Category Archives: Economy

The Tale of the Libertarians and the Bitcoins

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Charles Stross brilliantly stated what I’ve been thinking about Bitcoin, along with what I’ve long thought about libertarianism (h/t dpm). Bonus points for saying it in a post entitled “Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire”:

To editorialize briefly, BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. Which is fine if you’re a Libertarian, but I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behaviour which are unfortunately wrong).

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The Rise of the Super Zips

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Presumably because we just don’t have enough ways yet to isolate the super-rich from everyone else, the Washington Post has prepared an interactive map of the nation that identifies what it calls “Super Zips”—zip codes that rank in the 95th to 99th percentile for median income and education level.

Austin, Texas has eight Super Zips. Not at all surprisingly, they are all west of I-35. In fact, with the exception of a small sliver of 78749, they are all west of Mopac. (Fun fact: I lived in that sliver of ’46 for just over three years! In an apartment. Trust me, the Super Zip-ness comes from the west side of the highway.) The highest overall score, a 99, goes to 78746, which includes West Lake Hills and Rollingwood, and should not be a surprise either. The highest median income, however, is in 78739 ($132,552 to the ’46’s $129,188).

The lowest score in Austin, from my cursory review of the map, is east Austin’s 78742 zip code. It ranks in the 10th percentile, with a median income of $21,071 and 14% college graduate rate. It also doesn’t seem to have much in the way of buildings.

Just for fun, I thought I’d look at all of the zip codes where I have lived in my 14 years in Austin:

  • 78705: 48th percentile, median income of $11,910 (although it’s worth noting that this zip code is probably mostly college students);
  • 78751: 57th percentile, median income of $37,521;
  • 78749: 90th percentile, median income of $79,712 (especially now that I’m not there to drag it down);
  • 78704: 66th percentile, median income of $47,336 (damn hippies);
  • 78751 (I moved back here for a while); and
  • 78723: 43rd percentile, median income of $41,839 (interesting that it has a higher median income than ’51, but it only has 28% college graduates to ’51’s 64%).

Screen Shot 2013-12-04 at 3.06.49 PM

Also interesting: the zip code where I grew up, 78209 in San Antonio, is famous for its “old money” excess, but it only ranks in the 79th percentile these days. Still impressive, but it’s clear that the real concentrations of wealth have moved further northwest (check out 78248, 78257, 78258, and 78015 for the big bucks). I bet the ’09 still has an edge in snobbery, though!

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Let Them Eat Small Pieces of Cake

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Corporate America just can’t hold back its largesse this holiday season. The other day, we learned about a Wal-Mart in Cleveland that is trying to help its underpaid employees by soliciting donations from its underpaid employees. (Call it “benthic redistribution,” if you will. Or don’t, because it’s not a very good name.) Not to be outdone, McDonald’s is offering its underpaid employees tips on how to make the money last during the holidays (h/t Adam Lee):

McDonald’s McResource Line, a dedicated website run by the world’s largest fast-food chain to provide its 1.8 million employees with financial and health-related tips, offers a full page of advice for “Digging Out From Holiday Debt.” Among their helpful holiday tips: “Selling some of your unwanted possessions on eBay or Craigslist could bring in some quick cash.”

Elsewhere on the site, McDonald’s encourages its employees to break apart food when they eat meals, as “breaking food into pieces often results in eating less and still feeling full.” And if they are struggling to stock their shelves with food in the first place, the company offers assistance for workers applying for food stamps. [Emphasis added.]

ThinkProgress focused on the advice to sell stuff online (which makes me wonder if the person who wrote this has tried to sell anything online since the dot-com crash.) I’m more perturbed by the suggestion to “break apart food,” especially since it comes from the people who coined the term “super-size.” I’m not sure even Marie Antoinette would have been that cold.

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Let Them Donate Cake

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LE - Food DriveA Wal-Mart store in Cleveland is holding a food drive to support its own employees (h/t Myerman, Business Insider). The Cleveland Plain Dealer has good coverage of the controversy, which pits store spokespeople, who say that this is for employees who have suffered recent hardships, against employees and others, who argue that this demonstrates that the retail chain knows it doesn’t pay its workers enough to survive without government assistance, but isn’t willing to do anything except redistribute wealth between those same employees to address the issue. If the poll on the Plain Dealer’s website is any guide, a large number of people think this is a less than gracious gesture on Wal-Mart’s part.

Here we have a massive corporation whose size rivals the GDP of some small countries (just behind Taiwan’s 2010 GDP, and just ahead of Norway),  whose owners came into their substantial wealth largely through inheritance, and whose employees often barely scrape by on their wages. One of this corporation’s many stores decides to act on the dire financial straits of its employees by asking similarly destitute employees to chip in. The people at the top, as far as I know remain silent on this particular matter and, in general, largely indifferent to the plight of those on the bottom. I can’t think of a single historical analogy here in which those at the top ever had to reckon with the manner in which their wealth was built on the backs of others.

