This is particularly bad timing for such a thing as Google is in the process of laying off workers (though it is a very small number - something like 100) and if they are in a position where they have to layoff employees, why are they even talking about hiring employees?
The tight conditions that result in the need to layoff employees are the exact conditions in which it is most critical to be able to recruit and retain the best employees, since you need to get the most bang for your labor-cost buck, and can't afford to settle for second best or carry dead weight.
The problem is, this isn't really a political issue, it is a social issue.
Whether same-sex relationships should occur is a social issue, without being a political issue.
Whether same-sex couples are given the same treatment under the law, without unequal or supposedly "separate but equal" treatment under the law, is a political issue.
Prop. 8 relates to the second, not the first, and is therefore political. Of course one's view on the social issue is likely to color one's view on the political issue, but that doesn't stop the political issue from being a political issue.
Yeah, instead they'll move to one of all those other states where the voters have approved gay marriage.
Whether "voters approved" it or not is irrelevant, what is relevant is legality. And, yes, aside from that, people moving because they prefer jobs where same-sex marriage is legal, or not being willing to move to California to accept jobs at Google from places that gay marriage is already legal, like the states of Massachussetts and Connecticut, or the countries of the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Norway, and Nepal, is precisely the point: Google's recruitment for jobs located in California isn't restricted to people that already live in California or even the United States. Sure, in some of those places Google already has offices and may hire people, and it certainly could, at some cost, move functions from California to those places. But to say there is no impact is nonsense.
Given that, it sounds like the "not gratis" problem is a symptom of a greater "not libre" problem.
The ANSI X12 process, at least as it relates to the HIPAA standard transactions, is fairly open to participation; personally, I think free (both gratis and libre, but the latter in the "public domain" sense rather than the "GPL" sense) specifications ought to the norm for this kind of universal government mandate, but I don't think that either the price nor the fact that the specs are covered by a private copyright without an open license are even in the top 10 problems with HIPAA TCS implementation. (The fact that CMS' implementation of the NPI rule is inconsistent with the rule itself, and its rationale, and that the NPI rule directly impacts the TCS rule is a much bigger problem; I'm far from certain that even that is the the biggest problem, even though it is sufficient to make it impossible to simultaneously comply with the NPI rule and the TCS rule in certain cases.)
Admin system, not OPS. The ships still run fine, they just lost stuff like crew performance reviews. Quoting TFA: "purposes such as storekeeping, email and similar support functions."
Aside from the morale issues with email you noted, storekeeping is hardly a trivial function. A ship that "runs fine" is as much a function of morale and administrative functions as anything else.
A good start would be making the specs free. At a minimum, it appears you must pay hundreds to thousands of dollars just to read the technical details of the standard. Feel free to correct me if you know where the transaction standards are published openly.
Until, IIRC, 2-3 years ago, the Federal government subsidized the publication of at least the mandated X12 transaction specifications, and maybe all of the specifications required in the regs, and they were free (gratis). The federal government has ceased subsidizing them, and they are now rather expensive.
I would agree that this is (now) a problem, but, certainly, the absence of free specs isn't the primary source of problems with HIPAA implementation, since the specifications have been available free.
You would have to collect taxes for medicaid even if medicaid didn't exist?
There are essentially no taxes collected "for medicaid".
And the compliance costs I am talking about is the costs that businesses and individuals have to pay in order to comply with the medicaid-related tax code and the costs the government has to pay in order to enforce. I have a feeling you think these costs are trivial.
I don't really care what you have a feeling that I think. The fact is that compliance costs are part of the administrative costs included in the statistics. Are they trivial? No. They still don't drive the administrative costs of the Medicaid program anywhere near those of the rest of (and particularly the privatized portion of) the US healthcare system. In fact, they are pretty much exactly what the administrative costs are; there are very few things that are administrative costs that are not either provider-side or program-side compliance costs of the type you describe.
This is about the program under the law passed by Congress which authorized warrantless wiretapping after the President was doing it; not the program which was carried out prior to that by the President in direct contravention to the prohibitions of the statute law existing at the time.
Of course, one might reasonably question whether the decision comports with the Constitution even there, but its an important distinction to make, since there have been issues both with the power of government as a whole and the independent power of the President, regardless of the laws passed by Congress relating to warrantless wiretapping, and the two issues sometimes get muddled.
Actualy...if our congresscritters didn't take some damned much time OFF from work, they'd have more time to read those bills. I don't have the links on me, but, I saw a graphic on TV of how little they are actually in session....and it was shocking to me.
