This weekend, I came to grips with something that I probably should have accepted at least 15 years ago.
My dunking days are over and they are never coming back.
To be honest, it's probably a bit of an overstatement to say I ever had "dunking days". It's not as if I was going to the playground and throwing down monsters dunks on people in my youth. To be honest, I never dunked on anybody, and I never dunked in a competitive game. However, I did occasionally dunk on 10 foot regulation rims while practicing. Sure I was successful in only about one of every 100 dunk attempts, but in my, mind each one of those dunks was glorious, and was perfectly willing to make 100 or more attempts in an afternoon until I threw one down ( but I would never try in a game, because I wanted to win every game I played, and I wasn't about to pass up a 99% percent shot ( layup ) for a 1% chance at a dunk ).
So, I wasn't a great dunker; I wasn't a good dunker or even a fair dunker, but the fact that I was 6' 1" and could occasionally dunk filled me with pride, and gave a naturally unassertive kid like me a little bit of irrational confidence that helped me with many aspects of my life. I'm gonna be honest, - if I had never dunked in my life, and don't think I would have ever asked a girl out to this day.
In any case, because being a "dunker" was such an important part of my self image, that it was hard for me to accept the idea that dunking was no longer in the cards when I got older. Back in 2008 when I was 38, I found myself in gym with Michael waiting for his youth basketball class to start. I instinctively ran to the rim and tried to to grab it. On my first attempt, my fingers barely grazed the bottom of the rim, so I tried again and again until I started to touch the rim with the part of my hand where the base of finger meet the top of the palm. Michael's class started after that, so I didn't make anymore attempts, but I tried to convince myself that if I'd had the chance to warm up a little bit longer I would have eventually gotten my hand up to dunking level ( with my wrist touching the rim ).
Anyway, I could barely walk the next day, and I was limping around with a pulled groin in both legs for about a week after that.
As you might imaging, despite my best efforts to stay fit, my leaping ability has deteriorated quite a bit in the last 10 years. My leg strength really hasn't declined at all, but my flexibility ( which never good to begin with ) is terrible, and I feel absolutely no springiness in my legs. What worse, I now seem to have a fear of putting 100% effort into each leap, because feel like one of my tight muscle/tendons/ligaments is ready to snap at any second.
This all hit home yesterday when I was playing in the driveway with my kids with the rim set at 9-feet. I was able dunk a 9-foot rim will relative ease as recently as last year, but yesterday I found my dunk attempts being rejected by the front of the rim over an over again. Eventually, after about 20 semi-tentative attempts, I foolishly risked snapping a ligament, focused all my jumping power with a loud martial arts kiai, and barely manage to get a successful dunk on the 9-foot rim. So, I guess I had a small victory, but it was a pretty pathetic victory, considering it was now just as hard for me to dunk on a 9-foot rim as it had been for me to dunk on a 10-foot rim in my prime. I came to the realization that I had lost entire foot on my vertical leap since my youth.
Of course, I really shouldn't be complaining. I'm been blessed with better health than most people my age, and I still don't feel my age at all when I engage in activities like hiking, lifting weights, or running on my treadmill. Still it's a little bit scary to consider the implications of our inevitable physical decline. After all, no matter how hard we work to stay fit, we all slow down, we all start to lose our ability to do things, and eventually we all ...
You know what? Fuck it - let's not ever discuss this again. How about that Infinity War movie, guys!
Rich
Monday, April 30, 2018
Saturday, March 31, 2018
Trump's Tariffs
If you are a regular reader of my blog posts, you've probably noticed that I haven't written a decent blog post in quite some time. I don't think I've written anything that I'm remotely proud of since my post about California more than a year ago. I can't really promise that the post I'm writing now is going to be any good either, but I can promise you it will be unique. The subject of this blog post is going to be uniquely boring. I'm about to write about tariffs.
That last sentence may have lost about half my readers, but if you are still reading this please stick around, because tariffs are pretty important. As you might have noticed, the stock market has been tanking since Trump announced his tariffs on steel and aluminum, and I wouldn't be surprised if the economy as a whole starts to slump as a result of these tariffs.
Before going on, I want to make it clear that my opposition to Trump's tariffs have nothing to do with my general opposition to Trump. I've always been opposed to tariffs of any kind. I've always been in favor of free trade, which puts me very much in opposition to many of my fellow liberals. While I've never voted for a Republican, I've generally been happy with the trade policies of Republicans prior to Trump. The fact that Trump is going against the typical Republican position on tariffs, and Bernie Sanders supported tariffs in the 2016 campaign lends credence to the idea that tariffs do not need to be a politically partisan issue. Whether you are a Trump-loving conservative or a WTO-hating liberal, I'm hoping this post will help convince you that Trump's tariffs are a terrible idea.
Just to make sure we are all on the same page, I'm going to start by defining what a tariff actually is. A tariff is a tax on the importer of a particular good needs to pay to the customs authority of the country imposing the tariff. However, it is also possible the importer and exporter can reach an agreement for the exporter to pay the tariff or part of the tariff via a Delivered Duty Paid agreement. Regardless of whether the importer or exporter pays the tariff the importer will general have to pay my money to procure a product a tariff is being imposed on. Let's say an exporter in a country outside the USA acquires rubber balls for the equivalent of 89 US cents and sells them to an American importer for 1 dollar in the absence of any tariff. If the USA were to impose a 10% tariff on rubber balls, the importer is likely to spend more than 1 dollar per ball going forward even if the exporter agrees to pay all of the tariff. If the exporter was making a 11 cents per ball profit before the tariff, it's unlikely that the exporter could afford to make only a 1 cent profit per ball after the paying the 10 cent tariff per ball. It's likely that the exporter will raise their price a bit to more than 1 dollar per ball, which would effectively make the importer absorb some of the price of the tariff even if the exporter is officially paying all of the tariff.
