Tag Archives: motherjones-com

Quote of the Day: Will Obamacare Deliver More Votes Than Medicare?

by MiquelCuriel Posted on April 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Jonathan Bernstein, questioning whether Obamacare will ever be a vote winner for Democrats:

After Medicare passed in 1965, voters “rewarded” Democrats for Medicare with big midterm losses in 1966 and then by putting Republicans in the White House in five of the next six presidential elections.

Actually, that’s….true, isn’t it? Even granting that there was a lot of other stuff going on in 1966, let’s hope that history doesn’t repeat itself.

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Quote of the Day: Will Obamacare Deliver More Votes Than Medicare?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 18 April 2014

by AlisiaSears Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

I have to leave early today for yet another pulmonary checkup, so Friday catblogging comes a little ahead of schedule this week. Here is Domino pretending she doesn’t notice the fabulous feline shadow she’s casting in the late afternoon sun. But it is fabulous, no?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 18 April 2014

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Unless You Can Do It Blindfolded, Please STFU

by DeenaBumg Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

I’ve long suspected this, but now we have Scientific Proof™. Professional violinists who insist that there’s nothing like a Strad can’t even tell them apart from modern instruments:

In this study, 10 renowned soloists each blind-tested six Old Italian violins (including five by Stradivari) and six new during two 75-min sessions—the first in a rehearsal room, the second in a 300-seat concert hall. When asked to choose a violin to replace their own for a hypothetical concert tour, 6 of the 10 soloists chose a new instrument….On average, soloists rated their favorite new violins more highly than their favorite old for playability, articulation, and projection, and at least equal to old in terms of timbre. Soloists failed to distinguish new from old at better than chance levels.

Wine snobs can barely distinguish red from white when they’re blindfolded. Pro violinists can’t pick out a Strad from a decent modern violin. Art aficionados are routinely taken in by fakes even when they’re allowed to investigate them from inches away. The examples of this kind of thing are endless.

So am I skeptical when you claim your $90,000 turntable is really and truly light years better than some mere $2,000 POS? Yes I am. Am I skeptical when you claim you can distinguish Beluga caviar from Sterlet? Yes I am. Hell, I’m not even sure you can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. If you can do it blindfolded, then I’ll believe you. Until then, don’t even bother me with this nonsense.

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Unless You Can Do It Blindfolded, Please STFU

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Yep, Most of Paul Ryan’s Budget Cuts Come Out of Programs for the Poor

by Arkady549e Posted on April 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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A few days ago I guessed that 80+ percent of the cuts in Paul Ryan’s latest budget blueprint came from programs for the poor. Today, CBPP dives a little deeper and puts the number at 69 percent. The cuts come in five categories: health care; food assistance; college grants; other mandatory programs such as SSI, school lunches, and EITC; and miscellaneous discretionary cuts. However, CBPP warns that its 69 percent number is very likely conservative:

In cases where the Ryan budget cuts funding in a budget category but doesn’t distribute that cut among specific programs — such as its cuts in non-defense discretionary programs and its unspecified cuts in mandatory programs — we assume that all programs in that category, including programs not designed to assist low-income households, will be cut by the same percentage.

That’s definitely a risky assumption. In real life, two-thirds of those cuts would almost certainly end up coming out of programs for the poor. We’ll never know for sure because Ryan never has the guts to specify where his cuts would go, but I’m willing to bet that if Republicans were forced to provide line items for all of Ryan’s broad categories, we’d end up back at 80 percent of the cuts hitting those with low incomes.

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Yep, Most of Paul Ryan’s Budget Cuts Come Out of Programs for the Poor

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The Wall Street Journal Needs to Find Some New Clip Art

by qdyedut Posted on April 3, 2014

Mother Jones

Wait a second. Did the Wall Street Journal editorial page really use the Daily Kos logo to illustrate an op-ed by billionaire arch-conservative Charles Koch? Sure, it’s an out-of-date logo, but even so, do they not have any idea that this piece of clip art has long been associated with the Great Orange Satan? Color me amused.

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The Wall Street Journal Needs to Find Some New Clip Art

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The United States Is a Data Wonk’s Dream

by CarleyHannan Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Emily Badger, here’s an interesting chart showing which countries are most open with national data. Obviously rich countries do best at this kind of statistical recordkeeping, but some rich countries do better than others, and the US is one of the best. In fact, it would be the best if not for the fact that corporate registration is a state function, and the US therefore scores approximately zero for its lack of a national corporate registry database. Full data for all countries is here. Enjoy.

