Year: 2009

Carrier landings: “A perishable skill!” Notes

Background information behind the YouTube Background videos shown on Learning from Dogs

Many will have found the  video extracts about carrier operations on USS Nimitz thrilling, fascinating and superb watching.  The first was shown two days ago and the second yesterday.  In fact they come from an brilliantly executed

USS Nimitz
USS Nimitz

10-hour series from PBS in the US called Carrier.  The film has an associated web site including the ability to watch all ten episodes in full. [NB – it has been discovered that the PBS videos may not be available in all countries due to licensing issues.]

The USS Nimitz was launched in 1972 and has an overall length of nearly 1,100 feet.  WikiPedia has a good summary.

The final Post on this topic will be published tomorrow and will explore the questions of integrity and ethics that are associated with the emotions raised by the videos.

By Paul Handover

Health Care vs. Health Insurance

Being clear about the terms Care and Insurance when it comes to US health.

The issue for the day is the distinction between health CARE and health INSURANCE.

As we all know, they are not the same thing.  But, as we all have noticed, the two are often confused and the distinctions ignored by many, if not most, in the media, Congress, and the White House.

Health Care and Health Insurance are certainly interdependent. But it helps first to separate the two and take each in turn.

Let’s start with health insurance.  And let’s think of it first as just any “insurance,” like a policy on your house or car.

What is insurance?  It’s a contract that you buy to limit your losses if a bad event happens, even though the likelihood of the bad event occurring is usually very low.

Read more about this important issue

Carrier landings: “A perishable skill” Part 2

Carrier pilots learn about pitching decks, in the dark!

Yesterday we published the first of two 10 minute videos on YouTube about carrier operations on the USS Nimitz.  Here’s the second video.  Warning: Once you start watching you won’t be able to stop until the very end!

By Paul Handover

Rationing by Government or the Market?

Rationing.  First of all, what does rationing mean?

It means that there is a finite or limited supply of a good or service, and that not everyone will get all of it that they want.  Rationing can occur through the price that is charged for the good, or through limiting the quantity of the good by some centralized authority.

Yes, it is true that regardless of whether we get our health insurance from private insurers or from a government program, there is rationing.   But there is a huge difference between the type and scope of rationing by the market through price, and rationing by the federal government through control. When the service is rationed by an insurance company, a doctor, or a hospital, if we don’t like the decision, we have a recourse.  We have options. We have choices.  We can go to a different doctor, a different insurer, a different plan; we can report the company, sue the company, fire the company.

When your health care is rationed by government-sponsored single-payer health insurance, that’s it. If you don’t like the rationing decision, you can’t get “another government,” you can’t sue the government, you can’t fire the government, you can’t pay a higher price to get more services out of the government (not legally anyway).  You have no recourse.  The government decision is the end of the road.

So rationing in and of itself is not the point, is not the problem.  Government rationing is the problem.

By Sherry Jarrell

“What does economics mean?” by an economist

Keynes, macro economics and other terms need to be more widely understood.

Macroeconomics as a field is not very impressive, frankly.

In my view, it is more glorified accounting and policy than anything remotely related to testable economic theory!

Keynesian economics — the stuff that most macro courses are made of — smacks of a model created to justify a pre-conceived belief that government can run businesses better than private industry can.  Keynes spoke strictly of demand-side policies, namely fiscal and monetary policies, which create a large role for government intervention, as opposed to supply side policies, which basically get government out of the way by lowering taxes, fees, paperwork, and restrictions, and allow private industry to take risks and create value and manifest economic freedom.

Read more about economics

Carrier landings: “A perishable skill!” Part 1

Carrier pilots learn about pitching decks

A fellow author of this Blog, John Lewis, was chatting to me about a whole variety of items surrounding the Blog and future topics, etc.  Our conversation strayed into flying and John asked if I had seen the YouTube extracts from the PBS Film about the USS Nimitz.  I had not.  They are gripping.  Here is the first of the 10 minute videos.  The second one is here.

A perishable skill? Watch and all will become clear.

By Paul Handover

Very few really saw this crisis coming; are we still in the dark?

Who really understood the forces of destruction building up in the global economy?

(This Post is longer than usual but doesn’t lend itself to being divided into multiple Posts – trust it is worth the read.)

Part One – How investing in the 80s was so hit and miss.

My education with respect to the sound management of one’s wealth came from a propitious mistake by a global insurance company, one of Britain’s largest insurance companies as it happens.  Here’s the story.

Read the rest of this Post

Another one of the few who saw the crisis coming.

Steve Keen – Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney.

I know didly squat about economics.  I know a lot about the effect of economics in the sense of government policies, of inflation and debt, international trade and much more only in how they have impacted me over a lifetime of working, buying homes, raising a family, running a couple of businesses and now contemplating retirement.  I can sum up my personal strategy – LUCK!  I have been lucky.  The other Post out today shows an example of that luck.

Frankly, economists haven’t figured widely in my role call of people that I admired, probably because I don’t really understand what they are talking about.  (That’s why this Blog has a real live economist as part of the team, to help educate me and all the rest of the readers who come to this Blog!)

The other Post on this subject spoke of David Kauders, who clearly saw it coming.  Now here’s an economist who also saw it coming, Steve Keen.

Read more about Steve Keen

Chancellor Angela Merkel

Important lessons from former East Germans.

Have you ever noticed how the most ardent supporters of capitalism and free markets are those who’ve experienced a world without them?

How those who speak out most poignantly against health care reform in the U.S. are those who’ve experienced nationalized health care?  No?

Angela Merkel
Angela Merkel

If you can, then, take a moment and think back to the coverage, the news, the sound bites.  Take a look, perhaps a second look, behind the headlines and I venture that you will find endless examples of this phenomenon.    It is those who have done without freedom of choice, free markets, and self-determination who treasure it most, who most understand its value, who’ve lived with the consequences of its absence.

We need look no further than Chancellor Angela Merkel and her recent victory in Germany’s national election.

Chancellor Merkel grew up in communist East Germany and is now leading Germany out of recession with tax cuts and reduced government spending.

We should be listening to what the world is telling us.  Very hard, and very quickly.  We don’t want to have to lose it before we appreciate what we have.

By Sherry Jarrell

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Septembers

How clear, crisp September days echo 1940.

I was born in London some 6 months before the end of World War II.  The echoes of that tragic event in human history rang around the torn roadways and ripped buildings of London for many years, certainly for sufficiently long that I was able to remember as a young boy, away on his bicycle, the bomb sites and and the gaps where once buildings had stood.

Sometimes, when the September weather is as it was during the Battle of Britain, it’s almost as though those echoes can still be faintly heard.  Maybe all Londoners over a certain age hear them?

Read more about September days