The large amount of time in session is notionally intended to provide members time to return from Washington to their district; its not intended to be time off "work", and very little of the actual "work" of a member of Congress is done on the floor of the Congress, anyhow.
More time in session would probably mean less time for substantive work.
This abuse of the word "meme" needs to die. "Idea" works fine.
Advertising pays for nothing.
Advertisers do, in fact, directly pay for things. Yes, the people advertising generally hope to change peoples behavior in some way through the advertising , often (though not always) in ways which financially benefit the advertiser (not all advertising is done to sell things, though that's the biggest single reason for it.) But those people who buy things, hey, someone is paying them to. You can go infinitely far in regress of where the money comes from.
Directly, the hosting and distribution costs are paid for Google. The immediate support for them doing so is advertising dollars. Everything else is fluff.
Who do you think pays marketer's salaries?
A marketing firm, directly, for those that work for contract marketing firms; the company for whom they are marketing otherwise (and, indirectly, that company or those companies, in any case.)
You do.
Except insofar as I choose to have something marketed on my behalf, that is only even arguably true only in a very loose and indirect sense in which I can be argued to pay for just about everyone's salary on the planet through enough levels of indirection.
You pay twice, once in time and attention to avoid the ad
The time and attention I pay to avoid the ad (assuming I try to avoid the ad at all) does nothing to pay any marketer's salary.
and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
If the product doesn't have an expected utility to me that warrants the price, I don't pay it.
Very little is free and people who keep pushing advertising supported as "free" need to stop listening to the marketing parasites.
Advertising-supported media is, often, free, in financial terms, to the media consumer. This is a fact, not marketing, not fiction.
At this point, tweaking filesystems to accommodate not-really-random-access media seems like backwards thinking.
Over the next couple of years, SSDs performance benefits : price premium ratio may increase to the point where they are usually the primary and often the only drive on new desktops and laptop systems, but Linux is more than an operating system for the the newest desktop/laptop hardware. Its also for servers, and older hardware, and...
And, of course, ext4 is hardly the only supported filesystem.
In aggregate Roosevelt has done horribly badly: were it not for his idiot policies, recession would have been over in 2 years at most.
The only recession that lasted more than two years that overlapped any part of the Roosevelt Presidency was the 1929-1933 recession that Roosevelt inherited from Hoover. The recession began in late 1929. Roosevelt was elected in 1932. He took office in January of 1933. The recession ended in March of 1933. The idea that without the policies of his administration, the recession would have ended by late 1931, more than a year before he took office is an extraordinary claim requiring policies to change events that transpire long before the policies are implemented, which would require extraordinary justification, to say the least, to accept, since it would challenge essentially everything understood about causality.
10 years recession
There was no 10 year recession. There was a just over three year recession which ended shortly after Roosevelt came to office (the 1929-1933 recession) and a shallower, shorter recession four years later in 1937-1938.
combined with permanent high unemployment
This was a real problem, though unemployment began dropping when Roosevelt's policies replaced Hoover's; its just that Hoovers were such a failure that even when Roosevelt's policies had cut them in half, you still had over 10% unemployment.
(reduced during war by National War Labor Board I think that forced unions to knock off wage demands, and that helped to increase demand for labor)
The National War Labor Board actually helped unions and favored increases in low-end pay while being prone to restrict high-end pay. It was a big factor in the reduction of wage inequality and expansion of the middle class in the US which persisted long after the the Board itself was gone.
*just do not happen if not caused by policies making them last*.
Even if we accept your argument that 10-year recessions with these features don't happen without policies making them last, it would be irrelevant, since no such recession actually occurred. (And if the NWLB had ended the "recession" that started in 1929, it would have had to have been at least a 12+ year recession, since the NWLB wasn't recreated until January of 1942.)
You would be more credible in attempting to post explanations of events if you get the facts even close to straight on the events you are attempting to explain.
Japan didn't have deflation (well strictly speaking there were some points in 1990s where they had negative _real_ interest rates, but generally it doesn't count as deflation).
Uh, Japan not only had deflation, but it still hasn't gotten rid of it.
And deflation is not indicated by interest rates, real or nominal. (Though manipulating interest rate targets is a tactic frequently used, including in Japan, for addressing deflation.) Deflation is a decline in consumer prices (equivalent to an increase in the value of money.)
