Sibling Punditry

"Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice."

This one is about credit being delivered where credit is due. There is a teaspoonful for myself and a great chocolate-drizzled scoop of credit for my beloved sister.

I was looking for an old essay of mine and came across one from 2006 titled “The Next Saddam.” In it I point out that such disasters as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait don’t just pop up out of nowhere. There is a long string of circumstance leading up to the first shot being fired. In that case it included U.S. intervention on behalf of a dictator. I traversed from Saddam Hussein to the Shah of Iran and mused that there were probably other dictators in the Middle East and Central Asia desperately trying to hide the cracks in the foundation.

My pick for Most Likely to Abscond was Islam Karimov, the butcher of Uzbeckistan. My sister, under the nom de heresy Not a Jedi Yet, pointed a prescient finger at Hosni Mubarak, now former president of Egypt. This was not a random pin-the-tail-on-the-dictator guess. She backed her pick with reason and evidence. She was five years ahead of the pack, and it all fell pat as she predicted.

Not a Jedi Yet? The Force is strong in her punditry. Will she make more accurate predictions? Is she destined for a slot on cable news? Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future…

Further Evidence of the Decline of Western Civilization - Carnivore Carnival

As if we needed more evidence.

The Kitchener Cordless Super Jerky Blaster is on sale for $29.00. That’s 71% off.

And what, you may ask, is a jerky blaster? The Q&A section of the listing has the answer:

“The jerky blaster is for making meat sticks without a casing, and flat meat (jerky) You add your seasoned meat mixture into the meat barrel, then squeeze the mixture through a tube (flat or round style) onto a baking sheet.”

The device in question looks like the offspring of a cordless drill and a caulking gun. A simple pull of the trigger and you can produce oozing meat mixture in flat or round. The very existence of this tool raises questions.

Ok, so you want to make your own special recipe venison Slim Jims. I get that. You’re making a bunch, and your arms get tired rolling the stuff out by hand.

But cordless? You’re going to be preparing beef jerky on the roof? In the woods?  On the back of a moving flatbed truck? There are electric sausage stuffers on the market. They sit on your kitchen counter and plug into the wall socket. In your kitchen, where you prepare food. The existence of a cordless jerky blaster infers the existence of a place with no electricity, but access to cookie sheets and an oven. And yet, and yet, the jerky blaster comes with only one battery, so after some limited period of meat extrusion one must find a working outlet to recharge the device.

Someone in product development somewhere thought this was a great idea, and it passed muster in the executive offices. What America needs is a hyper-specialized cordless meat processing device. Nobody stopped for a moment and said “This is idiocy. Nobody needs to make jerky more than fifteen feet from an outlet.” I guess it’s a new rule for the age of lithium ion batteries: If it can be made it can be made electric, and if it can be made electric, it can (and will) be made cordless, whether that makes the remotest sense or not. For that matter, does any private individual in this world make enough jerky to need a dedicated tool like this? (“Hey Frank, check it out. Fresh batch of jer- Hey Frank, come back here!”)

I am imagining some factory worker in China asking the purpose of this new product. The look on this person’s face on receiving the answer would be priceless. And we used to call them inscrutable. We, who have created the most completely unnecessary thing.

On another front, the 666 food wagon, located in Manhattan, has come out with the world’s most luxurious hamburger. Costing $666, it contains a patty of Kobe beef wrapped in gold leaf, lobster, foie gras, truffles, and caviar. It is wrapped in three one-hundred dollar bills. They call it the “Douche Burger.” Disgusted with expensive and pretentious gourmet burgers presented at trendy restaurants, they came out with their own capper, describing it as “a f—ing burger filled and topped with rich people shit... It may not taste good, but it will make you feel rich as f–k. Douche."

