Without looking it up, who wrote “I Will Always Love You” and for whom was it written? If you highlight the blank area below it will reveal the answer.

This post was prompted by this Washington Post article. Harrumph.

As I read Elizabeth Bartel’s post at the RAND Blog on how to deter cyber-attacks on non-government computers:

Over the years, a great deal of attention has been paid to gaining security in cyberspace to prevent unauthorized access to critical infrastructure like those that control electrical grids and financial systems, and military networks. In recent years a new category of threat has emerged: the cyber-theft and subsequent public release of large troves of private communications, personal documents and other data.

This category of incident includes the release of government data by inside actors such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. However, hacks of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, a Democratic party strategist, illustrate that the risk goes beyond the theft of government data to include information that has the potential to harm individuals or threaten the proper functioning of government. Because the federal government depends on proxies such as contractors, non-profit organizations, and local governments to administer so many public functions, securing information that could harm the government — but is not on government-secured systems — may require a different approach.

I sincerely wished that she had greater familiarity with proven strategies for solving problems and that the RAND Blog had a comments section. The proven strategy is that you start by addressing the biggest facets of the problem first. Even fractional solutions of the biggest facets can produce big payoffs while even if you solve 100% of something that’s only 10% of the problem you’ve only solved 10% of the problem and you can never solve 100% of anything.

To give you some idea of how to approach solving the problem of computer attacks I’ll return you to a mesmerizing map I’ve posted on before. Look at it (and the associated data) for five minutes and, if you can avoid an epileptic seizure, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done.

At Bloomberg View Justin Fox produces six bar charts that illustrate which states have prospered the most over the last year, which the least, which states have prospered the most since 2009, which the least, and which states have prospered the most since 2000 and which the least. Just two states appear on all three “the most” graphs: California and Utah. Three states appear on all three “the least” graphs: Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia.

Searching for commonalities among winners or losers is tough. California and Utah are both west of the Mississippi but so is Louisiana. The other things that I can see that distinguish California and Utah from the rest of the United States is that both have mountains and both have percentages of black population far below the national average (California 6%, Utah 2%). However, West Virginia has mountains and just 4% black population. Go figure.

While high educational attainment doesn’t seem to be much of a factor among the states in becoming a winner, low educational attainment does link Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia as does all being Red States. California is a reliably Blue State while Utah is reliably Red.

Guess which state has had the worst millennium to date? You hardly have to ask. Illinois.

You might be amused at the post at RealClearFuture by Robert Tracinski analyzing the economics of Star Trek:

You hear this sort of thing quite a lot, particularly from advocates of the basic income, who somehow think that the world of “Star Trek economics,” where robots will do all of the work for us (despite the fact that there are hardly any actual robots in the Star Trek franchise), is just around the corner.

The obvious error is in projecting the viability of a whole economic system based on a fictional technology that is nowhere near to being available. The less obvious error is the misuse of the term “scarcity.” Saadia and other boosters of this school of economic futurism use “scarcity” to mean something like “poverty”: the inability to afford certain basic necessities of life. So they look forward to a society that will be so technologically advanced that such poverty is unnecessary. It will be a “post-scarcity” economy.

But this is not what “scarcity” means in economics. “Scarcity” means the existence of an economic good in a finite, limited quantity. This is pretty basic economics and can be figured out in about five second on Google. As the Wikipedia entry for “scarcity” explains, “The notion of scarcity is that there is never enough…to satisfy all conceivable human wants, even at advanced states of human technology.” Make a note of that phrase, “all conceivable human wants.” I’ll return to that later.

Read the whole thing.

What I believe is disturbing to some people about the World According to Star Trek is that it’s not minarchist. Most people, at least here in the United States, are woefully ignorant about history, political philosophy, and economics and tend to conflate things like liberal democracy, the market system, capitalism, etc. into a single lump. They ought to read some early 20th century or Soviet science fiction. Before Robert Heinlein most science fiction assumed socialism.

At the American Conservative Daniel L. Davis takes note of an exchange between Gen. John Nicholson and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Read the exchange, quoted in the linked piece, but here is how Mr. Davis summarizes it:

The senator asked and the general confirmed that in order to win, the U.S. had to “destroy” al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and have the Afghan government be “on a trajectory” toward a system of rule of law. Even if we do destroy al-Qaeda, ISIS, and any other terrorist groups that arise in the region, the Afghan government is not headed toward effective governance. In other words, this exchange lays the groundwork for the U.S. military to, literally, be made the Armed Forces of the Afghan state forever.

The Trump Administration is on the way to becoming the third consecutive presidential administration to misunderstand an old engineering wisecrack: “Don’t force it. Use a bigger hammer!” That is intended as sarcasm not as prescriptive.

We cannot achieve at least one of the objectives laid out by Gen. Nicholson—a competent, self-sufficient Afghan government—at any time in the foreseeable future regardless of the amount of force applied. We can’t even accomplish that here.

At the Health Affairs Blog Billy Wynne outlines a single-payer system for the United States:

My goal with this post is to demonstrate that a “unified” (punchline: It wouldn’t truly be single payer…), market-driven, federally regulated, privately delivered system need not possess any of these objectionable attributes. In fact, the parameters of such a system are all but staring us right in the face. I call it: Medicare Advantage Premium Support for All (MAPSA).

