1. Interview with me in French, on complacency.
3. Current famine in Africa could be the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II.
4. “Last year, expenditures on chemical plants alone accounted for half of all capital investment in U.S. manufacturing, up from less than 20% in 2009…” (WSJ)
#2. Wierd. I wonder if this is some sort of adaptive response to colony collapse disorder – bigger hives or larger multiple-queen hives.
At first I thought this was a response to #3
Speaking of which…. GMOs.
Africa has largely banned planting GMOs because their export market (Europe) won’t accept them.
How many starving Africans are going to be on the heads of anti-scientific GMO activists? People have been trying to develop drought tolerant crops specifically for African agriculture in the face of fierced opposition from anti-GMO activists. Would those crops have prevented this famine, or lessened it?
+100
“June 2016 The recent decision by the European parliament to oppose the promotion of large-scale, intensive farming and the use of GM seeds in Africa has stirred a swift and negative reaction among African scientists and food security experts. The measure was adopted by the European Parliament with 577 MEPs rejecting support for the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN) program, launched in 2012 to address global food security. ”
https://goo.gl/EfCrfS
That’s exactly the kind of stuff I’m talking about. Europe blocks the adoption of GMOs in Africa through all sorts of indirect mechanisms.
Hmmm, so if this was only about GMO’s, why didn’t they solve yet then? (Aaaah you say export, so its actually not for the Africans right?) -> Reduce TFR to 2.1 and no more problems in Africa. I can guarantee you, its not global warming is not corruption, is not poor infrastructure its the god damned TFR!!!!
Africans rely on Europe to sell the excess during bumper crop years, but they can still eat the food during drought years. Duh. They just wouldn’t want to grow a crop they can’t export because they don’t know in advance that whether it’s going to be a good year or a bad year.
Europe does not import that much corn, soybeans, etc which is the limit of GMOs.
Ie, there are no GMO coffee, cocoa, vegetables, fruits, teas, and all the GMO products corn, soybeans, can be produced in high volume in the EU without using GMOS, and the EU problem is getting farmers to grow vegetables and fruits which have no GMOS because they are all local to the micro regions and require thousands of varieties, and all the cost is in the labor.
No GMO flowers, a big Africa export to the EU.
The problem is that the trade agreements between Africa and the EU force Africans to adopt the same restrictive policies towards GMOs that the EU has adopted. the EU effectively imposes it’s agricultural policies on Africa, anti-GMO policies included.
Wikipedia says there are two GMO flowers already: carnation and petunia.
Actually, the opposite. Frequent swarming and small colonies have been found to improve bee survival. There is no sign of problems in Africanized bees, for example, which tend to swarm often and maintain smaller colonies than European bee races.
6. Way back, when Obama’s health care plan was an idea (“what’s a mandate, what’s a tax?”), there was a centerish position that while it was not perfect, it was an improvement over the status quo.
I think the solid lesson of the AHCA and the BCRA is that this centerish position was correct after all.
After nearly a decade of histrionics Republicans have discovered that a repeal would harm many voters, maybe even median voters. They have also discovered that they can’t fix this with “more market,” but instead are concentrating on different interventions, different market mandates.
Who would have dreamed that the Republicans would mandate that if you stop buying insurance of your own free will, you can’t just buy it again. The Republican government wants to mandate penalties for that.
I can’t predict what will happen next, but if some AHCA/BCRA passes, I think it will be equal parts injury to the public, and self-injury to the Republicans. Look out 2018.
The ACA was an entitlement sold as a reduction of costs to society. This is why it is so despised by some, myself included.
Over 90% of the marketing of the bill dealt with reducing the cost of health care, while 90% of the law deals with giving a portion of the population vast sums. Why was this done? Since the democrats knew, from polling, that there was very little support in the US for yet another entitlement program. Thus the remarkably disingenuous marketing campaign.
It should shock exactly no one that repealing an entitlement is near impossible. Loss aversion and concentrated benefits dispersed costs are both quite real.
This was a shockingly undemocratic ploy by the democrats and the nation will bear the costs for a very long time.
>The ACA was an entitlement sold as a reduction of costs to society.
It was far more than that – it was also a massive concentration of healthcare policy-making power into DC. This was the only real goal.
But if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
Actually, no. My healtcare provider was founded in 1945 by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. Care was to my experience the same before and after the ACA.
And yes I did keep my plan.
Actually, no.
The biggest innovation in the ACA was the mandate/tax. That is what broadens the risk sharing pool, and lowers insurance rates for the median Republican voter (who is old, but below Medicare age, and so looking at an increase in premiums with AHCA/BCRA).
The ACA does provide for lower income people with subsidies, but this is not the hardest part for repealers to crack. The hard part for them is that the mandate was necessarily to lower premiums for olds, especially with preexisting conditions.
“That is what broadens the risk sharing pool, and lowers insurance rates for the median Republican voter (who is old, but below Medicare age, and so looking at an increase in premiums with AHCA/BCRA).”
