Evaluating a Situation

I'm sure everyone has heard the saying "If you see something, say something," from various public safety campaigns. After all, why wouldn't you want to call the police if you see something suspicious; the worst that can happen if you're wrong is a minor inconvenience or a little bit of embarrassment and then everyone goes home, right?

Turns out reality is a bit more complicated than that. There's a lot more that can be lined up on the list of potential negative outcomes, unfortunately.

This shouldn't come as any surprise, either. Editorials like this one from the New York Times are quite common, as are the news stories they cite, as are the testimonials, arrest records, and surveys they're based on. And yet people still insist that this is how the system is supposed to work, or that the trouble caused by overly suspicious citizens and police is worth it.

I don't agree with either. Even if the police reacted appropriately to being called out to investigate every situation, it would still waste resources to call them out for every little thing. There has to be a balance between being so suspicious that we're wasting time and resources and being so apathetic that we're missing legitimate threats. And we're definitely not at the right balance between suspicion and apathy when someone calling the police because a fellow student fell asleep in the common room is regarded by many as a routine, unavoidable event.

Ratification and Nominations

One of the common points I've seen in the wake of President Trump's decision to pull out of the Iran deal is to argue that if President Obama had handled it the right way, then President Trump wouldn't have been able to get us out of it as easily as he did.

Which, frankly, is true enough. The JCPOA was never ratified by the Senate, so it's not a formal treaty, and what one president does by executive order can be cleared out just as easily.

However, I put somewhat less stock by the argument that this obviously means President Obama should have governed more to the center on this and many other things. To be blunt, most of the people I see using that argument are the same ones that argue that President Trump was fairly elected and that the Democrats in Congress need to stop taking advantage of their numbers to throw up roadblocks. If that were true, it would have applied equally well to the Republicans in Congress under President Obama, yet very few conservatives seem interested in acknowledging that.

In reality, there's a balance between the two. A president whose popular support has grown thin enough that they have to deal with a slight majority or minority for their party in Congress should be changing what they support and who they nominate in order to acknowledge that shift in public opinion. Blaming Congress alone for throwing up roadblocks (as with some of President Obama's efforts or with some of President Trump's nominations) isn't quite fair, since the system was set up to give them that power and to force the president to deal with that limit.

At the same time, Congress can't ignore the power the president holds. The best they can do is to make nothing useful happen if the president is pushing for a law or a nomination that most of them don't approve of. Sometimes that's warranted, but much of the time it doesn't actually serve the people's best interest to do that.

Unfortunately, fairly and consistently figuring out where the balance between those powers lies is rather difficult as long as we're all inclined to give our own side more of the benefit of the doubt.

Revival (again)

After yet another long hiatus, my interest in blogging is cropping up again.

Nothing to do but see how long I stick with it this time, I guess.

Protest and Rebuttal

Depending on exactly which estimates you use, the various women's marches around the country last Saturday are the largest protest event in our nation's history. It comes as little surprise that those who disagree with the values espoused at those events have already started to spread counterarguments.

The most common seems to be that women in America are already equal and have nothing to be afraid of. To a certain extent this seems quite convincing, given the status of women's rights in the US compared to what one tends to find in the Middle East, Africa, or parts of Southeast Asia.

What this gets wrong, though, is that the existence of greater problems elsewhere doesn't render all other problems irrelevant until those are dealt with. That argument, when challenged that way, tends to shift, and add an extra clause: that because our problems are so much smaller, they do not merit this much effort spent on them.

Needless to say I don't agree. Some of those reasons have probably been heard before, such as:

The stats regarding sexual assault in the US - such as the estimates regarding unreported incidents - are still not encouraging, despite all of the progress we've theoretically made.

Neither are the numbers regarding the pay gap or women in leadership positions.

Others are a little more unusual:

Women who fight back against domestic abuse are routinely treated harshly by our justice system.

Female genital mutilation wasn't actually banned here until 1996 - hell, health insurance covered it as a medical procedure until the 1970s! Oh, and it hasn't gone away yet, either, even here.

And some are just frightening:

There are religious right leaders in the US talking about first-degree murder sentences for women who use an IUD or Plan B contraception.

There are also women in the US that have been arrested following a miscarriage.

Other nations might have worse problems, yes, and they need assistance. If anyone tries to tell me that we do not have serious problems of our own, though, then I'm going to tell them that they aren't paying attention.

Repealing Obamacare

As expected, the new Republican-controlled Congress has voted to repeal Obamacare - or, at least, as much as they can reach through the budget provisions. They've promised to introduce more bills quickly to replace some of what they can repeal and alter other provisions they can't affect with the reconciliation bill, although exactly what that would look like is still a little unclear.

Needless to say I'm not particularly happy about this.

The best case scenario I can see (at least for one side) involves the Republicans somehow managing to get their block grants, interstate insurance markets, high-risk pools, and insurance-related tax deductions through a Democratic filibuster quickly. (Given the number of people who have painted unhappy visions of a partial repeal, I don't think I need to cover those negatives, and I don't really want to spend too much time on that anyway.)