There is much simpler explanation to what you write: Japan was simply unwilling to write off the bad loans resulting from their speculative real estate bubble in the 1980s (any similarities to today situation? naa) and in result they couldn't get consumer spending off the ground.
Certainly, the fact that Japanese banks have in many cases lent money to those with bad real estate loans that are used to pay interest on those loans rather than realizing the loss is a factor in continuing the deflation, but that policy itself is a sensible policy because the deflation continues, limiting the real loss associated with the added nominal losses this is likely to produce and limiting the attractiveness of alternative lending choices.
OTOH, this is not an "alternative" to the explanation I provide, since it is perfectly consistent with it.
That was really the factor behind deferring spending or investment, and not "fear of current situation / uncertain future" which is a psychological factor that doesn't last permanently.
Its not a psychological factor at all, if by that you mean something like a delusion born by shock that is decoupled from or, at best, an overreaction to the market realities; its a rational response to the private incentives in the existing market situation, and it lasts as long as the market situation lasts.
Most likely, all the stimulus packages made their situation even worse, bc they used up money that Japanese consumers could have used to kickstart the investment & consumption cycle again.
Stimulus packages only use money that consumers could have used if they are funded by present taxes on consumers, which is a decidedly non-Keynesian approach, and not the approach Japan actually took. So this is not only not the "most likely" explanation, its not even an explanation which is consistent with the basic facts.
Except it didn't really help them in 1990s to spend their way out of recession.
Once a deflationary recession is established, its notoriously hard to get out of, because even once money gets into the private economy, the incentive, except for those on the margin with necessities, is to defer spending or investing it (deflation means cash held has a positive real rate of return, and recessions tend to feature high risk in investment markets, so both spending and investing, outside of investing essentially-guaranteed instruments like government securities of a stable government, is discouraged.)
This doesn't mean that stimulus isn't better than no stimulus, but it means that there is big challenge to overcome in any case. (And, in recent months deflation appears to be setting in to the present US recession, which is one of the things that has been making the predictions as to the expected depth and severity of the recession get worse.)
Why all these comparisons to the New Deal? It didn't work.
In aggregate economic terms Roosevelt's pre-war policies, including the New Deal, appear to have worked pretty well; the recession that begain in 1929 ended in 1933, and 1933-1937 saw fairly strong aggregate economic growth; the 1937-38 recession, while substantial, was much shallower than the 1929-1933 one. So, why do we say that the "Great Depression" lasted until sometime in WWII? Because the 1929-1933 recession was let go so long without effective response that unemployment got up to 25%, and even though it recovered substantially under Roosevelt, it remained high (over 10%) until war spending put a two-pronged attack on unemployment, by both radically increasing government spending and radically shrinking the civilian labor force.
The evidence is not that the New Deal "didn't work", its that if you let things get horrible enough, even making them much better can leave them very bad, so its a good idea not to wait till things get that horrible before dealing with them.
No, instead of spending the money by the government why not let those who actually earn it decide what to do with it?
Tragedy of the commons: the private incentives in an economy featuring deflation and high volatility are, beyond necessities, to hoard and/or invest in "risk-free" investments (like T-bills -- which is why short-term T-bill yield is hovering around 0% right now). If, of all available federal taxes, you specifically give an income tax holiday, almost all of the money you give back is going to people who aren't spending on necessities, and thus, in the current economic environment, can be expected to use the money in ways which will not, by and large, produce any stimulus.
I'm just curious as to whether you really consider this to be a constructive response.
More constructive than I consider the recommendations it responded to.
The point is not the name of the person who reads a particular bill.
If that's not the point, then that's not what you should have complained about. Complaining that people respond to what you say rather than some unstated point that you did not say seems to me a bit odd.
The point is that the Founding Fathers intended for most of our experience with government to come from the state and local levels.
If by "Founding Fathers", you mean the members of the Constitutional Convention, then this, at best, misleading, if not completely wrong. They, despite a charter to work out revisions to the extraordinarily decentralized system under the Articles of Confederation, drafted a system with a strong central government and argued very forcefully for that system.
Certainly, in the early government under the Constitution, both the State:Federal and Local:State distribution of responsibility pushed more down to the smaller levels of government than is presently the case, some of that represents changes in ideology (and some of it, in the State:Federal domain, is reflected in subsequent changes to the Constitution), much of it is just response to changes in circumstances, and reflects neither ideological nor Constitutional change at any level.
But instead of that, we have a federal government that is so involved and so complex that the people running it have no hope of personally managing their own workload.