Are you sure it wasn’t the cap on the spread of insurance premiums, which forces young people starting out in life to subsidize Boomers who apparently couldn’t be bothered to save for their own care, that achievs this? Without the cap, insurers would still price premiums for old people based upon their actuarial risk, which far exceeds the ACA’s cap relative to young people.
Sure, the cap on spread does go hand in hand with the mandate as well.
But be careful attacking savings-free Boomers. They are the Trump core, and if this passes they are in for a rude awakening.
“The biggest innovation in the ACA was the mandate/tax. That is what broadens the risk sharing pool”
It broadens the risk pool similarly to me taking on 50% of my neighbor’s debt broadens the risk pool for his bankruptcy. What a dishonest talking point.
The children’s table is over there.
Me and the 80% that were happy with our health care insurance arrangements were harmed by ACA.
We look at the GOP bill as a half-full glass. The CBO also stated that the deficit (far more dangerous to all Americans than health care) and national debt (far more dangerous . . . ) would, for once, move in the right directions. And, Americans would have ore discretionary income to allow for real GDP growth, reversing the huge amounts of money going to health boondoggles. .
FYI Obamacare did not reduce the numbers of Americans that die. It did not make Americans more healthy.
Why didn’t Obamacare make Americans healthy? It was not designed to do that. ObamaCare succeeded in concentrating more money and more power in Washington.
If you are typical you have workplace insurance.
How do you feel about Republicans (by some reports) mandating yearly caps on benefits, and lifetime caps as well (this is confusing to me, but they are messing with outlays to “lower premiums”)?
http://time.com/money/4820506/the-senate-health-care-bill-could-hurt-you-even-if-you-get-insurance-through-work-report-says/
(I don’t really buy the argument that insurance did not save anyone. That’s silly.)
I have workplace-provided insurance, and I would be very happy to see the elimination of these and other mandated benefits. What I want from insurance is something that pays out when I am hit by a massive, unexpected, and unchosen cost. Coverage of anything more than that (regular check-ups, contraception, abortion, maternity, therapy, etc) is just unnecessarily reducing my pay.
In a few years, I would like to leave work and sail around the world for a while. At that time, I would really like to be able to purchase a catastrophic plan on the individual market which costs me my actual expected pay-out. Obamacare has made that essentially impossible. It has destroyed the individual market for non-subsidized buyers by mandating plans that cover so many expected and chosen costs as to make them attractive only to those with high expected and chosen costs (which drives off the rest of us, which increases the average cost per customer, which drives off more of the rest of us, …).
How do you know what massive unforeseen costs you will have? Is needing dialysis a massive cost? It only costs a few hundred dollars a treatment. What about diabetes? That only costs a few hundred per week in most worst cases, but only when you can’t ignore it. Often diabetes and high blood pressure can be ignored for years to save paying a few hundred a month to treat them. The heart, kidney, blindness problems that often result aren’t massive costs initially, only massive when the rising costs of treatment aren’t paid, and quick death does not result.
You can’t argue you know how to avoid problems while arguing doctors don’t know how to prevent problems. If you know how, you can tell doctors so they know how to prevent problems that become increasingly costly to treat, just to reduce the odds of ending up in massive costs.
And buy the way, the biggest source of those massive costs is getting a year older every year. That is the universal preX which can be prevented only by suicide. The only way people under 30 don’t pay the high costs of those over 30 is to kill themselves at age 30.
I don’t really buy the argument that insurance did not save anyone. That’s silly.
And yet study after study (RAND,Oregon Medicaid) comes to that conclusion.
During the ACA debate, Ezra Klein went on and on about how Obamacare would reduce mortality by very significant numbers. It seems to get very little press, but as far as anyone that studies it can tell, the ACA has had no measurable impact on mortality.
So, paying for medical care which prevents hospitals from closing in bankruptcy does not save anyone because hospitals never save anyone???
Why not prohibit anyone operating a hospital, clinic, or practicing medicine given they never save anyone, never make anyone healthier?
You’re arguing the entire health care industry is a fraud, a scam, that is only taking people’s money and doing nothing useful in return.
Ezra Klein went on and on about how Obamacare would reduce mortality by very significant numbers. It seems to get very little press, but as far as anyone that studies it can tell, the ACA has had no measurable impact on mortality.
This deserves better follow-up. The factoid was that there were 45,000 deaths a year due to lack of insurance. There are about 3.1 deaths normally. This is a 1.4% drop. Have we seen it?
You said “Obamacare” before, which resulted in at least three kinds of expanded coverage: mandated individual market, more employer based coverage, and finally more Medicare.
None of those millions got a shot of antibiotics in a time of great need?
mulp: There are many medical treatments with clear, significant, and proven effects on mortality. And yet giving people medical insurance does not have a significant, measurable impact on their mortality. What might be some of the reasons for this disconnect? Extra credit question: why might leftists want to conflate medical insurance with medical care?