In any case, the bottom line is that tariffs on a given product will generally increase the amount of money an importer will have to spend to acquire a given amount of that product. If the importer needs to pay more for the product, retailers generally need to pay more for the product, and most people would argue that this mean the cost of a tariff is ultimately passed on to the consumer.
In fact, the argument that "tariffs are passed on the consumer" is the most common argument I've heard from people who are opposed to tariffs. However, while this is certainly an argument I would often make against tariffs, I don't want the make a blanket statement that the costs of tariffs are always passed down to the consumer, because I can think of scenarios where this might not be true. I say that because a retailer will not always respond to rising expenses by raising prices.
One of the most simple examples of this how the owners of sports teams set ticket prices. For years, I've heard sports fan blame the players for rising ticket prices. They'll say something like, "If those greedy players didn't demand such high salaries, ticket prices wouldn't be so high." However, that's simply not true. Consider what would happen if the the salaries of all baseball players, were magically reduced by 90%. Would the baseball owners cut ticket prices by 90%? Would the baseball owners cut ticket prices by even 1%. No, they wouldn't, because there would be no rational reason for the baseball owners to give up any revenue. Sports team set ticket prices to maximize revenue. They will try to maximize revenue regardless of how high or low their expenses are. More specifically, they try to set their ticket prices in such a way to maximizes the value of ticket revenue in the following formula ...
Ticket Revenue = (Average Ticket Price) x (Number of Tickets Sold)
Clearly, lowering the Average Ticket Price ( ATP ) will raise the Number of Tickets Sold ( NTS ) and raising the ATP will lower the NTS. So, teams simply can't raise ticket revenue by raising ticket prices. There are times that raising ticket prices might reduce ticket sales so much that ticket revenue would fall. Conversely, there are times that reducing ticket prices might boost ticket sales so much that ticket revenue would increase. My point here is that sports team probably employ groups of really smart people to figure out the optimal ticket prices to maximize revenue, and those people have no reason to take player salaries into account, because the process of maximizing ticket revenue has nothing to do with the expense of player salaries.
Just like rising player salaries don't lead to high ticket prices, tariffs that lead to higher costs for retailers won't always lead to higher prices for consumers. However, they usually will, because retailer need to focus on the total profit they make from sales rather than the total revenue. For example, let's say a New York store owner sells 100 Mets caps a month at a price of $10. Well, in this case, the store makes $1000 in revenue from Mets caps each month. Let's say the owner is aware of market research that suggest that the store could sell 200 Mets caps a month if the price dropped to $7.50 per cat. While dropping the price of the cap to $7.50 would raise the revenue to $1500 a month, it may not be a good idea. If it cost the store owner $8 to get each Mets cap, then dropping the retail price of the cap to $7.50 would obviously be a terrible idea, because the store owner would be losing 50 cents for each hat sold. So while owner of sports teams try to set prices in a way that will maximize revenue, retailers try to set prices to maximize profit made for each product is a given amount of time. In other words, a retailer tries to maximize Profit from Product in the formula below ....
Profit from Product =
( (Retail Price of Product) - (Cost of Product to Retailer) ) * ( Units of Product Sold )
A tariff on a product will almost always increase the "Cost of Product to Retailer" for a given product. In the absence of any change in the retail price of the product, an increase in the cost of he product to the retailer will decrease the profit for the retailer. In most cases, the retailer will increase the retail price in order to get back some of the lost profit, but this won't always be the case. It's possible that the consumers of the product might be very sensitive to any price change. It's possible that even a tiny increase in the price of the product might push consumers to by a similar yet cheaper product. In that case, the retailer might not have any choice but to keep the price of the product the same and accept the lower profits. Conversely, it might be the case that the product is something that consumers find essential and many would be willing to pay more for. In that case, retailers could increase the retail price of a product after a tariff is imposed on it and make more profit than they would have made by keeping the retail price of the product static.
In any case, I'm not quite sure why I spent all this time writing about why tariffs won't necessarly lead to higher prices for consumers ( aside from the fact that I've always been annoyed by people who blame high-paid athletes for high ticket prices, and I wanted to prove them wrong ) because I'm undermining my position that tariffs will usually lead to higher prices. It will usually make sense for a retailer to raise prices after a tariff raises their costs, because when profit margins are low ( which they often are in retail ), the profit-per-unit gained by raising prices after a tariff will outweigh the profits lost by losing sales. For example, consider the example of the Mets cap I brought up earlier. If the 100 caps are sold a month at a price of $10 and each cap cost the store 8 dollars to acquire, the store would be making $200 a month of profit on the Mets caps. If a tariff is placed on Mets caps ( I know that's a stretch, but if Rudy Giuliani's campaign for president has been successful 10 years ago, and I guarantee you there would have been tariffs on Mets everything, regardless of whether the items were imported or not. ) and the cost of Mets caps for retailers becomes $9 after a tariff, the store owner's profits on Mets caps would drop to $100 a month if the retail price of the Mets cap was not changed. In this case, I think the owner could expect profits to go up if the retail price of the Mets cap was raise from $10 to $11, because raising the price to $11 dollars would double the per-cap profit from $1 to $2, and it is unlikely that sales of the cap would drop more than 50% if the retail price was raised from $10 to $11. Even if raising the price of the Mets cap from $10 to $11 dollars made sales go down by 40%, the store owner would make $120 dollars a month on Mets caps ( $2 profit/cap x 60 caps/month ) verses the $100 a month on Mets cap ( $1 profit/cap x 100 caps/month ) the store owner would have made if the retail price of the caps had remained at $10.