A government for a nation of 300 million people in an era of instantaneous communication and globalized trade and transport (and consquently also crime, terrorism, disease propagation, etc.) is vastly more complex than one for a population of 4 million in an era where the fastest means of transportation or long-distance communication are horse and sail. You'll also find that most state and local elected government officials rely quite a bit on staff work; its not that the work has moved to the federal government and the states and localities are twiddling their thumbs. Localities and states also have much more to deal with than they did in the 1790s (which isn't surprising as most states and many localities have greater populations, greater flows of visitors, and far greater aggregate economic activity than the entire 1790s US.)
This is all, to say the least, hardly surprising. Making federal elected officials waste time trying to imitate medieval monks and copying out documents by hand is not a "constructive" recommendation, nor are your other proposals.
When I say it bothers me that Congressmen don't read the bills they vote on, I am not saying they are lazy and that I could do a much better job (the absence of those claims from my post was your first clue).
And I didn't say you said anything like that. So what?
I am saying they are dealing with an unwieldy, overly complex system that does not need to be this way.
And I'm saying that you're wrong.
They obviously need their staff to deal with the system as it is, so it's not a leap of faith to say that requiring the representatives to personally take care of thee matters would be a step in the direction of changing how the system currently is.
It is a quite a leap to say that doing so would be a step in the direction of positive change, even if it could be done.
Sure, I could run for office and try to do things differently but it would accomplish next to nothing unless the culture itself changes.
Assuming, for a moment, the truth of that statement, it would be pretty clear that one of the things that you c
So the IRS is gonna put all their forms up on Google Docs instead of hosting them in-house soon, right?
I didn't say anything remotely like that.
The fact that cost is a factor doesn't mean its the only factor, and doesn't mean it applies to every bit of content any part of the government might want to distribute for any purpose in the same way.
What bothers me is that in Congress, the senators and representatives routinely vote on bills that they have not even read. They rely far too heavily on their staff to process and condense this information for them, which is flawed because we voted for and elected the representative, not his assistant.
And the representative chose the staff, and chose how much to rely on them.
If you don't like it, run for office yourself on a platform of not having your staff read bills and condense information for you, and you can test the theory of whether or not that is really as important to other voters as it clearly is to you.
Any particular reason they can't host this content on a.gov server that I could possibly get to from work?
Having it hosted on YouTube doesn't cost the taxpayer anything for hosting and distribution, whereas hosting it on a.gov server would have a cost to the taxpayer.
If youtube is going to start carrying government videos, presumably funded by taxpayers, the videos need to be public domain and youtube needs to have a built in mechanism to allow views to save the video.
Sure, if they are produced by the US government, they have to be in the public domain, but why does Google need to change the features of its service if the government chooses to submit videos to the existing service with the existing features?
The numbers you are quoting are false and they get quoted all over the place.
No, they aren't false. Its the actual administrative cost in the Medicaid program.
You are not accounting for tax collection and compliance costs
Tax collection is done with or without the medicaid program and medicaid imposes no additional cost for tax collection. Compliance costs are, in fact, part of the administrative costs.
you are not accounting for the effect that the government-created "monopolies" create economies of scale that distribute fixed costs over a much larger population.
Even if that was the case, so what? If it was true, it would be a positive factor in favor of the efficiency of government-monopoly healthcare, so its a factor that you wouldn't want to negate in a comparison when the issue is whether or not we ought to have government-run healthcare. OTOH, Medicaid isn't a "monopoly" in any sense.
Even ignoring these problems, the 5% number still doesn't sound remotely right to me.
I don't really care if the facts "sound" right to you.
If it's true, it must only be due to the high costs of the health care itself
You are continuing to demonstrate that you don't know much about Medicaid.
Do you realize that 24% overhead beats the crap out of any government program I've ever heard of?
All this tells me is that you don't know about many government programs. It doesn't even beat most government healthcare programs in the US, which operate with lower overhead than the overall healthcare industry. (E.g., Medicaid runs at about 5% in administrative costs.)
24% might sound ridiculous to you,
Mostly, because compared to healthcare systems anywhere in the world, including government-run ones in the US, it is ridiculous.
I'm right with you, but the United States is not any other major industrialized nation. There are parts of the country that are borderline deserted.
The same is true of, e.g., Australia.
I'm not convinced that the solutions applied to the more population dense countries of Europe will work as effectively here in the United States.
"The rest of the developed world" is not the same thing as "the more population dense countries of Europe".
