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From an interview with Nobel Prize winning Economist Thomas Schelling (Why you interview an economist about climate change is beyond me):

Well I do think that one of the difficulties is that most of the beneficiaries aren’t yet born. More than that: Most of the beneficiaries will be born in what we now call the developing world. By 2080 or 2100 five-sixths of the population, at least, will be in places like China, India, Indonesia, Africa and so forth. And what I don’t know is whether Americans are really willing to understand that and do anything for the benefit of the unborn Chinese.
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If I were to come clean to the American public I would say that, except for a very low probability of a very bad result — which is the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which would put Washington DC under water — we are probably going to outgrow any vulnerability we have to climate change. And in case we’ll be able to afford to buy food or import it is necessary. You know, very little of the US economy is susceptible to climate. All of agriculture is less than 3% of our gross product. Forestry may be endangered. Fisheries may be endangered. But recreation might actually benefit!

So if we can double our GDP in the next 70 or 80 years, even if we lose some of our GDP from climate change — even if we lose 10% of our GDP from climate change — we’re still ahead so much that the effect of climate change wouldn’t be noticed.

While I think our current health care system needs to change, I don’t agree with what the Democrats are working to get through congress now. I also don’t buy the “any change is a good” start theory that I hear thrown about these days.

I’ve recently read two articles that pretty much reflect what I would like to see. The first one is from the CEO of Whole Foods. (who is getting a lot of hate mail for not toeing the nutty liberal line on health care- OMG!, He’s a capitalist).

While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment

He goes on to list 8 specific things that he thinks should be done. (something I’d like to see more opponents of Obamacare do – enough with the “death panels” and the government is going to kill your grandma scare tactics).

The other article is a long article in the Atlantic by David Goldhill.

The most important single step we can take toward truly reforming our system is to move away from comprehensive health insurance as the single model for financing care. And a guiding principle of any reform should be to put the consumer, not the insurer or the government, at the center of the system. I believe if the government took on the goal of better supporting consumers—by bringing greater transparency and competition to the health-care industry, and by directly subsidizing those who can’t afford care—we’d find that consumers could buy much more of their care directly than we might initially think, and that over time we’d see better care and better service, at lower cost, as a result.

I feel a bit better about the opposition to Obamacare after reading these two articles. Hopefully some of these good ideas will make it into the debate. I’m too pessimestic to think that they actually will however.

Wow, this article by Bruce Bartlett comes as close as anything to the way I feel about the current state of the Republicans and how much of a disaster Bush was as president.

I think conservative anger is misplaced. To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush. This is not to say Obama hasn’t made mistakes himself, but even they can be blamed on Bush insofar as Bush’s incompetence led to the election of a Democrat. If he had done half as good a job as most Republicans have talked themselves into believing he did, McCain would have won easily.

One of the big problems I have with the Republicans and Bush is that they did such a poor job while in power that they created an environment where a person as liberal as Obama could get elected president. If they had actually been fiscally conservative they might have been able to keep many independent voters like me. When it came time to vote my choice was between socially conservative big government and socially liberal big government. Since I don’t hate the gays, don’t believe in God and don’t wave the ‘merican flag every chance I get, I decided to vote for what I saw as the lesser of two evils.

If they had actually done a good job, I probably would have voted for McCain. (even though I think Palin is a complete moron). Through their incompetence and poor performance, the Republicans are the reason Obama is president.

Another point made in the article that seems to fly right over most conservatives heads these days:

In my opinion, conservative activists, who seem to believe that the louder they shout the more correct their beliefs must be, are less angry about Obama’s policies than they are about having lost the White House in 2008. They are primarily Republican Party hacks trying to overturn the election results, not representatives of a true grassroots revolt against liberal policies. If that were the case they would have been out demonstrating against the Medicare drug benefit, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, and all the pork-barrel spending that Bush refused to veto.

Why weren’t all these tea-baggers out in the streets protesting when Bush & Co were spending all this money? The answer is, that they don’t really care. It’s really all about their team. They’ve picked the Republicans. For them it’s just like pulling for the Redskins or the Yankees. It’s just their team. The issues are there only to be cherry-picked when they support their side.

Since Bartlett has criticized the Republicans, he must now be a stinkin’ liberal. They don’t tolerate dissent well these days. If the Republicans maintain their current course, the best they’ll get from independent voters is that we’ll stay at home. I doubt that will be good enough however.

First month has gone well. Started at about 290 and I weigh around 278 now. I’d like to get below 200 but I’ll settle for 220 or so.

Been in a fairly useless meeting for an hour now. Someone please kill me.

This is a sure way to get Obama re-elected in 2012. Nominate this guy. He can pull in a good 30% of the vote.

Rode about 12 miles today in 97 degree weather. Luckily the part of the W&OD trail that I decided to ride on today is 90% in the shade.

I tried a new GPS App for the iPhone today since I’ve had problems with MotionX GPS crashing in the past. This one is called B.iCycle. It fucking crashed and lost data for half the ride. I don’t get it. For years I’ve written various applications that log measurement data. (gps, signal strength, voltage etc). I never keep most of the my data in RAM. Doesn’t the iPhone have an append-to-file function? Seriously, this is retarded. Even if the App crashes it should have the data kept up until the last saved measurement. Both MotionX GPS and B.iCycle only save the data when prompted by the user. Maybe I should just write my own App. It wouldn’t be as pretty but I bet you it wouldn’t lose the last 30 minutes of data if the program crashed.

EDIT: It looks like after graphing the data that B.icycle did save all the data. You couldn’t tell from the App on the phone. It only showed summary data for half the ride. Still unacceptable.

Here’s half of the data that B.iCycle saved, it also screwed up the altitude by about 1000ft.:

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