Daniel: Google “impact of obamacare on mortality”. One top hit: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445260/obamacare-no-lives-saved. Even the Vox article that comes up is forced to concede the basic point, although they immediately soften it: “Right now we don’t have any direct evidence of Obamacare’s impact on mortality, since it takes a long time for changes in things like health …” Note that Klein was quite explicit that he expected to see results immediately.
Anonymous: Just about all of those millions would have gotten their antibiotics without Obamacare. Antibiotics are very cheap. Among more expensive proven treatments (e.g. dialysis as brought up by mulp above), many are still cheap enough that most people could pay for them on their own if their lives depended on it. And often friends, family, charitable institutions, and research institutions doing studies would chip in for really expensive treatments. And if insurance really only covered extremely costly, clearly proven treatments for unexpected, low-probability medical events, it would be a lot cheaper and many more people would voluntarily choose to buy it before getting sick. Finally, many of the really expensive end-of-life treatments are only going to prolong life by a few months, so even if we went from no one getting them to everyone getting them, mortality statistics aren’t going to change appreciably. Sure, you can imagine situations where none of those apply, but they occur such a small fraction of the time that any positive impact of increasing insurance on mortality is going to be very suppressed and come at great cost.
I understand that insurance is a lossy path to health care, and health care is even a lossy path to health.
But that does not equal the extreme view that health insurance does not contribute, after inefficiency, to health.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/12/stateline-health-insurance-death-rates/8999769/
Anonymous: I have never asserted that “extreme view”. In all my writing here and elsewhere, I have always said that insurance shows no “measurable” or “significant” impact on mortality. While many studies constrain the impact to be very small (very much smaller than figures coming out of people like Klein and outlets like Vox), if I had to guess, I’d guess that it probably does have a positive sign. (I wouldn’t be entirely sure though; there are mechanisms by which giving people insurance can lead to worse health outcomes.)
As the article you link to notes, the Romneycare study is an outlier in finding any statistically significant effect at all, and here is the article’s money quote on how big that effect is: “Greater access to health care may have prevented as many as 320 deaths per year”. Here is an analysis of just how bad a return on investment that is, in dollars per year of life saved: http://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2014/05/06/romneycares_costs_and_benefits_936.html.
Even though we spend a lot of effort worrying about whether the give-people-insurance intervention has any health outcome at all (and even though it appears very hard to show that this intervention meets that very low bar), the real bar should to be cost effectiveness, not just “has any effect at all for an arbitrarily large spending”. And it is absolutely crystal-clear that give-people-insurance does not meet that bar. Really, the argument there is only about just how bad it is. If you take the Romneycare study number, we are overpaying by about 30 times per year of life saved, i.e. getting about 3 cents of value per dollar of spending. If you take the zero impact numbers from other studies, the money is entirely wasted, we are getting 0 cents on the dollar. If you look at studies that don’t look for mortality impact, but just try to figure out how much the people who are getting this insurance would have been willing to pay for it out of their own pockets, you find that we are getting as much as about 40 cents of value on the dollar. So even on the most generous estimate of its effectiveness, we would be better off to burn half of what we spend on Obamacare and give the rest to its beneficiaries in cash.
How do you feel about Republicans (by some reports) mandating yearly caps on benefits
For someone who uses the word mandate so much, you sure aren’t careful with its use. Yearly caps may suck, but this is the complete opposite of a mandate.
That comment was awkward because is was based on an unconfirmed tweet I saw, that the BCRA would “require” caps.
That would be a mandate, and a market intervention, but in further reading it seems more that it would “allow” rollback to caps?
Either way it is likely a reduction in coverage, but “allow” in this case is less bad than “require.”
[and national debt (far more dangerous . . . ) would, for once, move in the right directions.]
Temporarily. The reason they need this done NOW is for the tax cuts, right? The national debt is not going down anytime soon. lol.
What percentage of Americans currently say they are satisfied with their health insurance?
67%.
Curiously, VA, Medicare, and other government programs have satisfaction rates in the mid 70s.
Gallup
“Satisfied” is a vague term.
They like the thing they have, they wish it were cheaper or covered more, they are especially afraid of losing it, and offers to replace what they have with something else, even something promised to be better, are going to be met with high resistance.
I often wish the Democrats had passed something that would make it legal for a private firm to offer their own versions of what the NHS does without being sued. If the Republicans were a lot more clever they may have been able to triangulate the Democrats into doing that.
I’m only one data point, but as a white collar worker who gets insurance through his employer, the ACA has had zero perceptible effect on me. Key word being perceptible; it’s possible my employer has been forced to be more stingy w.r.t. non-healthcare compensation in order to completely subsidize rising health insurance costs.
You haven’t seen your premiums rise, the ones you pay in addition to whatever your employer pays? How about your deductibles?
Not that premiums weren’t rising pre-ACA of course.
