Sunday, March 28, 2010
Britain's National Health Service – the Obamacare Model...
Reason takes a look at what kinds of people the NHS hires to handle the medical care of its citizens. If you've paid any attention to what's happened to America's public schools over the past thirty years or so, you won't be surprised to hear that the number one category of new jobs opened at NHS is ... bureaucrats. Not doctors, not nurses, not lab technicians, but bureaucrats.
Exactly what's happened in our schools.
Are you pissed off yet?
Exactly what's happened in our schools.
Are you pissed off yet?
Now This Takes Talent!
Imagine having the job of running a gambling monopoly. Simple math tells you what the “house” is going to take in, and you have no competition. How could you possibly fail to make a profit?
New York's Off-Track Betting (OTB) system managed to do just that.
This is the caliber of bureaucrat we can look forward to in our medical care system under Obamacare. There's a good chance some of the laid-off OTB bureaucrats will end up in the medical care system, making decisions about things like whether you can have the MRI that might save your life...
Are you pissed off yet?
New York's Off-Track Betting (OTB) system managed to do just that.
This is the caliber of bureaucrat we can look forward to in our medical care system under Obamacare. There's a good chance some of the laid-off OTB bureaucrats will end up in the medical care system, making decisions about things like whether you can have the MRI that might save your life...
Are you pissed off yet?
I, Pencil...
Leonard Reed's famous 1958 essay I, Pencil is online, so far as I'm aware for the first time. It's a wonderful eye-opener about the complexity of modern manufacturing – and of course today manufacturing is a couple orders of magnitude more complex than when Reed wrote his essay. It's just a few pages long; if you've never read it then you should read it now...
Jiggering the Numbers...
Here's a detailed look at exactly how the government jiggers the numbers (in this case, the retail sales numbers). Basically they cleverly excluded a major source of bad news. For retail store sales, they exclude any data from stores that were open last year, but aren't open this year. But new store openings (zero sales last year, but sales this year) are positive news, so those numbers stay in.
Over the years, I've dug into government supplied data perhaps 10 times. Each and every time the same thing happened: I discovered that the government made themselves look better by excluding the bad news. The “pros” all know this, and it's openly discussed all the time – they just switch to some other source of data.
For example, one of the most notorious examples is the unemployment percentage (currently being reported as around 10%). This government-supplied number leaves out all the so-called “discouraged” workers – those who have given up looking for work. They're not unemployed? What kind of logic is that? When you include the “discouraged” workers, the national unemployment rate right now is around 18%...
Over the years, I've dug into government supplied data perhaps 10 times. Each and every time the same thing happened: I discovered that the government made themselves look better by excluding the bad news. The “pros” all know this, and it's openly discussed all the time – they just switch to some other source of data.
For example, one of the most notorious examples is the unemployment percentage (currently being reported as around 10%). This government-supplied number leaves out all the so-called “discouraged” workers – those who have given up looking for work. They're not unemployed? What kind of logic is that? When you include the “discouraged” workers, the national unemployment rate right now is around 18%...
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