If you’d like a nice example of a point I’ve repeatedly around here, that the federal government is stuck in the past from a business processes standpoint, this description of the Office of Personnel Management should give you the general idea:

Here, inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers.

But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.

The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records.

This odd place is an example of how hard it is to get a time-wasting bug out of a big bureaucratic system.

Held up by all that paper, work in the mine runs as slowly now as it did in 1977.

“The need for automation was clear — in 1981,” said James W. Morrison Jr., who oversaw the retirement-processing system under President Ronald Reagan. In a telephone interview this year, Morrison recalled his horror upon learning that the system was all run on paper: “After a year, I thought, ‘God, my reputation will be ruined if we don’t fix this,’ ” he said.

That approach had been obsolete for a decade or more when it was adopted. Yet another example of how the federal government does not handle technology well.

John Goodman has a to-do list for reforming the PPACA:

Getting rid of the mandates, letting people choose their own insurance benefits, and giving everyone the same universal tax credit for health insurance would be a good start. More easily accessible health savings accounts for people in high-deductible plans is another good idea.

Every provision in ObamaCare that encourages employers either not to hire people or to reduce their hours should go. Everything in the law that prevents employers from providing individually owned health insurance that travels from job to job should go. And everything that makes HealthCare.gov more complicated than eHealth (a 10-year-old
private online exchange) should go.

I presume that most of the things that make HealthCare.gov more complicated than eHealth are due to its need to interact with an alphabet soup of government agencies, each with its own mutually-incompatible, frustrating, and obsolete access method. Those are in desperate need of reform but, sadly, experience suggests that they’ll only be reformed when it’s absolutely, positively, ten years later than they should have been replaced and then they’ll be replaced with something just as maddeningly obscure as what they’re replacing. What probably should have been done was to have established a set of standards in the context of the PPACA and mandated that the various agencies conform to them. Water under the bridge.

Meanwhile, I wish someone could provide a good explanation on the merits of why we continue to subsidize big business at the expense of small ones. It’s one of life’s mysteries.

Sadly, Republicans are in permanent attack mode while Democrats are in permanent defense mode. That makes it darned hard to hold an adult conversation on how the PPACA should be reformed.

I see that in the post from Nate Silver that is provoking squeals of outrage from Democratic partisans he is in essence predicting what I have for some time: a Senate that is even more closely divided than the present Senate. I think it’s likely to be 50-50. Mr. Silver apparently thinks it’s more likely to be 51-49 with Republicans gaining control of that house.

This might also be a good time to repeat my suggestion that President Obama’s pollsters are telling him the same thing. That’s why his rhetoric has gradually shifted from gaining control of both houses of the Congress to what he can do without Congressional support.

There’s a post by Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic that I think deserves more attention than it will probably receive. I find it troubling and largely true. The post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Mr. Coates and Jonathan Chaits on the prevailing progressive view of the pathologies that afflict the black community, epitomized in the president’s “My Brothers Keeper” initiative. The core of Mr. Coates’s argument is that none of the so-called pathologies to which people point arose in a vacuum:

And we do not find an era free of white supremacy in our times either, when the rising number of arrests for marijuana are mostly borne by African-Americans; when segregation drives a foreclosure crisis that helped expand the wealth gap; when big banks busy themselves baiting black people with “wealth-building seminars” and instead offering “ghetto loans” for “mud people”; when studies find that black low-wage applicants with no criminal record “fared no better than a white applicant just released from prison”; when, even after controlling for neighborhoods and crime rates, my son finds himself more likely to be stopped and frisked. Chait’s theory of independent black cultural pathologies sounds reasonable. But it can’t actually be demonstrated in the American record, and thus has no applicability.

I think that’s just the tip of the iceberg. IMO AFDC destroyed the black family in ways that slavery never could. Oppression evokes resistance in a way that responding to incentives does not. Without taking a breath, I could probably produce a dozen different ways that anti-black racism is operative today, not just in the form of overt racism but in the actions of the very nicest people.

That’s not to say that I don’t think there are actual cultural problems in the black community. I do agree with Mr. Coates that these problems didn’t arise in a vacuum and the context needs to considered as well as the consequences. It isn’t simply poverty—there are distinctive problems in the black community that aren’t factors among other ethnic or racial communities that are equally poor.

Perhaps we can start some discussion on this subject. What do you think of Mr. Coates’s post? We don’t have a time machine. How do we solve these problems on a day-forward basis?

I am more inclined to forgive Ross Douthat’s maunderings on Russia than I am Anne Applebaum’s or Zbigniew Brzezinski’s. I would expect that they, at least, should know what the heck they’re talking about. I don’t expect Mr. Douthat, on the other hand, to know anything about Russia but what he reads in the newspapers.