I don’t know what the premiums are. My employer pays them, and I get some kind of annual report that I throw away before reading. This was the usual practice until not very long ago, and it is still not that unusual. (I work in a field where cash compensation is subject to close IRS and public scrutiny, so benefits tend to be generous.)
Wow you don’t pay any out of pocket for premiums? Nice plan! I work at a big company with decent healthcare coverage and I pay a fair amount each month (pre tax) to go with whatever the firm pays.
The fact that something is hard to repeal is not a positive thing. In vacuo, it is strictly negative, never positive. It may be positive when combined with something else, but talking about unrepealability itself as a positive is a sign that one cares more about having one’s tribe be able to claim a victory.
I certainly knew PPACA was going to be hard to repeal and probably said so in the comments here. What does it mean to end the ban on ruling against pre-existing conditions? A bunch of poor people have no-good shit insurance (my poor friends still rely on charity from providers rather than insurance) but we can’t take it away because LITERAL MURDER?
I know constitutionalists who decry Roe V Wade as a power grab, but they are even more afraid of it being overturned. Because it shows that the meaning of it is subject to short-term political hijinks. Sometimes it’s safer to leave the knife in someone rather than pull it out.
I’m sure the Democrats remember Iraq and how it took so long to leave. Even though they thought it was a bad idea, they couldn’t even use Congressional funding to stop it. Because lots of things, once you start, you’re in.
If the goal is good governance, then creating things that cannot be undone should only happen with extreme reluctance. If the goal is having a legacy, though, the opposite logic applies.
I think you are losing the thread. It is hard to repeal because it is an improvement, for pretty much all Americans.
If the young and healthy feel slighted, they will get their turn, to be old and sick. It averages out.
Obamacare regressively taxes the young generation to pay for a richer (income & wealth) older generation.
Even if cash transfers balance out, this is clearly a bad thing, destroying utility for the generation over it’s lifetime.
But it’s worse than that. Young people who feel poor have smaller families started later— that’s a damage to them and to America.
You assume that the young won’t get their turn, or that they won’t benefit from therapies discovered now with these funds.
Bad bets imo. Most likely they will have even longer “lives in old age” and will need solutions in place.
You assume that the young won’t get their turn
The young assume they won’t get Social Security, too.
This is like the opposite of a generational promise. “You take care of me; then someone else will come along to take care of you, maybe.” Pay it backwards. Make sure you get yours. It’s the same logic frats use to haze their freshman. “Some day you will get to do this to someone else.”
If you want a losing bet, it’s being on the other side of the balance sheet from the baby boomers. They created a benefit that they never paid for, but tell you you ought to pay for it because some greater fool will come along. It works great until it doesn’t.
Shrug. We can discuss the laws as written or we can talk about general pessimism.
No. I only assume people would rather have X dollars when they are young and poor and need them to start a family than when they are older and richer. That seems obviously true to me.
It’s hard to repeal because it’s a benefit. All Things Considered just had a special segment answering listener questions about how the health care bill would kill them. They made sure to cover people over 50 who might be charged more for their insurance, people being removed from Medicaid rolls, people who could face lifetime caps. Tune in tomorrow to find out how it kills veterans.
If this benefit didn’t exist in the first place, there wouldn’t be wall-to-wall coverage about how it needs to exist. But once given, it’s really hard to take it away.
ACA is an utterly crap bill. It costs $200+ billion per year to extend coverage to 25 million people (max). There’s apparently still another 20 million people who do not have insurance, and the individual market insurance plans are crappy plans with absurdly high premiums and deductibles.
There is no observable decrease in mortality, which was promised, and I don’t see any premium decreases in my health plan, which was promised. Even taking that stupid 25,000/lives per year study at face value, the cost of ACA is probably going to be close to $300 billion by 2026, coming out to like $12mm per life saved. What a waste of money.
ACA does not make median Republicans better off. We have jobs and employer sponsored coverage or are retired old cranky people with Medicare. We also are likely to have spouses and can get employer coverage through them if we lose our current jobs.
ACA will tax my employer-sponsored plan in extremely short order to fund this massive waste of cash.
You missed the part where the BCRA allows employers to roll back to light (fake) insurance? (The kind where you only find out what isn’t covered when you need it.)
Sadly a lot of people do operate at the level of “but I have insurance,” not understanding that it only covers 50% of hospitalization, and $500,000 lifetime benefit.
Good luck with that chemotherapy.
“real insurance” includes expected costs covered, acupuncture covered, and pregnancy for men covered.
The crazy person table is over there.
ACA slaps an additional 40% surtax on all “Cadillac health plans” which will affect ALL health plans since the targeted increase is lower than the rate of healthcare inflation.
Chemotherapy and cancer treatment costs vary widely. This item here suggests an average course is $20,000. http://www.everydayhealth.com/news/how-much-does-chemotherapy-cost/
I can pay that now, without insurance. Obviously other costs are involved in cancer, and I may require other episodes. Nonetheless, it’s an affordable cost. So I’ll take my chances.
