Doctor D's World

Corporations are people too!

2011-09-19T08:10:00.000-07:00

But, wait a second. Why hasn't anyone in the media or legal world wondered aloud, "If a corporation has First Amendment rights, doesn't said corporation also have to be treated as one person when it commits acts of fraud or malfeasance?" Seriously. How do they get to have it both ways--as if I have to ask, knowing the power that they wield in our "democracy"?

Here's what should happen, if a corporation is indeed one person. That person should go to jail or pay the fine(s) if, say, the accounting department (see ENRON and WorldCom), or the risk management department and CEOs (see Goldman Sachs and Leimann Bros. for starters) commit crimes. Every man and woman who is part of that corporation should be treated as part of the whole. Everyone in that corporation should go to jail, not just the few who screwed our country. After all, despite what the Koch Bros. and Fox News would like you to believe, the rank-and-file, managers, and everyone else are who really build the wealth in a corporation. Granted these people have little to no say in executive decisions, but perhaps they should if the lot of them are going to federal prison if the CEO decides that he is not interested in the laws of the U.S. of A.

I just can't believe that a corporation can have the power to control our democracy, yet have none of the responsibilities that every other "person" in our country has.

Don't touch Medicare...Privatize Medicare

2011-05-26T05:36:00.000-07:00

Interesting tactic by the GOP right now, pushing to privatize Medicare and hand out vouchers so people will have the freedom to buy health insurance. This will save the government tons of money, they say. Let's look a little closer.

Fact: Medicare is very expensive, and can't be covered by our tax revenues, even before the GOP forced us to cut taxes on corporations and the rich. Why is that? Because health care costs are rising faster than in any other country on earth. And in the GOP-authored and pushed through 2003 Medicare drug bill, which has cost--and handed big pharma--more than a trillion bucks so far, has a direct provision that Medicare cannot negotiate drug prices with drug companies. So as it is, and not because it's in any way socialist, but a GOP cash cow, it is very expensive.

But all that money has to go somewhere, why are the right wing backers (big industry) wanting to kill it? Because, as many doctors and clinics are finding out, it's hard to get money out of Medicare for services. It is not trivial, but easier to make deals with the health insurance industry. So here's what you do. You kill Medicare as a single-payer, even though used right it could help to control the runaway cost of health care. Then give out cash to people so they can go try to find an individual plan that will cover their health situation, which, if you're over 60, you know that it's damn near impossible. This way, the money goes directly into the health care industry, people assume all of the risk, and there's no control whatsoever on the rising cost of health care. And, the government gets out of the way so industry can fleece us as it sees fit.

The CBO has documented that the plan will not really save the government much, and will strap the elderly with much higher health care costs. And one thing I have a hard time figuring out is why the insurance industry would want all those unprofitable elderly enrolled in the first place? What industry wants to take the thousands upon thousands of elderly Medicare beneficiaries that could never pay in as much as they claim. This can not go well for seniors. They will not get good service, and there will have to be low levels of coverage. BC/BS is not going to assume the structural debt of Medicare, and corporate hospitals and big pharma are not going to give up profits, so something has to give. I think it will be the American people who have very little to say regarding the decisions made about their lives.

The Ryan plan is already costing the GOP political points, and District 26 in upstate NY may be a sign that voters can see what's brewing. But does the GOP care? Naw. Why let voters get in the way of your ideological battles and handouts to big industry? After all, Obama is not one of us, right? So he can't win in 2012. If the GOP keeps following an ideology that does not coincide with the needs of the populace, I would suspect he will, no matter the ad hominem attacks.

Why I hate American Idol and every show like it.

2011-04-03T06:29:00.000-07:00

OK. First off, I don't like the way the contestants sing, or the songs they choose. So it would be painful to watch even if I could stand the format of the show--and I worry that one of the contestants is going to be injured by all the sunshine that gets blown up their arses by the "judges". But the endemic insta-celeb of these shows is my biggest problem. Some of my favorite artists, and some of the biggest cultural and artistic influences were not cut from some commercial mold that creates pop-bots, which sing as they are told, so the big media can flood the market with the homogenized crap that is about as original as the piles of mass-produced flip-flops down at the Wal-Mart. Real artists developed a craft, and worked hard. If it resonated with people, it grew. They, and their audience had something to say, and it was many times a primal scream.

