SS Post Clean Up

Interesting thing about blogging... normally, with other web pages, I'd just edit my previous post to clear up the confusion that I've caused over my muddled thinking/writing/both. However, in the spirit of full disclosure, I'll just post the corrections here.
  1. My first point was just that if the private investments were so beneficial to the Chilean people, it should have affected the underlying poverty rate in the past 30 years. It hasn't.
  2. A corollary to my first point was that if the you really did end up with a huge windfall (as a % of base salary) at the end of your work, it seems to me people would be falling all over themselves to work in ANY job as long as they could participate in the retirement plan at the end (rather than working in the cash economy). However, given the breadth and depth of that cash economy (according to the article), Chilean citizens still appear to be choosing the cash economy over a government endorsed one. Note: This could be for ANY reason (availability, benefits, salary, etc) but if the market works as it should, and the government package is better end-to-end, the cash economy jobs would slowly fall out of favor.
  3. My second point was that if the private savings accounts are so much better at generating returns, why not take the existing social security surpluses and put them into the same private savings accounts that we are suggesting for individuals. You get instant benefits and no additional problems. No one is suggesting that because a) the government is using the surpluses today for other things and b) you can't have higher returns without higher risk.

Hope that cleared it up.

D

More about SS Private Accounts

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: The Proof's in the Pension

I can't understand how we are still talking about this. The columnist says how great it is that his friend in Chile has his money in a government account that will make many percent better than social security and let him retire to a huge estate with many beautiful women and have been doing so since 1980. Ok, sweet! Couple of quick questions:
  1. If this is so great, then why does 20% of the country STILL live in extreme poverty? EVERYONE who was 40 in 1980 would be well out of poverty by now (or passed on, in which case their descendents would be). According to the article, we must account for so many people who work in the cash economy and thus cannot participate. Fine, I'll accept that, but if the benefits really WERE that fantastic, wouldn't people be falling all over themselves to take jobs in the real economy, no matter how much they paid?
  2. If we are so confident in the stock market, why do we continue to put the surplus have in social security in government bonds!?! We get 3.5% in 15-year non-negotiable US treasury bonds, resulting in $1.7 trillion in 2018 which then starts getting drawn down in 2018. But if we take the SAME surplus we're getting every year (call it $100 billion a year, growing smaller every year), and put it in the same accounts that the author is proposing, we'd double the surplus! It'd be around long enough for the baby boom bubble to significantly pass and we'd be free and clear. Either this math works or the people pushing privatization are hiding something. Make up your mind. Either way, it's totally unnecessary for a form of private accounts that are being proposed currently.

Heart Beat Measure for Working Out

FitSense

Instapundit chimed in with this measure for exercise. I have/had one of these (the battery ran out on the sensor and I have yet to replace it) and I love it. The thing it provides is actual measure of what you're supposed to be doing. For a long time I would just try and go at 70 RPM for 20 minutes, but I had no idea if it was long enough, too long, too fast, etc. Which leads me into one of Chooky's recent blogs (and not just cause he references me):

http://chookyfuzzbang.blogspot.com/2005/04/iron-yuppie.html

He brings up a perfect point. Until a few years ago, we were supposed to be drinking 8 glasses of water a day. And fifty years ago, smoking was healthy. And a hundred years ago, so was cocaine and opium. And 500 years ago, so were leeches. Ok, so I do not think anything we're doing today is quite as bad as this... asymptotically I think we're getting closer to what true health is. However, Chooky's right; Without universally agreed upon measurements and clear causality between the measurements and health, unfortunately we would end up in a situation where we would have constantly moving and different measures based on the different plans. I wonder if this could be alleviated and combined with Chooky's idea of simply looking at the three most expensive types of people who have a treatable condition. Just as an example, if you are over three bills, you've got to find your own way to get coverage.