Still a profit of $120 a month isn't as good as the pre-tariff profit of $200 a month ( nor would a profit of $198 a month be as good as $200 a month if sales of Mets caps caps had only fallen to 99 caps a month after the retail price of the cap was raised to $11. I think it reasonable to expect some loss in sales for any price increase, so the store owner would not be able to recoup lost profit simply by trying to pass the entire cost of the tariff on the consumer ). The store owner would definitely be worse off after the tariff was imposed, as would the consumers who would now be paying $11 for Mets caps rather than $10. And that brings me to the main point I'm trying to make; tariffs hurt almost everybody. They hurt both retails and consumers, not to mention anyone in the import/export business. They only people who are helped by tariffs are the people in the USA who make the product a tariff is being imposed on. However, I would content a lot more people are hurt than are helped by tariffs. Take Trump's steel tariffs for instance. According to Moody's Investor's Services, there are 6.5 millions Americans who work in industries that consume steel, and only 140,000 Americans who work in the steel industry. Not only will these tariffs on steel and aluminum hurt a lot more workers than they will help, but they go against some of basic principals of capitalism the President Trump's party is supposed to be in favor of. Republicans have historically believed that the government should leave private businesses alone, but tariffs do the opposite of that. When a government imposes a tariff, it is picking winners and losers in the economy instead of letting the invisible hand of the market choose winners and losers. Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs are making winners out pf American steel and aluminum companies, and making losers out of the auto industry, beverage companies, and all other American industries that benefit by getting imported steel and aluminum at low prices. For that reason, I'm sure Ayn Rand's long-lost grandson Paul Ryan hates the idea of these steel and aluminum tariffs, but he'll ultimately cave-in and support Trump's tariff policies, because like almost all Republicans he'd rather abandon his principles to support a terrible Trump policy than face the wrath of Trump-loving voters in a Republican primary.
This is unfortunate, because if enough Republicans in Congress found the political courage to do so, they could team up with Democrats to take Trump's power to impose tariffs away I should emphasize that if Congress did take action to reduce the power of the president to impose tariff, it would not just affect President Trump, but all future presidents. This would be a good thing, because something that could affect as American lives as tariffs should not be in the hands of a single person. I know that very few ( if any ) Republicans read my blog posts on a regular basis, but if you are a Republican or are a constituent of a Republican member of the House or Senate, please considering letting that congressperson know you believe Trump's tariffs are a terrible idea for our country. I know it probably won't any difference at all, but there's zero chance these tariffs will be stopped if Republicans don't speak out against it. C'mon, there are probably more Republicans who believe in free trade than Democrats who do, so if these tariffs are going to be stopped, its the Republicans who are going to have to do it.
Rich
In any case, the bottom line is that tariffs on a given product will generally increase the amount of money an importer will have to spend to acquire a given amount of that product. If the importer needs to pay more for the product, retailers generally need to pay more for the product, and most people would argue that this mean the cost of a tariff is ultimately passed on to the consumer.
In fact, the argument that "tariffs are passed on the consumer" is the most common argument I've heard from people who are opposed to tariffs. However, while this is certainly an argument I would often make against tariffs, I don't want the make a blanket statement that the costs of tariffs are always passed down to the consumer, because I can think of scenarios where this might not be true. I say that because a retailer will not always respond to rising expenses by raising prices.
One of the most simple examples of this how the owners of sports teams set ticket prices. For years, I've heard sports fan blame the players for rising ticket prices. They'll say something like, "If those greedy players didn't demand such high salaries, ticket prices wouldn't be so high." However, that's simply not true. Consider what would happen if the the salaries of all baseball players, were magically reduced by 90%. Would the baseball owners cut ticket prices by 90%? Would the baseball owners cut ticket prices by even 1%. No, they wouldn't, because there would be no rational reason for the baseball owners to give up any revenue. Sports team set ticket prices to maximize revenue. They will try to maximize revenue regardless of how high or low their expenses are. More specifically, they try to set their ticket prices in such a way to maximizes the value of ticket revenue in the following formula ...
Ticket Revenue = (Average Ticket Price) x (Number of Tickets Sold)
Clearly, lowering the Average Ticket Price ( ATP ) will raise the Number of Tickets Sold ( NTS ) and raising the ATP will lower the NTS. So, teams simply can't raise ticket revenue by raising ticket prices. There are times that raising ticket prices might reduce ticket sales so much that ticket revenue would fall. Conversely, there are times that reducing ticket prices might boost ticket sales so much that ticket revenue would increase. My point here is that sports team probably employ groups of really smart people to figure out the optimal ticket prices to maximize revenue, and those people have no reason to take player salaries into account, because the process of maximizing ticket revenue has nothing to do with the expense of player salaries.
Just like rising player salaries don't lead to high ticket prices, tariffs that lead to higher costs for retailers won't always lead to higher prices for consumers. However, they usually will, because retailer need to focus on the total profit they make from sales rather than the total revenue. For example, let's say a New York store owner sells 100 Mets caps a month at a price of $10. Well, in this case, the store makes $1000 in revenue from Mets caps each month. Let's say the owner is aware of market research that suggest that the store could sell 200 Mets caps a month if the price dropped to $7.50 per cat. While dropping the price of the cap to $7.50 would raise the revenue to $1500 a month, it may not be a good idea. If it cost the store owner $8 to get each Mets cap, then dropping the retail price of the cap to $7.50 would obviously be a terrible idea, because the store owner would be losing 50 cents for each hat sold. So while owner of sports teams try to set prices in a way that will maximize revenue, retailers try to set prices to maximize profit made for each product is a given amount of time. In other words, a retailer tries to maximize Profit from Product in the formula below ....