You mention dialysis above: why is the government funding a $100,000/year regimen for elderly people who have a 1 in 3 chance of dying in 5 years?
“I will pay for everything!” is treating my bank account as an ATM for your delusions. Yeah, I’ll take my chances with cancer over that. Which really should say something about how credible you are and how little I trust these government idiots to manage my money wisely.
BTW, most likely cancer for men is prostate cancer, national treatment cost is $12 billion. Howsbout more targeted funding if you want to improve health treatments? Maybe you can give me a prostate treatment card instead of buying my birth control (which I don’t need because I am an actual man…?)
ACA slaps an additional 40% surtax on all “Cadillac health plans” which will affect ALL health plans since the targeted increase is lower than the rate of healthcare inflation.
Good. The fact that people could get health benefits untaxed through their employer was undoubtedly increasing health care spending all across America. Like a lot of the unpopular-but-necessary parts of PPACA, it got watered down, but I hope it sticks around.
.Chemotherapy and cancer treatment costs vary widely. This item here suggests an average course is $20,000. http://www.everydayhealth.com/news/how-much-does-chemotherapy-cost/ I can pay that now, without insurance.
Not sure of your circumstances but my wife has had cancer for nearly 4 years. The initial treatments were weekly, then they switched to every 3 weeks now it is 4 weeks. That sounds like improvement but actually it isn’t, progression means you switch to the next line of chemotherapy and each chemo has its own schedule.
From what I’ve seen it would probably be $20K per treatment or per month. The oldest chemo drugs may be off patent and cheaper but newer ones cost a lot. Some are biologics like Avastin so even though they are technically off patent they are still expensive because they require a very complex manufacturing process. Also every time you get chemo you have a check by the oncologist (figure $200 at least), bloodwork to make sure your counts are safe to receive chemo ($500 maybe?). On top of that expect a PET scan every 3-6 months to track the disease ($2500-$5000). Plus multiple pills (let’s say $250-$500 per month without insurance but easily $15,000 if your cancer can be dealt with by a targeted therapy).
I figure you could probably ‘self-insure’ if you have say $1M disposable cash set aside (that’s independent of anything you are keeping for retirement or emergency funds). Even then $2M would probably be better.
If there were to be any changes in mortality they’re not going to be observable after only a few years. Most people die of the consequences of chronic conditions accumulated over many years. If someone is near enough death for their data to be included in before/after ACA snapshots then their disease will have been rumbling on for many years prior to that.
I don’t have a position on whether or not increasing coverage will significantly alter mortality, only that the question is not really answerable at this point.
#3 “philanthropic fatigue”. Unfortunately for Africa, this really is par for the course when its post-colonial history is a literal trope of throwing bad money after bad money…the euphemism that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. Good governance in Africa, economic theory that works, and finding a humanitarian solution to the litany of humanitarian problems on that continent is the Gordian Knot of modern socioeconomic philosophy. The continental Rubik’s cube
#5 I like this explanation although it misses how toxic and immovable political impasses really are a terror generator in and of themselves. Also, the “Pareto Principle” so commonly cited in human assortative mating can really be applied to almost everything else in these cases with one unique 21st century spin….trying not to settle for a less than ideal outcome has been replaced to not willing to SETTLE AT ALL for one. I’ve seen this extensively more and more with some of my company’s younger hires. It is making the next generation exceedingly difficult to work with.
Specifically talking about Yemen, its pretty damn hard to create “good governance” when regional powers backed by the US are able to bomb your ports, farms, and water systems to dust with zero repercussions.
#3. Current famine in Africa could be the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II.
…No, it ain’t even close to being the “worst”
This is deliberate fabrication and standard UN political propaganda
Consider the Great Chinese Famine of 1958-1962 … with 29 Million dead
Of course not. But Russians and Chinese aren’t black. That’s the “there” there.
29 million was what percentage of the China population? 5%? How high the deaths from famine is in dispute. Forcing city folk onto farms where they died does not mean they died of famine because they were hungry. They would likely have died even if not hungry.
“EARLIER this month the United Nations estimated that 258,000 people died in the Somalia famine between October 2010 and April 2012. The number of deaths caused widespread shock and the proportion—4.6% of the population—was shockingly high. According to Stephen Devereux, an economist at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, famine deaths rarely exceed 2-3% of a country’s population. But the absolute death toll was not especially high by recent historical measures.”
In March, the report on Somalia: “The UN children’s fund, UNICEF, says the number of malnourished children could double by the end of the year. Already 185,000 need life-saving support.” That’s just the children getting special food to save their lives. Adults don’t get the same special treatment because their brains are already developed and won’t suffer long term harm from starvation if they survive until it ends with rain, etc.
The China 1960 case was bad in large part because birth rates cratered as every measure was taken to prevent children being born, by individuals and government. In areas with famine today, efforts are made to punish suffering people by increasing the number of children born by raping them. No one is actively working to reduce the number of starving children by providing abortions to the willing and unwilling girls and women. In fact, Trump made it US policy to increase the birth rate as a condition of getting any aid at all for starving children.
