What Happened to the Simpsons?

The Simpson's seasons 3-5 are brilliant and really form the basis of my childhood. I think I can probably quote almost every episode. But I've been saying forever that the Simpson's really stopped being funny after season 10

Here's John Ortved, author of The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History, over at Salon:

"After it hit that 10-year mark, the show had a serious drop-off in quality, and it's just never, ever come back. They started relying on guest stars and more topical humor, which they can't really do because the lead time is so long. So I think this actually speaks to how outdated their writing room is. They'll do an "American Idol" episode, but they'll do it four years after "American Idol" became this big thing. Or they'll do an iPod episode, but they do an iPod episode in like 2006."

Couldn't have said it better....

New Clash of the Titans Trailer!

The new Clash of the Titans trailer looks like the coolest Ronnie James Dio music video never made

Intraparty Squabbles

Unhappy with compromises made to appease conservative Senators, like stripping away the public option and the Medicare buy-in, progressives have now come out against the senate bill and against the President

Former DNC Chair Howard Dean has rallied the troops with the refrain “Kill the bill.”

Glenn Greenwald grumbles the administration hasn’t done enough:

“The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives.  The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start -- the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry.”

Even unions are considering pulling their support, and Bernie Sanders says he will vote against the bill.

To what end is this opposition useful? Progressive advocacy for the public option kept it alive a lot longer than it would have without it, but I can’t see an upside to riling the progressive base in opposition to this bill. If this is a hardball negotiating tactic, what are they negotiating for? What else is still on the table?

My chief concern is that this opposition will further turn people off at a time when they should be excited. Most people aren’t policy wonks. They aren’t interested in the nuance of Congressional negotiation. They’re concerned about their families, about the economy, and about their own welfare. We shouldn’t call a success a failure. This bill will help them. The Democrats need to get on message about how this bill will benefit the American people, their families, and their children.

Democrats should be singing their praises for being just outside of accomplishing what has no one has been able to do in 50 years, not fighting with each other because the bill didn't turn out perfect.

Did you get enough sleep last night?

Rarely do I get enough sleep. But thanks to modern technology, we now know what causes the side-effects of lack of sleep, AND how to fix it. For those of you that don't know, cAMP is "cyclic adenosine monophosphate". It's what's called a second messenger, which basically is responsible for intracellular communication. So, if you don't have enough of it, or if it's being blocked by this newly discovered enzyme, your brain is literally not functioning correctly.

Coffee is going to be a thing of the past (except of course for the weirdos who drink it because they like how it tastes...ahem). From now on, we will simply have to take a pill every morning that will decrease the amount of this new enzyme in our system, and we can start our day as if we had gotten our prescribed 7-9 hours of sleep.

Cool.

I wonder what this will do to the economies of the coffee producing countries of the world?

Minimum Wage Ctd.

Bryan Caplan responds to Krugman on minimum wage:

Paul does address the real balance effect, but he still ignores the main arguments I've made before:

1. Cutting wages increases the quantity of labor demanded.  If labor demand is elastic, total labor income rises as a result of wage cuts.

2. Even if labor demand is inelastic, moreover, wage cuts reduce labor income by raising employers' income.  So unless employers are unusually likely to put cash under their matresses, wage cuts still boost aggregate demand.

An even simpler way to explain it: Imagine every firm divided its existing payroll between a larger number of workers.  How is that bad for aggregate demand - or anything but good for employment?

Tyler Cowen adds:

I would add two points.  On Bryan's #1, workers at the current minimum wage are unlikely to receive nominal wage cuts if the minimum wage were lowered, for the usual morale and efficiency wage and lock-in reasons.  So the chance that total labor income rises is very high.  Second, no I don't believe in an upward-sloping AD curve, but in any case multipliers from production increases plus wage bill increases are likely to be more potent than multipliers from aggregate demand increases alone.

Dangerous Wands

Sometimes the best defense against the dark arts, is to care....

Worst Christmas Song: Part 1

As Christmas draws near, we appreciate the very worst in Christmas music:

Nickleback mashup... with Nickleback

Even the drum fills are nearly identical...just wow

Still a Better Deal Than Nothing Ctd.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones sums up why there's no going back:

If healthcare reform dies this year, it dies for a good long time.  Say what you will about the Democratic leadership, but Harry Reid, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Steny Hoyer all know this perfectly well.  So do John Boehner and Mitch McConnell.  (Boy do they know it.)  But if it passes, here's what we get:

• Insurers have to take all comers.  They can't turn you down for a preexisting condition or cut you off after you get sick.
• Community rating.  Within a few broad classes, everyone gets charged the same amount for insurance.
• Individual mandate.  I know a lot of liberals hate this, but how is it different from a tax?  And its purpose is sound: it keeps the insurance pool broad and insurance rates down.
• A significant expansion of Medicaid.
• Subsidies for low and middle income workers that keeps premium costs under 10% of income.
• Limits on ER charges to low-income uninsured emergency patients.
• Caps on out-of-pocket expenses.
• A broad range of cost-containment measures.
• A dedicated revenue stream to support all this.

