Month: January 2023

Apparently Britain's National Health Service is having problems these days. What's the solution? More privatization? More accountability?  More doctors from overseas?

I don't want to pretend that the NHS's problems aren't complex. But at least one of them is pretty simple. Consider this chart from a couple of years ago:

This is plain enough. In 1997 Tony Blair and his Labour government took power and increased NHS funding growth to 6% per year (in real terms). In 2009, Labour lost power and Conservatives slashed NHS funding, approving real growth in its budget that averaged about 1.5% per year.

Remember those dates: 1997 and 2009. Now let's look at a chart showing public satisfaction with the NHS:

The bright red line indicates patients who are very or quite satisfied with the NHS. This number started to go up around 1997, peaked around 2010, and has been going down ever since then.

(It's gone down even further since 2018, but that's largely due to COVID-19 and a change in survey methodology. It's unfair to include that, so this chart stops at 2018.)

This shows a pretty simple picture: When Conservatives slashed spending growth from 6% to ~1.5%, service levels dropped and patient satisfaction went down. In absolute terms, that growth rate of 1.5% from 2009-18 compares to a real growth rate of about 3% for Medicare in the US. By any measure, the NHS is pretty starved for funds.

You can usually get away with this for a while, but eventually it all catches up to you. In Britain, "eventually" is now.

Any other questions?

Here are average SAT scores since 1980:

These scores have been adjusted for a couple of renorming and recentering changes since 1980, so they're comparable from year to year. The exception is 2017, when a scoring change was made that can't be adjusted for. Scores from 2017-2022 are presented with no adjustments.

It's an odd thing: SAT scores were generally up all the way through 2005 (a little bit for verbal, a lot for math), when they suddenly started to drop. This drop affected both verbal and math scores and both male and female students by similar amounts.

So what happened in 2005?

By popular request I have searched for a simple comment editing plug-in. I found one called Simple Comment Editing Plug-In, which sounds like just the thing.

Anyway, I installed it, so now you can allegedly edit your comments within ten minutes of posting them. Give it a whirl and let me know if it works.

UPDATE: I guess the limit is actually five minutes. Write fast!

Here is Charlie watching the second round of the Australian Open. He was, of course, rooting for the unseeded young American Jenson Brooksby to beat the jötunn of Norway, Casper Ruud. Which he did. Mainly, though, Charlie just liked watching the little pong thingie that kept going back and forth across the screen.

Sami Scheetz, a state representative in Iowa, tweets today about a bill introduced by state Republicans that restricts the kinds of food that can be purchased with SNAP (food stamps):

It's obvious that this is intended to make low-income workers on SNAP even more miserable than they already are. But there's more. As the list of what's allowed and what's not gets longer and longer, it becomes more and more of a hassle for supermarkets and corner stores to keep track of it. Some will decide it's not worth the bother and just stop accepting SNAP.

So SNAP will be harder to use and will restrict you to a diet not dissimilar from that of your average American prison.

This single tweet encapsulates about 90% of why I'm not a Republican. They're just so goddam meanspirited.

Which state has suffered the worst change in its economy over the past 12 months? Here are the bottom 20 in job openings and layoffs:

Oddly, there are only five states that are on both lists (Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, Indiana, and Utah). You'd think there would be overlap, wouldn't you?

Several months ago Donald Trump lost his bizarre lawsuit against an array of his worst imagined enemies. On Thursday his enemies had their say:

A Florida-based federal judge has ordered nearly $1 million in sanctions against Donald Trump and his attorney Alina Habba, calling the former president a “mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process.”...In the new order, Hillary Clinton got the biggest award of fees for a single defendant: almost $172,000.

Losing the lawsuit is bad enough. Getting fined a million bucks is bad enough. But having a huge chunk of the fine go directly to Hillary Clinton? Priceless.

Clinton should announce that she's contributing the entire sum to ________. My brain is foggy and I need someone else to fill in the blank. What would piss off Trump the most?

POSTSCRIPT: Today Trump dropped his lawsuit against New York Attorney General Letitia James. Coincidence? I doubt it.

This is the dome of the crematorium at the famous Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris—permanent resting place of Jim Morrison and lots of other famous folk. It's a great picture because there's scaffolding covering the entire building right now, which extends up to about an inch below what you can see from this angle. You'd never even know it was there.