3. You can donate at wfp.org
They take paypal, but want name and address for tax tracking.
#3 Expect more of this, squared and cubed, in the future. UN medium projections for the population of Africa in 2100 are above 4 billion people. Talk about the white man’s burden!
+1
Sadly I agree. Eugene Weber, Professor of Western History at UCLA once famously said about humanitarian assistance to Africa and the colonial world in general, “It enslaves as much as it frees, and kills as much as saves lives.”
OMG, right. I spent less at wfp.org than I do on a typical night out .. but I’m “enslaving” them. The drama.
Who cares if it helps or harms, what matters is that everyone knows how virtuous you are.
Obviously I am not virtuous for spending less than a night out. Try harder with your virtue-free bs.
I think you failed to capture in my comment what anti-gnostic just did. The assistance creates dependence, dependence that comes with no additional motivation to become self-sufficient or create systems that do so.
Your assistance provides you with altruistic rewards/virtue-signaling about making a difference when in the long-term (and increasingly short-term as we move along in this century…) you could actually be doing the opposite.
Is that why Republicans voted no on hurricane disaster aid for New Jersey? Because then every time a hurricane hit the Northeast people would look for a handout?
See that’s the rub. There is everyday charity, and then there are special circumstances.
Narrowly dodged that one, didnt you?
If they could grow their own crops locally, say, with GMO drought-tolerant maize and cassava, maybe they wouldn’t need food aid.
Yes, sure! I think we could rather start investing massively on family planning….
I bet Planned Parenthood would be really excited to set up some extension offices in the many villages.
Nothing against GMOs, but they aren’t actually magic beans. Even “drought tolerance” is a game of inches.
Everyone has droughts. We had one in the midwest a couple of years ago. But our annual food production is high enough that we have stores of grain to last years. Any increase of food production is going to increase food security and increase grain stores.
Cassava can’t be stored without industrial processing into flour. And grains can’t be stored without expensive drying and storage facilities. In the US, the storage costs for grain are so high the capital costs are shared to gain the profit that might result from crop failures. But in times of conflict, any stored crops are stolen from farmers.
And all these US storage facilities are located on government central planned and subsidized construction railroad lines.
And until you can list at least one nation with rail lines, or canals, supporting farmers to the same degree as in the US and China where farm land is far from large populations, I see zero evidence the free market can deliver the means for farmers to reliably deliver commodity GMO food crops like the US can. And all GMOs assume high tonnage of inputs in fertilizers, requiring railroads or canals.
So, there exist GMO maize and cassava that grow without any water?
The famine isn’t caused by crop failure from disease, but by drought and war. GMOs do nothing to end war and drought.
A drought means a shortage of water, not zero water. Obviously there are going to be some places that get less water than needed to grow a conventional non-GMO crop, but enough to grow a GMO drought tolerant crop. This would increase the amount of land area recieving sufficient rainfall to bring a crop to harvest.
Really? Because when I Google ‘Eugene Weber it enslaves as much as it frees, and kills as much as it saves lives’ (no quotation marks) and ‘Eugene Weber humanitarian assistance’ nothing comes up besides your comment.
More substantially, we’re talking about famine here. Weber’s alleged critique would be ridiculous. Starvation is not freedom, and giving food to the hungry does not kill them.
There are, of course, indirect impacts. For instance, buying food in the West and distributing it for free in famine zones undermines the extant agriculture and thus leads to greater risk of future famine even as it ameliorates the acute problem. This used to be common, but donors have moved away from it over time as the indirect impacts became clear.
Right, that’s why GMOs are so important – it improves local food production capability, so they don’t have to rely on imports – it doesn’t screw up the indigenous agricultural economy.
I’m all for GMOs, but it is hard to believe that their absence plays a significant role in the problems we see today.
We feed, they breed, they need.
These “famines” are actually break-downs in the civil order by nations incapable of self-governance to Western standards. We should probably take them over again. The alternative is bringing them here, where eventually they’ll starve to death in the ruins of the West as in the fever-swamp slums and denuded soil of their homelands.
“nations incapable of self-governance to Western standards.”
Everything must be measured against Western standards, not just self-governance. There’s probably a lot of ugly smiles due to the dearth of orthodontists in equatorial Africa.
Third option: leave these places to their own devices to sink or swim as they are able. Can’t say I disagree but I don’t think it will be allowed to happen.
That means the developed world prohibits global corporations from doing any business in these nations, especially the mining corporations and all in those value chains. Ie, no oil or copper or cobalt or diamond or gold mining or processing in Africa or exporting by any corporation that is not purely African owned and operated with only African workers.
Conservatives point to the socialist expropriation of wealth by the Pilgrims as the best American idea. The equivalent was when the OPEC nations expropriated all the assets of the global oil corporations. All the American colonies were British chartered and owned global corporations, and they were on land owned by the British, Spanish, French. Then the Americans expropriated everything from these global corporations in multiple wars.