Profit from Product =
( (Retail Price of Product) - (Cost of Product to Retailer) ) * ( Units of Product Sold )
A tariff on a product will almost always increase the "Cost of Product to Retailer" for a given product. In the absence of any change in the retail price of the product, an increase in the cost of he product to the retailer will decrease the profit for the retailer. In most cases, the retailer will increase the retail price in order to get back some of the lost profit, but this won't always be the case. It's possible that the consumers of the product might be very sensitive to any price change. It's possible that even a tiny increase in the price of the product might push consumers to by a similar yet cheaper product. In that case, the retailer might not have any choice but to keep the price of the product the same and accept the lower profits. Conversely, it might be the case that the product is something that consumers find essential and many would be willing to pay more for. In that case, retailers could increase the retail price of a product after a tariff is imposed on it and make more profit than they would have made by keeping the retail price of the product static.
In any case, I'm not quite sure why I spent all this time writing about why tariffs won't necessarly lead to higher prices for consumers ( aside from the fact that I've always been annoyed by people who blame high-paid athletes for high ticket prices, and I wanted to prove them wrong ) because I'm undermining my position that tariffs will usually lead to higher prices. It will usually make sense for a retailer to raise prices after a tariff raises their costs, because when profit margins are low ( which they often are in retail ), the profit-per-unit gained by raising prices after a tariff will outweigh the profits lost by losing sales. For example, consider the example of the Mets cap I brought up earlier. If the 100 caps are sold a month at a price of $10 and each cap cost the store 8 dollars to acquire, the store would be making $200 a month of profit on the Mets caps. If a tariff is placed on Mets caps ( I know that's a stretch, but if Rudy Giuliani's campaign for president has been successful 10 years ago, and I guarantee you there would have been tariffs on Mets everything, regardless of whether the items were imported or not. ) and the cost of Mets caps for retailers becomes $9 after a tariff, the store owner's profits on Mets caps would drop to $100 a month if the retail price of the Mets cap was not changed. In this case, I think the owner could expect profits to go up if the retail price of the Mets cap was raise from $10 to $11, because raising the price to $11 dollars would double the per-cap profit from $1 to $2, and it is unlikely that sales of the cap would drop more than 50% if the retail price was raised from $10 to $11. Even if raising the price of the Mets cap from $10 to $11 dollars made sales go down by 40%, the store owner would make $120 dollars a month on Mets caps ( $2 profit/cap x 60 caps/month ) verses the $100 a month on Mets cap ( $1 profit/cap x 100 caps/month ) the store owner would have made if the retail price of the caps had remained at $10.
Still a profit of $120 a month isn't as good as the pre-tariff profit of $200 a month ( nor would a profit of $198 a month be as good as $200 a month if sales of Mets caps caps had only fallen to 99 caps a month after the retail price of the cap was raised to $11. I think it reasonable to expect some loss in sales for any price increase, so the store owner would not be able to recoup lost profit simply by trying to pass the entire cost of the tariff on the consumer ). The store owner would definitely be worse off after the tariff was imposed, as would the consumers who would now be paying $11 for Mets caps rather than $10. And that brings me to the main point I'm trying to make; tariffs hurt almost everybody. They hurt both retails and consumers, not to mention anyone in the import/export business. They only people who are helped by tariffs are the people in the USA who make the product a tariff is being imposed on. However, I would content a lot more people are hurt than are helped by tariffs. Take Trump's steel tariffs for instance. According to Moody's Investor's Services, there are 6.5 millions Americans who work in industries that consume steel, and only 140,000 Americans who work in the steel industry. Not only will these tariffs on steel and aluminum hurt a lot more workers than they will help, but they go against some of basic principals of capitalism the President Trump's party is supposed to be in favor of. Republicans have historically believed that the government should leave private businesses alone, but tariffs do the opposite of that. When a government imposes a tariff, it is picking winners and losers in the economy instead of letting the invisible hand of the market choose winners and losers. Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs are making winners out pf American steel and aluminum companies, and making losers out of the auto industry, beverage companies, and all other American industries that benefit by getting imported steel and aluminum at low prices. For that reason, I'm sure Ayn Rand's long-lost grandson Paul Ryan hates the idea of these steel and aluminum tariffs, but he'll ultimately cave-in and support Trump's tariff policies, because like almost all Republicans he'd rather abandon his principles to support a terrible Trump policy than face the wrath of Trump-loving voters in a Republican primary.
This is unfortunate, because if enough Republicans in Congress found the political courage to do so, they could team up with Democrats to take Trump's power to impose tariffs away I should emphasize that if Congress did take action to reduce the power of the president to impose tariff, it would not just affect President Trump, but all future presidents. This would be a good thing, because something that could affect as American lives as tariffs should not be in the hands of a single person. I know that very few ( if any ) Republicans read my blog posts on a regular basis, but if you are a Republican or are a constituent of a Republican member of the House or Senate, please considering letting that congressperson know you believe Trump's tariffs are a terrible idea for our country. I know it probably won't any difference at all, but there's zero chance these tariffs will be stopped if Republicans don't speak out against it. C'mon, there are probably more Republicans who believe in free trade than Democrats who do, so if these tariffs are going to be stopped, its the Republicans who are going to have to do it.
