I’m in the habit of looking at Google News every morning. What I particularly like about it is that, in theory, as long as I haven’t “personalized” my news feed, it should give me a reasonable cross-section of what people are reading today in the news. Continue reading Post #1861: The propaganda apparatus at work.
Edit: I originally posted this back in January 2023, as Post #1671. I didn’t cash in my government bonds at the time.
Yesterday I came across the phrase “the crumbling of the American political system”, and it really resonated.
I mean, come on, seriously, how many unprecedented events have to occur before you realize that this time, it really is different. To put it plainly, I think the “red Caesar” totalitarians are going to win, riding on the backs of the ignorant.
With the House unable to function more-or-less indefinitely, the Supreme Court a corrupt arm of the Republican party, and the propaganda machinery running full-bore, all we need now is a good, stiff economic recession to ignite the flame. Any appeal to “checks and balances” and “free press” to prevent this is just so much whistling in the dark.
I guess what I’m saying is that, right now, it does indeed look as if the U.S.A. has been McBoatfaced.
I think I’ll buy some more gold. Not a good investment, but it makes me feel better.
Original post follows.
Normally my posts tend to be reality-based and fact-oriented.
Today, by contrast, I’m having a hard time dealing with reality, so I’m going to blather about the current state of affairs in the U.S.A.
I will eventually get around to those I-bonds. But it’s not exactly a direct route.
Your scope of authority is the stuff you have control over. Things you can change. Decisions that you get to make. That sort of thing.
Your scope of responsibility is the stuff you’ll be held accountable for. Financially, legally, morally, socially, or whatever. It’s all the stuff that, if it goes wrong, you take the blame and/or penalty. And if it goes right, you get the praise and/or reward.
If you’ve ever taken a class on how to manage a business, you’ve almost certainly heard some version of the maxim above. In an ideal business — and maybe in an ideal world — each person’s scope of authority and scope of responsibility would coincide.
Where scope of authority exceeds scope of responsibility, you get irresponsible decision-making. The decision-maker doesn’t have to care about the consequences of the decision.
Where scope of responsibility exceeds scope of authority, you get stress. A classic case might be where a customer screams at a waiter over the quality of the food. It’s not as if the waiter cooked it. But the waiter is held responsible for it.
This is really not much deeper than saying that you should be held accountable for your decisions. And, conversely, that you shouldn’t be held accountable for things outside your control.
Source: Wikipedia
You can read the full saga on Wikipedia or the New York Times.
Briefly: About a decade ago, an arm of the British government (the NERC) decided to make a major investment in a nearly $300M polar research ship. That ship has the serious mission of measuring the effects of climate change in the earth’s polar regions.
As the ship neared completion, it required a name. And so, to gin up popular support, they decided to choose the name of this new capital vessel via internet poll.
Hijinks ensued, in the form of the most popular name, by a wide margin, being Boaty McBoatface. The name was, in fact, suggested as a joke. The guy who suggested it eventually sort-of apologized for doing so. But it won handily.
In the end, the NERC reneged and gave the ship a properly serious name (the RRS Sir David Attenborough). But they did name one of the autonomous submersibles the Boaty McBoatface. As shown above, courtesy of Wikipedia.
This was a classic violation of Business 101. The scope of authority — the right to name the ship — was handed to an anonymous internet crowd who bore no responsibility whatsoever for their actions. Meanwhile, the people responsible for paying for and running the ship had, in theory, no control whatsoever over the name.
This is hardly the first time that a seemingly serious internet poll led to a frivolous outcome. But it was such a stunning backfire that “McBoatface” has now become a verb in its own right, per the Wiktionary:
Verb Boaty McBoatface (third-person singular simple present Boaty McBoatfaces, present participle Boaty McBoatfacing, simple past and past participle Boaty McBoatfaced)
(neologism) To hijack or troll a vote, especially one held online, by supporting a joke option. [from 2016]
In the U.S., an election is an anonymous poll in which those casting votes bear no individual responsibility for the consequences.
It’s hard for me to see much difference between that, and a typical internet poll. Other than the fact that it’s difficult to vote twice. And that some people actually do take elections seriously.
I guess it’s a bit pejorative to suggest that the current chaos in the House of Representatives has occurred because we McBoatfaced the last election. Still, you have to wonder about the people who voted for candidates whose sole promise was to be loud and disruptive, and do their darnedest to interrupt the normal business of government. Did they think that would be fun prank, the same as the McBoatface voters? Own the libs, or whatever. Or was that really their serious and thoughtful goal?