And, in any case, its not a single solution, even within Europe, its one feature that is common in the rest of the developed world: through one mechanism or another, no one lacks health coverage because of inability to pay. Whether its a purchase mandate plus subsidies (as in Germany) with private insurers and providers, a system where the only or main healthcare system is government-run (like Britain or Canada), or some other solution, the rest of the developed world makes sure that health care is universally accessible. They don't all do it the same way, and a US solution wouldn't need to exactly mirror the system used in any other country.
No matter how you put it. No manufacturer, ever, paid for the expense of risk.
The customer always pays the cost, the question is really not who pays but who is exposed to risk (i.e., who pays unexpectedly if things go wrong.)
If the manufacturer is exposed to the risk, it is in their interest to make software only if there is a market at the price necessary to justify the cost of largely eliminating the risk; this will improve quality, but reduce cost. Now, for cars (where failures have substantial public safety implications, and other costs to people other than the direct customer -- i.e., burden to everyone else on the road) it makes sense for government to mandate that the manufacturer pick up most or all of the risk of defects, since otherwise the public bears a large share of the risk, even though they aren't involved in the individual purchase decision.
OTOH, for most software, I don't think their is as clear a socialized risk in event of defects; clearly, the customer is at risk, but the customer is free to demand performance guarantees that they are willing to pay for or just not buy the software. Mandating that the risk is born by manufacturers would just eliminate low-cost software even for those willing to accept the risk. Certainly, for some classes of software, there might be clear socialized risk, but I don't see it being generally the case.
Sure this isn't the waterfall model as published in the text books, but it's how it works (fails) in real life.
Someone just needs to find a better way to communicate agile methodologies to executives; with "big lump" waterfall development, you have, essentially, nothing of value until the system is done. No matter what some progress chart says about % completed, you essentially have a binary completion: its either done or you have nothing to show for your work.
With agile methodologies, you have definite value delivered and usable throughout the life of your project, in units defined by discrete business needs that are useful on their own. Meaning that when the project is X% complete, you have delivered something at least remotely resembling X% of the value, and if you decide to redirect effor midstream, the effort you've expended to date isn't wasted (there'll probably be some loss in whatever components are currently midstream, but not the total loss you'd have if you abandoned a big-lump project halfway through.) Which means that executives in organizations that implement those methods have more control than with waterfall methodologies.
Slashdot Mirror
The tight conditions that result in the need to layoff employees are the exact conditions in which it is most critical to be able to recruit and retain the best employees, since you need to get the most bang for your labor-cost buck, and can't afford to settle for second best or carry dead weight.
Whether same-sex relationships should occur is a social issue, without being a political issue.
Whether same-sex couples are given the same treatment under the law, without unequal or supposedly "separate but equal" treatment under the law, is a political issue.
Prop. 8 relates to the second, not the first, and is therefore political. Of course one's view on the social issue is likely to color one's view on the political issue, but that doesn't stop the political issue from being a political issue.
Whether "voters approved" it or not is irrelevant, what is relevant is legality. And, yes, aside from that, people moving because they prefer jobs where same-sex marriage is legal, or not being willing to move to California to accept jobs at Google from places that gay marriage is already legal, like the states of Massachussetts and Connecticut, or the countries of the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Norway, and Nepal, is precisely the point: Google's recruitment for jobs located in California isn't restricted to people that already live in California or even the United States. Sure, in some of those places Google already has offices and may hire people, and it certainly could, at some cost, move functions from California to those places. But to say there is no impact is nonsense.
The ANSI X12 process, at least as it relates to the HIPAA standard transactions, is fairly open to participation; personally, I think free (both gratis and libre, but the latter in the "public domain" sense rather than the "GPL" sense) specifications ought to the norm for this kind of universal government mandate, but I don't think that either the price nor the fact that the specs are covered by a private copyright without an open license are even in the top 10 problems with HIPAA TCS implementation. (The fact that CMS' implementation of the NPI rule is inconsistent with the rule itself, and its rationale, and that the NPI rule directly impacts the TCS rule is a much bigger problem; I'm far from certain that even that is the the biggest problem, even though it is sufficient to make it impossible to simultaneously comply with the NPI rule and the TCS rule in certain cases.)
Aside from the morale issues with email you noted, storekeeping is hardly a trivial function. A ship that "runs fine" is as much a function of morale and administrative functions as anything else.
