2016-01-11 Letter to Colchester Legislators

2016-01-11 Letter to Colchester Legislators - Google Docs:

January 2016

Senator DIck Mazza, Representative Jim Condon, Representative Joey Purvis, Representative Pat Brennan, Representative Maureen Dakin

Thank you for your service to Colchester and Vermont! Another tough legislative session looms and your task will be no easier this year.

Below are my views/priorities on the issues that deserve your focus and that of your leaders.

Please resist any impulse to waste time on minutiae, including expansive legalization of recreational marijuana. All other arguments aside, do not be cajoled into believing that you will have the opportunity to create a new revenue stream. Instead, you would enable a robust black market while creating yet another regulatory bureaucracy.

Control Overall State Spending

Recognize that Vermont has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Please adopt that mindset and resist the temptation to raise taxes and fees yet again to balance the budget. Focus on efficiency in state government and reduce services as necessary. The AHS budget in particular is out of control.

Resist the siren song of budgeting on the notion of a “moral economy” where Vermonters needs and wants are so conflated that runaway spending is sure to follow. Vermont’s government role is not to meet all the needs/wants of Vermonters.

Keep the Cap on Education Spending

While Act 46 and the details within it are controversial, the fundamental premise, capping statewide education spending at 2%, is absolutely correct. Retain that and work on the details if you must. Do not succumb to the argument that because health care or other costs may have risen, the cap should change. Hold the line on total spending.

Reduce the overly generous income sensitivity element of education funding so that taxpayers vote more rationally on school budgets.

Carefully Scrutinize the Administration’s All Payer Waiver Request

The Administration wisely abandoned its single payer ideology as unaffordable. Do not allow Vermont to create an alternative that would pull Medicare funding under state auspices. The Medicaid crisis was created by the Legislature as part of the Single Payer/VHC fiasco. Please do not aggravate Vermont’s demonstrated inability to manage health care by allowing the Administration/GMCB to tamper with Federal control Medicare funds. Instead, keep focused on constraining the costs of Vermont’s health care rather than fiddling with the payment stream..

Carbon Tax

No!

Vermont’s  Regulatory, Population and Workforce Infrastructure Problem is Critical

Vermont’s workforce and demographic trends portend yet deeper trouble for our economy. The excessive time, energy and costs for doing business in Vermont are serious debilitating burdens on businesses. Because we lack common-sense regulation with swift decisions, capital investments are unnecessarily delayed in far too many instances. The regulatory and bureaucratic overburden at all levels of government is a major factor in the unsustainable costs of housing, business development and growth. A serious overhaul is long overdue and substantial improvements would send a potent signal that Vermont is open for business and job growth.

Respectfully,

David Usher, 267 Biscayne Heights, Colchester VT 05446, 802 735-2233

cc: Colchester Sun

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Media Cowers in the Face of Radical Islam

We are both enthralled and dismayed with the radical Islamist terrorist attacks in France. The TV  talking heads do their best to help us understand today’s reality but meander in it. Will they promote the anti-Islamist meme or be cowed by fear of retaliation?

Good effort initially by most, but missing the long view. Radical Islam, perhaps co-opting the 1.6 billion mainstream adherents of Islam, intends to create the overthrow of the longstanding paradigm of nation states, democracy, and the rule of law divorced from religious ideology.

So far the media has chosen to refrain from ‘offending’ Islam probably out of fear for themselves and their employees. Has freedom of the press and speech been co-opted by Islamic crazies? If so, cowardice has trumped freedom and western civilization is threatened by their lack of courage. For sure, journalism is a risky business and those who practice it faithfully buy into those risks

Western civilization must understand that their worldview and way of life  is under attack by radical Islamists. The media and press must stand and speak against this threat if they believe in democracy and the underpinnings of Western civilization. Otherwise they fail us as an institution of demcracy.

The Mental Virtues

The Mental Virtues (David Brooks 08/29/14 NYT) Character and Thinking, the important elements; Is it possible to display and cultivate character if you are just an information age office jockey, alone with a memo or your computer?

Love of learning. Some people are just more ardently curious than others, either by cultivation or by nature.