At least their candidates seem to be carrying through on their campaign promises.
Here’s one that kind of cracks me up, but kind of doesn’t. You hear a lot of people saying that the lack of a functioning House is OK, because the Federal government already passed a budget for FY 2023. They won’t have to face that task until this fall.
I think that’s backwards.
Rephrased: Senate Republicans saw this predictable train wreck months ago, and so worked with Democrats to pass the current (2023) FY budget. That’s presumably because they already knew (or strongly suspected) that the House wouldn’t be capable of doing that.
Re-interpreting today’s events: The predicted chaos has come to pass. I’d have to bet, then, that there will be no new budget for the next fiscal year, and no increase in the debt ceiling.
The currently-funded fiscal year (2023) ends on 9/30/2023. So that’s a known. Even then, I believe that entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare) remain funded. It’s only the “discretionary” part of the budget that is not.
But as to when, exactly, we hit the debt ceiling, nobody can quite say. Consensus seems to be mid-2023.
At that point, the Federal government will continue to make what payments it can. So, likely, Social Security checks will continue to go out. (Figuratively speaking — I don’t think they’ve mailed out physical checks in decades.) Other payments will not be made.
Source: Covertinstruments.com
Which brings me to my final speculation. Everybody is working under the assumption that, eventually, this will all get straightened out. Somebody will figure out some way to rein in the House of Representatives so that they can do their required business.
By contrast, I keep asking myself, what if this is as good as it gets?
What if the house is permanently McBoatfaced?
Back when I was a kid, we had joke Presidential candidates. Comedian Pat Paulson was one. There was a movement to elect the fictional TV character Archie Bunker as U.S. President. And so on. But everybody knew they were jokes, or that they were fictional characters.
Enter Representative Santos of New York. Line, meet blur. The people of that district definitely elected a fictional character. They were simply not aware of it at the time. To which we can add a handful of Republican house members whose sole platform appears to have been being mad as hell, and stating their unequivocal unwillingness to go along with anything required to conduct the business of government. I guess we all now know they weren’t kidding.
A couple of days back, a friend asked me to see if I could open a couple of old suitcases that had belonged to her grandmother. Luckily, I happened to own the Covert Companion (r) tool, pictured above. The version I use has a few tools to help with what are called “low skill” attacks on locks. (“Low skill” being an accurate description of my lock-picking ability). Because I happened to own those crude little pieces of steel circled above, I had relatively little problem opening the simple warded locks on those suitcases.
But if I hadn’t had the tools, I’d have been helpless. The only way to open the suitcase would have been to destroy it. It’s a case of any tool, no matter how crude, being better than no tool at all.
Right now, I’m not seeing the tools in hand to fix the U.S. House. Not even the crudest tactic that could possibly resolve the current impasse, let alone get the place functional going forward. And, unlike those old suitcases, nobody has the power to destroy it, to achieve some end. The House works the way it works, or doesn’t, until such time as it works well enough to change the way it works. Which can’t happen. Because right now, it’s not working.
Which finally brings me to I-bonds. Is it smart to own I-bonds when the House is broken?
I’ve owned these for decades. In fact, they are so old that they are going to quit paying interest just a few years from now. Pre-tax, they pay just a bit more than the rate of inflation. Most of the decades that I have owned them, they’ve paid little more than zero. But now, as these things are reckoned, they are paying pretty well, compared to the alternatives.
But that high rate of return means nothing if you can’t spend it. And of all the people the Federal government could choose to stiff, in the event of a permanent failure to fund the government or raise the debt ceiling, I’d bet that small bondholders would be right at the top of the list. (N.B., I-bonds are marketed at small savers, with a purchase limit of $5000 per person per year.)
In any case, my conclusion is that if the House is permanently McBoatfaced, I might be wise to cash those I-bonds before we hit the debt limit sometime this summer. Otherwise, I just get the feeling that the longer this goes on, the longer it’s going to go on. Combined with the feeling that maybe this is as good as it gets. That there is no tool for fixing it.
And that if everybody has their hand out, to the Feds, I’m going to end up at the back of the line.
I told you I’d get to I-bonds eventually. It just took a while.
