Dana Blankenhorn

Where Santorum Might Have Had A Point

Rick Santorum jumped the shark and sank his Presidential hopes recently by condemning college education. 

(The original of this picture is at FiscalTimes.) What he said, specifically, is dead-wrong. The idea that you're “a snob” if you support higher education is beyond stupid. He deserved what he got for it – Romney as the GOP nominee.

But beyond that, there is some truth hidden away inside his statement. Sometimes the squirrel does indeed find a nut.

We've become credential-mad in this country. What the President said, and quite rightly, is that trade schools and similar training programs, as well as college, are essential to the maintenance of a highly skilled workforce.

But should cooks really have to attend a college in order to cook? Should people running radiology machines need a degree in order to point it at people?

I don't think so. I think many programs for what are basically trades are misguided and wasteful. After due consideration, I'd add journalism to that list.

Why ObamaCare Works

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 9 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The Affordable Care Act, aka “ObamaCare,” is the Nixon Shock of our time.

Just as the Nixon Shock let the economy deal with the natural deflation of Moore's Law, so ObamaCare is essential to dealing with the natural inflation of health care costs.

Obamacare makes medicine part of the social contract. Rather than focusing on “cures,” it makes the market focus on “health,” which is the only way of dealing with the vast demographic changes taking place in our society.

I'm getting older. So is the whole baby boom. As we age labor shortages will increase. There will be fewer-and-fewer workers around to pay for our care, and our comforts. This would break the present health care system, leaving our economy uncompetitive, our seniors wasting away with no care, and our life expectancy headed downward. Life under the present regime is becoming nasty, brutish, and short.

Breitbart

When Saul Alinsky died I don't recall the mainstream media making a big deal of it. If Abbie Hoffman had died in 1972, I doubt anyone in the mainstream media would have cared. I wasn't told to feel sad when Gadhafi got what was coming to him, or when they hung Saddam Hussein.

But Andrew Breitbart was a "publisher." And that makes his death, at 43, a day of national mourning. 

That's the way it is in journalism. You don't get to change things if you're a writer. Or an editor. You do get to change things if you're a publisher. And you don't need any ethics to do so, either. Journalism operates according to the golden rule – he who has the gold makes the rules.

No one ever asked where Breitbart was getting his money. They just asked if his checks bounced and, if they didn't, sit right down here next to Morty Zuckerman, Rupert Murdoch and Mr. Sulzberger, could you move down a seat so Breitbart can get his tookis in there, thank you very much.

This is, and has been, the big lie of the American media, of the journalism “profession” itself. It always was a clown show, an entertainment, not a “profession” at all. Anyone can get in if they have table stakes.

Exhibit A. Breitbart.

Why Gas Prices Are Rising

It's not what you think. Drilling has nothing to do with it. Oil prices have little to do with it.

This is a story of conservation and content. The story is in the refineries.

The gas you use in winter is different from what you use in summer. It's different depending on where you live.

Gas used in the winter contains a lot of butane. Butane is cheap, but it turns to gas at about the melting point of water. That's why your gas cap has a “vapor lock” – it's trying to trap the gases in the gas in the tank, so they can be used, rather than blow away and be wasted.

What replaces butane in summer gas? Mainly ethanol. Alcohol. It can be made in the refining process, or it can be made in other ways. Ethanol costs more than butane. Some people pay as much as $250/gallon for it – if it's properly aged in the right barrels. But even the cheapest ethanol has a price higher than that of butane.

What Warren Buffett Doesn't Know

Warren Buffett won himself some headlines today with another call for newspapers to charge people for content. 

Newspapers grabbed this one eagerly but there's something neither they nor Buffett know.

They already do charge. All of them.

They charge you in time. The time it takes you to read anything is a real cost, to you. I can very much understand why you would resent anyone talking about charging you money for something you're already paying for, with your time, attention, and (assuming you believe what you read) credibility. I resent it, too.

Especially since, in the old print model, content was always free to begin with. The cost of the paper was never more than the cost of getting it from the printer to you. The cover price was split between the newscarrier (or newstand) and the truck that dropped piles of paper on the street (or driveway).

How were writers paid 20 years ago? Advertising. The ads that surrounded the content paid for the writers, the editors, the salesmen, the typesetting, and the printing. Not to mention the executives at the top of the tower and the profits that went to shareholders.

Project Takeover

Note: An edited version of this story appeared last week at Open Source Delivers.

 

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We all know what happens when a big company comes in and takes over a popular open source project.

It's not pretty.

What happened to Java, OpenOffice and Solaris under Oracle was not pretty, but the community did all it could about it. Those projects had already been under a big company, Sun Microsystems, so Oracle's takeover was something in the natural order of things.

What we may soon see, however, what we're starting to see, are big companies taking on support of projects that already have a corporate sponsor. A small company devoted to the code that has been fighting to monetize it suddenly looks up and finds a giant hovering over it. The cat eating the mouse becomes food for the coyote.

Revolution Analytics recently found itself in this position. The corporate sponsor of the R big data language recently found out that Oracle will be offering support for R in its data center offerings.

David Smith, the company's vice president of marketing and community, doesn't feel like the cat before the coyote, however.