I have a question, based on my general impression that there’s a lot of exaggeration these days. At what presidential political rallies has there been mass violence and by whom has it been perpetrated?

I don’t mean a single instance of someone slapping someone or punching them in the nose. I mean groups of people turning cars over, setting them on fire, or lobbing rocks at police. Stuff like that.

I don’t think there’s been much of it. Just list every instance you can think of.

I found this article by Kelefa Sanneh at the New Yorker on immigration interesting. Right from the outset it starts tackling tough issues:

What, exactly, are our obligations to people in other countries who would like to come to this one? The argument over Syrian refugees is a good example of how our political conversation tends to sidestep this thorny issue. Ironically, strong opposition from Republicans made it easier for President Obama to avoid explaining how he had determined that ten thousand, not more, was the proper quota for Syrian refugees. Were there security concerns that prevented the U.S. from admitting, say, a hundred thousand? How many Syrian refugees—an estimated five million have fled the country’s civil war—would be too many? Obama didn’t have to entertain questions like these, airily insisting that “refugees can make us stronger,” and claiming, not implausibly, that some of his political opponents seemed to be deficient in “common humanity.”

If there is such an obligation, which countries bear it and why? Japan, for example, accepted fewer than 30 asylum-seekers in 2015 and fewer than 200 to date in 2016.

My own view is that there’s a distinction between virtue and obligation. It would be virtuous to accept genuine asylum-seekers but we are not obligated to do so. I’d be more comfortable if more of the refugees were being settled in Marin County, California, Westchester County, New York, and Fairfield County, Connecticut than in suburban Omaha or Indianapolis.

Our experience in accepting refugees from the Middle East and North Africa has not been particularly felicitous. Somali refugees have had unemployment rates north of 25% for decades and constitute a very large proportion of the Americans who’ve joined DAESH. And we shouldn’t forget that an astonishing proportion of the total number of Chechen refugees in the United States either perpetrated or were complicity in the Boston Marathon bombings, despite their having by all accounts very little to complain about in their treatment here.

Is it possible that there isn’t actually much of an analogy between Ashkenazic Jewish refugees 70 years ago and Middle Eastern refugees today?

I would have it was obvious. The reason the House of Representatives has a Republican majority is that the Democrats’ strength is in the cities and that runs afoul of the deliberately designed structure of the Constitution. That’s the gist of Jason Willick’s post at The American Interest.

That’s not a result of chicanery and it’s not unfair. It’s the rules of the game. If you don’t like the rules, change them. Or change your appeal.

The Democratic Party wasn’t always ultra-urban. For nearly 50 years of the 20th century Democrats controlled the House under the same rules as prevail today. But Democrats had much greater rural, small town, and suburban strength then than they do now.

But under the present rules and with the present Democratic Party strategy Republicans will maintain strength in the House if not outright control. Which is one of the reasons the Republicans won’t go the way of the Whigs whatever the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

I turned eagerly to this explication at The Conversation on how the Congress could address the problems with the Affordable Care Act only to be confronted by this:

The first question is what exactly do they want to repeal or fix. The ACA seems to have evolved into a great political Rorschach test somewhat devoid of real content but relying on projection of underlying beliefs.

For Republicans, it is evidence of governmental overreach and excess expenditures, while Dems seem to think of it as the essence of collective action and shared responsibility for those less fortunate. As such, neither informs the specific directions we might take from here.

In reality, the ACA consists of four major parts:

1. Expansion of Medicaid for low-income working poor, with mostly federal financing.
2. Research on alternative ways to treat conditions to inform physician practice.
3. Tests of innovative ways to organize and deliver health care for better value that can be quickly implemented across the system.
4. The exchanges, for purchasing subsidized individual policies from private insurance companies.

That prompted me to think about the Monty Python sketch shown above. Among the many major part of the ACA…

By what stretch are the last two major components of the legislation? They certainly weren’t what the CBO thought were the legislation’s major components. It thought they were:

1. The Medicaid expansion (initially the largest part)
2. The exchanges (eventually the largest part)
3. The individual mandate
4. The employer mandate
5. The tax on “Cadillac plans”
6. The excise tax on medical devices

to which I would add the regulations imposed upon qualifying insurance plans and EMR. Methodologically, you shouldn’t intermingle unquantifiable objectives with quantifiable ones which is what the author of the post seems to be doing.

They say we shouldn’t take selfies of ourselves voting but I couldn’t resist.

It’s not exactly a state secret that markets can be analyzed. The “marketing universe”, the total pool of hypothetical customers for any given product, can be divided into the “early adopters”—those who will buy readily, those who, eventually, will buy, and those who will never buy. That’s true of everything whether you’re talking about soap or healthcare insurance, as the architects of the Affordable Care Act are learning. And it’s true of roof-top solar panels, as this Reuters article notes:

California for years has required utilities to purchase excess rooftop solar power, paying homeowners in credits that lower their utility bills. But this so-called “net-metering” mandate capped the number of people who qualified for the most attractive incentive. In June, the utility serving Scripps Ranch, Sempra Energy (SRE.N) unit San Diego Gas & Electric, was the first to reach its limit, and the state’s other large utilities are expected to reach theirs soon.