Rich
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Guns Again
I've written about a mass shooting at least once before in the past, but I haven't written about it in many years, because frankly, it's a depressing thing to write about, and the aftermath of each incident always plays out in the same depressingly predictable way; parents and friends of the victims call for more gun control, Democrats and liberals echo those calls, the NRA and Republicans oppose any gun control, blame the mental health of shooter ( if the shooter is white ) or call for more immigration restrictions ( if the shooter is an immigrant ) , and suggest that more guns ( in the hand of "good guys ) are the answer to the underlying problem of mass shootings. In the end, Congress takes no action, the NRA receives more donations, gun sales go up, and the next mass shooting in just around the corner.
Just about all of that happened after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting ( with the one extra element of the GOP blaming the FBI, because the GOP has been anti-FBI since the FBI started to investigate Donald Trump ), but something else has happened too. The fellow students of the Stoneman Douglas victims have started to organize in a way the families/friends of mass shooting victims have never organized before. It is easy to be cynical about the chances these kids have to make any lasting impact on the gun debate in the USA, but one can't deny that some unprecedented progress has been made in the last week. Until a week or so ago, most people were not aware that lots of companies offer NRA discounts, much in the way companies offer AAA discounts. Thanks to these Stoneman Douglas kids, many more people became aware of these NRA discounts, voiced there displeasure to these companies, and many of these companies ended their NRA discount programs.* For example, last week I learned that every major rental car company offered NRA discounts, and now all of them are ending their NRA discount programs. I know that may seem like a really small thing, but it could potentially be one of first steps forward in changing the gun culture in America. When all those companies ended their NRA discounts, they were well aware that they would be alienating the NRA and many members of the NRA. They knew they were risking losing the business of NRA members. However, they are apparently believed that the risk of losing the business of people who despise the NRA was greater than the risk of losing the business of NRA members. In other words, these companies were more afraid of gun control advocates than they were of the NRA. If we can get members of Congress to feel the same way, we can really start to make progress in the fight for gun control in this country.
Of course, it could still be a long time before we can get Congress to feel the same way, because GOP members of congress seem to joined at the hip with the toxic narratives put forward by the NRA after every one of these mass shootings. I'd like to spend a little bit of time addressing some of those narratives.
"Guns don't kill people; people kill people"
I can't deny that if somebody wants to kill another person, there are plenty of ways to do it. Somebody could build a bomb, or stab a person, or start driving on the sidewalk to run down people. However, while there are many ways to kill a lot of people, there really isn't an easier way to kill a lot of people than by using a semi-automatic assault weapon. Building a bomb takes technical knowledge most people don't have, a knife or sword can't be used to kill people from distance, and a car is a tool that is not designed to murder people. A car could be used to murder lots of people if enough people are in close proximity, but the main purpose of a car is transportation. The main purpose of an assault weapon is to kill many things in a short amount of time. Yes, people do kill people, but with that in mind, why they hell would we every want to make it easier for people to kill other people?
"The real problem is mental illness, not guns"
This argument always makes me think of a cartoon I saw taped to one of my professor's door back in my college days. The cartoon had two panels. The first panel had the title "Crazy person with a gun", and showed a crazy-eyed man with an assault weapon firing multiple shots. The second panel has the title "Crazy person without a gun", and showed a crazy-eyed man with his fingers in the shape of a gun shouting "BANG! BANG! BANG!".
"If you outlaw guns, only the outlaws will have guns"
Well, first of all, most people in favor of gun control are not in favor of outlawing all guns. Many gun control advocates would like assault weapons like AR-15s banned. Presented with that fact, I think that many advocates for gun rights might responds with a quote like "If you outlaw AR-15s, only outlaws will have AR-15s". However that revised quote would not be accurate either, because if AR-15s were outlawed, police SWAT teams and the armed forces would still have access to AR-15s and guns with far more firepower than AR-15s.". I know that some people feel they need an AR-15 for home-protection, but feel like guns like that should be left in the hands of trained professionals ( I'll comment more on this in the "good guy with a gun" section below ).
The second point I want to make here is that every single illegal gun on the street was originally a legal gun ( There could be an extremely rare exception of a criminal who crafts guns from scratch, but c'mon, I don't see why a criminal would do that when so many gun are in circulation ). A certain percentage of legal guns manufactured get bought/sold/stolen illegally and become illegal guns. If the gun industry keeps manufacturinglegal guns at the pace they are making them, there will inevitably be more illegal guns on the street. Outlawing sales of assault weapons to civilians won't take assault weapons out of the hands of criminal, but it help dry up the supply of illegal assault weapons for criminals. Why wouldn't we want to dry up the supply of illegal assault weapons and give our law enforcement officers ( who would still have legal access to assault weapons ) a fighting chance?
"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
We've been hearing variations of this one a lot lately. People have called for arming school security guards, and Donald Trump has suggested that school shootings could be prevented by arming a certain percentage of teachers.
There are so many problems with the "good guy with a gun" idea, that I barely know where to begin.
Let me start by conceding there are certain isolated scenarios in which a teacher or a security guard with a gun could save the lives of students. For example, if a teacher and students were cornered by a school shooter, and there was no way to escape, I'm sure that a teacher with a gun would have a better chance to save students than a teacher without a gun. However, the benefit of having guns for self-defense in schools in that very specific scenario is far outweighed by the dangers posed by having guns in schools on a daily basis.
While an armed teacher or a security guard could potentially save students in a school shooting situation, it is far more likely that the "good guy with a gun" is going to wind up getting more people killed. If you look up statistics on "friendly fire" in the military or statistics on shooting accuracy for police ( This study indicates that police only hit their targets 18% of the time in a gunfight ), you'll see that even trained professions have a hard time hitting their targets in high stress situations. In a school shooting situations, it is reasonable to expect that teachers or security guards wielding guns would have terrible accuracy. There is a great chance that more children would die in the crossfire if a teacher or security guard tried to play Rambo, and even a greater chance that a teacher or security guard trying to be a hero would be gunned down by the first police officer who saw them wandering the halls with a gun in a school shooting scenario.
In addition to the issues that would be introduced by additional gun-firing individuals in a school shooting situation, having guns in schools on a daily basis will almost certainly lead to additional shooting incidents in schools. Teachers and security guards are human being with human flaws. They have the potential to lose their temper or become mentally unstable. There also have the potential to get an "itchy trigger finger" and shoot people when they mistake minor problems for serious threats. There are already far too many unarmed people shot each year by trained law enforcement professionals. I'd hate to think about how many people could be shot in schools by teacher of security guards who are asked to "play cop" without the training a cop receives.
I hear the next two narratives a lot when a Democrat happens to be in a Oval Office. For the next two narratives, I'm going to address the people who hold these view directly in blue text.
"I need guns to protect me from government tyranny"
The federal government has far more powerful guns than the ones you might have stashed in your basement. The federal government also has tanks, fighter jets, Apache Helicopters, drones, and various bombs and missiles at its disposal. Your private stash of guns is not going to be able to protect you from any of that. If the federal governments wants to impose their will on you, you will not be able to stop. If the federal government wanted you dead, you would have been dead yesterday. When it comes to stopping tyranny, a ballot in your hand is a far more effective tool than a gun in your hand..
"I'll give ups my guns when the President gives up his Secret Service protection"
The President needs armed Secret Service protection because there are millions of people all over the world who would like to kill him.
Nobody wants to murder your sorry ass.
"The government can't regulate my guns because of the 2nd Amendment"
2nd Amendment : A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Rich
* I don't know if any of the Stoneman Douglas kids were directly responsible for spreading the word about NRA discount programs, but I'm sure that information would not been publicized last week if the Stoneman Douglas kids had not shined a light on the NRA.
Just about all of that happened after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting ( with the one extra element of the GOP blaming the FBI, because the GOP has been anti-FBI since the FBI started to investigate Donald Trump ), but something else has happened too. The fellow students of the Stoneman Douglas victims have started to organize in a way the families/friends of mass shooting victims have never organized before. It is easy to be cynical about the chances these kids have to make any lasting impact on the gun debate in the USA, but one can't deny that some unprecedented progress has been made in the last week. Until a week or so ago, most people were not aware that lots of companies offer NRA discounts, much in the way companies offer AAA discounts. Thanks to these Stoneman Douglas kids, many more people became aware of these NRA discounts, voiced there displeasure to these companies, and many of these companies ended their NRA discount programs.* For example, last week I learned that every major rental car company offered NRA discounts, and now all of them are ending their NRA discount programs. I know that may seem like a really small thing, but it could potentially be one of first steps forward in changing the gun culture in America. When all those companies ended their NRA discounts, they were well aware that they would be alienating the NRA and many members of the NRA. They knew they were risking losing the business of NRA members. However, they are apparently believed that the risk of losing the business of people who despise the NRA was greater than the risk of losing the business of NRA members. In other words, these companies were more afraid of gun control advocates than they were of the NRA. If we can get members of Congress to feel the same way, we can really start to make progress in the fight for gun control in this country.
Of course, it could still be a long time before we can get Congress to feel the same way, because GOP members of congress seem to joined at the hip with the toxic narratives put forward by the NRA after every one of these mass shootings. I'd like to spend a little bit of time addressing some of those narratives.
"Guns don't kill people; people kill people"
I can't deny that if somebody wants to kill another person, there are plenty of ways to do it. Somebody could build a bomb, or stab a person, or start driving on the sidewalk to run down people. However, while there are many ways to kill a lot of people, there really isn't an easier way to kill a lot of people than by using a semi-automatic assault weapon. Building a bomb takes technical knowledge most people don't have, a knife or sword can't be used to kill people from distance, and a car is a tool that is not designed to murder people. A car could be used to murder lots of people if enough people are in close proximity, but the main purpose of a car is transportation. The main purpose of an assault weapon is to kill many things in a short amount of time. Yes, people do kill people, but with that in mind, why they hell would we every want to make it easier for people to kill other people?
"The real problem is mental illness, not guns"
This argument always makes me think of a cartoon I saw taped to one of my professor's door back in my college days. The cartoon had two panels. The first panel had the title "Crazy person with a gun", and showed a crazy-eyed man with an assault weapon firing multiple shots. The second panel has the title "Crazy person without a gun", and showed a crazy-eyed man with his fingers in the shape of a gun shouting "BANG! BANG! BANG!".
"If you outlaw guns, only the outlaws will have guns"
Well, first of all, most people in favor of gun control are not in favor of outlawing all guns. Many gun control advocates would like assault weapons like AR-15s banned. Presented with that fact, I think that many advocates for gun rights might responds with a quote like "If you outlaw AR-15s, only outlaws will have AR-15s". However that revised quote would not be accurate either, because if AR-15s were outlawed, police SWAT teams and the armed forces would still have access to AR-15s and guns with far more firepower than AR-15s.". I know that some people feel they need an AR-15 for home-protection, but feel like guns like that should be left in the hands of trained professionals ( I'll comment more on this in the "good guy with a gun" section below ).
