Gucci Little Piggy

Kicking. Squealing.

Links

1.  Alex Tabarrok takes down the slave mentality espoused by the bloggers at Crooked Timber (Corey Robin being one of them) who complain that employers place too many rules on their employees.  As Tabarrok points out, people rarely discuss how important free association is – both employers and *employees* can sever their workplace relationship for any reason they wish.  Slavery and indentured servitude once prevented people from quitting jobs that they might like to quit.  The flipside is an indentured servitude of a different feather.  The Crooked Timber post exposes progressivism for what it’s become – comfort and mediocrity is the highest ideal.

2.  A 2008 article from the New York Times about the shortage of primary care physicians in Massachusetts after the enactment of the health insurance mandate.  I won’t hold my breath for a similar nationwide trend piece on the same topic.

3.  Predictable:  men are increasingly purchasing female beauty products.

4.  Razib Khan links to this post by Education Realist which lives up to the author’s handle.  It reminds me of the time I spent on the high school basketball team tutoring the stupid kids on the team.  I distinctly remember going through a simple slope exercise and getting hung up as the “pupil” had to use his calculator to figure 6 minus 2.

About these ads

11 Responses to Links

  1. nick digger 07/03/2012 at 5:58 pm

    Funny, slopes are usually pretty good with math. And not usually on the basketball team.

  2. ATC 07/03/2012 at 5:59 pm

    “The Crooked Timber post exposes progressivism for what it’s become – comfort and mediocrity is the highest ideal.”

    You tell ‘em! CT is justa buncha softies. So they say workers should have a right to a pee break…aww, those spoiled brats! And claiming the urinal cams are an invasion of privacy? How mediocre!

  3. Dain 07/03/2012 at 7:06 pm

    Echoing ATC’s sarcasm somewhat, I wouldn’t want anything to do with a conservatism that fetishized non-comfort. I suppose enduring pain, discomfort – and for the purposes of this discussion, an a-hole boss – will put hair on your chest or something, but it also really sucks.

    A market with at-will employment should improve one’s options for greener pastures, not help them avoid a pleasurable workplace.

  4. Reym 07/03/2012 at 9:21 pm

    Failing at 6 minus 2 is pretty bad. Subtraction is harder than addition, but come on.

    I remember one time when I was playing a game with a group of friends, and there was a new guy invited. Basic rules, you go round robin and roll a pair of dice and add them up. This new guy’s turn comes up and he rolls two dice and says the result is 15. Oddly enough, this new guy was loaded with more money than brains.

  5. C.R. 07/03/2012 at 10:41 pm

    ATC, Dain:

    As Tabarrok pointed out, how often do people get fired for taking an extra pee break? Just thinking back through all of the people I’ve known I can’t remember anyone being fired for anything so frivilous.

  6. Nikos 07/04/2012 at 1:52 am

    comfort and mediocrity is the highest ideal.

    In other words, women values as the ideal.

  7. johndraper 07/04/2012 at 2:27 am

    Regardless of what you say about healthcare, the fact is that the US is hopelessly partisan, making it ungovernable from either side. Anyways, America already has socialized healthcare. It’s called an emergency room. For this and other reasons, the US healthcare system achieves worse outcomes for more money than just about anything you could devise.

    Most Americans seem to be beyond helping themselves: either admit that the state needs to make their decisions for them and enact fat taxes, or make healthcare even harder to obtain and let them die off. This middle path you’re taking is killing you.

  8. totalesturns 07/04/2012 at 7:02 am

    As Tabarrok pointed out, how often do people get fired for taking an extra pee break? Just thinking back through all of the people I’ve known I can’t remember anyone being fired for anything so frivilous.

    The beauty of being an academic leftist is that you never have to spend any time among the working class that you claim to speak for.

    Why would you need to, when there’s an entire Internet’s worth of news stories to cherry-pick striking anecdotes from? (Yeah, that woman who donated a kidney to her boss (!) probably got a raw deal when she got fired. But hard cases make bad law.)

  9. Kaz 07/04/2012 at 10:02 pm

    God dammit I don’t want men to engage in the same arms race that women have to when it comes to beauty products. No one ABSOLUTELY no one wins here, except the cosmetics industry of course..

    Also the primary care doctor issue is one separate from insurance issues, and policies.

    Standard primary care doctors in most cases operate on a low level that really makes the decade+ worth of knowledge they acquired during their schooling useless. We don’t need primary care doctors with that kind of education for basic check ups/physicals. The system to should be that there could be someone like nurses being able to nearly completely run primary care themselves, maybe with one doctor overseeing them in case of something that requires more expertise.

    Costs should go down, and there will be less wait time.

  10. Anthony 07/06/2012 at 1:11 pm

    There are two sorts of jobs where conditions are “harsh” – those where physical conditions are difficult, and those where the employees can’t be trusted.

    For the first – the guy at the top of a tower crane doesn’t get pee breaks unless he brings a bucket with him. He also makes a *lot* of money. Bus drivers don’t often get them unless their route stops by the terminal, but the driver can’t leave the bus unless all the passengers are off or there’s someone else to watch the bus. I’m not too sympathetic for the bus drivers – they have a union (around here, anyway), but their negotiators have gone for more money instead of basic comforts like bathroom access on the route.

    For the second – where employees are likely to slack off or steal, the rules get harder. If the employees are generally young and dumb, they’ll tend to respond by trying harder to get away with slacking off or stealing, and it becomes the sort of vicious circle that leads to getting fired for one too many pee breaks (which usually means “you’re doing drugs in the bathroom but we can’t prove that, so we’re firing you for too many pee breaks”).

    You see this in larger corporate white-collar/pink-collar settings, too, like at AT&T call centers, where people get fired for missing a word in their script three times in a day, then the union files a grievance, and the person comes back to work two days later. The union-management hostility is terrible, but neither side can back down, so stupidities like that keep going on.

  11. jz 07/09/2012 at 12:28 pm

    Re: #2) the impact of RomneyCare in MA. one year after it started, ER visits in MA went up 9%.
    What happens when the uninsured receive Medicaid? Medicaid reimburses poorly; no doctor wants those patients in their payer mix; so the new Medicaid beneficiaries,now relieved of the costs, go to the emergency departments. They are still shunned away from primary care, but they can receive episodic care from ERs without cost. The care is free, unlimited, and they never see a bill.

    Planet Money reviewed some research showing that new Medicaid beneficiaries experience a huge improved well being based upon the financial security alone; that’s before they ever receive any care.

    I’ve finally realized the difference between RomneyCare and ObamaCare: it the taxes and regulation.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: