Thursday, July 22, 2010

Pet health care industry - what our health care would look like if Congress mostly stayed out

Health insurance for pets has never really gotten off the ground, although it has been tried, because of the relatively lack of congressional interference with pet health care compared to human health care. Market forces unskewed by congressional attempts to "help" have made pet health care relatively affordable and quick to get. You will always have the extremes, but because congress isn't forcing broad strokes over all pets to address the extremes, even the cost at the extremes is on average significantly less comparably to us humans. So what we see in general is greater affordability and availability overall with pet heath care whereas with us humans, congress' injection of increasing amounts of money through health insurance to subsidize the health industry has only pushed prices and affordable health care farther away and has abnormally affected market forces so that supply isn't where the demand needs it to be. This isn't even addressing the incredible amount of complexity all the laws have introduced which are the main reason for high overhead to manage health insurance.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

The 100,000 year climate cycle

For all those global warming alarmists, one thing you probably should check out is the long term ice core data from Vostok Research Station in Antarctica:

While global warming data has been concentrating on the relatively recent time period, what the ice core data shows is a repeated cycle approximately every 100,000 years where temperature rapidly rises and then gradually falls. We are near the peak of one such cycle. What does this mean? It means that we may be attributing human influence as having far more effect on global temperature than it actually does, and there are factors like the eccentricity, axial tilt and precession of the earth orbit which overshadow anything humans could do to either change global temperature or attempt to keep the same. Because we are near the peak of a cycle, global temperature trend will either continue to rise for a couple thousand years on average no matter what we do or it could start the gradual cooling down for the next 100,000 years. What this means is that we need to put our egos in check and instead of wasting time and resources trying to keep the climate from changing, we need to prepare for when it changes, and it will change.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Foreign purchase of US debt hid the money supply increase

What is missed is the reason why the current economic crisis was hidden from us until it was on top of us. This is because foreign purchase of the US debt masked the normal increase in inflation that usually indicates that the money supply was too high. This fooled the market into complacency instead of panic until it was too late. The continued purchase of US debt by foreign countries is continuing to mask the warning signs that would normally indicate that the deficit is too high. This also dangerously keeps inflation down giving a false sense that deflation is more a concern than inflation. As soon as foreign countries run out of money to purchase US debt, inflation will snap back like a rubber band from hell.

Calorie density

It is the calories which are the issue. We tend to eat calorie dense foods, and we tend to get more calories than we need eating calorie dense foods before we feel full. Controlling calories is what is needed, but is often hard to do. What may be more successful is doing the things which make us feel full longer. There is a huge list of things that can make you feel less hungry. Exercise is probably at the top of the list. Making your body burn calories causes the body to compensate by filling your bloodstream with glycogen which in turn tells your brain that you are less hungry. There are other measures like drinking more water, eating more foods that are calorie sparse (e.g., vegetables, etc.), etc. For some people, eating fat or certain nuts can actually make them feel more full than the actual calories ingested would normally make them feel otherwise.

How much the president and congress should be paid

I advocate that the president, vice president, and every member of congress should be paid the mean salary of the country of the previous year. This way the only way they would get a raise is if they improved the economy of the country, and they would understand what the average American feels financially.


Abortion is functionally is a waste of potential and a significant impact on the female body. The female body performs significant changes initiated by the fertilization of the egg in preparation to make the body an idea place as possible for the growth of the baby. Any deviation from this normal course does impact the woman physically and psychologically. Not only is all the energy and effort to grow a baby wasted, but the potential of the baby to become a human being of significant impact to society for the better is lost, and although the news concentrates on the negatively of humanity, most people are beneficial. What this means is that abortion should be a matter of last resort rather than treated as a casual choice. If no pregnancy is wanted, the best option is to avoid the situations would cause it to occur. The levels of effort ranging from abstinence to contraceptive devices/procedures to acts during sex which will try to avoid conception should be in accordance to how important it is to avoid conception to the couple.

Graduation rates of students by state

The first thing that comes to mind is that if it wasn't for Asians, this country would truly be in a sorry state. What makes Asians more successful in general is a greater dedication by the parents towards their children's education success and ensuring distractions like drugs and sex affect their children as little possible. The second thing that comes to mind is that California has a significantly higher spending per student compared to a state like Texas and definitely more liberal policies with comparable Hispanic population percentage, and yet it is doing worse. You can only conclude that throwing money at government education and liberal education policies don't work.

For those who say it is the blacks and hispanics causing California to be worse, the facts are at

It isn't because of the rate of blacks and hispanics. 6.7% and 36.6% of Californians are black and hispanic or latino respectively. By comparison, 11.9% and 36.5% of Texans are black and hispanic or latino by comparison. However, Texas is doing significantly better.

Number of homeless are decreasing

Number of homeless:

2006 - 759,101
2007 - 671,888
2008 - 664,414
2009 - 643,067

During a period in time when you would assume the number of homeless people in total would skyrocket, it has been steadily decreasing. Nobody seems to know why this is happening, but the latest report says "All of the decrease occurred among unsheltered chronically homeless people." This seems to indicate a decrease in the number of street people and people living under bridges. This also seems to correlate with the decrease in funding for programs which support the chronic unsheltered homeless. Is it possible that the lack of support that allows homeless people to survive on the streets is driving them to seek alternatives off the streets?