The second point I want to make here is that every single illegal gun on the street was originally a legal gun ( There could be an extremely rare exception of a criminal who crafts guns from scratch, but c'mon, I don't see why a criminal would do that when so many gun are in circulation ). A certain percentage of legal guns manufactured get bought/sold/stolen illegally and become illegal guns. If the gun industry keeps manufacturinglegal guns at the pace they are making them, there will inevitably be more illegal guns on the street. Outlawing sales of assault weapons to civilians won't take assault weapons out of the hands of criminal, but it help dry up the supply of illegal assault weapons for criminals. Why wouldn't we want to dry up the supply of illegal assault weapons and give our law enforcement officers ( who would still have legal access to assault weapons ) a fighting chance?
"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
We've been hearing variations of this one a lot lately. People have called for arming school security guards, and Donald Trump has suggested that school shootings could be prevented by arming a certain percentage of teachers.
There are so many problems with the "good guy with a gun" idea, that I barely know where to begin.
Let me start by conceding there are certain isolated scenarios in which a teacher or a security guard with a gun could save the lives of students. For example, if a teacher and students were cornered by a school shooter, and there was no way to escape, I'm sure that a teacher with a gun would have a better chance to save students than a teacher without a gun. However, the benefit of having guns for self-defense in schools in that very specific scenario is far outweighed by the dangers posed by having guns in schools on a daily basis.
While an armed teacher or a security guard could potentially save students in a school shooting situation, it is far more likely that the "good guy with a gun" is going to wind up getting more people killed. If you look up statistics on "friendly fire" in the military or statistics on shooting accuracy for police ( This study indicates that police only hit their targets 18% of the time in a gunfight ), you'll see that even trained professions have a hard time hitting their targets in high stress situations. In a school shooting situations, it is reasonable to expect that teachers or security guards wielding guns would have terrible accuracy. There is a great chance that more children would die in the crossfire if a teacher or security guard tried to play Rambo, and even a greater chance that a teacher or security guard trying to be a hero would be gunned down by the first police officer who saw them wandering the halls with a gun in a school shooting scenario.
In addition to the issues that would be introduced by additional gun-firing individuals in a school shooting situation, having guns in schools on a daily basis will almost certainly lead to additional shooting incidents in schools. Teachers and security guards are human being with human flaws. They have the potential to lose their temper or become mentally unstable. There also have the potential to get an "itchy trigger finger" and shoot people when they mistake minor problems for serious threats. There are already far too many unarmed people shot each year by trained law enforcement professionals. I'd hate to think about how many people could be shot in schools by teacher of security guards who are asked to "play cop" without the training a cop receives.
I hear the next two narratives a lot when a Democrat happens to be in a Oval Office. For the next two narratives, I'm going to address the people who hold these view directly in blue text.
"I need guns to protect me from government tyranny"
The federal government has far more powerful guns than the ones you might have stashed in your basement. The federal government also has tanks, fighter jets, Apache Helicopters, drones, and various bombs and missiles at its disposal. Your private stash of guns is not going to be able to protect you from any of that. If the federal governments wants to impose their will on you, you will not be able to stop. If the federal government wanted you dead, you would have been dead yesterday. When it comes to stopping tyranny, a ballot in your hand is a far more effective tool than a gun in your hand..
"I'll give ups my guns when the President gives up his Secret Service protection"
The President needs armed Secret Service protection because there are millions of people all over the world who would like to kill him.
Nobody wants to murder your sorry ass.
"The government can't regulate my guns because of the 2nd Amendment"
2nd Amendment : A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Rich
* I don't know if any of the Stoneman Douglas kids were directly responsible for spreading the word about NRA discount programs, but I'm sure that information would not been publicized last week if the Stoneman Douglas kids had not shined a light on the NRA.
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
What is America?
I've been writing at least one blog post a month for nearly a decade now, and it has generally been a joy to write each post. However, that has really changed over the last year. I like to write stuff related to current events, but current events have just been so damned dreary lately. With that in mind, I've decided to write about something positive this month. So instead of commenting on current events this month, I'm just going to attempt to answer the question below.
What is America?
Before attempting to answer this question, let me make it clear that in the context of this question, "America" represents the United States of America.
So, that being said, in the most literal sense, one could define America to simply be the land mass consisting of the 50 states. However, I've never considered America to be defined by its territory, or the by people who live within its boarders at any given time. I've always considered America to be an idea.
America is the idea that anyone in the world can be an American. Well, I guess that's not entirely true, but to paraphrase Anton Ego, not everyone can become an American, but a great American can come from anywhere. I know a lot of people in Trump's America believe immigration dilutes America's greatness, but I believe immigration is the engine that drives American greatness. I feel that nobody is more American than somebody who is willing to uproot their lives in another country to come to America. Natural born American citizens often take citizenship for granted because they never made a conscious choice to be American. I'm not saying that natural born American don't love America, but is it a different kind of love than the love immigrants have. A natural born American loves America the way a child loves a parent. An American immigrant loves America with the kind of passion one might feel for a sweetheart. I'm not saying that people who were born in the USA don't love their native country deeply, but the love you choose always comes with more passion. For our country to stay strong, we need new immigrants that have a passion for the country they chose.
I firmly believe that other the nations with largely homogeneous populations and cultures will never be able to match the the greatness of America's diverse population. As long as the United States continues to encourage a diverse population of immigrants to come to the USA, the United States will be drawing from a larger talent pool than the rest of the world. When a difficult problems needs to be solved, Germany can tackle that problem with the most talented German people, Japan can tackle that problem with the most talented Japanese people, India can tackle the problem with the most talented Indian people, and China can tackle the problem with the most talented Chinese people. However, America can tackle the problem with talented and daring immigrants who came from Germany, Japan, India, and China, along with native born Americans and immigrants from many other nations. There's a reason why Americans' keep winning Noble Prizes and that a disproportionate number of those Nobel Prize winners are America immigrants.