Scripps Ranch homeowners who put up panels now still will be able to sell power they don’t use to the utility at the same retail rates as those who got in before the cap. But they will have to pay $100 to $200 more per year in fees and charges to SDG&E. They also eventually will be shifted to new, time-of-use power rates, which could result in lower credits.

Installers say such changes will be meager compared to the thousands of dollars in savings over the life of a system. But customers seem skeptical. At the peak, installers were putting up 55 systems a month, on average, in Scripps Ranch. In July and August – typically good months – installations dropped to 15 and 36, respectively.

Residential solar connections were down 25 percent in the third quarter compared to a year earlier in the utility’s entire San Diego territory.

“The phones just aren’t ringing as much,” said Ian Lochore, director of residential sales at Baker Electric in nearby Escondido.

A less dramatic slowdown is playing out across California, which produces about 40 percent of the nation’s residential solar.

The sector saw slower growth in the first half of the year, and declines in the third quarter. Installations in Pacific Gas & Electric’s service territory in Northern and Central California fell 7 percent year-over-year, while in Southern California Edison’s territory they fell 4 percent.

One of the morals of this story is that if you’re seeing declines like this in the most favorable market in the country for your product you’re probably nearing market saturation. Once a market is saturated the only way to get new customers is to take them from somebody else, presumably by selling a better product.

The other moral is that the roof-top solar panel business is a creature of government policy and what the government hath given it can darn well taketh away. Relying on swift and prudent stewardship on the part of a government agency is living in another world.

Speaking of web services, consider the market share of the major web services providers. It depicts a classic oligopoly with the early mover, Amazon, holding 31% of the market, Microsoft, the next largest, 9%, IBM holding 7%, Google 4%, Salesforce 4%, and a “long tail” dragging behind.

The market for web services will continue to bubble for a while. Amazon may hold onto its largest share or it may not. It’s basically a zero sum game of perfect information. There is a solution and it probably won’t settle on a single dominant provider.

I can’t help but laugh when I read analyses of Amazon and this one from Steven Russolillo at the Wall Street Journal is no exception:

Amazon.com Inc. boss Jeff Bezos is fond of saying “your margin is my opportunity.”

Traditional retailers who scoffed at him 19 years ago when Amazon went public aren’t any more. Shareholders who stuck with the company, on the other hand, are laughing all the way to the bank with a 2,400% gain in the past decade.

Yet, with the e-commerce giant set to report its sixth consecutive quarter in the black on Thursday, the source of more than half of its pretax operating earnings in its most recent report, is someone else’s opportunity.

Amazon Web Services, the cloud-computing unit, will be affected by the offsetting trends of rapid growth and brutal competition that has left much of the market commoditized. Competitors such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google, International Business Machines Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are no dowdy brick-and-mortar merchants. What’s more, AWS might fetch far less as a stand-alone company than what its profits have helped tack onto Amazon’s market value.

Investors therefore need to do more than see if Amazon misses or beats analyst consensus third-quarter estimates Thursday. They will look for signs that its core retail business can eventually be highly profitable.

Massive investment in Amazon’s warehouse and delivery infrastructure makes its position increasingly difficult to challenge. Newer endeavors into music, groceries and apparel are starting to pay off, too. Amazon is expected to top Macy’s Inc. next year as the biggest apparel seller in the U.S., according to Cowen & Co.

From this he concludes that Amazon should focus on retail.

The mistake he makes is in thinking that Amazon’s roots are in retail. They aren’t. They’re in finance.

19 years ago I said that Amazon was an IPO in search of a business model and nothing the company has done over the intervening period has done anything but confirm that. In Amazon Web Services it’s finally found something it can make money doing. If I’m not mistaken retail is still running at a slight loss for Amazon, something that has moved Matthew Yglesias to call Amazon a not-for-profit operating for the benefit of the American consumer.

The “unicorns” of the future won’t be able to follow Amazon’s lead. Today you actually need viable business models in order to succeed. The mid-1990s were a unique time and we shall not see their like again. And don’t be surprised if Amazon disappears as mysteriously as it arrived, still searching for a business model. It will have given its investors a wild ride.

I strongly disagree with Laura Ingraham’s conclusion in her piece at LifeZette but I think her argument is obviously correct. Rather than forcing you to read it, I’ll summarize it. A long list of measures that have been part of the “Washington consensus”, a list of things on which Democrats and Republicans have largely agreed, have not worked as expected. These include:

• Managed trade agreements have not made most American workers better off or reduced problems caused by illegal immigration.
• The WTO has not protected the United States against unfair practices on the part of our trading partners. Quite to the contrary it has provided a forum in which our trading partners could sue us.
• A wealthier, more prosperous China has not tended towards liberal democracy and has become more aggressive.
• Weakening Russia has not made it less aggressive.
• The EU has not brought greater prosperity to most of its members. However, it has made Germany more prosperous.
• Mass immigration has not produced greater prosperity or social comity.

and I would add that expanding NATO has not made us more secure but the opposite.

What conclusions should be drawn from all of this? I don’t think it’s that we should return to a “Fortress America”. I think it’s that we should recognize that the other countries of the world have interests, too, and should be expected to pursue them. And that there are no grand solutions. Slow, gradual, tedious work is necessary for just about everything, whether it’s negotiating good international agreements or producing peace and prosperity.