Sambal

Arnold Kling in a fair but pessimistic post:

Absent an effective constitutional brake, deficit spending is like smoking. In theory, the politicians can quit at any time. In practice, in many cases we end up with cancer.

I would add to that, a history of how the US got into its fiscal mess.  After the Second World War, the US was able to spend money in excess of income tax revenue by ‘borrowing’ from the Social Security ‘trust fund’.  When that did not provide enough funds, we went into frank deficit spending by borrowing on the open market.

What did we spend the money on?  Our politicians bought gifts for favored constituencies — defense contractors, labor unions, progressive causes, doctors, homeowners.

Now we have reached the point that even with borrowing the Social Security/Medicare revenue stream, even with borrowing on the open market, even with the Fed printing money to buy the bonds the Treasury is issuing, we do not have enough money for both major parties to fund all of their priority constituencies.  The consequence is legislative deadlock while the two parties try to negotiate whose stakeholders will get the shaft.

Meanwhile, a reckoning is looming.

Have a nice day.

Still makes me laugh: http://tinyurl.com/bs3tz22

Though I see that it’s been Bowdlerized.  I’m curious – does anybody but me remember the bit they edited out of the video at about 1:16-1:18?

Arnold Kling has returned to blogging as of um.. yesterday, looks like.  I quit reading EconLog after he quit, so I’m very glad to see he’s blogging again.

While on hiatus he was working on an education/app startup, apropos of which he says

Just as computer programming these days relies a great deal today on shared code libraries, with “reinventing the wheel” an awful sin (and I have a hard time giving up sinning),

and I agree, it’s considered an awful sin.  Here’s why I think that belief is shortsighted.

First off, it has to be “the wheel” that you’re reinventing in order for it to be sinful and mockable.  Reinventing yourself is a time-honored metaphor; Reinventing the Toilet is a current topic in developing countries.  “Reinventing Health Care” sounds laudable.  Why harp on about reinventing the wheel?

In programming we generally use “reinventing the wheel” to describe the student or novice practice of writing everything yourself and not taking advantage of previously-written code.  But what about when the code you’re supposed to take advantage of is buggy, slow, and dangerous?  Then you might find yourself writing your own C++ string class (a classic example derided as “reinventing the wheel”).  Happened to me in 2006; I discovered the system’s std::string used a broken, non-thread-safe version of Copy-on-Write that actually was slower than naïve malloc/free.  Rather than try to find a better implementation, I coded up just the subset I needed.  It took a day, solved the problem we were dealing with, and we moved on.  When we got to a system with a non-broken std::string, I retired it (just last month, in fact).

Or what about a learning task?  Maybe the best way to learn how to make wheels is to spend some time inventing wheels, building various versions of them.  Linus Torvalds reinvented the POSIX-compliant OS in order to teach himself 386 assembly.  That turned out pretty well.

Or maybe what you perceive as reinventing the wheel is actually inventing something different.  From the perspective of locomotive design, early automobiles looked like an inferior imitation.. but were ultimately a different product.  So maybe the programmer next to you isn’t reinventing the wheel, but rather making rocket-powered roller skates.

Of course — it’s a trope because the failure mode is common.  I think the worst reinvent-the-wheel story I’ve heard was the E4 team (engineering students) who were trying to build an electronic controller for a laser/cryogen gun using Radio Shack parts: resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc.  They didn’t even know about the stockroom — let alone reach for a programmable IC.  On the other hand, the members of that team who continued in engineering will probably never forget the experience…

Ever reinvented the wheel?  Was it a disaster?  The comment box is right there…

Medicare is simultaneously two things — first, an “insurance program” which we use to fund health care for the elderly; second, a price schedule and system of subsidies for medical education.  We don’t do ourselves any favors in combining the two; it makes substantive reform all the more difficult.

The Claremont Colleges had a TEDx?

The Claremont Colleges had a TEDx and David Allen came?

The Claremont Colleges had a TEDx, David Allen came, and I didn’t find out about it until afterwards?

Dammit.