As it turns out, it was a joke and an advertising gimmick. What the article I read reveals, however, is that there are unintentionally shame-filled burgers out there. There is a $295 burger available at a New York restaurant called Serendipity that contains a "mix of Japanese Wagyu beef infused with 10-herb white truffle butter, seasoned with Salish Alderwood smoked Pacific sea salt, topped with cheddar cheese." A similar Wagyu based atrocity with foie gras and champagne retails for the speechless-rendering price of $5,000 at a restaurant called Fleur.

It’s hard enough comprehending people paying the price of a used car for some semi-durable bauble such as a designer handbag. But a burger?

Final kicker, double barreled: Wagyu beef, and its partner on fancy menus, Kobe beef, sound as if they are raised on some meticulously run farm in a picturesque part of Japan. The meat is from some heritage breed of Japanese cattle bred over centuries for the refined palates of the shoguns and pampered by their anal-retentive attendants, right?

First barrel - You cannot purchase actual Japanese Kobe beef in the U.S. As Larry Olmstead reports in Forbes, it is illegal to import it. Second barrel – Wagyu means beef from cows raised in Japan in general, but you can’t get that over here either. What you are eating when you peel off those Benjamins for a Kobe/Wagyu steak (or burger) is U.S.  raised cattle that have a Japanese cow somewhere back in their family tree. It is simple culinary fraud. Boom, boom.

You’d be better off eating an honest stick of American made beef jerky. You could make it yourself.

Website Changes

Just a quick note on a couple of changes here in the Land of Minor Heresy.

Down at the bottom of the left hand column you’ll notice a list of earthquakes, all above Magnitude 5 on the Richter scale. This is a data feed from the European-Mediterranean Seismological Center. I decided to put that on after researching and writing my piece on the vulnerability of the Fukushima spent fuel pools to a moderately severe earthquake, say Magnitude 7. If you look there one day and see an earthquake in the 7 range or above in Japan you will want to see how close it was to Fukushima and plan your future accordingly.

Yeah, it’s a downer, but people could actually do something about this.

On a cheerier note, the second item down in the left hand column is a button that says “Donate.” After six years of writing this stuff I finally got around to giving you, my beloved readers, a chance to show your appreciation in, ahrm, a pragmatic way. I spend some solid blocks of time thinking about and writing my posts. I try to offer up something more than the mere snark and link-pointing so often found in blogistan. An intellectual value proposition, you might say. I also pay real money to maintain this site on the Squarespace server.

Do not fear that this site will end up like public radio, with a twice yearly pledge drive. It’s hard to imagine, actually. Perhaps the several sentences above repeated endlessly, like Jack Nicholson’s “All work and no play…”, interspersed with a description of the donate button. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

After this mention I will let the Donate button sit there and do its own thing, glaring at you like the eye of a malevolent pagan god, its altar of credit cards reeking with the stench of burnt electronic funds, and yet demanding more.

Thanks for being my readers.

Medical Loss Ratio

The other day I received a letter from my insurance company telling me that I wasn’t going to get a refund. I was reasonably happy about that, actually. The reason has to do with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR).

The MLR is the ratio of how much money a health insurance company pays out to cover medical expenses versus the amount of money it collects in premiums. An MLR of 75 means that for every $100 the company takes in it pays out $75 in coverage.

An MLR of 75 isn’t good enough anymore. In an amazing denial of insurance company wishes the ACA contains a provision requiring a minimum MLR of 80 for small group policies and 85 for large group policies (over 100 people). Companies that don’t meet this standard have to refund money to their policyholders to the point where they are at an MLR of 80 or 85%.

My health insurance provider has been paying out more than 80% of premiums, so no refund was forthcoming. Other people around the country are getting refunds, however. In Florida, one company is going to be refunding $15.7 million to 67,000 people. That company is called Golden Rule (*cough, hack*). Pardon, a little bile caught in my throat.