Stories in real life rarely have a fairy-tale ending. This one is an exception. Continue reading Post #1856: Can this furniture be saved? Happy ending.
My recent foray into furniture repair has turned into a lesson on why you should do you own Swedish death cleaning as you age.
To recap, this is what is left of a pair of chairs that got tossed to the curb, across the street from me, here in the middle-class suburbs of DC. They were in great shape when I picked them off the curb, but years of use by my kids took their toll on the half-century-old fabric and foam.
These were discarded, in excellent condition, alongside heaps of other household goods, by the children of an elderly, recently-widowed woman. Her kids were clearing out her house, as they prepared to move their mother down to Texas to be near them.
At that time, I couldn’t find any images of these on the internet. I assumed they were 1970s Sears knockoffs of a mid-century-modern design. Or similar. Middle-class couple, middle-class house. Surely these were nothing special.
Yesterday I started putting these back together, as shown in the just-prior post. At that time, I didn’t even know what to call them. But they’re pretty nice, and it would be a shame to see them end up in the dumpster. So why not.
On a whim — now two decades after my first attempt to ID them — I did another Google search.
I have now gotten a certification, from the son of the designer, that this is (or was) what’s left of a pair of Adrian Pearsall Craft Associates chairs.
Adrian Pearsall is now something of a legend in U.S. mid-century-modern furniture design. Properly restored, this pair of chairs would be worth thousands of dollars.
Worse, improperly restoring them is something of a sacrilege. Not for the money lost, but for taking a valued piece of Americana and destroying it.
This is suddenly a different and more complex task. All my woodworking plans go out the window. And now I have to figure out how to proceed, now that I know what they are. I don’t collect antique furniture, so it’s not clear these have any business staying with me.
I guess the real take-away is that these never should have ended up in the trash. But they did so, because the prior owner left it up to her kids. I only discovered the chairs’ secret identity because they became part of my own Swedish death cleaning. I still have no idea what to do with them, but at least I’m making the decision, with an understanding of what they are.
Just another AI test. I gave Gencraft.com the names of some famous people. I took the better of the two pictures generated for each name. Then I matched them to actual pictures. I tried to avoid iconic real images, where possible. Continue reading Post #1850: Which pic is real?
It’s funny how catastrophes linger in our collective memory, but near-catastrophes fade.
Fifteen years ago, the “housing bubble” that developed during the Bush administration finally collapsed, and almost took down the U.S. banking system with it. To the point where the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) ran a negative fund balance, due to the wave of bank failures (below).
Source: FDIC, , courtesy of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), s
By now, most have forgotten how crazy housing prices were in some parts of the country. And what extraordinary measures the Federal Reserve took to avoid a complete collapse of the U.S. financial system.
We’re still dealing with the fallout from the 2008 near-catastrophe. In particular, that led to more than a decade during which the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. Lower than the underlying rate of inflation, in fact. As I see it, the Fed recapitalized a bankrupt U.S. banking industry on the backs of U.S. savers.
But that era of below-zero real interest began to end a couple of years ago.
And nothing much has happened. Yet.
Yesterday, a friend pointed out that some economic analysts see the U.S. housing market as once again ripe for a collapse in prices. Given that I own a house, I thought it was well worth taking the time to look at current U.S. housing market data. And while I was originally skeptical, I’d now have to say, he has a point. There’s not a lot of sunshine in the current housing market data.
With apologies to Song of Solomon, 2:12. But surely the blog title makes at least as much sense as ” .. the voice of the turtle … “. Whatever. This post isn’t about Bible specifics.
The background here is that a friend, has a little kid, who really likes a stuffed toy, that has a broken electronic voice-box.
The catch is that the toy in question is a 25-year-old plush chihuahua dog. It was a promotional giveaway from Taco Bell. It was never meant to be repaired.
There are probably a lot of these exact Taco Bell chihuahua dogs still in existence. You can buy one on Etsy (below). But at this point, it’s a fair bet that the 25-year-old batteries in the device either have died, or will soon die, if the toy is actually used as a toy. So if you want one that talks — and the little girl in question definitely wanted that — you’d best be prepared to replace the batteries, at least.
Source: Etsy (link to page).
So, would I mind trying to fix it? Needless to say, replacement parts may be an issue. And in terms of helpful instructions on the internet, I found none.