Would Woody Guthrie, Pete Seger, or Neil Young survive the first Idol cut? No. Go read about how any truly original artist got their big break. Many times it was getting discovered at a small venue, got airplay by a bold DJ (before media conglomeration replaced them with play lists), or got picked up by an indie label.

The model for commercial celebrity is nothing new. It started as soon as there was money in records and airplay. But this is ridiculous because it's hard to escape the parade of new "great performers" flooding our culture like iGadgets. In the current system, there are very few DJs with a metro-area market that can help the new REM, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Social Distortion, The Clash, The Replacements, or Pearl Jam along. The internet will help keep some semblance of counter-culture going, but there always seems to be less and less that has yet to be homogenized by our corporate plutocracy, and why I can't stand anything about "Idol".

Why American capitalism isn't sustainable Part 4: the environment

2011-04-03T05:34:00.000-07:00

What drives capitalism? Profit, of course. How much profit is there in a device that would save the world? None. Zip. Zilch. You put tons of money in it, it saves the world, and you didn't make a penny from it. So why would Apple develop an iWorldsaver when people are mesmerized by high-res, 2-inch screens with little frogs jumping across lanes of traffic? Not going to happen.

My point is that the only development of environmentally positive systems (e.g., wind turbines, solar panels, or a device that turns assholes into something useful) is going to come from pooled tax money--which can be terminated by the next collection of assholes in congress--or university research. And the majority will even notice the impending catastrophe because they will be texting.

One of the biggest problems with capitalism is that the only profit to be made from doing anything sustainable will come as pressures from depleted resources (used up or polluted) mount and there is little time for development.

Is the Husker Nation really broke, governor?

2011-03-23T19:16:00.000-07:00

Governor Dave Heineman

Office of the Governor

P.O. Box 94848

Lincoln, NE 68509-4848

Dear Governor:

I have been trying to understand the Nebraska state budget, and I’m a bit confused. According to the University of Nebraska Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Nebraska ranks first in the nation in the production of commercial red meat, and second in the nation in cattle and calf sales. We rank third in the nation in the production of corn for grain, and sorghum and dry edible beans. Over the last 15 years, Nebraskan corn farmers alone received more than $8 billion in farm subsidies. Corn surpluses in December were almost 8% lower than a year ago, and it is perched above $6 per bushel and expected to rise further.

As of 2009 we only have approximately 1.8 million residents. Our state appropriations increased only 2.5% from the 2009-10 to the 2010-11 budget, and from 2008-09 to 2009-10 appropriations dropped almost 1% (http://www.budget.ne.gov/).

I don’t know how the state handles the agricultural economy, but how in the world can we be in a deficit when so much is being produced here? I’m always hearing that the tax receipts are lower than expected, or that we are spending way too much on teachers and chalk. Could you help me out here? Where is all this money going, and is there really a deficit, or is this manufactured in order to cut the budget for the middle class?

Sincerely,
DocD

My take on peaceful protests

2011-03-17T07:40:00.000-07:00

I was watching the Oscar-drenched movie Gandhi a few weeks ago. It was a nice refresher on civil disobedience and oppressed societies. But there are two concepts that jumped out at me. First, the Indian people tried peaceful protests. They gathered together in defiance of the British Indian Army, and the Brits killed them. And they arrested Gandhi. He stopped eating, the people all got upset, and the Brits let him go. Then, Gandhi had a great idea: shut down the colony by having an impromptu day of prayer. When people stopped working, the British Empire lost lots and lots of money. These types of protests, as Martin Luther King, Jr. found out, are the only ones that work. When civil-rights leaders held a march, the Alabama police beat them up, set attack dogs on them, and sprayed them with hoses. Awful, but who really cared? Not enough people until the Black community started boycotting buses and other businesses, and the oppressors lost money.

Now look at the Middle East and the Arab protests. The protests worked in Tunisia, and in Egypt. Huge groundswells of fury. In Tunisia the aristocrats didn't have the military might or blood-thirst to start killing the people. In Egypt Mubark had the military, but apparently the uproar--and perhaps his nationalism and conscience--was too much. Of course, though Mubark skipped out with more than $70 billion of mostly American free money, his legacy is still in power and we will see if the people have actually gained a foothold.