Nope, no historical analogies at all.

Anyway, this is depressing to talk about so close to the holidays. Let’s just listen to some music instead. Here’s a song from Rush that I totally picked at random:

Photo credit: “LE – Food Drive” by vastateparksstaff [CC BY 2.0], on Flickr.

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This Week in WTF, September 20, 2013

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Original idea by Videmus Omnia; Original remastering by Antonu [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Some search results are quite meta. (Via Wikimedia Commons)

– If you are a blogger who likes to include picture in blog posts, you are probably familiar with Wikimedia Commons, the crowdsourced site for Creative Commons and public domain images. Since pretty much anyone can upload pictures there, it seems inevitable that some of them will be…….controversial. Some of it might even be called “porn.” To combat the scourge of free porn, which is literally not available anywhere else on the internet, public pressure led Wikipedia to root out and delete all of the porn on Wikimedia Commons. Except that they gave up on it. This made Fox News mad. Which made giving up totally worthwhile.

– Due to what a manager calls “some major budgetary changes,” nurses at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville will soon be responsible for taking out trash and cleaning toilets in their patients’ rooms. Because nothing helps a hospital run more smoothly than an angry, demoralized nursing staff. Also, consider cross-contamination risks. Seriously, though, I wonder if the administrators urging the nurses to “pull together” are making any comparable sacrifices. Maybe they should scrub toilets for a bit. Builds character, you know?

– An Indian-American woman won the Miss America crown this week. This has angered a subset of Americans who seem determined to ensure that America cannot have nice things. Critics (although that seems too generous a description) somehow managed to link this to the anniversary of 9/11, while also making obligatory 7-11 jokes. Sigh.

Photo credit: Original idea by Videmus Omnia; Original remastering by Antonu [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Some Excellent Questions for Libertarians

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I often make common cause with self-styled libertarians on social issues, police brutality, military overreach, and the like. Where I differ greatly is on economic issues, for the basic reason that libertarians generally pretend that all individuals start from an equal bargaining position. R.J. Eskow has a piece at Salon called “11 questions to see if libertarians are hypocrites” that hits on pretty much all of the issues I have with the Ayn Rand style of libertarianism. Here are a few choice quotes.

On the lack of libertarian societies throughout history:

At no time or place in human history has there been a working libertarian society which provided its people with the kinds of outcomes libertarians claim it will provide. But libertarianism’s self-created mythos claims that it’s more realistic than other ideologies, which is the opposite of the truth. The slope from that contradiction to the deep well of hypocrisy is slippery, steep—and easy to identify.

On libertarians’ narrow definition of “order”: Continue reading →

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Contemplations on Current Events

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Emerson's 2nd Adoption Day by themoonmachine, on Flickr

The world is beset by fools, so here is a dog in a party hat.

I seem to have a proclivity for quoting Kurt Eichenwald here. What can I say? It’s easier than writing my own content. His list of 25 Contemplations on Current Events is one for the ages. Here are few highlights:

1. Given the messages we’ve learned from the Zimmerman case, Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, and the N.R.A., all young black men should arm themselves and shoot anyone whom they believe threatens them. Because freedom.

2. It makes no sense to argue that you support Stand Your Ground and then condemn Trayvon Martin for confronting a guy who was following him. You can’t pick and choose who gets to stand their ground based on a perception of threat. Which is why that law is so obscene.

5. All anti-abortion protesters should be presented, on the spot, with an application to sign up as foster parents. They should also be given the names of children in their area in need of adoptive parents. And if they won’t sign or volunteer, they should shut up.

7. Whenever someone says zygotes are babies, I reply: “Imagine a thousand zygotes in test tubes in one room, and three toddlers in another. A fire breaks out, and you only have time to get to one room. Which would you save from burning, the zygotes or the children?” It’s so much fun to watch the forced-birthers try to wriggle out of the conundrum created by their bumper-sticker slogans.

12. Isn’t it amazing that almost every religious bigot was born into the only true religion?

17. Wealthy folk need to stop whining about “class warfare.” Rich people having their heads impaled on pikes and marched through the town square is class warfare; paying three cents more in taxes on every dollar earned over $250,000 a year is not.

21. Tea Partiers really must stop moaning about losing their freedoms until, you know, they actually start losing their freedoms. (Hint on how to tell when that happens: if the government no longer allows you to say that you are losing your freedoms, then you have started losing your freedoms.)

22. Sarah Palin must . . . ahh, who cares.

Photo credit: Emerson’s 2nd Adoption Day by themoonmachine [CC BY-ND 2.0], on Flickr.

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Let Freedom Ring All Throughout North Dakota

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A bunch of libertarians ranked the fifty states based on “freedom.” Fox Nation reported on the results under the headline “Report: Americans Are Migrating to More Free Republican States.” The article contains gems like:

Americans are migrating from less-free liberal states to more-free conservative states, where they are doing better economically, according to a new study published Thursday by the George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

The “Freedom in the 50 States” study measured economic and personal freedom using a wide range of criteria, including tax rates, government spending and debt, regulatory burdens, and state laws covering land use, union organizing, gun control, education choice and more.