What I’ve been trying to explain to people, both here and at Outside the Beltway, are the realities of dealing with Russia. Let me summarize what I think people should recognize:

1. Russia has interests and a foreign policy which are not ipso facto opposed to ours.
2. One of those interests is access to its base at Sevastopol which from Russia’s point of view is not negotiable.
3. Having hostile countries on its border is a persistent irritant to the Russians.
4. The present Ukrainian government is an illiberal kleptocracy.
5. If pressed hard enough, Russia will use nuclear weapons.
6. The EU is unlikely to impose economic sanctions on Russia with any bite.

I do not support Russia or Putin but Russia is not the Soviet Union and does not present anything remotely like the threat to us that the Soviet Union did. The Soviet Union was not only run by violent thugs, from the 1920s to the 1950s those thugs had dreams of riding to victory on the wings of world revolution and they had some reason to believe that was possible.

Ukraine is not worth risking nuclear war over.

If you want to read something reasonably sensible about the Ukrainian situation this piece by Christopher Booker in the Torygraph is closer to the mark:

The EU knows it is powerless to prevent Mr Putin in due course absorbing Ukraine’s Russian-speaking industrial heartland, leaving the EU to look after what remains of that bankrupt country, like a dismembered corpse. But there is no sign that those impotent nonentities who pose as our leaders have yet realised that their ambition to take over Ukraine must now rank alongside the euro as the two leading examples of how their collective act of make-believe is finally hitting the brick wall of reality.

The word “entrepeneur” is derived from the French word and originally from the Old French word entreprendre, someone who undertakes something. It was originally used in the sense of a theatrical manager, presumably because many of them in England were French, and it’s one of the many words used in the theater that have made their way into common usage.

Apparently, France is providing a hostile environment for its own homegrown entrepeneurs and they’re leaving for more welcoming places:

France has been losing talented citizens to other countries for decades, but the current exodus of entrepreneurs and young people is happening at a moment when France can ill afford it. The nation has had low-to-stagnant economic growth for the last five years and a generally climbing unemployment rate — now about 11 percent — and analysts warn that it risks sliding into economic sclerosis.

Some wealthy businesspeople have also been packing their bags. While entrepreneurs fret about the difficulties of getting a business off the ground, those who have succeeded in doing so say that society stigmatizes financial success. The election of President François Hollande, a member of the Socialist Party who once declared, “I don’t like the rich,” did little to contradict that impression.

After denying that there was a problem, Mr. Hollande is suddenly shifting gears. Since the beginning of the year, he has taken to the podium under the gilded eaves of the Élysée Palace several times with significant proposals to make France more alluring for entrepreneurs and business, while seeking to preserve the nation’s model of social protection.

Historically, the U. S. has been a prime destination for foreign entrepeneurs. Due to our extremely robust system of intellectual property law, if your business depends on intellectual property, you still may come to the United States. In more recent years that has declined somewhat. We’re competing with other places, especially Hong Kong and Singapore. Even more recently New Zealand has attracted the attention of new entrepeneurs.

If we don’t want them, they’ll go somewhere else.

There’s an interesting story at the Wall Street Journal about how taxes and regulations drove a budding entrepeneur from the United States to Switzerland to Austria and, finally, to Hong Kong, looking for a home for his fledgling business. It’s a cautionary tale.

I’m sure that the governments of the United States, Switzerland, and Austria all had very good reasons for harassing the man as they did. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The bottom line is that we’re making it harder to start businesses. Mr. Pirker’s experience isn’t an isolated one. I’ve heard dozens of similar stories.

As the rate of formation of new businesses declines, I certainly hope that those who favor higher taxes and regulations have an alternative. Those new businesses they’re turning away are precisely the ones most likely to create new jobs.

Based on some things said in comments, I think it’s time for a little more autobiography. I’m one of those rare, fortunate or unfortunate depending on how you look at it few who are good at both humanities and science/mathematics. In high school and college I straddled the line, taking more language, literature, and history courses than just about anybody who was oriented towards science and math while taking more science and math courses than anybody who was oriented towards the humanities.

I’ve written about music here and here and my martial arts experience here.

In the SATs I scored in the 99+ percentile on both the verbal and the math sides (like Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer). I was a member of the high school drama club and participated in a summer repertory theater during the summers but my home hobbies were chemistry and electronics.

In grad school I turned to the tech side but I continued with theater well into my 20s, with music into my 40s, and with martial arts into my 50s.

It might sound empowering to be good at so many things but it’s not. It’s frustrating. I’ve never been able to find my niche in life and at my advanced age it’s unlikely that I ever will. Nothing really satisfies me.

I don’t feel sorry for myself. Appreciating everything and learning about everything gives one a richer, fuller life. But the idea of a job that I just love is completely foreign to me.

You’ve got to hand it to the Irish. They are great ones for lost causes. Eamonn McCann at The Irish Times argues that we should be taking Russia’s side in the situation in Ukraine. I have yet to see a good, coherent argument for taking Ukraine’s side. The most prudent strategy would seem to me to be butting out but, of course, we can’t do that, can we?.

He does raise a good point, however. Is it really paranoia if everyone is, in fact, against you?