Other countries with peaceful protests will not fare as well, as we are seeing in Bahrain, and Libya. Bahrain and Libya are prime examples of relict colonial holdings of Western Europe, and the wealth and power of the ruling elite have not come from the toiling of the populace as it did in India. This wealth just appeared. In the case of Bahrain, wealth grew because of the US military and the fact that they are close to the Straits of Hormuz, that 29-mile-wide stretch of the Persian Gulf through which 29% of the world's oil passes. The Bahrain monarchy are not tied to the people, and this supposed division between Shia and Sunni is not nearly as important as the fact that the US has given and sold them more attack helicopters than you can shake a protest sign at. Did our Pentagon think that they were going to use all those arms against a common enemy, or their own people?

In the case of Libya, Colonel Gadaffi became a ruthless dictator by selling billions of dollars of oil to Europe, buying US weapons, and oppressing his people, much like the Italians did before him. It is estimated that the terrible, awful, blood-thirsty, terrorist--but we don't really care because you've got oil leader is worth more than $100 billion.

In both of these cases, the entire country could march, and they will most likely die. They could walk off their jobs, and it would hardly affect these despots. What the people do doesn't support their leader's wealth. These uprisings do, however, hurt the US and Western Europe because of the increased price of oil. The only problem is that we need that oil to survive, and will therefore side with the terrorist despots.

This is a similar problem for the state employees in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana. If you walk off the job, the kids will suffer, society will suffer, and our country's future will suffer. Will the economy? Will the GOP? Perhaps, but they might also replace you with corporate for-profit education and you can join the hordes of corporate whores. The next election might well change things, but when billionaires can throw money at a democracy willy-nilly, democracy loses.

Why American capitalism isn't sustainable Part 3: the Empire Strikes Out

2011-03-05T06:59:00.000-08:00

The United States spends more than a trillion dollars per year on "security", which for the most part supports the British Empire Redux. It appears that the U.S. is a British groupie. We have treated aboriginal people the same way that the British Empire did, we exploit resources in territories and allies--our euphemisms for colonies--and developed a system of government and attitude for our homeland like the the UK on steroids.

Much like the British Empire, we use a huge seagoing and land-based military to support huge, multinational corporations that extract wealth from colonies for the crown, which in the US is Wall Street. The problem with this model, as the British showed us a century ago, is that it is not sustainable. The homeland spends so much money extracting resources from all of these places (e.g., South America, Asia, the Middle East) that one perturbation at home (e.g., gas prices jump or Wall Street collapses the economy) or multiple perturbations in the hinterlands (e.g., Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, etc.--in the British Empire it was India) can bring the whole thing down.

The problem isn't that an empire is bad. I love sitting here on my couch made in China, eating food grown in Mexico and California picked by Mexican serfs, and watching a TV made in three different countries, and all of which I can afford on a salary that hasn't increased in 20 years. I can put on my blinders and forget that anyone in the world has suffered under oppressive regimes supported by my Department of Defense to get me these nice things at such a low price that even with my limited spending power, some rich fuck can get still richer selling it to me.

The problem is that this imperial system doesn't follow the rules of free-market capitalism. The profits are not based on supply and demand, because they are propped up by a system that controls the variables of wages, cost of resources, and especially, risk. This causes the system to perpetuate and grow, ignoring all checks and adjustments until a catastrophic collapse. Without the checks built into real free-market capitalism, the system will, without doubt, turn into a boom and bust cycle that will fail catastrophically when the resources of the homeland can no longer support the military support for the corporations, and the price of resources exceeds the spending power of the proletariat (e.g., gas prices rise above $4.00 per gallon).

Keep an eye on this. China is making deals all over the world for oil and coal, because they need it desperately. Instead of using our mythical capitalistic wheeling-dealing "best and brightest" industrial cleverness, we sent "our brave young men and women into harms way to defend our liberties back home", yada, yada, yada. Our military got us nothing when it comes to oil contracts with the colonies who sit upon the reservoirs. Nothing but enormous debt and an unsustainable empire that will, inevitably fall apart, leaving the homeland in dire straights.

Why American capitalism is not sustainable Part 2: Healthcare

2011-03-05T06:23:00.000-08:00

First off, Health care vendors are not "health care providers". If they are, then supermarkets are food providers, and prostitutes are sexual providers. A provider doesn't ask reimbursement. Which is why, as corporations took over the health industry, they changed the name to "providers" so that as they captured a market that has no alternative--no competition--they would be insulated from criticism.