In the end, I tried to fix four broken Taco Bell chihuahua voice boxes. You never know who might want to read about fixing a mute Taco Bell chihuahua plush toy. So I thought I’d document the fix. It’s not as if hordes of folks read this blog, even on my best days. Bottom line, three out of four now work. Continue reading Post #1842: … and the voice of the chihuahua is heard in our land, …
This post is a first followup to Post #1667, Döstädning and the problem of small stuff. In this post, I describe how I mostly-muddled-through getting rid of a roomful of miscellaneous stuff. Continue reading Post #1838: It all boils down to the size of your junk drawer.
My wife and I just returned from a brief vacation in Ocean City (OC), Maryland.
Our annual OC vacation has changed since our kids have grown up. Without the need to entertain the kids, the beach experience becomes a lot more, eh, ritualized, for want of a better term. Continue reading Post #1838: Two electrical issues from our recent vacation.
The statistically savvy among you might have noticed something odd about the graph at the end of the last post.
When I let unconstrained math (via Excel) determine the best straight-line fit to these data points, it appears to tell me that these cars lost about 4% of battery capacity for every 10K miles.
But …
But what that doesn’t do is guarantee that with zero miles, I predict that you’ll have 100% of original capacity.
And that matters, because it looks like a lot of these cars must have lost a lot of range early on, that is, at low mileage. And that loss of battery range doesn’t get factored into the 4% per 10K range loss estimate.
So this is a rare instance of a straight-line fit for which you are justified in “setting the intercept” manually, rather than letting an unconstrained least-squares fit to the data do it. By definition, the line has to pass through zero miles matching 100% of original range.
Look what happens when I do that:
On average, pinning the linear trend to pass through 0 miles = 100% of original range, range loss is more like 8% per 10K miles.
The whole cluster of dots is quite “low” on that graph, so to speak. Those cars on average followed a path of losing a lot of range early on. And having the loss taper off to a mere 4% per year.
My guess is that exponential decay is the line you’d like to fit, for something wasting away. But I can’t seem to get Excel to give a trend passing through the required point, with the required shape. So I freehanded what I think the Conventional Wisdom says about the time-path of battery loss.
No matter how you cut it, the actual observed battery loss over this range amounts to much more than 4%/10K miles. The mid-point of the fitted line sits around a 40% loss over 5K miles. That’s the 8%/year calculated when the regression line was pinned at 100% capacity at zero miles.
George Akerlof, economist, once wrote a piece whose title began “The Market for ‘Lemons’: ” The paper is pretty deep, but the takeaway is pretty simple. In this case, it boils down to: People sell their cars when those cars are lemons, not when they are peaches.
That’s one obvious explanation of why these losses appear far larger-than-expected. (Where, lurking in the background is the idea that EVs lose, oh, like two percent a year, maybe, based on looking at a few graphs in the past.) The point is, maybe most of these cars appear in the used car listings precisely because they had above-average battery capacity losses. And that’s why their prior owners sold them. And I’m seeing them.
The other possibility is that the mileage estimated from the dashboard readout is substantially biased downwards. (I know it has a high variance, as it depends on recent driving style. Leaf aficionados refer to it as the “guess gauge”. That should just add noise, not bias, I think.)
There is one element of bias in what I did in my calculation, in that the range bars are each about 8 percent thick. For example, when I saw four range bars, my calculation assumed the car was (4/12 =) 33% charged. But if four bars is really just 3.5 bars, on average, then that charge level is actually just a shade over 28%, on average. I would then triple that error in arriving at 100% of charge, and so end up understating total range by a factor of about 15%.
Adjusting for that would require multiplying my range estimate by (1/.85 =) about 18%. The upshot is that what looked like a 60-mile range based on the dashboard could plausibly be a 70-mile range in reality.
That said, I’m not sure this materially changes the situation. No matter how I slice it, the range of the car I’m interested is far lower than the Recurrent.com estimate that I had been looking at.
Finally, I can’t fully discount that the losses observed in this low-end used car sample are typical of a random sample of Leafs. But if it were, I doubt there’d be many Leaf fans out there.
On net, I think the explanation is that I’m looking at a market for lemons. By looking only at the low-cost end of the market, and only looking at what people are trying to sell, I’m probably looking at a fairly biased sample of all Leafs.
Unfortunately, that’s the sample of cars I’m buying from, if I continue down this path. Perhaps time for a re-think.