Until, IIRC, 2-3 years ago, the Federal government subsidized the publication of at least the mandated X12 transaction specifications, and maybe all of the specifications required in the regs, and they were free (gratis). The federal government has ceased subsidizing them, and they are now rather expensive.
I would agree that this is (now) a problem, but, certainly, the absence of free specs isn't the primary source of problems with HIPAA implementation, since the specifications have been available free.
There are essentially no taxes collected "for medicaid".
I don't really care what you have a feeling that I think. The fact is that compliance costs are part of the administrative costs included in the statistics. Are they trivial? No. They still don't drive the administrative costs of the Medicaid program anywhere near those of the rest of (and particularly the privatized portion of) the US healthcare system. In fact, they are pretty much exactly what the administrative costs are; there are very few things that are administrative costs that are not either provider-side or program-side compliance costs of the type you describe.
This is about the program under the law passed by Congress which authorized warrantless wiretapping after the President was doing it; not the program which was carried out prior to that by the President in direct contravention to the prohibitions of the statute law existing at the time.
Of course, one might reasonably question whether the decision comports with the Constitution even there, but its an important distinction to make, since there have been issues both with the power of government as a whole and the independent power of the President, regardless of the laws passed by Congress relating to warrantless wiretapping, and the two issues sometimes get muddled.
The large amount of time in session is notionally intended to provide members time to return from Washington to their district; its not intended to be time off "work", and very little of the actual "work" of a member of Congress is done on the floor of the Congress, anyhow.
More time in session would probably mean less time for substantive work.
This abuse of the word "meme" needs to die. "Idea" works fine.
Advertisers do, in fact, directly pay for things. Yes, the people advertising generally hope to change peoples behavior in some way through the advertising , often (though not always) in ways which financially benefit the advertiser (not all advertising is done to sell things, though that's the biggest single reason for it.) But those people who buy things, hey, someone is paying them to. You can go infinitely far in regress of where the money comes from.
Directly, the hosting and distribution costs are paid for Google. The immediate support for them doing so is advertising dollars. Everything else is fluff.
A marketing firm, directly, for those that work for contract marketing firms; the company for whom they are marketing otherwise (and, indirectly, that company or those companies, in any case.)
Except insofar as I choose to have something marketed on my behalf, that is only even arguably true only in a very loose and indirect sense in which I can be argued to pay for just about everyone's salary on the planet through enough levels of indirection.
The time and attention I pay to avoid the ad (assuming I try to avoid the ad at all) does nothing to pay any marketer's salary.
If the product doesn't have an expected utility to me that warrants the price, I don't pay it.
Advertising-supported media is, often, free, in financial terms, to the media consumer. This is a fact, not marketing, not fiction.
Over the next couple of years, SSDs performance benefits : price premium ratio may increase to the point where they are usually the primary and often the only drive on new desktops and laptop systems, but Linux is more than an operating system for the the newest desktop/laptop hardware. Its also for servers, and older hardware, and...
And, of course, ext4 is hardly the only supported filesystem.
The only recession that lasted more than two years that overlapped any part of the Roosevelt Presidency was the 1929-1933 recession that Roosevelt inherited from Hoover. The recession began in late 1929. Roosevelt was elected in 1932. He took office in January of 1933. The recession ended in March of 1933. The idea that without the policies of his administration, the recession would have ended by late 1931, more than a year before he took office is an extraordinary claim requiring policies to change events that transpire long before the policies are implemented, which would require extraordinary justification, to say the least, to accept, since it would challenge essentially everything understood about causality.
There was no 10 year recession. There was a just over three year recession which ended shortly after Roosevelt came to office (the 1929-1933 recession) and a shallower, shorter recession four years later in 1937-1938.
This was a real problem, though unemployment began dropping when Roosevelt's policies replaced Hoover's; its just that Hoovers were such a failure that even when Roosevelt's policies had cut them in half, you still had over 10% unemployment.
The National War Labor Board actually helped unions and favored increases in low-end pay while being prone to restrict high-end pay. It was a big factor in the reduction of wage inequality and expansion of the middle class in the US which persisted long after the the Board itself was gone.
Even if we accept your argument that 10-year recessions with these features don't happen without policies making them last, it would be irrelevant, since no such recession actually occurred. (And if the NWLB had ended the "recession" that started in 1929, it would have had to have been at least a 12+ year recession, since the NWLB wasn't recreated until January of 1942.)
You would be more credible in attempting to post explanations of events if you get the facts even close to straight on the events you are attempting to explain.