But let's look at it from a purely capitalistic point of view. There is no better market for capitalism than one that the consumer must have, or they will die. Much like Kenney Lay showed us, and his good friend George W. Bush, back in the 1990s, privatizing the public utilities in California was a great idea. Not necessarily for the country, or even for capitalism in a pure theoretical sense, but in a profit sense. He showed us that if we abandon all shame and ethics, and take over a market that people need and have no alternative for, then accuse them of being wasteful and want for, then cut the supply so that the cost triples, this is a good thing. And Lay built his own bubble, and it was good, of course until it popped.

Now American capitalism has latched onto health care. If you look at the forces, we have a huge market in the United States. People need some medications, and some care. They are relentlessly told with billions of dollars in advertising that they need other drugs and care. And thanks to a strange belief that the same drugs and care are ordained better since they are American, that this market should pay more than anyone else on the planet. But the cost of the services are suppressed by cutting insurance premiums and cutting nurses' numbers and salaries, to name a few.

Why is this a problem? It would seem that this is a truly great capitalistic utopia. A monopoly. The problem is that the market is not a bottomless pit. Particularly when wages are stagnant, the housing bubble pops, and jobs are being outsourced to cheaper labor markets. The huge market in America can provide the capital for a while, but when the quest for profit is not contained, there is a mass-balance problem, and this is not sustainable.

And keep in mind that this is also a large train that will most likely not be stopped before sailing off the unfinished bridge. With all of the attacks on federal spending--thinly veiled ideological battles from the right--there is zero--fucking none!--attacks on the cost of health care that is driving the structural debt nightmare that is MediCare. Why not? Because the forces driving the GOP and many Dems are from the behemoths of the health care industry, which benefit greatly--and exist outside the rules of free-market capitalism.

Why American capitalism is not sustainable: Part 1

2011-01-26T20:12:00.000-08:00

Since I do a lot of numeric models on natural systems, I look at other systems in similar ways. I look at mass balance and forces. I'm not an economist--but then neither are any of our elected officials. I am going to lay out my observations and how I see our economic system in the long run.

Capitalism is defined as

an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, esp. as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.

It should also be noted that the businesses and individuals in a capitalistic system that maximize profits will be the most successful. This is usually the corporation that has the lowest labor and material cost, and the largest share of the market for their product. Two of these components are made up of the American middle class: the market and the labor.

There's a major problem with the American work force maintaining their place in a capitalistic system. The United States, by virtue of ample resources and isolation from invasion or foreign attacks, developed a high standard of living in the 1950s, which fueled a strong market for goods. At this time the manufacturing base in the US was very strong, and most of the goods purchased by the middle class were also produced by the middle class. This system remained in equilibrium for some time, until the forces of capitalism shifted the equilibrium.

From the 1970s onward, the cost of American labor increased, predominantly because of the cost of employer-subsidized health care and an aging and highly educated workforce. This caused the profit margin for American-made goods to decrease. This, and cheap transportation costs, pushed the manufacturing to cheaper labor sources. This was initially Mexico, Central America, and Taiwan. It then shifted to China and southeast Asia. This wasn't necessary, as the profits could have remained adequate without runaway inflation, but capitalism is never satisfied, and will search out the cheapest materials and labor. After the 1970s, wages have remained virtually flat, but are still higher than most other countries, and they have to be in order to maintain the standard of living and health care.

But how do corporations get away with this, keeping a strong market while moving the source of revenue--wages--to other countries, and still be able to sell goods to this market? There is a mass-balance problem here. Less wealth is going in, but the same is coming out, as well as increasing housing, energy and health care cost to the population.

This disequilibrium has been maintained by keeping wages, food, and energy costs low, increasing worker productivity, pushing consumer debt to unprecedented levels, and relying on increasing home equity for much of the population. It is also supported by the large number of American consumers; if some lose their jobs, there are always more.

This, as we have seen, is not sustainable. When the housing bubble burst, most home equity disappeared, as well as many, many jobs. I have been amazed at President Obama telling us that we have to work harder and be better educated than other countries. None of this matters, because we will always have more expensive labor. Our leaders also push China to open up its market to American goods. So they want to open up a market for goods made in a country with higher labor costs, in a country with a weaker market made up of cheap laborers. But what makes anyone think that these goods will be made in America, or that any American corporation will try to exploit this? It is like swimming upstream. It will never happen.