Second, there is courage. The obvious form of intellectual courage is the willingness to hold unpopular views. But the subtler form is knowing how much risk to take in jumping to conclusions. (Intellectual courage is self-regulation, Roberts and Wood argue, knowing when to be daring and when to be cautious.)

Third, there is firmness. You don’t want to be a person who surrenders his beliefs at the slightest whiff of opposition. On the other hand, you don’t want to hold dogmatically to a belief against all evidence. The median point between flaccidity and rigidity is the virtue of firmness. Firmness is a quality of mental agility.

Fourth, there is humility, which is not letting your own desire for status get in the way of accuracy. The humble person fights against vanity and self-importance. He’s not writing those sentences people write to make themselves seem smart; he’s not thinking of himself much at all. The humble researcher doesn’t become arrogant toward his subject, assuming he has mastered it. Such a person is open to learning from anyone at any stage in life.

Fifth, there is autonomy. You don’t want to be a person who slavishly adopts whatever opinion your teacher or some author gives you. On the other hand, you don’t want to reject all guidance from people who know what they are talking about. Autonomy is the median of knowing when to bow to authority and when not to, when to follow a role model and when not to, when to adhere to tradition and when not to.

Finally, there is generosity. This virtue starts with the willingness to share knowledge and give others credit. But it also means hearing others as they would like to be heard, looking for what each person has to teach and not looking to triumphantly pounce upon their errors.

The mind is embedded in human nature, and very often thinking well means pushing against the grain of our nature — against vanity, against laziness, against the desire for certainty, against the desire to avoid painful truths. Good thinking isn’t just adopting the right technique. It’s a moral enterprise and requires good character, the ability to go against our lesser impulses for the sake of our higher ones.

(Shared from Google Keep)

Our Comrade the Electron

https://static.pinboard.in/webstock_2014.htm

Our Comrade the Electron by MACIEJ CEGLOWSKI

"We put so much care into making the Internet resilient from technical failures, but make no effort to make it resilient to political failure. We treat freedom and the rule of law like inexhaustible natural resources, rather than the fragile and precious treasures that they are.

And now, of course, it's time to make the Internet of Things, where we will connect everything to everything else, and build cool apps on top, and nothing can possibly go wrong."

Highly recommend you read this very poignant essay. Predicting how society, culture and governments will respond to technological change is nearly impossible.

Study Questions Fat and Heart Disease Link - NYTimes.com

Study Questions Fat and Heart Disease Link - NYTimes.com: "Many of us have long been told that saturated fat, the type found in meat, butter and cheese, causes heart disease. But a large and exhaustive new analysis by a team of international scientists found no evidence that eating saturated fat increased heart attacks and other cardiac events."

So, another long-standing medical axiom seems to have bitten the dust.



I have always maintained that reasonably healthy people who eat a balanced diet will remain reasonably healthy. Given the diversity in the genetic makeup of our bodies, a one-rule-fits-all formulaic approach can only be relevant to average people. Of course, none of us is 'average.' We are all unique.



I believe we will eventually learn what foods are best for each of us based on our genome. We are getting closer to that goal as research gallops ahead.



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Interview with Founder of 23andMe Genetics Testing Company

This interview with Anne Wojicicki, the founder of the direct-to-consumer genetics testing company 23andMe provides her view of the potential of genetic testing for citizens.

My genetic information is in their database and I have been fascinated with the outputs provided.

I hope the FDA soon approves what they are doing as it relates to medical information so that the updates relevant to my DNA will continue.

An interesting dialogue about the FDA controversy is available here at Ycombinator.

The future of jobs: The onrushing wave | The Economist

The future of jobs: The onrushing wave | The Economist:

We are in for a long , difficult economic and societal dilemma as spelled out in this piece. The political expression of it is the growing gap between the rich and the poor and the hollowing out of the middle class that politicians bloviate about without offering any real solutions. Perhaps they fail to understand or believe the underlying problem, opting instead to try and legislate job growth..

I'm reading this book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies,  referenced in the Economist story, which provides deep insight about the disruption of the traditional economic expectations.

