fun with the DMV

Some not-really-related stuff had me thinking about the DMV. I've had pretty substantial dealings with the DMV in three states now, and while it's not my favourite way to spend a morning, it's always been much better than the general reputation would lead you to believe. The employees have always been pretty helpful and reasonable - certainly far above the average in the wide world of customer service. The processes are about as efficient as could be hoped for. The only real trouble is the wait time, which is just a consequence of having too few employees, due to the mania for small government and all. Same thing with the post office, which incidentally is not publicly funded and is so good at what it does that even private companies already in the package delivery business don't bother trying to compete with it directly.

I'd far rather deal with either than make a complex support call to most tech companies any day.

I've always assumed that the intense conservative animus towards these things was just a cheap talking point, but I'm wondering now if it isn't about power relationships. We're all equal at the DMV or the post office, and (sadly) there isn't much recourse if it isn't going the way you want. Money and power don't make much difference, and with the folks behind the counter having things like unions and a middle-class salary, you can't feel nearly as much superiority to and dominance over them as you can at Target. I think that sort of freaks conservatives out.

Making Jeremiah Wright look understated

Conservatives really go to amazing lengths looking for 'reverse racism'. Quite a lot of them - including friends of mine, and I think they're totally sincere - go looking for tea leaves to read every time a nonwhite person is arrested, hunting for ways they're being treated too well. This is especially true if terrorism is also involved, so this week's excitement was that reporters didn't immediately publish hearsay versions of the name of the suspect in the attempted plane-bombing.

"(X) finds it very telling that "reporters" initially discouraged sources from giving the name of the suspect. I guess that type of information is only considered a "scoop" when it's an amish farmer or american male gun enthusiast. nothing to see here, move along..."

I know my brain doesn't work quite the same way as theirs, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the notion is here. Phase 1: delay releasing a suspect's name for a couple of hours in a highly sensitive situation. Phase 3: profit!

ok maybe two months is too long

This blogging thing is harder to get round to than I previously imagined.

I just finished "The Family", which was the sort of pretty good book that makes you wish for a better one. It offered another perspective on something I've been thinking for a long time: corruption, among modern conservatives, has been considerably displaced by a sort of perfect confluence of interests. If you really, truly, religiously believe that what's good for Walmart is good for America, the money they give you isn't quite a bribe. Sharlet writes of an early Christian-right politician,

"Langlie didn't so much end corruption as legalize it. Langlie wasn't opposed to a government organized around the interests of the greedy; he just didn't want to have to break the law to serve them..."

The philosophical (if you can call it that) merger of business interests, Christianity, and liking war a lot is the defining characteristic of modern conservatism, and it's a very strange mix indeed...

Math is hard. Let's go right-wing!

Michelle Malkin is very excited about a flaw she thinks she's found in the standard study of the effects of being uninsured on mortality.

Malkin notes that studies frequently find that a moderate fraction of those self-reporting as uninsured - 10%, say - turn out to be insured after all. She thinks this means... actually I've read through her post four times now, and I'm not sure what she thinks it means. She's just thrilled to have found a flaw.

Suppose, if you will, that being uninsured does indeed have some negative impact on health. We can probably trust that this is true; if not, the insurance companies are even more nefarious than we think.

Then if some people in the group labelled "uninsured" are in fact insured, this will decrease the effect of not having insurance found by the study. It means being uninsured is worse for you than the study finds, and people are dying from lack of insurance at a higher rate than is routinely reported. As the author of the study put it - Malkin quotes him in the post, but doesn't appear to have parsed it - "If present, such misclassification might dilute the true effect of uninsurance in our sample."

(To head off a possible objection, the figure for the number of uninsured Americans, and thus the extrapolation to the number of needless deaths we get annually, is not dependent on self-reporting.)

Similarly, if not having health insurance was just a temporary condition for the people in the study at the time they were surveyed - if they've all gotten health insurance since - that means that the difference in death rates is due not to people going all this time without insurance, but people missing out on insurance only briefly! We thought it was this bad for you to go your life uninsured - but actually it's that bad for you to go just a year or two without insurance.

Sorting out statistics like this can be difficult, so let's make an analogy with cookies. Let's say you make two batches of cookies. You follow the exact same recipe, only with one batch you use yummy chocolate chips... or maybe those big chocolate chunks, let's say semi-sweet, from Ghirardelli... sorry, I got distracted there.

Anyway, with the second batch, you replace the chocolate chips with lab rat poop. Then you feed people your cookies and see their reactions. Turns out people think the chocolate chip cookies are five times as good as the rat poop cookies.

Then, like in those old Folger's commercials, it turns out that your rat poop supplies were actually only half rat poop and were half chocolate chips. Does that mean rat poop is better than you thought? No. It means that rat poop is more disgusting than you thought - twice as disgusting, in fact.

For the rest, Malkin seems to have the routine right-wing problem of not understanding that people can be convinced by study that they should believe in something like health-care reform, rather than the normal conservative mode of people who already believe something doing bogus studies to try and prove their point. I guess that's kind of how it goes.

Moral of the story: if you are in no way a scientist, and you are also an idiot, you probably shouldn't try to debunk peer-reviewed papers.

Careful what enters your brain

Hey, this blogging every day thing is hard.

Yglesias notes that cable news messes with his head, yet it's on around the clock in the average Congressional office.

I think this sort of thing is a big deal. I tell it to friends who claim to watch things skeptically all the time. You have to be careful what you let into your head; even if you think you're just watching it to 'see what other people are saying' or something, unless you are very mindful it will affect you. And you actually really don't need to know what Glenn Beck is saying. Just turn it off.

Laws Have Consequences

Lots of people have noted that, in the name of compromise and small government, the Blue Dogs are setting us up for a situation where millions of Americans are required by law to pay premiums to insurance companies they despise for coverage of little value. This is probably not a recipe for victory for the Democrats.

There's a broader point here that I think is getting lost, though. Throughout the media and centrist politics, there's very little recognition that most of the political impact of an action comes after it has been taken and people see what the consequences are. Sure, there could be a temporary hit in the polls if the American people think we've passed a health care bill that's too liberal (not that that's going to happen.) But within a couple of years, public opinion is going to be largely about what the bill actually did, not the debates of 2009. Accusations that we're giving health care to 'illegals' make noise now, but in the end that either happens or it doesn't. People like what's happened to their insurance, or they don't. If you think your grandmother is going to be sentenced to death by panel, you are reasonably likely to notice in the future whether or not this occurs. If sending more troops to Afghanistan solves the problems there, it's probably a good political move regardless of how it polls this week, and vice versa; you may recall invading Iraq was a pretty popular idea back when we did it.

That's not to say the politics doesn't color future perceptions of the bill, or that it won't have big implications for the 2010 election. But a lot of people seem to have this notion that politics and policy are perfectly separate. Policies this big can affect the electorate for generations, particularly if politicians are, as a friend put it, brave enough to take credit for doing popular things. The current state of political loyalties among African-Americans and Southern whites is not based on who said exactly what during the debate of the Civil Rights Act.

This kind of indifference to the political consequences of real-world outcomes has a lot of troubling implications beyond writing a lousy health care bill. It feeds the centrists' addiction to compromise, of course. It also raises the question of exactly what they went to Washington for anyway.