Then the American governments collectively developed the land for American profit which required more people, thus lots of American corporations recruited immigrants to take control of land expropriated from indigenous people illegally in America for more than 10,000 years.
“These “famines” are actually break-downs in the civil order by nations incapable of self-governance to Western standards.”
In other words, siege warfare. The Nazis and Communists under Stalin did the same thing but it would be weird to explain the resulting famines as “break-downs in the civil order by nations incapable of self-governance to Western standards.”
Stalin and Hitler were providing food aid to the places they besiege which created an unsustainably high population requiring more food aid, and this is what you think is an effective method for a siege?
Sorry the proper method is to cut off all trade of any kind and destroy all productive capacities and wait for the besieged to all starve to death or to give up, depending on your objectives.
“4. “Last year, expenditures on chemical plants alone accounted for half of all capital investment in U.S. manufacturing, up from less than 20% in 2009…””
The article was gated, but the header points to this being another result of Frakking and the boom in US Natural gas production.
Here’s the article ungated. http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/06/25/shale-revolutions-staggering-impact-in-just-2.html It’s all about petrochemicals and the production of plastics, which are in great demand worldwide. I feel like I’m in a time warp. Remember the advice given to Benjamin in The Graduate:
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
#3: Pretty disgusting that the op-ed blatantly brushes aside the complicity of the US military-industrial complex in the famine in Yemen. The Saudi-UAE coalition, who have violently imposed the conditions for a catastrophic famine, wouldn’t be able to function without the US holding its officers’ hands, selling them tens of billions of dollars in heavy weapons, providing intelligence and logistical support, etc. It is also worthwhile to investigate the more indirect influence of US imperialism and its various wars in the region on famines in Somalia (where it has engaged in direct military operations and participated in an escalating spiral of violence), South Sudan (a client state), and Nigeria (another client state, where a vicious terrorist group got a tremendous boost in the anarchic aftermath of NATO’s regime-change operation in Libya in 2011).
Of course, this is par for the course for liberal humanitarianism. Famines and other humanitarian crisis never in their eyes have any connection with politics or imperial strategy, and are only problems because Western do-gooder citizens “lack awareness” to fork over part of their salaries to NGOs.
LOL!
LOL? Well US and UK sold billions of dollars in weapons to Saudi Arabia, so that they spend some of it in Yemen, yes, those people are dying courtesy of our tax dollars, pounds and euros… (and with some help from Iran and Russia too)
It’s not our tax dollars. Unlike some other counties, the Saudis pay for their weapons themselves.
Is this satire or real? Hard to tell on this blog nowadays.
Yemen is a mess, and has been forever. Houthis are 1/3 of the population at best (assuming 100% of Zaidis support them), funded by Iran, and are causing mass chaos and destruction. They dissolved the government.
The war (this iteration) has been going on for what, 13 years? But somehow it’s our fault.
Shockingly the states that border Yemen find the current situation intolerable. Wonder why.
“Is this satire or real? Hard to tell on this blog nowadays.”
Normally, I would think that this was obviously satire meant to make fun of the cooky Left. However, since the author actually links too his own Blog, it’s probably just an actual member of the far Left. The kind of person who actually thinks that the “US military-industrial complex” is actually to blame for all kinds of extreme things, up to and including a drought in Africa.
The Houthis are no angels, but they are largely autonomous from Iran, who mainly backs them opportunistically. They didn’t need Iranian backing in their previous wars, and they don’t need it now. Much more important than Iran is the fact that they are allied with Saleh loyalists in the Yemeni military.
They were able to topple the previous government because that government had little popular standing. It was entirely a puppet regime cooked up by the GCC in order to quell the mass protests and unrests of 2011 and 2012 and preserve a pro-GCC elite. It is utterly unsurprising that this regime collapsed as soon as the Houthis sneezed in their general direction.
Yemen has been a mess for a long time, it is true. But there was no threat of mass famine prior to the Saudis, with the critical support of the US, completely decimating the country’s infrastructure and putting its economy under siege.
#5 might be a little overwrought. I think there’s more just good old fashioned groupthink involved. Yes, in a sense you’re competing against all these peers who are a lot like you, but they are also your friends and potential romantic partners. They might be fellow Cameron Crazies or ‘We Are…Penn State’ toolbags. I think this generally mitigates the impulse to burn heretics and we shouldn’t overstate the Darwinian, zero sum nature of being a college student these days, which is in most aspects pretty darn laid back. As I recall, high school was way more socially dog-eat-dog than college.
Wasn’t the chocolate war mandatory junior high reading back in the 1980s?
Hmm…I remember the name; don’t recall whether I had to read it or not. I was in high school in the late ’90’s and early ’00’s.