"In a forthcoming book Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, argues along similar lines that America may be pioneering a hyper-unequal economic model in which a top 1% of capital-owners and “supermanagers” grab a growing share of national income and accumulate an increasing concentration of national wealth. The rise of the middle-class—a 20th-century innovation—was a hugely important political and social development across the world. The squeezing out of that class could generate a more antagonistic, unstable and potentially dangerous politics.
The potential for dramatic change is clear. A future of widespread technological unemployment is harder for many to accept. Every great period of innovation has produced its share of labour-market doomsayers, but technological progress has never previously failed to generate new employment opportunities."

I believe it's different this time because of the blinding pace of technological change and the ability to explore new models of productivity, work and service, nearly all of which reduce the human labor content in many previously 'safe' occupations.

Our institutions are more deeply entrenched and harder to change. Poorly educated people do not stand a chance for their insufficient skills to command a good-paying job in this new economy. With more generous government benefits, the incentive to work disappears from most folks.

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Reality and Politics Clash

Government dependency is a corrosive force that undermines democracy. TeamObama's thrust to transform America creates a collision course toward the destruction of democracy. How is it that so many people fail to see this?

When people accept the government as their source of basic sustenance, the spark of personal responsibility is slowly extinguished. Following that is a loss of a person's verve to better his/her condition. When government largess supplants individual initiative, the country is on the road to its demise as an example of freedom and liberty.

This should be the core debate in the elections ahead.

Radical Islam vs the West

I have concluded that the West has lost control of the Middle East and those parts of the world, North Africa and other places, that are beset with Radical Islam played out in the Sunni-Shia-anti-Infidel conflict. The West is both unable and unwilling to confront this menace and it will only end with a MAJOR conflict.

Israel will act on any real threat to its existence and no amount of Kerry diplomacy will thwart the players driven by Islamist religious differences. This situation can only end in the Biblical Armageddon. Many prophecies foretell this conflict.

We may delay it, but the threat cannot be eliminated. War will inevitably happen and, IMHO, it will be nuclear.

TeamObama's Big Question

President Obama's big question:

Does he recover by trying to work with Republicans in Congress or by confronting them heading into next year's midterm elections?"

Credit WSJ 12/31/13
I'm guessing he will confront and aggressively enter campaign mode.

New Health Law Frustrates Many in Middle Class - NYTimes.com

New Health Law Frustrates Many in Middle Class - NYTimes.com:

The more I read about the failings of ObamaCare, not the website mess which can be fixed, but the underlying framework, the more I'm convinced it will fail. It is enormously complex with the net effect being higher costs for too many middle class people.

Perhaps it was constructed as an interim step destined to fail so that insurance companies would not suddenly fail. Was it designed with a small likelihood of success in an attempt to make single-payer a last resort option, which is what Obama, Dean, Shumlin and other liberal Democrats obviously prefer.

The political calculus in all this is fascinating to watch as it unfolds. The Democrats have a lot to lose in the 2014 election. The Republicans have a lot to gain, but being against ObamaCare is not by itself a winning strategy. They must come forth unified with a better plan. That should coalesce and be heavily promoted beginning in April with a solid strategy for implementation on the national level.

Without a viable plan they will fail to win the electorate. For me, any viable plan must include cost control. That means rationing and convincing providers and patients to accept it, a tall order.

"...An analysis by The New York Times shows the cost of premiums for people who just miss qualifying for subsidies varies widely across the country and rises rapidly for people in their 50s and 60s. In some places, prices can quickly approach 20 percent of a person’s income..."

The Republicans need to focus on fixing ObamaCare by strongly and truthfully promoting a rational solution. They  must win a majority in the Senate and retain control of the House with majorities to override potential vetoes by Obama in 2015 and 2016.

Single payer will not easily be accepted because trust in 'big government' is at an historic low, even among Democrats. The folks are unlikely to believe that they can pull off a single-payer plan.

I wonder if they're up to the task?


