Riiiiight…

All sorts of surprising people are throwing their hats into the presidential ring, for example Hillary Clinton, last seen artlessly trying to sell a straightforwardly socialist healthcare bill to middle America. So who else can we dredge up from the political graveyard? Dan Drezner has this to say (link blatantly ripped off from Instapundit):

Gingrich intrigues me — he’s far more complex and interesting a thinker than the nineties stereotype of him suggested. And if Hillary Clinton can remake herself as someone who’s learned from past mistakes, I see no reason why Gingrich can’t as well.

I can see why he might actually write that. Afterall Richard Nixon made something of a comeback as an elder statesman. Gingrich just isn’t that far in the past though, and while the media will try hard to give Hillary a pass, Gingrich’s skeletons (probably starting with the legendary hospital bed divorce of his first wife) would make encore appearances in the very first stories about his Presidential exploratory committee. Like Lebanon and Abu Ghraibh, that’s just the world we live in.

Globalization

This started off as a comment, but I’m making it a post instead. Commenting on this post, Clint tossed out a couple of the standard arguments against globalization. I’ve got an argument against unilateral dropping of trade barriers, but I’ll get to that. First, Clint’s comments:

Unemployment stats are pretty b.s. the way they are computed. I think they should include EVERYONE who doensn’t work.

Then they would include babies and retired people and be at least as misleading. My understanding is that they’re based on new unemployment filings, which seems relatively reasonable in that people who are long-term unemployed will seek unemployment compensation, while presumably the rest got new jobs. As Clint says though, that still doesn’t account for the ones whose new job is greeter at WalMart.

the goal of globalization seems to be to have every job X to eventually reside at place Y where job X gets paid the least on the planet.

Technically, that’s true, but it leaves something out. In the simple perfect-market model, an industry will tend to move where its overall cost of production is lowest (both labor and materials) because then it gains the maximum price competitiveness for its products.

Where it goes off the rails is in the implication that companies somehow have an interest in making people poor. Companies make money by selling stuff. If everyone is poor, who’s buying their stuff? That even works if you assume the customers are other companies or governments instead of individuals, because a poor population makes a poor government (no tax revenue) and poor companies (no disposable income). There is no “conservation of wealth”–it can be created or destroyed, so the only way for anyone to get richer in the long term is for everyone to be made better off. Which is the ultimate goal of globalization. In the longer term it means that the prices of both labor and goods and services will become fairly even around the world, but in the short term, leveling between, say, China and the US will be painful for the richer country just as it is good for the poorer one.

Which brings me to my argument against unilateral open markets. It does nobody any good for country A to open its markets while country B maintains protectionist trade barriers. There is some case to be made for rich countries to help poor ones by maintaining a minor trade imbalance (minor for the rich country but a big deal for the poor one) but an imbalance large enough to actually damage A’s economy is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. So on that basis I am (in principle) a supporter of “fair trade” or a series of bilateral trade agreements, versus one-size-fits-all open markets on our part while China, India etc. maintain protectionist policies at our expense.

The Congressional Cullah’d Waterfountain

Presented without comment:

Freshman Rep. Stephen I. Cohen, D-Tenn., is not joining the Congressional Black Caucus after several current and former members made it clear that a white lawmaker was not welcome.

[...]

“Mr. Cohen asked for admission, and he got his answer. … It’s time to move on,” [Rep. William Lacy Clay Jr., D-MO] said. “It’s an unwritten rule. It’s understood. It’s clear.”

[...]

Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., who is white, tried in 1975 when he was a sophomore representative and the group was only 6 years old.

“Half my Democratic constituents were African-American. I felt we had interests in common as far as helping people in poverty,” Stark said. “They had a vote, and I lost. They said the issue was that I was white, and they felt it was important that the group be limited to African-Americans.”

Well, one comment–what’s with the old-style abbreviations for the states? They switched to two-letter abbreviations when I was in elementary school, so you know, a loooong time ago!