While any flavor of single payer may be the last thing that comes to mind when contemplating bipartisan initiatives, just as the far left and far right share some libertarian (and other) commonalities, we may have indeed finally come full circle in this tiresome, so-far-futile debate. By combining two shots of conservative orthodoxy with one overflowing progressive one, and stirring slowly, it is not at all far-fetched to envision an endgame cocktail for our health care system that covers everyone, decreases costs, and can pass Congress. Cheers.

I find his assumptions excessive at the very least. Here are the three most important assumptions:

If you remove employer and household spending from the equation for the moment, which means both elements would contribute nothing (you’re welcome), that leaves about $1.5 trillion or $5,371 per person available to fund the new system.

Now, Medicare spent about $11,642 per person in 2015, but keep in mind that these beneficiaries are aged or disabled, much less healthy, and more expensive to care for than the average American, which includes children, young invincibles, and so forth. If we take health plans and actuaries at their word, an “age rating band” (or ratio between what we charge the oldest and youngest members of the insurance pool) of 5:1 is appropriate. This is also, I’d note, the ratio advanced by Republicans in the AHCA.

This suggests that $6,985 is the average cost of coverage if we use Medicare spending as the benchmark (that is, calculating premiums at a 3:1 ratio if 5:1 is Medicare’s $11,642). That may be too high, because for this exercise we are actually excluding current Medicare beneficiaries, so the fifth quintile of the rest of the population would actually cost less, on average, to cover.

When contemplating health care reform I think there are several things to keep in mind:

• Canada’s administrative expenses are about 15% of the whole.
• U. S. administrative expenses are about twice that.
• Once you’ve realized your savings by trimming administrative expenses, you’ve realized your savings. At the present rate of increase in health care costs, the savings realized by cutting administrative expenses would be offset in just a few years. That’s not a lot of headroom.
• Cost savings beyond that can only be realized by cutting reimbursements, something we’ve shown little willingness to do, cf. “doc fixes”.

Mr. Wynne is less cynical than I. I think that if Medicare covered Americans for the first 18 years of life rather than the last 18 years we’d have the highest paid obstetricians and pediatricians in the world and med students would be jostling one another to get into those specialties.

I continue to believe that cutting costs, not just cutting the rate of increase but actually cutting costs, is the sine qua non of health care reform. Until we’re willing to do that anything else is just waste motion.

I’ve got to admit I was gravely tempted when I first read about Tesla’s solar roof. Here’s a good article about the product at Greentech Media:

According to Tesla, the product will cost $21.85 per square foot for an average American home — making it competitive with standard tile, metal or slate roofs. You can read more about Tesla’s assumptions here.

Speaking on a briefing call with reporters, Musk said a solar roof covering 40 percent of the average-sized American home would generate 10 percent to 20 percent more electricity than a standard solar system.

“It’s a better product at a slightly better price,” said Musk, comparing the product to conventional roofs.

“It’s the most affordable roof you can buy,” said Peter Rive, SolarCity’s chief technology officer, on the call.

Tesla has been known for making aggressively optimistic statements about its products and its abilities. A typical roof lasts for twenty years or more. Tesla has been around for less than 15 years and it’s lost money every year. What will its “infinity” warranty be worth if the company doesn’t exist in 20 years?

If they had to put down a bond for each roof sold, I doubt that the company could survive.

I wish more people (other than me) had been saying what Ted Galen Carpenter is saying over the The National Interest:

The Bosnia conflict was a huge missed opportunity for the United States to set new, more rational, priorities for itself in the post–Cold War world. A far better policy would have been to inform the Europeans that a petty conflict in the Balkans did not reach the threshold of a serious security threat to the transatlantic community warranting direct U.S. involvement, much less requiring Washington’s leadership. NATO’s European members had no more right to expect a dominant U.S. role in dampening a Bosnian civil war than Americans would have had the right to expect European countries to take the lead in addressing a similar conflict in the Caribbean or Central America.

back when it might have done some good. That is practically verbatim what I said at the time and have maintained ever since. I understand the rationale of Lord Ismay first Secretary General of NATO’s characterization of NATO’s purpose as “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”.

But how did keeping the “Germans down” transmogrify into pursuing German foreign policy objectives? Destabilizing Yugoslavia was a German foreign policy objective as was NATO expansion.

More recently from a practical standpoint NATO has been a mechanism for venue-shopping for approval in U. S. military actions rejected by the United Nations Security Council with no moral or legal standing.

Today Barry Eichengreen takes over the job of Germany-bashing at Project Syndicate:

In 2016, Germany ran a current-account surplus of roughly €270 billion ($297 billion), or 8.6% of GDP, making it an obvious target of Trump’s ire. And its bilateral trade surplus of $65 billion with the United States presumably makes it an even more irresistible target. Never mind that, as a member of the eurozone, Germany has no exchange rate to manipulate. Forget that Germany is relatively open to US exports, or that its policymakers are subject to the European Union’s anti-subsidy regulations. Ignore the fact that bilateral balances are irrelevant for welfare when countries run surpluses with some trade partners and deficits with others. All that matters for Trump is that he has his scapegoat.

The Reader’s Digest version of his post is that the Germans save a lot, don’t invest much, don’t consume much, and export a lot.

Interesting factoid: there are no German universities in the global top 50. Those are absolutely dominated by American and British institutions of higher learning.