The Minor Heretic was once a customer of Golden Rule, back when Lake Champlain was salt water. I was on a budget, and they offered a cheap, high deductible plan. It was a good thing that I was healthy, because they provided an empty parachute pack. Look up “Golden Rule Insurance review” online and you will find a string of stories from people who were denied coverage, dropped when they got sick, or had their rates doubled or tripled without warning. Behavior like this did wonderful things for GR’s MLR. I found out while I was throwing my money down their gold plated toilet that their MLR was 52. They pocketed 48% of every premium dollar. More recently, in 2010, their MLR in Florida was 65.

No more. Thanks to that goddamned socialist ObamaCare that is going to enslave us all, health insurance companies can no longer gouge us. At least, not much.

Speaking of socialism, the MLR for Medicare, run by those bloated, inefficient, wasteful bureaucrats, is 97. No private insurance company comes near that, of course. That’s why they bribed, er, lobbied so hard against the public option provision when the ACA was being written. They simply couldn’t imagine competing with a program with only 3% overhead.

It would be a huge fight, but adding a Medicare-like option to the ACA would legitimize the “Affordable” part of the name. It would drop insurance costs by 15% or more, and might very well kill off a major part of the quasi-criminal health insurance industry.

For the moment I’ll appreciate not being screwed so badly by my insurance company. Down the road I look forward to Vermont becoming the first state with public single payer health coverage. Perhaps, eventually, all of America will realize that getting health insurance doesn’t have to mean wasting money.

A Penny Borrowed is a Penny Earned

Record low 10-year bond interest

Back in December I wrote about how the U.S. government was enjoying what amounted to negative interest rates on treasury bonds. That is, the rate of inflation, low as it was, exceeded the interest rate, meaning that we could make money by borrowing money. It was a case of international investors looking at the Euro crisis and other factors and paying a slight premium to safely store their money.

It is still the case. In fact, the interest rates our government pays on 10 year bonds is hovering around a record low of 1.44%. We just sold $21 billion of these bonds at 1.46% a few days ago. Inflation has been in the 2-4% range for the past year, dropping to 1.7% as of May. When we pay off that 1.46% interest with money that buys 1.7% less we are making 0.24% on every dollar we borrow. If inflation holds steady we'll make  $50 million on that bond sale over the next year, or half a billion dollars over the life of the bonds. If inflation goes up, we'll make more. It's Alice-in-Wonderland weird, but it's a good kind of weird.

The policy implication is straightforward. The government should borrow a huge whack of cash and spend it on useful things. I'd suggest repairing our maintenance-starved transportation infrastructure, especially our freight and passenger rail lines. Energy effiicency and renewable energy would be good investments, as would education at all levels. Whatever. Employ some people and get them spending. That would tend to push inflation up by a point or two, so we'd be making some real money on those 1.46% bonds. We'd also be collecting more tax revenue from all those newly employed people to pay off the loans in slightly inflated dollars. The bond market is saying "Borrow my jumper cables to restart your car and I'll give you a buck." As long as the interest rate is below the inflation rate and unemployment is unacceptably high it is idiotic not to borrow.

To the fiscally shocked I say yes, yes, of course we will have to pay it off. Right now we are looking at a federal deficit of $900 billion for fiscal year 2013. How can we deal with that? As I have suggested in the past:

Actually enforce tax laws against multi-millionaires who illegally offshore income: $70 billion a year

Close loopholes on corporate offshoring of income: $90 billion a year

 Cut the military budget so that we spend as much as the next 5 nations combined instead of the next 14 combined: $310 billion a year (I should note that 2 of the 14 are China and Russia and the other 12 are friendly countries such as the UK, France, and Japan.

Include a drug benefit in traditional Medicare and negotiate drug prices with manufacturers: $40 billion a year

Let the Bush-era tax cuts expire: $280 billion a year

There's $790 billion and I haven't even touched oil company subsidies. It is eminently doable, post campaign finance reform. Right now we can borrow at a profit and solve our unemployment problem. Later we can boot the moneybags out of our electoral system and solve our structural debt problem. The numbers speak to those not blinded by ideology.