Fortunate for Republicans that Democrats took power

The Democrats winning both the executive branch and both sides of congress at a time when hard decisions had to be made about controlling spending, a weaker point for the Democrats than the Republicans in general although not by much, was the best thing that could happen to the Republicans. The Democrats, in their attempt to push their left leaning agenda, angered the bulk of the people by putting the economy and jobs in lesser priority than most people wanted. With only the shadow of Bush to blame which people didn't buy, the Democrats continued pushing their demands against the will of the people. This had the effect of galvanizing the eclectic conservatives who didn't identify themselves with the Republicans into supporting Republicans as the lesser of two evils. By trying to compromise to allay this growing force, the Democrats disillusioned their core supporters. The Democrats had an opportunity to push their main goals, but their control of power happened at the wrong time during the economic cycle, and they will pay the price for it.

Jobs not priority one for Obama

At a time when jobs should be priority number 1, the Obama administration has shown over and over again that this isn't true. This is why the Democrats will lose at least the House of Representatives in November. A recent example is the effective death knell of the Constellation program by forcing it to decrease cost by $1 billion. This will cost tens of thousands of jobs. Another example is the moratorium on offshore drilling which will cost tens of thousands of jobs as well as other economic impacts as the oil rigs move out of the Gulf of Mexico. This doesn't even account for all the executive mandates made early in his presidency which made the left wing happy but put negative pressure on the economy.

Pandora box

The complexity created by the laws that created and supported Fannie Mae is the root of our current economic crisis. If we followed Canada's example and eliminated all the exceptions which allowed people to get home loans and rates that they normally wouldn't qualify for, we wouldn't have the crisis we are having now. Instead of tackling the root of our financial problems, our government continues to increase the complexity because "helping" us garners them more votes. This in turn creates permutations ripe for abuse which the government can never hope to regulate, but the government continues blindly down the wrong course of trying to keep a lid on this pandora box from the top with their butterfingers. The current financial bill does nothing to prevent further abuse nor a bigger economic crisis in the future. Only by tackling the root of the problem by decreasing the complexity by decreasing the laws to "help" us will we not only decrease opportunities of abuse but also the buildup of unseen money supply problems which will come crashing down on us. This will also decrease the need for regulation which the government has proven over and over of being incompetent at.

To increase real wages

From a widespread perspective, real wages are impacted by multiple factors. the major ones usually are: money supply, inflation, labor pool size, and jobs available. During the last four decades, it is undeniable that the labor pool size has been increasing, and it had been meeting or exceeding the jobs available which would be a down pressure on real wage. However, the money supply has been increasing, often artificially, which allowed employers to pay more unadjusted for inflation, but it has been empirically proven that rising wages leads to rising inflation which often keeps real wages down and devastatingly so if inflation is too high. However, since Reagan's big government spending, foreign purchase of US debt has been counterbalancing the downward pressure on wages by keeping inflation relatively low. It is easy to blame the "rich", but wealth disparity is the symptom of all these factors. There are two way to drive real wages up in this environment and decrease wealth disparity. The first would be to decrease the labor pool and the second would be to increase the number of jobs. This is all done while keeping the money supply from increasing rapidly to drive inflation.

Cost worth trying to address fallable long term global warming predictions?

The thing people overlook is that global warming scientists have been showing off data from the past, but it has been inaccurate in terms of predicting the future. Relatively, the long term global temperature predictions have so far been as accurate as trying to predict the weather one month from now. Popular speakers on the left basically have said it would take destroying our economy to decrease the carbon emissions to prevent a most likely inaccurate projection of what the global temperature will be in the future, and the current economic crisis has supported them by being able to bring carbon emissions below Kyoto Protocol limits when everything else has failed. So the main question everybody should be asking is if the cost of the destruction of our economy worth trying to address fallible long term predictions? If you are perfectly happy with the economy now and don't mind it getting worse, you should pursue the suggestions of the left full force.

Why the recession is lasting so long

The thing that people don't realize is that in order to buffer the effects of the economic crisis, the government spending has spread out the negative impact over a longer period. So instead of a major pain and a relatively quick recovery, we are getting a long drawn out pulling of a big nail embedded in our muscle. This has been shown the case in every past attempt of the government to spend its way out of a depression or recession regardless of which party is in power. By spreading out the pain, it also accumulates overhead and interest. It is like the difference in total cost of a house by either buying it outright or getting a mortgage and paying a huge amount of interest in the long run. Those who concentrate on the bottom line prefer to get it over quickly. Politicians, of course, prefer the long drawn out period because it gets them more voters in the short term especially when they are campaigning. Nothing seems to garner votes than the promise of giving away money. If this was all there was to it, even fiscal conservatives could tolerate taking the long drawn out pain plan. The trouble is that government doesn't stop spending. It mistakenly takes the periods of positive direction as excuses to increase spending even though the recovery from the previous downturn hasn't been truly addressed. Our current economic crisis has many factors, but one that really hasn't been discussed is that it was built on the downturns that resulted in the savings & loans bailout and other government attempts to alleviate past major economic downturns. Until we bite the nail and vote for people who will control government spending instead of promising to give us money, we are only heading for an even bigger economic crisis in the future.