Even if I grant the assumption that they'll get it through quickly, and if my assumptions about what policies they'll pursue are correct, it still doesn't look good to me. Once insurers actually manage to establish the networks they need in other states (which will not be simple, easy, or quick), then they're just going to find the state with the least comprehensive requirements and operate there. That's fine if you don't need very much coverage... but with the reduction in the market for more comprehensive plans, those prices are going to go up, and many people who need more coverage are going to find themselves in trouble. And I doubt that any high-risk pools will have low enough prices to help, or that any of the incentives offered to offset costs will be anything other than a cut relative to what the ACA offers.

And yes, government spending will also go down... along with the number of people actually receiving assistance from Medicare and Medicaid, or the number of people receiving assistance to obtain health insurance.

So what I end up looking at is less coverage for our money, fewer people being covered, and probably no change in my taxes, since we're in debt either way. I see more people risking their health on more limited insurance, and I think many of them are going to find themselves worse off as a result. I see many people not being covered at all, and I know they'll definitely be worse off.

Somehow it seems just a little bit callous to be happy about those prospects, when my budget can easily survive the increases in taxes or insurance costs that keeping Obamacare would entail.

On Finding Something to Talk About

... If not for this post, I would be missing my second week in a row of blog posts. Given that this blog has lain dormant for months in the past, it's not like this is a new problem to have. This time, though, as I considered topics to write about, discarded them, wrote and re-wrote opening sentences, and otherwise got exactly nothing done, it occurred to me that doing a bit of self-reflection on what makes this difficult might be an interesting blog post on its own. So here we are.

Finding topics I feel strongly about usually isn't the problem. I can think of two or three right off the top of my head, and I think the people I've interacted with in debates can agree that I don't like to abandon an argument. Also, given that each draft I've got in my blog's list represents something I thought might be interesting to write about, the fact that I've added plenty of those in recent days supports the thought that I've got topics to write about.

Then again, that increasing number of incomplete drafts I have lying around suggests that figuring out how to properly express my thoughts may be part of the problem. It's a bit of a balancing act between worrying about the mistakes or misinterpretations I'm leaving open and worrying about making the whole thing too elaborate and hard to understand (never mind the inconsistencies that show up when I start being elaborate). It's great for thinking about my ideas, but tends not to produce anything I want to show to other people.

Not much for that but more practice and more confidence, though. Hopefully I'll have something to show for it next week.

Entertainment and Value

So far today, I've basically wasted all of my time bouncing around my favorite corners of the Internet - checking all of my favorite blogs, reading a couple webcomics, refreshing my Facebook page incessantly, etc. So a pretty standard weekend morning with absolutely no hint of any useful work done, right?

Well, one webcomic for today (Schlock Mercenary) indirectly refers to a nice little philosophical question about the nature of one's self, consciousness, and death. So maybe that's not quite so useless as far as interesting material to ponder is concerned. One of the blogs (Ask a Manager) focuses entirely on work-related questions and has a lot of useful advice for managers or really anyone dealing with interpersonal issues at work. So that's probably helpful too, in the long run. And, of course, there's still plenty of ranting on my Facebook page both for and against the Electoral College, and some people are referring to some pretty good articles and posts on the topic. That's probably also an important question to consider...

I've addressed this point before, of course, but moments like this only reinforce my conviction that if you can't think of the value derived from a given activity, the problem probably isn't that the activity is useless; it's more likely that you've failed to figure out what the benefit is. There are some activities for which that's not true, some activities that don't provide any benefit, but they seem to be the exception to the rule.

Of course, inevitably people will claim that you're not correctly judging the benefit, or that it costs too much, or that there's a more efficient way to get the same benefit, and so on. Some of these claims are valid. Many of them are not, though, and there are two major pitfalls that they usually run into.

One is comparing the efficiency of a given activity to some theoretical ideal without considering the costs of reaching that efficiency. Yes, I probably could become a better philosopher faster by taking college courses or joining a discussion group instead of reading webcomics. But given the effort it'd require to set the former activities up, are they really a realistic option for me? If the choice is between doing something to keep my brain active and doing nothing, then the benefit is a lot easier to see, and it makes quite a bit less sense to blame me for doing what I can.

The other is using the wrong standards to judge the benefit of an activity. There are plenty of college degrees that rarely pay for themselves on the job market, for example. Then again, when you read a work advice blog, you run across plenty of stories about people that are getting massively overpaid for crappy work, or massively underpaid for great work. Or we could just reflect on the value of good journalism and the impact the news media has on the world, and ask ourselves how many people are willing to pay for it. So it seems fairly clear that there are other ways to think about what value something has, and it seems fairly shortsighted to dismiss something as valueless because it fails only at one metric for determining value.

I'd encourage everyone to take a step back, think about something they see as useless, and ask themselves whether they're really made the right call there or not. If nothing else, finding more ways to get value out of your everyday life is something that anyone can benefit from.