I have to mention this since we’ve discussed this on this blog for so many years with some seeing it coming:
” The banks’ senior bonds surged after Rome shielded bondholders, who have highest priority for repayment, from losses as part of the plan. Junior creditors and shareholders will be wiped out. But there was outrage among German politicians, who argue that it undermined rules put in place after the financial crisis aimed at making sure taxpayer money was not used to deal with banking crises.” All those can kickings led to this. What a waste.
Financial Times – US Edition Kindle Edition, © 2017 The Financial Times Ltd Germany calls for tighter rules after Rome’s €17bn banks wind-up EU pledge not to tap taxpayers’ cash ‘broken’ Berlin pushes to close state aid loophole JIM BRUNSDEN — BRUSSELS ROBERT SMITH — LONDON CLAIRE JONES — SINTRA, PORTUGAL
“But there was outrage among German politicians”: that probably means that the money spent was not directed eventually to German banks. The horror!
I should put you over my knee and spank your bottom.
Can I watch?!
#5 This is not how one writes “Girondin”.
Girard, underrated.
Zizek, overrated.
I tried to pay attention re #3 but fuck if I’ll pay to read the Bezo Wapo. Checking alternative sources.
#6…”Now, I assume, and have had from the beginning, that there will be changes to the ACA going forward. The main achievement of the ACA was to recognize a form of universal coverage. If people would offer improvements in good faith, I think we could alter the plan as needed, but I’m not seeing a lot of good faith.”
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/06/what-is-the-sticker-shock-for-aca-reform.html
I simply don’t believe the last three years have needed to be so unproductive.
2. 100,000 bees in such a small area would be very loud. The homeowners remove them because a friend who is allergic to bees was going to visit. ???
3. Starvation is a cruel tactic in war.
4. So we can export our bad habits to other developing nations. The oceans do not thank us.
5. The Millenials and Boomers have much in common.
The free speech advocates often mock protest but these issues are interwoven. America micromanages dissent to a high degree: permits with approved venues/paths, fenced areas. Was this the intent of our Founding Fathers? “Give me liberty, or give me death.” Would we sit back and allow England to rule us or proceed down the same messy path? Conor Freidersdorf has a series of article this week. Start with the Wisconsin legislation and move forward in time.
6. Yuval is such a rational and concise writer. Why are you the clean-up hitter for the Republican Party? Is it mimetic desire?
Lots of comments here so I think I’ll just jump the threads and throw these shots out there:
1. Mortality – Funny these are assertions almost always made for other people. There is no evidence, for example, that employees of conservative think tanks demand no insurance coverage in exchange for higher pay.
2. Decline in mortality – Let’s think about cars. It probably is the case that cars that have full collision coverage have lower ‘mortality’ (meaning less chance of being junked in a year) than the same types of cars that don’t. After all, if you don’t have collision you might opt not to spend thousands to restore your car that just got whacked good.
Now consider people. Unlike cars we always get ‘critical care’. Have a heart attack in the middle of the street and you will go to the ER whether or not you have coverage. They don’t send you to the ‘junk yard’ if you don’t have coverage or a few thousand cash to cover the hospital. So the change in mortality from coverage would be analogous to having a maintenance package for a car that covers oil changes, tune ups and small preventative repairs. In order to see how that impacts mortality, though, you will need a large sample size and a good amount of time. If you do your oil changes on the mark but your neighbor hardly ever, there’s a good chance a year or more might go by and both of your cars will run fine. The impact will take longer to materialize.
3. obamacare promised X wha wha wha:
Sorry none of this is permitted anymore. Obama said you could keep your doctor, you could. Almost no one lost their doctor or even their insurance plan and of the very few who lost the particular insurance plan they were on, well private insurance plans renew every year and in the individual market insurance plans have a half-life of maybe 2 years. If Obamacare never passed no one who uses this bullshit line today would still have the policy they had in 2008. Fact is Obamacare bent over backwards to keep the promise of not messing with the current policies of those who liked what they had and did a very good job at keeping that promise.
How does that compare to the promises made by the Republicans and Trump?
Trump asserted during the debates that he would work with Democrats to make a bipartisan bill. Today we hear that Republican Senators are being threatened if they don’t pass this crap now they will ‘have to negotiate with Schumer’
Trump asserted he would achieve lower premiums and lower deductibles. Today we hear a 64 year old man making $54K a year would have to pay $20K for a Trumpcare policy.
We were told Obamacare was partisan because no Republican voted for it, yet it had dozens of hearings and hundreds of amendments Republicans got in. Here we have a secret bill that we are lucky to get a vote on after the CBO’s score.
4. Obamacare makes young pay for old / healthy pay for sik-
First all insurance does this. Unless you are talking about people who are sick but very wealthy, there’s no way you won’t get the healthy paying for the sick.
Second, Obamacare let’s premiums for older people go higher than younger people. This is a *break* from employer provided insurance that charges all employees the same premium.
amazing must have a book from you guys ,, really appreciate..
reading is a good habit .. !!