As long as the forces of capitalism are active on the system, the American worker will be at a disadvantage, and jobs will continue to leave America. And, I would think that the only way to maintain the American standard of living and labor force is to reclaim the American market with American-made goods. This goes against the forces of capitalism, but is necessary unless the American labor force is to be reduced to the cost of that in China. There is no labor force in the world that has a higher cost of labor than the US, and therefore no market for American goods under the rules of free-market capitalism.

Feeding the world...NOT! Feeding the coffers.

2010-12-17T06:12:00.000-08:00

Free market ~~capitalism~~ cash update: included in the big tax-cut bill is a $31 billion tax-cut subsidy for corn ethanol. I'm sorry, but this isn't green energy, this a green handout from tax payers. Thanks to all you "big government bad" tea party look-a-likes crying foul over corporate welfare. Oh, yeah, you don't really care unless some unemployed computer programmer needs a little help.

Climate change and Animal House

2010-11-23T06:17:00.000-08:00

Looking at the fracas in the good ol' US of A, the ever-increasing belching of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the indisputable physics that tell us of the consequences--some of which we see before us--I can't help but stumble upon another human nature metaphor: the drinking party.

When one is consuming alcohol in a social setting, perhaps a college party--or you just want to fuel the experience of going out and lighting a fire and shooting things--one knows from previous experience or observations that it is going to end badly. One knows that it is damaging one's body. One might even know that there are long-term consequences as well as the acute impacts. But humans do it anyway. It feels good, and I can't argue that someone shouldn't feel good, and the law of averages says that most people emerge from the experience with funny stories and for the most part with no easily transmitted diseases.

But we are living on this planet the same way that we get drunk and throw up on ourselves. It feels good to drive down the road in that F-250 with dual wheels covered by the custom fenders, with spinners and tinted windows. It is cool to drive that re-issue Dodge Charger that helped win the Revolutionary War. I'll admit it, it's appealing. And we can't stop. The over-sized house, the wasted gas trying to find our way out of the maze that is suburban development, the lack of effective public transportation, the new, bigger TV with HD so that you can see every drop of blood in the tap-out cage fight. We keep going, even though everything is telling us that it will hurt when we wake up--everything except those profiting or gaining power from the status quo. And we most likely won't change course, because it feels good for the time being.

Flying the friendly skies...

2010-11-19T06:04:00.000-08:00

Interesting how we want to scan a plane full of old ladies with x-ray vision to make sure that everyone who goes up in a plane isn't trying to blow it up, yet we want everyone in America to be packing heat, and everyone growing weed to be put in the slammer.

When I look at risk, vulnerability, and impact, versus cost and consequences on the system, I don't get it. I don't see the risk very high at all of another underwear bomber, particularly since the one that tried burned his phallus and wasn't able to hurt anyone else. This alone should deter any other potential males from trying it, though even in failure he got us to freak out. And I don't trust anyone--I mean anyone--to be within range of me with a gun. I don't care if you're Charlie Heston in a robe on Mount Sinai. The risk may also be fairly low--not lower than an underwear bomber--but the results would be even worse, since the person with the gun will be able to inflict terrible harm without much chance of singeing his Johnson.

And what is the risk of someone growing weed? We pay a tremendous cost to corporate prisons to incarcerate these people, and the only reason there is any risk to me now, is due to the fact that there is a risk to them of going to prison. Thus, they might shoot someone who witnesses a deal in the park, or stumbles upon the cultivation.

Now, in a real America, stoned citizens would be packing guns on a DC-9 with no record of their private parts on TSA scanners. And we would all live happily ever after.

Steroids and climate science

2010-11-04T05:50:00.000-07:00

I'd like to comment on the psychology of the steroid years in Major League baseball and the phenomena described by climate science. There are 4 stages associated with both. First, scientists collected data, both current data and ancient data. They showed that during the Quaternary (last couple million years) climate and greenhouse gases have fluctuated, with climates bouncing back and forth between ice ages and interglacial periods similar to that in which we currently reside. Much care went into building this data set, filtering out bad data and refining it. It became clear that the Holocene climate (the last 10k years) was changing in an unnatural way, and in concert with a rapid rise in carbon dioxide, which ancient climates were also sensitive to. It wasn't a guess, or a radical idea, it was simple physics and observation. It was ignored.

During the late 90s and early 2000s, changes were taking place in baseball. Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire in particular put on lots of muscle mass and started belting lots of home runs. The data set was obvious and any person with common sense knew that this was not natural. But it was our national past time and we liked the drama and the round-trippers. The reason that these freakishly over-sized home-run machines were hitting it out of the park was ignored.