World's biggest airliner completes first flight

World's biggest airliner completes first flight - Aviation - MSNBC.com

I love how Airbus is touting this thing like it's going to be a flying city. Let me give you a little hint... NOTHING is going to appear on that plane that does not increase the ability of a given airline to jam as many people into a given flight as possible. Store? Bar? Relaxation chair? Movie theater? Gimme a break. Welcome to the world of changing germs with 555 other people on a 6 hour long flight with nothing to eat but a bag of peanuts and pretzels. They'd pack people into the galleys if they could. And rightly so! If you, the airborn public, were willing to pay a nickel more so that you wouldn't get deep vein thrombosis for being shackled into your seat like a feed cow, the airlines would accomodate you! But, oh no, you had to Hotwire yourself into a seat that saved you a buck. Welcome to Hell, kid.

Microbial Fuel Cell Turns Waste Into Hydrogen

Microbial Fuel Cell Turns Waste Into Hydrogen

Every time I see these stories about bacteria turning garbage/waste/dirt/steel/sunlight/etc into something we can use, I'm always worried about it just being snake oil. Of course, had you asked me this about 50 billion years ago, I probably would have been skeptical of photosynthesis. Assuming this does work, I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to actually capture the hydrogen output and store it... let alone ship it on so it could be used broadly. Um... plus THIS whole thing.

Google puts Adsense into RSS

Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET - Longhorn Edition : AdSense in RSS - Explained

The cool thing here is that Google is willing to push their revenue stream into many different areas even if it puts it original revenue stream at risk. Rather than Google forcing people back to the website, where they have their standard ad sense revenue stream, they put their ads into the RSS feed. In fact, this gives them even more exposure, but these ads are absolutely ripe to be stripped out. Interestingly, Google decided to render the ads as images rather than text... apart from being costly on the performance side for Google, I'd imagine they will be much more costly to download as well. One of the very cool things about RSS is how it's practically a nothing download and can be read in any device or format with little trouble. These images are forced to be of certain dimensions. Still, I have to respect Google for pushing the limits. I wonder what will happen when the next big thing comes along and Google has to do something that is a little bit more onerous such as interstitials or something similar.

Adobe aims at Microsoft and Vice Versa

Macworld: News: Adobe aims at Microsoft

Metro document format

It is so motherfuckin' on, you don't even know. For those who are outside the tech industry, allow me to sum up how I see this. Adobe makes graphics software and specializes in stuff that printers and designers love. They tend to stay away from the stuff that directly impacts consumers, prefering more to focus on the tools behind the scenes that make the consumer stuff look great.

Microsoft makes OSes and associated applications for consumers. They focus on making the core components work or providing stuff directly for the end-user. They tend to stay away from tools in the middle that makes the consumer goods look great and they just focus on the plumbing and the end user apps.

Adobe bought Macromedia, a much more direct competitor to MS in both the plumbing and the end user space. MS is going into print ready document formats, an area that Adobe has totally owned with PDF. I don't know who planned to piss in who's swimming pool first, but damn if it isn't on like a mofo now. Round 1.... FIGHT!

The World Will Kick Humanity's Collective Ass

"Plague to World: Drop Dead"

I wish I could read. Not that I lack the ability to see words in a sentence and comprehend them, more that I find myself just infinitely distracted from doing something as simple as sitting down and reading a book. I find myself continually just skimming to the briefest summary of the information and using that as my primary source. It's a shame really.

Anyhow, the NYT book review of this book makes it sound just fantastic. I wish people today had a better sense of context. We're so focused on the terrible (and they are terrible) things that happen today. But if one looks back, you'll always find something more terrible. Tsunami = 150,000 dead. Black death = 200 million dead. Titanic = 1,200 dead. Sultana = 1,650 dead. Jewish Holocaust = 6 million dead. Chinese Cultural Revolution = 65 million dead. It's easy to go on.

To the point at hand, the world is just so going to kick our ass in some major event, you don't even know. It'll be an Earthquake, plague, massive storm, whatever. And it'll kill a billion people. Fortunately, because there is nothing whatsoever you can do about it, I invite you to ignore it until it happens.