Japan didn't have deflation (well strictly speaking there were some points in 1990s where they had negative _real_ interest rates, but generally it doesn't count as deflation).
Uh, Japan not only had deflation, but it still hasn't gotten rid of it.
And deflation is not indicated by interest rates, real or nominal. (Though manipulating interest rate targets is a tactic frequently used, including in Japan, for addressing deflation.) Deflation is a decline in consumer prices (equivalent to an increase in the value of money.)
Certainly, the fact that Japanese banks have in many cases lent money to those with bad real estate loans that are used to pay interest on those loans rather than realizing the loss is a factor in continuing the deflation, but that policy itself is a sensible policy because the deflation continues, limiting the real loss associated with the added nominal losses this is likely to produce and limiting the attractiveness of alternative lending choices.
OTOH, this is not an "alternative" to the explanation I provide, since it is perfectly consistent with it.
Its not a psychological factor at all, if by that you mean something like a delusion born by shock that is decoupled from or, at best, an overreaction to the market realities; its a rational response to the private incentives in the existing market situation, and it lasts as long as the market situation lasts.
Stimulus packages only use money that consumers could have used if they are funded by present taxes on consumers, which is a decidedly non-Keynesian approach, and not the approach Japan actually took. So this is not only not the "most likely" explanation, its not even an explanation which is consistent with the basic facts.
Once a deflationary recession is established, its notoriously hard to get out of, because even once money gets into the private economy, the incentive, except for those on the margin with necessities, is to defer spending or investing it (deflation means cash held has a positive real rate of return, and recessions tend to feature high risk in investment markets, so both spending and investing, outside of investing essentially-guaranteed instruments like government securities of a stable government, is discouraged.)
This doesn't mean that stimulus isn't better than no stimulus, but it means that there is big challenge to overcome in any case. (And, in recent months deflation appears to be setting in to the present US recession, which is one of the things that has been making the predictions as to the expected depth and severity of the recession get worse.)
In aggregate economic terms Roosevelt's pre-war policies, including the New Deal, appear to have worked pretty well; the recession that begain in 1929 ended in 1933, and 1933-1937 saw fairly strong aggregate economic growth; the 1937-38 recession, while substantial, was much shallower than the 1929-1933 one. So, why do we say that the "Great Depression" lasted until sometime in WWII? Because the 1929-1933 recession was let go so long without effective response that unemployment got up to 25%, and even though it recovered substantially under Roosevelt, it remained high (over 10%) until war spending put a two-pronged attack on unemployment, by both radically increasing government spending and radically shrinking the civilian labor force.
The evidence is not that the New Deal "didn't work", its that if you let things get horrible enough, even making them much better can leave them very bad, so its a good idea not to wait till things get that horrible before dealing with them.
Tragedy of the commons: the private incentives in an economy featuring deflation and high volatility are, beyond necessities, to hoard and/or invest in "risk-free" investments (like T-bills -- which is why short-term T-bill yield is hovering around 0% right now). If, of all available federal taxes, you specifically give an income tax holiday, almost all of the money you give back is going to people who aren't spending on necessities, and thus, in the current economic environment, can be expected to use the money in ways which will not, by and large, produce any stimulus.
More constructive than I consider the recommendations it responded to.
If that's not the point, then that's not what you should have complained about. Complaining that people respond to what you say rather than some unstated point that you did not say seems to me a bit odd.
If by "Founding Fathers", you mean the members of the Constitutional Convention, then this, at best, misleading, if not completely wrong. They, despite a charter to work out revisions to the extraordinarily decentralized system under the Articles of Confederation, drafted a system with a strong central government and argued very forcefully for that system.
Certainly, in the early government under the Constitution, both the State:Federal and Local:State distribution of responsibility pushed more down to the smaller levels of government than is presently the case, some of that represents changes in ideology (and some of it, in the State:Federal domain, is reflected in subsequent changes to the Constitution), much of it is just response to changes in circumstances, and reflects neither ideological nor Constitutional change at any level.
A government for a nation of 300 million people in an era of instantaneous communication and globalized trade and transport (and consquently also crime, terrorism, disease propagation, etc.) is vastly more complex than one for a population of 4 million in an era where the fastest means of transportation or long-distance communication are horse and sail. You'll also find that most state and local elected government officials rely quite a bit on staff work; its not that the work has moved to the federal government and the states and localities are twiddling their thumbs. Localities and states also have much more to deal with than they did in the 1790s (which isn't surprising as most states and many localities have greater populations, greater flows of visitors, and far greater aggregate economic activity than the entire 1790s US.)
