicare by four months per year would reduce Medicare spending by $6.6 trillion, with an offsetting increase in exchange-based premium subsidies of $1.5 trillion, for a net spending reduction of $5.1 trillion.
In Roy’s case, it is massive cost shifting he is engaged in. And that is fine, he values low taxes and no services in his moral policy universe. Let us be explicit in what that means though.
Sometimes cost shifting is a good policy as it can lead to a more efficient way of achieving a task. For instance, my two year old likes to “help” Mommy and Daddy sweep. We will give him the broom and allow him to clean the dining room. Once he sees a shiny object or his sister, we’ll take the broom back and sweep the kitchen, the room that needed to be swept. The cots shift of taking the broom out of his hands and into ours produces significant time and thus cost savings as we avert a temper tantrum, get a happy child, and a clean kitchen.
However, there are seldom that many wins that are that easy.
The proposal to increase the Medicare eligibility age by four months per year is a classic example of cost shifting. We have good estimates from the CBO on the federal budgetary impact of raising eligibility age by two months a year to merely age 67. The federal deficit impacts are minimal, as the savings on Medicare are eaten up by increased subsidies for the Exchanges, increased disability payments and increased Medicaid payments plus increased suffering as more people are uninsured:
Looking farther into the future, CBO estimates that by 2038, spending on Medicare would be about 3 percent less under this option than it would be under current law—4.7 percent of gross domestic product rather than 4.9 percent. On the basis of its estimates for 2016 through 2023, CBO projects that roughly two-thirds of those long-term savings from this option would be offset by the increases in federal spending for Medicaid and exchange subsidies and the reduction in revenues described above.
Although CBO anticipates that most people who would lose eligibility for Medicare under this option would continue their existing health insurance coverage or switch to other forms of coverage, the number of people without health insurance would increase slightly. For example, CBO estimates that of the 5.5 million people who would be affected by this option in 2023, about 50 percent would obtain insurance from their (or their spouse’s) employer or former employer, about 15 percent would continue to qualify for Medicare on the basis of their eligibility for disability benefits, about 15 percent would buy insurance through the exchanges or in the nongroup market, about 10 percent would receive coverage through Medicaid, and about 10 percent would become uninsured.
Roy reduces the offsets by decreasing Exchange subsidies by significantly reducing what the subsidy has to buy on the Exchange and shifting long term disablity care for Medicaid to the states. In his world, the federal government would offload most of their expenditures to the group insurance market, or onto the backs of individuals who would go uninsured and thus have a much higher risk of having significantly lower quality of life or possibility of avertable death than they would if they were Medicare enrolled. And since Medicare is cheaper than group health insurance, dumping people back onto the group health insurance market means that the people who receive group health insurance will be eaten up by the increased premiums of employed elderly and near elderly who are then hanging on for their dear lives for Medicare eligibility. (BTW, this is why Medicare buy-in to age 55 was attractive, it removed the oldest and most expensive current cohort from the group insurance market, significantly reducing rates and shifting risk onto the federal government)
And this is only with the two month jump to age 67. Moving to age 75 in four month leaps cost shifts even more aggressively. The biggest difference would be the incentive effect to stay with employer sponsored coverage would be far stronger and far longer plus the very low acturial value of plans that insurance companies would offer to healthy seniors and the absolutely fugly plan designs that would be offered to potentially and actually sick seniors would shift most of the risk and costs of moving away from an effective single payer system to Roy’s Universal Exchange with its attendant low coverage schemas onto individuals.
Sure, it saves the federal government a buck, and it might reduce health expenditures because a $7,000 or $10,000 deductible with a network that doesn’t have a tier 1 doc in the specialty that you need will reduce utilization through fear of bankruptcy and FUD on the customer service phone tree, but suffering is real and it is expensive. But it is not actually saving significant system resources except through increased suffering via foregone treatment or earlier death of poorer seniors who are no longer Medicare eligible, so again, the cost savings are cost shifts to demonetized costs.
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads, Pet Rescue
From commentor Original Lee:
Here is a photo of our two rescue dogs, Layla (left) and Lucky (right). We are dormant volunteers with Blue Ridge Border Collie Rescue. These two and their issues are part of the reason why we’re dormant!
After a lot of work and love, these two have become quite pleasant companion animals, especially if you are willing to rub their bellies for hours at a time.
I was lamenting, earlier this week, that we accidentally acquired a papillon-and-probably-border-collie rescue who has made bringing other animals into the household deeply problematic. Gloria looks like a half-sized border collie with slightly oversize ears, but more significantly, she “works” like a herding dog, with her head & tail held low, using a strong eye. All we know about her first five years was that she was taken into police custody for “neglect”, but from her behavior over the last three years, it wasn’t an easy life. Like Scarlett O’Hara, she resolved never to go hungry again; and like Scarlett, this resolve has made her unfit for polite society. After much work on both sides, she no longer bites as a first resort, and she’s gotten somewhat less dedicated about stealing not-remotely-edible items (like used teabags, or Dial soap wrappers), but she’ll always be a karmic reminder that I once mocked people who had no better sense than to rescue dogs they were plainly incapable of handling.
And the tragedy is… Gloria’s really smart, sometimes scarily so. In a different life — with a better start, or more competent/physically fit rescuers– she’d have been an agility or obedience star. When people tell me, I would like to get a dog, but I want a smart one, my response is: No, what you want is a compliant dog — one that’s smart enough to understand your household rules, but not so smart that spending 23 hours out of 24 sitting around is going to make it (and you!) crazy. Leave the smart dogs for dedicated professionals, and settle for a smart enough dog.
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Apart from whining about the small tragedies of everyday life, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Emotional RescuesPost + Comments (37)
This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize, Open Threads, Science & Technology
Via not-exactly-DFH-territory Quartz:
The recent deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of policemen have spurred calls to curb police violence in America. But a critical element to understanding the problem is missing: data. There’s no comprehensive database of law-enforcement misconduct, and without reliable statistics, it’s more difficult to identify abusive police departments and hold them accountable.
Three teenage siblings from Georgia want to help. Today, they’re releasing Five-O, an app for Android and iPhone that aims to crowdsource a nationwide police-ratings database—a Yelp for police departments, as one of its young developers describes it.
Five-O asks users to log their interactions with the police, including details about the incident (“Was the stop legitimate?” “Were you physically assaulted?”) and a description of the officer (badge number, race, gender). Officers are rated with an A-to-F letter grade. Those grades are converted into an average score and collected (along with other anonymous information from the submissions) in a database that can be searched by location…
Five-O is the latest in a series of high- and low-tech citizen tools created to monitor police. Copwatch started in 1990 in Berkeley, California, to combat harassment of the homeless, and has since gone nationwide. Two years ago, the New York Civil Liberties Union released an app to document stop-and-frisks, joining other apps that surreptitiously record police. And of course plenty of people film their interactions with cops (even when they’re wrongly told they’re not allowed to) and share the results on social networks like Instagram, Vine, and Twitter.
Five-O is a little different. It intends to centralize data from across the US, not only to track abuse but to create incentives for police departments to do better. “We’ll definitely highlight the positives so that they can be an example for any negative interactions taking place,” Ima says. They also plan to add a function for police to respond to complaints…
More detail at the link.
I don’t have a smartphone, and as an old fat white aspiring agoraphobe I’m hardly the target market. But one likes to encourage initiative in the rising generation. Anybody want to offer an opinion on Five-0? The other apps mentioned? Suggestions for further research?