What's more, for the first time we get a national commitment to providing healthcare coverage for everyone.  It won't be universal to start, unfortunately, but it's going to be a lot easier to get there once the marker is laid down.  That's how every other country has done it, and that's how we did it with Social Security and Medicare, both of which had big gaps in coverage when they were first passed.

Krugman and the Minimum Wage

Krugman slams the idea of lowering the minimum wage to boost employment:

Here’s how the fallacy works: if some subset of the work force accepts lower wages, it can gain jobs. If workers in the widget industry take a pay cut, this will lead to lower prices of widgets relative to other things, so people will buy more widgets, hence more employment.

But if everyone takes a pay cut, that logic no longer applies. The only way a general cut in wages can increase employment is if it leads people to buy more across the board. And why should it do that?

Well, the textbook argument — illustrated in this little writeup — runs like this: lower wages lead to a lower overall price level. This increases the real money supply, and therefore liquidity. As people try to make use of their excess liquidity, interest rates go down, leading to an overall rise in demand.

Even in this case, it’s hard to see the point of cutting wages: you could achieve the same effect, much more easily, simply by having the Fed increase the money supply.

But what if we’re in a liquidity trap, with short-run interest rates at zero? Then the Fed can’t achieve anything by increasing the money supply; but by the same token, wage cuts do nothing to increase demand.

The problems at a zero interest rate are complicated and Krugman may be right on this point (he won the Nobel prize after all), but I'm confused. As I understand it, a minimum wage law is only redistributing money, not creating new money. This redistribution increases the cost of a unit of labor. The higher the cost of a unit of labor, the fewer units will be demanded. This argument has nothing to do with the demand for the widgets they produce, like Krugman was talking about.

In theory, at least during normal economic conditions, lower wages create demand for my units of labor. It essentially, frees up money within a firm to be distributed to additional workers. That's the theory anyhow. Obviously, there is no guarantee, if a firm had low demand for new labor they could always just save the money and keep their staffing the same.

One more question on Krugman: in his notes he writes:

But in liquidity trap conditions, the interest rate isn’t affected at the margin by either the supply
or the demand for money – it’s hard up against the zero bound. And as a result the usual
explanation for the downward slope of the AD curve doesn’t work. You can appeal to the Pigou effect, I guess – but against that you have to put Fisherian debt deflation. In a liquidity trap, the AD curve is at least as likely to be upward-sloping as it is to be downward-sloping.

Again, I'm not an economist, but how can an AD curve ever be upward sloping? Vertical, I get, but upward sloping?

Still a Better Deal than Nothing

Even if the Senate Bill has been watered down, Ezra Klein makes the point that it's still better than nothing:

To put this a bit more sharply, if I could construct a system in which insurers spent 90 percent of every premium dollar on medical care, never discriminated against another sick applicant, began exerting real pressure for providers to bring down costs, vastly simplified their billing systems, made it easier to compare plans and access consumer ratings, and generally worked more like companies in a competitive market rather than companies in a non-functional market, I would take that deal. And if you told me that the price of that deal was that insurers would move from being the 86th most profitable industry to being the 53rd most profitable industry, I would still take that deal.

I have too many friends on the left who think that without the public option this bill will simply subsidize insurance companies. But that's too simplistic and ignores the real accomplishments of the bill. Like the subsidies that give lower-income families access to health care, the regulations that stop the denial of coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, the reforms that will bring  down costs across the board.

I understand it's because they're mad. I get that. But don't cut off your nose to spite your face. Especially when you're about to win. That's like walking away at the 1 yard line. It's vanity. It's not in the best interest of the uninsured or the country.

The system isn't designed for broad, sweeping changes. It favors the incremental revolutionary. That's what this is: big change achieved step-by-step. Don't give up the quest just because it turned out to be a longer walk than you'd anticipated.

This Deal is Getting Worse All the Time...

Many liberals are worried that health care negotiations have begun to look like this:



It's a reasonable concern. As I said, progressives have very little leverage in this negotiation. It's not just Lieberman who could demand more concessions. It's really any conservative Democrat or moderate Republican willing to negotiate in return for a cloture vote. It sounds like they can have the votes by next week but we're definitely not out of the woods yet...

Via Reason with a hat tip to The Daily Dish

Hannity's Disgusting Manipulation of 9/11 Families

Via The Daily Dish

 

Hannity is as vile a propagandist as you're likely to come by. Here he manipulates his audience with a small room full of family members of 9/11 victims.

The Internet Knows Everything

And here be proof.

I know that people have delivered babies without instructions before, but it's certainly an accomplishment to do so successfully in a culture that emphasizes specialization to the degree that ours or Britain's does. Most people haven't got the first clue, and I'd be right there trying to Google the "how to" also.

Smelly Presents

I wanted to post this because I did most of my Christmas shopping yesterday, and it made me wonder if any of my gifts have a particular smell. Unfortunately, I have already wrapped all of them, so I cannot test this theory. Also, I didn't buy thread, car tires, or pencils, so I don't know if my shopping habits apply to this study.