This is all, to say the least, hardly surprising. Making federal elected officials waste time trying to imitate medieval monks and copying out documents by hand is not a "constructive" recommendation, nor are your other proposals.
And I didn't say you said anything like that. So what?
And I'm saying that you're wrong.
It is a quite a leap to say that doing so would be a step in the direction of positive change, even if it could be done.
Assuming, for a moment, the truth of that statement, it would be pretty clear that one of the things that you c
I didn't say anything remotely like that.
The fact that cost is a factor doesn't mean its the only factor, and doesn't mean it applies to every bit of content any part of the government might want to distribute for any purpose in the same way.
And the representative chose the staff, and chose how much to rely on them.
If you don't like it, run for office yourself on a platform of not having your staff read bills and condense information for you, and you can test the theory of whether or not that is really as important to other voters as it clearly is to you.
Having it hosted on YouTube doesn't cost the taxpayer anything for hosting and distribution, whereas hosting it on a .gov server would have a cost to the taxpayer.
Sure, if they are produced by the US government, they have to be in the public domain, but why does Google need to change the features of its service if the government chooses to submit videos to the existing service with the existing features?
No, they aren't false. Its the actual administrative cost in the Medicaid program.
Tax collection is done with or without the medicaid program and medicaid imposes no additional cost for tax collection. Compliance costs are, in fact, part of the administrative costs.
Even if that was the case, so what? If it was true, it would be a positive factor in favor of the efficiency of government-monopoly healthcare, so its a factor that you wouldn't want to negate in a comparison when the issue is whether or not we ought to have government-run healthcare. OTOH, Medicaid isn't a "monopoly" in any sense.
I don't really care if the facts "sound" right to you.
You are continuing to demonstrate that you don't know much about Medicaid.
All this tells me is that you don't know about many government programs. It doesn't even beat most government healthcare programs in the US, which operate with lower overhead than the overall healthcare industry. (E.g., Medicaid runs at about 5% in administrative costs.)
Mostly, because compared to healthcare systems anywhere in the world, including government-run ones in the US, it is ridiculous.
The same is true of, e.g., Australia.
"The rest of the developed world" is not the same thing as "the more population dense countries of Europe".
And, in any case, its not a single solution, even within Europe, its one feature that is common in the rest of the developed world: through one mechanism or another, no one lacks health coverage because of inability to pay. Whether its a purchase mandate plus subsidies (as in Germany) with private insurers and providers, a system where the only or main healthcare system is government-run (like Britain or Canada), or some other solution, the rest of the developed world makes sure that health care is universally accessible. They don't all do it the same way, and a US solution wouldn't need to exactly mirror the system used in any other country.
The customer always pays the cost, the question is really not who pays but who is exposed to risk (i.e., who pays unexpectedly if things go wrong.)
If the manufacturer is exposed to the risk, it is in their interest to make software only if there is a market at the price necessary to justify the cost of largely eliminating the risk; this will improve quality, but reduce cost. Now, for cars (where failures have substantial public safety implications, and other costs to people other than the direct customer -- i.e., burden to everyone else on the road) it makes sense for government to mandate that the manufacturer pick up most or all of the risk of defects, since otherwise the public bears a large share of the risk, even though they aren't involved in the individual purchase decision.
OTOH, for most software, I don't think their is as clear a socialized risk in event of defects; clearly, the customer is at risk, but the customer is free to demand performance guarantees that they are willing to pay for or just not buy the software. Mandating that the risk is born by manufacturers would just eliminate low-cost software even for those willing to accept the risk. Certainly, for some classes of software, there might be clear socialized risk, but I don't see it being generally the case.
Someone just needs to find a better way to communicate agile methodologies to executives; with "big lump" waterfall development, you have, essentially, nothing of value until the system is done. No matter what some progress chart says about % completed, you essentially have a binary completion: its either done or you have nothing to show for your work.
With agile methodologies, you have definite value delivered and usable throughout the life of your project, in units defined by discrete business needs that are useful on their own. Meaning that when the project is X% complete, you have delivered something at least remotely resembling X% of the value, and if you decide to redirect effor midstream, the effort you've expended to date isn't wasted (there'll probably be some loss in whatever components are currently midstream, but not the total loss you'd have if you abandoned a big-lump project halfway through.) Which means that executives in organizations that implement those methods have more control than with waterfall methodologies.