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2013 Atlantic hurricane season wrap-up: least active in 30 years

2013 Atlantic hurricane season wrap-up: least active in 30 years:

Oops, the experts really missed this forecast. Most likely they are wrong about global warming, too. This failure reveals the inherent weakness of climate and weather modeling.

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Review & Outlook: Escape From ObamaCare - WSJ.com

Review & Outlook: Escape From ObamaCare - WSJ.com

"The Affordable Care Act appears to be misfiring in every imaginable way, and Democrats are having second thoughts about serving as human shields for White House ineptitude. If they really want to make amends, they'll join Republicans in trying to repair some of the damage they caused."

The chaos that is ObamaCare is the direct result of failed leadership from TeamObama. Rep. Pelosi and Senator Reid have not stepped into the breach to repair the damage that their policies have caused. This failure is far more than a troubled website. It's the result of tinkering ineffectively with America's healthcare system and negatively affecting the lives and destroying the trust of Americans. This is a very big deal because it's so personal.

The real problem to be solved is the cost of America's healthcare and how to reduce it. This problem receives scant political attention.

This is an opportunity for Republicans to seize the advantage. I will watch keenly to see if they have a viable alternative.

Mr. Blow at the NY Times sums up the TeamObama catastrophe here.

Himmelstein Shumlin and Vermont Single Payer | Single Payer Action

In case you missed it...

Himmelstein Shumlin and Vermont Single Payer | Single Payer Action: "“No, no,” Himmelstein said. “I’m actually just saying what’s true. And that is, you can have a publicly financed program, and as Deb [Richter] said, it won’t be single payer. It will be enormous progress. But let’s not confuse it with single payer because you will give up much of the advantage of the single payer program.”
“Let me just say, I agree with you,” Shumlin told Himmelstein. “But I’m going to try to get the waivers to get everybody [in Vermont] in the pool — everybody. I want everybody in the pool.”"

“That of course will take an act of Congress,” Himmelstein answered.

“That’s right,” Shumlin said. “But if you help me get rid of those Tea Party nuts in 2014, I’ll get it done.”

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How Healthcare.gov Doomed Itself By Screwing Startups | TechCrunch

The severity of the problems with the ACA Exchanges puts big government inefficiency on display. This piece argues that the nimble startup private sector may well have been in a better position to build and operate these exchanges.

Nevertheless, I suspect the most severe problems are to be found in the backend, connecting the various government legacy systems. Perhaps the exchanges are fatally flawed by the wrong systems architecture.

The fact that the CIA will spend $600 million with Amazon Web Services should be seen as a signal that big systems and big data may best be handled by smart people who can leap ahead of legacy systems many of which were designed in the last century

How Healthcare.gov Doomed Itself By Screwing Startups | TechCrunch: "These types of solutions will be entirely absent from California and New York. Ironically, the president’s chief technology officer, Todd Park, often espouses the principle of “Joy’s Law,” named for legendary founder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, which states that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people in the world work for somebody else.” 

For a year, Park has been reorganizing the entire federal IT system to put data in the hands of private developers, rather than have government websites be the central hub. It is bizarre that the president’s signature initiative would ignore its own principles."

On a New Jersey Islet, Twilight of the Landline - NYTimes.com

The inevitable is upon us. POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is nearly dead

As George Gilder predicted in 1995 in his book Telecosm, the copper telephone network must/will die because of the dual drivers of rapid technological advances and the 'socialist' morass of subsidies and regulatory overburden that ruled the copper network fostering Universal Service in the U.S during the last 70+ years.

Gilder had this to say:

"The fact is that the universality of telephones is crucial to their usefulness; yet universal service using current technology is totally uneconomical and impractical. Snow and ice are the least of it. The basic problem is the architecture of the system, with a separate pair of lines, on average two miles long, devoted exclusively to each user. It simply does not pay to lay, entrench, string, protect, test and maintain miles of copper wire pairs, each dedicated to one household that uses them on average some 15 or 20 minutes a day."