Stage two began when climate data were released, concurrent with a change in political and public acceptance of science--not all science, just climate and evolution science. This began with Ronald Reagan, who brought the religious right into the throngs of the Republican Party. And it peaked during Bush's war on science. All of a sudden, the increase in global temperature, which coincided with increased CO2 and methane in the atmosphere, was dubbed the "hockey stick" and was attacked by numerous "experts" funded by the energy industry--most if not all had never published a paper on climate science. Politically and socially, many were in denial. At the same time, Barry Bonds' trainer was coming forth with stories of how he injected Barry with designer steroids. He and many other sluggers--with the exception of McGuire--denied ever taking any steroids. And reporters were attacked if they ran stories of, for instance, seeing actual steroids in a player's locker. If you like things the way they are in your fantasy world where there is no such thing as cause and effect, then deny that there is anything going on. Worked for the tobacco industry.

Stage three began as more and more data came forward, and the weather seemed to change. More satellites and land observations showed oceans warming, glaciers and permafrost melting, deserts growing, and oceans becoming more acidic. But the deniers weren't going to give. Their chorus was that the planet may be warming, but it's natural. The sun was getting warmer and it wasn't our fault. Get out of the way and let us burn fossil fuels. Barry and company also started to admit that something was going on, but he said that though he may have been using, he didn't know it was steroids. He thought it was flax-seed oil--magic flax-seed oil apparently. In any case, it wasn't his fault.

Stage four is the stage where the denier no longer can dispute what is happening, or what is causing it. The planet may have already crossed a tipping point. But the strategy was not to deny or dispute the science, it was to introduce chaos, to spread doubt like OJ's lawyers did. And much of the populace ate it up. "Oh, there's plenty of blame to go around. It's too expensive in these times to do any thing about it. The scientists don't even agree on global warming. Al Gore flies around in a jet, polluting the air while telling us we're no good for warming the earth." All either lies, ad hominem attacks, or straw-man arguments. And, the admission from baseball that the "steroid era" was over, carried the caveat that Barry and Mark were the best hitters ever, and steroids didn't give them that gift--I suppose just an extra hundred feet of distance. Again, it was not disputing the data or the results, just defending the guilty parties by casting doubt whether the steroids actually caused the inordinate number of home runs hit while they were cartoonish muscle-bound freaks.

And here we are. Baseball has presumably cleaned up their act, but the American public, many of whom know very little about what climate science really is, or how amazing many of the scientists are--or how extensive the knowledge base really is--still attack and deny and vilify. They also forget that one cannot excel in science if one is biased. You can't make up climate science. Good science is why we find oil reservoirs, why we know that a drug might work, and why we can get a man back safely from the moon or the Space Station.

But the sick election of 2010 showed us that irrational seeds sowed by the Rovian politics of the 2000s have divided us--in many cases turned off our brains--and given us gifts like multi-national corporations with First Amendment rights, and the tea party movement, whose candidates to a man deny the results of climate science.

We ignored, denied, shirked culpability, and cast doubt. But we do this at our peril. Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire will still be revered by some; may have a asterisk next to their records, and will probably be hated by others. But our planet is changing before our eyes. We will ask God to make it continue to support 6 billion, 7 billion, X billion people. We will expect the same scientists that we hate on Fox News to engineer a way out. We will fight over the last damn barrel of oil and the last arable acre. But there's no hall of fame for climate deniers, and no asterisk for a planet that has lost in a couple hundred years what the previous millions of years took to create and support human occupation. Batter up!

The royal scam

2010-10-22T04:52:00.000-07:00

Here's an institutional scam. Because it is so expensive, in order to have decent health care one has to buy (remember the word "buy") health insurance. This can, if one has a full-time job, be partly paid for by the employer, though this is essentially money that one would have received in wages anyway. In my case, with a very big plan with a large enrollment, is around $5,000 per year, not including co-pays and the 20% not covered for certain things, or the 90% not covered if I go to a doc not on the list.

But, when questions arise about the escalating cost of health care, the industry says that the cost is going up because everyone has unlimited free health care because of the huge sacrifice by employers and insurance companies. It is the middle-class consumer sucking up all of the hospitals' MRI time because they don't have to pay for it. What is going up is profit.