Hotfixes

So I get to the office this morning to find that the network admins have pushed out another hotfix, which rebooted my machine after installation. No big deal, I’m glad I don’t have to think about that stuff along with my actual job responsibilities. But it occurs to me to wonder if getting used to this at work is detrimental to taking good care of my home computers. Of course it’s not for me, but what about non-technical people? Will they eventually be so used to stuff being installed and even rebooting their machine that they won’t notice when spyware or viruses do the same thing at home?

How Much House for $300k?

This NYT puff piece isn’t as interesting as it could have been. There are lots of towns where you can get some very interesting houses for well under 300, most of which have history and amenities that most of us would love to have–if only we could get a decent job in the area. But hey, I guess it’s nice to know that even in Alabama I can spend $300,000 on a tiny condo if I feel like burning money.

Retraining For "Victims of Globalization"

Here’s an interesting description of what happened when free trade came to Galax, Virginia:

Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) [...] includes up to two years of unemployment benefits while retraining, temporary subsidies to help pay medical insurance and, for those over 50, a short-term top-up to any lower-paying new job. The centre also co-ordinates more basic help, from child care to food banks run by private charities.

That’s an apparantly federal program intended to transition blue-collar workers to new careers when their jobs go overseas. How’s it working? According to the article, three big textile factories in Galax closed down all at once, laying off 1,000 people. The result:

At 6%, Galax’s unemployment rate is twice Virginia’s average, but no higher than it was a year ago.

[...] other, mainly younger, workers are already better off. After 19 years in a textile factory, Bobby Edwards has retrained as a radiologist. Brian Deaton has set up a thriving picture-framing business and has started selling gourmet coffee. Few of these people are enthusiastic about globalisation. “No one trusts China around here,” is a common refrain. But government help has cushioned the shock. “I’d be lost if they weren’t here,” says Mr Rotan, nodding towards the centre’s staff.

When I was younger, the national unemployment rate was 6% and things were said to be in good shape. In fact, most economists consider 6% or less to be effectively zero unemployment. Which means we seem to have a rare case here: a government program that actually works!

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And As Long As We’re Talking Snow…

I like to pull out the old saw about “legislating the wind” to make fun of people who pass various laws to fight basic human nature (for example, the drug war) but as they say, truth is stranger than fiction and real life has now obsoleted that joke:

Romanian snowboarders have staged a protest at the lack of snow in front of the country’s weather institute.

Blocking traffic, the snowboarders sat in the road and only moved on when weather officials said that their complaint at the lack of snow “would be passed on to a higher authority”, Ananova reports on January 16th.

(link via The Bitch Girls)

Total Destruction

No, not by the “snowstorm” (yet .. it’s accumulated to around an inch as I write this) but at Clint’s 33rd birthday party last Saturday. I don’t have much to add, aside from taking ‘executive producer’ credit for Glen’s videography of the early-evening ‘RAPpening’. It is pretty funny how in our college years and 20s most parties were fight-free, but now that most of the OGs are over 30, fisticuffs have become a semi-regular feature.

Posting To Document That…

…it’s snowing. Yes, snowing in northern Virginia in the winter of 2006-7.

UPDATE: here’s a picture.

Diary Land

I’ve had a couple of blog or journal sites over the years, and am slowly consolidating them now. The focus has varied, from my urban planning blog to my personal page on diaryland, but reading over the old entries has been fascinating. I never kept a paper diary, mostly out of laziness but also because I thought interesting stuff didn’t happen every week or month, let alone everyday. But years later I find even the “nothing happened today, I’m still waiting for this and the other to break” entries interesting, if only because they fix the timeline of major events. Also occurs to me that our grandkids will probably read our blogs the way people used to read their ancestors’ old letters.

Anyway, for my three regular readers, you can look for more old posts to appear. I’ll also get back to posting excerpts of my Europe journal in the near future.