...the idea persists that wireless telephony is an expensive supplement to the existing copper colossus rather than a deadly rival of it. The installed base of
twisted-pair wire still appears to many to be a barrier to entry for new competitors in the local loop, rather than a barrier to RBOC entry into modern communications markets.
The conventional wisdom sees the electromagnetic spectrum as a scarce resource. Few believe that it will soon emerge as a cheaper and better alternative to the local loop, in the same way that microwave emerged as a cheaper and better substitute for copper long-distance wires. 

The death throes will be played out in many locales typified by this example in Mantoloking, NJ.

On a New Jersey Islet, Twilight of the Landline - NYTimes.com: "Verizon’s move on this sliver of land is a look into the not-too-distant future, a foreshadowing of nearly all telephone service across the United States. The traditional landline is not expected to last the decade in a country where nearly 40 percent of households use only wireless phones. Even now, less than 10 percent of households have only a landline phone, according to government data that counts cable-based phone service in that category."

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From the Start, Signs of Trouble at Health Portal - NYTimes.com

This story in the NY Times, normally a strong supporter of this Administration, reveals that the the health portal rollout was and is a colossal failure. Meanwhile, TeamObama has obviously been lying to the American people about it, if we are to believe this story.

Having been associated with complex information technology systems over the years, I am not surprised.  This one is even more fragile because users are not trained in its use and had high expectations because of experience with other complex website that work.  This situation was made doubly worse because Administration officials failed to tell the truth and properly set expectations.

Thank God our military software systems are normally thoroughly tested before deployment and work as they should.

This mess is a direct result of the politics surrounding ObamaCare and the fact that so many people disapprove of it. The roll-out failure is sure to further drag down its popularity and rightly so.

Will it be soon that top Administration officials will be fired? I think it's likely that Secretary Sibelius will lose her job.

From the Start, Signs of Trouble at Health Portal - NYTimes.com: "Interviews with two dozen contractors, current and former government officials, insurance executives and consumer advocates, as well as an examination of confidential administration documents, point to a series of missteps — financial, technical and managerial — that led to the troubles."

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European utilities: How to lose half a trillion euros | The Economist

A fascinating story about the combined effects of government policy and renewable electricity technology in Europe. Good intentions and massive subsidies have produced very high electricity consumer prices and decimated the finances of the electric utilities. The future seems even more uncertain as the consequences of these policies are destroying wealth with no demonstrable environmental benefit.

Are the same consequences in store for America?

European utilities: How to lose half a trillion euros | The Economist: "Those goals are now harder to achieve. Renewable energy has grabbed a growing share of the market, pushed wholesale prices down and succeeded in its goal of driving down the price of new technologies. But the subsidy cost also has been large, the environmental gains non-existent so far and the damage done to today’s utilities much greater than expected. Europe in general and Germany in particular see themselves as pioneers of low-carbon energy. If they are genuinely to be so, they will need to design a much better electricity system that rewards low-carbon energy without reducing reliability and imposing undue and unnecessary costs."

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Breaking News: House Republicans Discuss Plan for Short-Term Increase in Debt Ceiling - dusher@gmail.com - Gmail

Seems the logjam will break. I suspected Congressman Ryan was up to something because he had been so quiet in this recent wrangling. Also, no mention of the ACA in this.


Breaking News: House Republicans Discuss Plan for Short-Term Increase in Debt Ceiling - dusher@gmail.com - Gmail:

 "House Republicans gathered Thursday morning to discuss a plan to lift the government’s statutory borrowing limit temporarily to allow for negotiations on a package of deficit reduction and tax reform proposals that could lead to a reopening of the government and an end to the threat of government default."

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Paul Ryan: Here's How We Can End This Stalemate - WSJ.com

Congressman Ryan's opinion piece suggests that budget negotiations are essential and some common ground may exist among Republicans and Democrats. And he makes no mention of the Affordable Care Act.

Paul Ryan: Here's How We Can End This Stalemate - WSJ.com:

"Over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office predicts discretionary spending—that is, everything except entitlement programs and debt payments—will grow by $202 billion, or roughly 17%. Meanwhile, mandatory spending—which mostly consists of funding for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—will grow by $1.6 trillion, or roughly 79%. The 2011 Budget Control Act largely ignored entitlement spending. But that is the nation's biggest challenge."

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