This shows, beyond a doubt, that the consumer has no choice, and there is no free-market capitalism model in which this will have any check on the supply-side. One can say that the government should be scaled back and let the market take care of it, but it is in the best interest of Americans to find an advocate somewhere, and if laws won't help, then the citizens should make it work. Nothing else can have any hope of controlling the health care industry.

While we were sleeping: rare-earth elements

2010-10-04T09:35:00.000-07:00

Rare-earth elements (e.g., Scandium, Ytterbium, and Lutetium) are not really rare at all. They are distributed all throughout the Earth's crust. What's rare is a deposit of them that is economically extractable. OK, so why do we care?

Rare-earth elements are very important in electronic devices like that crack-berry buzzing and hopping around on your desk. They are also very important in permanent magnets, like the ones in jet engines, on the fins of missiles, and in your Prius. Also, guidance systems and lasers; the Department of Defense uses more than anyone else--like fossil fuels. Actually, the permanent magnet that gives you that scintillating vibration from your yell-phone is made from rare-earth elements.

So, you ask, why do we care if our predator drones can't function without Gandolinium, and our lasers need Erbium? We can always ask a geologist to find us some, and we can always rip the top off a mountain in Chile and dig some up, right? G.W. Bush was always talking about how years in the future historians would vindicate all of his calamities, so he must have been looking after our future supply of these elements, right? Like invading countries with lots of them? Well, not quite. Granted, Afghanistan has some pretty good deposits, but our boys aren't fighting for our freedoms over there because of that.

Our leaders have been too busy deregulating the banks to think about where the next iPhone is going to come from. And while the dubster was spreading freedom and the American way across the Middle East, those gol-dang Chinese were locking down a monopoly on 97% of the rare-earth extraction industries on the planet. Yes, our corporate overlords not only moved our manufacturing sector to China, but they also paid no heed to the fact that the Chinese were also locking up the natural resources, and not just those found in China (They are also buying up Russian natural gas and African and Iranian oil). Interesting how China is monopolizing markets that our ~~empire~~ interests rely on.

And, finally, one might ask, aren't there lots of rare-earth elements here in the good-ol' US of A that the dang liberals and tree-huggers won't let us dig up? There actually are, but the cost of an environmental impact statement isn't what has shut down the mines. It is the fact that China is mining them like mad, with no environmental controls and no interest in protecting their miners--yeah, yeah, unions are bad, but so is a mine explosion. This means that we can't compete with the low-overhead Chinese extraction industry. And, a few years ago, China dumped tons of cheap rare-earth elements on the market, which drove the price down and put many American mining companies out of business. Because the Chinese had lots of cash--they didn't lend us all of it--they could buy up mineral rights and mining companies in developing countries like the Congo. Turns out the American tax payer would have to subsidize the mining industry in order to get it going again, and relaxing environmental regs won't open it up. There are, however more mining companies getting out the picks and shovels, e.g., MolyCorp. This is good-ol' free-market capitalism, but on a nation-state scale. Milton Friedman has a chubby in his grave.

But what about recycling e-waste, won't that help? The problem there is that each cell phone doesn't have but a tiny bit of these metals in it, and it is dang hard to get out. Same with computers and ballistic missiles. When you take a concentrated deposit of metals, then concentrate it more, and put a little tiny bit in gadgets that are going to be spread all over the US, and missiles that are going to be blown to bits in some Pakistani village, you can't go and get them all and re-concentrate the stuff--physically or economically.

So, the next time you surf to CNN, check out what China did to Japan when the Japanese were holding a Chinese fisherman who was fishing in disputed territory. The Chinese cut the export allotment of rare-earth elements, the price of the metals jumped more than 30%, and Japan immediately capitulated (this part was left out of the CNN article).

And remember, support your local geologist. You may need him or her some day.

Actually...

2010-09-23T06:24:00.000-07:00

Being nice isn't working as well as I thought it would. And I can't quite, reach...Could someone help me, urrrg, man, it's in there good. Here--I'll turn around. Just grab the handle and pull the knife out of my back. Thanks. Wait, it still feels strange. Oh, there's another one? Hey! Come back and help a guy out!

Welcome to the new World

2010-09-22T15:27:00.000-07:00

You've found the new and improved Doctor D's World. And I've gotten shock treatments and a lobotomy, so I'm not ever going to say anything mean about anyone ever again. I love Lincoln, Nebraska, home of the Big Red! Chairman Tom is the happy great leader of the Husker Nation! Woohoo! So, enjoy the new look and the new atmosphere!