So, if Fox Nation is to be believed, people are departing oppressive states for places where they can stockpile weapons, miseducate their children, and do with their employees as they please. What magical wonderland is this, I wonder…

The freest state overall, the researchers concluded, was North Dakota, followed by South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire and Oklahoma. The least free state by far was New York, followed by California, New Jersey, Hawaii and Rhode Island.

Oh, I see…

Look, no disrespect to North Dakota, but what. The. F*********.

People are leaving California, New York, and New Jersey for the Dakotas? Does Fox Nation think we’re stupid? Does Fox Nation think at all?

I could link to evidence showing that Californians are not doing a reverse-Steinbeck in droves back to Oklahoma, but honestly, what’s the point?

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The Problem with Private-Sector “Free” Services (or, WTF Happened to Google Reader?)

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970189_79303244Google is shutting down its Google Reader service on July 1, 2013, I recently learned. I have used Google Reader for all my RSS feeds for over a year, and have liked it far more than any other similar service that I have used. It works particularly well with an iPad app called Flipboard, which arranges posts in a style reminiscent of a newspaper. Apparently, Flipboard will allow its users to transfer Google Reader subscriptions directly to its service, to the gratitude of many users. I’m pretty sure Flipboard did not have to do that, just like Google does not have any obligation to keep Reader going. The reason for that is that I, and as far as I know everyone else in the world, do not pay for the Reader service, or for Flipboard.

As my friend Kevin said (or quoted), if you are not paying for a service that you are receiving, you are not the customer. You are the product.

Google has no obligation to continue offering a service that does not make it money, even if everyone loves it. Google makes money from its online services by selling advertising, just like nearly every other internet service that does not charge a fee directly to users. You, the user, are the recipient of that advertising. Google’s revenue is based on how it can monetize your online behavior. The company has an interest in keeping users happy, because it needs us to keep coming back to the site, or any other site plugged into Google (which is probably most of the world’s websites by now.) Its bigger concern, though, is keeping those advertising bucks coming in and keeping costs low. If a service costs enough that it impacts the acceptable profit margin, it goes. If you are not a Google shareholder or an actual customer, you ultimately have zero clout in influencing the decision to discontinue a service.

Google Reader is not an essential service for me, but rather a convenience. My life will not suffer for a lack of centralized RSS feeds in a handy newspaper-style format. At worst, I’ll have to get used to a different way of reading the news/blogs. The convenience offered by Google Reader/Flipboard is not something so important that I think it should be a public service. I do think that other services that benefit the public much more directly need to remain public, for the very reason that public service, not profit, should be the primary motivator. Prisons come to mind. So do roads and sewer mains.

I would consider paying something for a service like Google Reader. Maybe no one else would anymore. Maybe that is the problem.

Photo credit: svilen001 on stock.xchng.

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I’ll Take a Check, but You Could Just Set Up an Account in the Caymans for Me…

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USMC-060115-M-7772K-062An official estimate of the cost of rebuilding Iraq, or whatever it is we did, was recently released by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR). Of the roughly $60 billion spent on reconstruction, it estimates that we wasted $8 billion. The Atlantic points out that this amounts to $1,500 of taxpayer money wasted per minute.

As we all know, quite a few people believe that their tax dollars should not go towards anything they personally morally oppose. This seems to only apply to women’s reproductive health in the minds of these particular people, but let’s expand the idea further, shall we?

  • The population of the United States, as of the Census Bureau’s estimate at 16:19 UTC on March 6, 2013, is 315,444,368.
  • Applying the formula devised by top Republican thinkers, the United States has 167,185,515 taxpayers.
  • I have paid federal income tax for numerous years, and I own my own business, so I know that I am part of Ayn Rand’s ruling class.
  • If we divide the total amount of money allegedly wasted in Iraq among all American taxpayers, it comes to $47.85 per taxpayer.
  • If we were to divide it among both taxpayers and everyone else, it comes to $25.36.

I have often made the argument that I want my money back from the Iraq war if we don’t have to fund government activities we morally oppose. To be honest, I thought the per-taxpayer number would be higher. While I set out to make a ridiculous demand for an untenable sum from the government when I started writing this post, ten minutes ago, I see that its purpose has, ahem, evolved. Any single government program is unlikely to affect any individual taxpayer’s bill very much. The numbers sound big, but there are also a lot of Americans.

That said, if the government were to send me a check for $47.85, or even just $25.36, I’d accept it.

This still does not address the concern about funding things that someone morally opposes. For that, I guess all I can say is that the government can’t make all of the people happy all of the time, and if your opposition is to other people having the realistic ability to control their own lives and bodies, I’m inclined to say suck it up.

Photo credit: Lance Cpl. Shane S. Keller [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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