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The United States Is a Data Wonk’s Dream

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Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in February

by PedroMollison Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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The American economy added 175,000 new jobs in January, but about 90,000 of those jobs were needed just to keep up with population growth, so net job growth clocked in at 85,000. If we accept the notion that bad weather has been holding back the economy, that’s pretty good. If we don’t, it’s mediocre—but still better than the past couple of months of dismal job numbers.

The unemployment rate ticked up to 6.7 percent, caused almost entirely by an increase in the number of long-term unemployed. Since long-term unemployment isn’t much affected by weekly variations in the weather, my guess is that our severe winter hasn’t played a big role in the job picture. This is confirmed by the establishment data, which shows that construction employment is up while retail and IT employment are down. That’s not bulletproof evidence or anything, but it’s not the kind of thing you’d expect to see if weather were a big factor. It’s what you’d expect to see if consumer spending is weak.

Bottom line: we continue to plod along. Things could be worse, but they still aren’t very good.

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Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in February

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Chart of the Day: Driverless Cars Are Coming!

by KayleighFruehau Posted on February 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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I consider myself a pretty reckless optimist when it comes to the general topic of artificial intelligence and the specific topic of driverless cars. In particular, I figure that true driverless cars will be here within a decade or so. But apparently I’m not being aggressive at all. In fact, I’m just an old fogey. Via Matt Yglesias, here’s a projection from a recent Morgan Stanley research report:

Damn! “Limited” driver substitution by next year. And full-on driverless cars within four or five years. I sure hope the researcher who wrote this knows something I don’t. If this is all really in the works, it’s pretty awesome.

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Chart of the Day: Driverless Cars Are Coming!

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Bitcoin Is a Fiat Currency, But That’s Not Its Big Problem

by Isela Harris Posted on February 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mt. Gox, the biggest name in Bitcoin exchanges, has apparently suffered a huge, ongoing theft amounting to several hundred million dollars. Today, their website is shut down. All is chaos, and science fiction author Charles Stross doesn’t have much sympathy:

C’mon, folks. Mt. Gox was a trading card swap mart set up by an amateur coder and implemented in PHP!….I’ve written software that handled financial transactions for a dot-com startup—a payment service provider, now a subsidiary of Mastercard. Been there, got the scars.

….You can’t do this shit on an amateur basis and not get burned….Datacash grew from a tiny seed (about 30 credit card transactions in our first three months) to something that was handling around 20,000 transactions per server per day when I left in early 2000, following 30% compound growth per month for an extended period; the early codebase was retired as rapidly as was feasible, the company had penetration testers, an in-house crypto specialist, and coding standards with test harnesses and QA well before it was handling 10% of MtGox’s turnover … and still shit happened. From what I’ve read, I’m not convinced that MtGox ever understood what financial security entails. But the fault isn’t theirs alone. The real fault lies with Bitcoin itself.

A real currency with a fiscal policy and the backing of a state that could raise loans would be able to ride out this insult. It’d be extraordinarily painful, but it wouldn’t devastate the currency in perpetuity. But Bitcoin doesn’t have a fiscal policy: it wears a gimp suit and a ball gag, padlocked into permanent deflation and with the rate of issue of new “notes” governed by the law of algorithmic complexity.

Personally, I consider Bitcoin useful in one narrow way: it forces people to think about what a fiat currency really is. Bitcoin, after all, is the ultimate fiat currency: just a bunch of ones and zeroes on a computer with no intrinsic value. But so are all currencies. The difference is that it’s more obvious with Bitcoin because the entire enterprise is actively marketed as nothing more than algorithmically-created data. It’s one of their big selling points.

So that forces you to think about what the ultimate value of a Bitcoin can be. And if there isn’t any, then why do dollars and yen have value? Why do IOUs passed around in prison camps have value? Or babysitting chits? Once you figure out what ultimately underlies the value of these various fiat currencies, you’ve taken a big step toward understanding why some currencies are better than others and why playing games with the debt ceiling is so stupid.

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Bitcoin Is a Fiat Currency, But That’s Not Its Big Problem

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Friday Cat Blogging – 21 February 2014

by Oliab719z Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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The weather is still great around here, and that means we get another outdoor pic of Domino this week. Today, she’s posing as Queen of the Garden. If you look closely, you’ll see that she’s plonked herself on top of a sprinkler head, and since these are on a timer I always figure she’s going to regret that someday. But not yet. So far, a sprinkler has never gone off while she’s sleeping on it. Nine lives indeed.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 21 February 2014

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