Uber-blogger-turned-substacker Matt Yglesias was profiled in the Washington Post last week, so now everyone is talking about Matt Yglesias. What's his secret? Why is he so popular? Whatever you happen to think of the quality, wit, or erudition of Matt's writing, there's no question that one of his talents is sheer quantity. He can churn out a lot of stuff and he can (apparently) do it forever without burning out.

Max Read says this is a key requirement for contemporary bloggers, content creators, and newsletter proprietors, which he calls regularity:

I say “regularity” instead of “consistency” because “consistency” sort of implies quality to me, and reliable quality is of only passing importance compared to reliable production. “Regularity,” on the other hand, reminds me, appropriately, of bowel movements.

Ahem. But I have to admit this is disturbingly accurate. I've never had Matt's ambition, mainly because I'm older than he is and already had lots of money by the time I started blogging, but we do share one thing in common: we like to write all the time.

My first real job was as a technical writer for a tech company. During the interview, my prospective boss—who currently fixes classic cars in Florida—asked me what seemed like an odd question: "Do you enjoy the act of putting your fingers on a keyboard and making words come out?"¹

Well . . . yes. I do. I've spent the past 40 years putting my fingers on keyboards and making vast quantities of words come out. As it happens, I don't think you can feel this way unless there's some minimal quality to your work,² but it hardly has to be Shakespearian level. My writing is basically workmanlike—sort of AP style writ large—but that's enough. It's reasonably clear, personal, and easy to read, which is enough for anyone who happens to enjoy reading about my particular hobby horses (i.e., charts, lead, inflation, amateur research, Republicans, other people being wrong on the internet, etc.).

And that's about it. Accuracy is great. Wittiness is great. Good spelling is great. But in this business it's really all about enjoying the act of writing constantly and quickly. There are surprisingly few people like this, and those who are can do well if they also demonstrate at least a minimum level of quality—which I will not try to define.

I'm a walking, talking example of this. In fact, this very post is an example of this. It would have gone entirely unwritten and unmissed if something else had flitted across my brain this morning, but nothing did and I really felt like putting my fingers on the keyboard and making some words come out. So I did.

¹Or something along those lines. It was 40 years ago, so cut me some slack.

²Psychopathic serial killer types excepted, of course.

Nouriel Roubini is . . . not optimistic these days:

What I have called megathreats others have called a “polycrisis” — which the Financial Times recently named its buzzword of the year. For her part, Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, speaks of a “confluence of calamities”. The world economy, she warned last year, is facing “perhaps its biggest test since the second world war”. Similarly, the former US secretary of the Treasury Lawrence H Summers argues that we are facing the most acute economic and financial challenges since the 2008 financial crisis. And in its latest global risks report — released just before elites gathered in Davos this month to discuss “cooperation in a fragmented world” — the World Economic Forum warns of “a unique, uncertain and turbulent decade to come”.

Hmmm. "Buzzword" is pretty much the opposite of "deeply thought out." After all, the 2022 buzzword of the year among the chattering classes was apparently "ussy," which is now being made a suffix for every possible word in the English language.¹

As for the rest, calm down, people. There are always multiple crises floating around, and the ones we're personally facing always seem far more dangerous than the crises of past generations. But this is an illusion, a combination of recency bias and the fact that we know how all the past crises worked out (i.e., we're still alive so how bad could they have been?).

It's always possible that we're entering a new age of annual pandemics or something, but there's no special reason to think so. At the moment, the only two really, really serious crises are climate change and artificial intelligence. And while I'll grant that climate change is a calamity in the waiting, artificial intelligence isn't—at least, it doesn't have to be. If we assume that chess-playing computers don't accidentally destroy us all, the main effect of AI-powered robots will be to do all our work for us—and fix climate change while they're at it. That sounds pretty nice.

Of course, this assumes that the human race can act decently, instead of like the greedy mofos we've been throughout history. After all, taking advantage of AI means little more than fairly distributing the products of all that free labor.

That should be easy, right? All we have to do is act decently! How difficult can that be, you lizard-brained cretins? Every time I think about this, it makes my blood boi—

Ah, right. What was I saying? Oh yes: we just have to overcome our lizard-brained selves and treat other people decently. So it's really a monocrisis, not a polycrisis. But it's a big 'un.

¹As in, say, "That's a hell of a blogussy you have there, Kevin!" Do you think this makes no sense whatsoever? Welcome to the over-40 club.