I also believe that America means the opportunity to achieve one's dreams. America doesn't always live up to the ideal of the America Dream ( consider how much discrimination there is and how much the laws favor the wealthy ), but the ideal is something the nation should always be striving for.
I know a lot of people who think we need to "Make America Great Again" ( MAGA ), don't agree with my definition of America or Americans. The "again" in MAGA implies that our nation's greatness lies in our past, while I believe that it lies in our future. Those who believe in MAGA feel that our nation will become less great if it becomes less Christian, less English-speaking, and less connected to Western culture ( which for some, means less white ). They feel that an America full of non-Christian, non-English-speaking, and non-Western people won't be America anymore. I couldn't disagree more. If America evolves into a largely Spanish-speaking nation in which white English-speaking Christian people are a distinct minority, it will still be America if the it lives up to the ideals or opportunity, freedom, and inclusiveness. If we are still a democratic nation in which political parties can argue the issues of the day without fear of repercussions from the government, we will still be America, regardless of the language the politicians are arguing in. If people are still free to worship ( or not worship ) they way they please, we will still be America regardless of whether most people are praying in a church, a mosque, a synagogue, or a temple. I'd agree with "Make America Great Again", if they dropped the "Again", and added an "er". I would hope that's something we could all agree with. We should all want to "Make America Greater". However, America won't became greater just because we want it to. It is going to take a lot of work, and we are not going to be able to do it until all of us are willing to work together. Those who want to shun our newest wave of immigrants would should remember our nation's founding motto.
E pluribus unum ( Out of many, one )
Rich
Saturday, December 30, 2017
The Republican Gerrymander Bomb
In a few days, 2018 will be upon us, and before long we'll start seeing ads for the 2018 elections. While a lot of liberals are excited about the Democrats' chance to take back control of Congress, other liberal insists that Democrats chances are doomed because of Republican gerrymandering. The naysayers feel gerrymandering efforts by Republican-controlled state legislatures have created so many safe Republican congressional districts, that it will be nearly impossible for Democrats to take control of Congress.
If you look at the latest congressional generic ballot, you'll see that Democrats currently ( as of 12/29/17 ) have a 12.9% advantage over Republicans.
You can click here for the most recent generic ballot results.
Of course, these generic polls are no guarantee that the Democrats will have such a large advantage come Election Day 2018, but I think there is a very good chance that the Democrats will be able to win a lot of those "fairly safe" Republican districts that were created by gerrymandering. The Republicans may think their gerrymandering efforts will ensure that they'll keep control of the House of Representatives for years to come, but I think they are sitting on a gerrymander bomb that is about to go off in 2018.
Rich
Well, I'm here to tell you that those naysayers are wrong. I believe that these Republican gerrymandering efforts will lead to a huge Democratic wave in 2018.
Why? Well, let me start by reviewing what gerrymandering can or cannot do for a political party.
Gerrymandering CAN be used to make legislative districts more safe for a political party.
Gerrymandering CAN be used to help a political party win more legislative districts.
Gerrymandering CAN be used to help a political party win more legislative districts.
However, gerrymandering CANNOT be used to help a political party win more districts AND make districts more safe. It's mathematically impossible to accomplish both these goals at the same time.
I'll illustrate this by going over a few theoretical examples. For these examples, we'll assume that there are 10 districts, and 1,000,000 voters, and that the Republican party has the power to gerrymander these 10 districts any way they want. Based on those parameters, let's look over a few scenarios.
Scenario 1 : Gerrymandering to make districts more safe.
Let's say that in an average year, the vote totals in these 10 districts are approximately the following:
So, in a normal year, the GOP wins 5 districts by 5 points and loses 5 districts by 5 points, and the GOP wins 50% of the overall vote. However, let's say the GOP becomes aware that upcoming election will be far from normal and that Democrats are expected win about 55% of the vote on average and thus win a normal even district by 10 points. In that case we would expect that 550,000 total votes would be cast for Democrats and 450,000 total votes would be cast for Republicans. If this happened, and the GOP did not try to gerrymander these districts, we would expect the vote to go this way ...
... and the GOP would lose all 10 districts.
However, the GOP could prevent this loss of 5 districts by gerrymander the districts. For example, the GOP could gerrymander these 10 districts in a such a way, that in a normal year ( when there are an equal number of GOP votes and DEM votes ), the election results would be as follows ...
So, in this scenario, GOP gerrymandering has turned districts 1 - 5 into "safe" Republican districts in which a Republican would be expected to win by 15 points in an average year. In a year in which Democrats were expected to have a 10 point advantage over Republicans, we would expect the election results to go this way in the gerrymandered districts ...
So, in this scenario, gerrymandering would help Republicans keep control of half of the districts, even though Democrats won 55% of the total vote.
The gerrymandering I've described here is what I like to call defensive gerrymandering.
The gerrymandering I've described here is what I like to call defensive gerrymandering.
Scenario 2 : Gerrymandering to win more districts.
Let's say that in the area covered by 10 districts, the Republicans win 54% of the vote in an average year. The population is spread across these 10 districts in such a way that Republicans usually win 6 out of the 10 districts.
In this scenario, the GOP decides to gerrymander these 10 districts in such a way, that they will win each of these 10 districts by about 54% to 46% in an average year.
This is what I like to call offensive gerrymandering. The Republican Party has been using offensive gerrymandering quite a bit over the last decade to help win extra seats in the House of Representatives. However, as is illustrated in the two tables above, the GOP gerrymandering effort has turned 6 extremely safe districts into 10 fairly safe districts. That's great for a GOP in a typical, year, but in an election cycle in which the Democrats are much more popular that Republicans, "fairly safe" districts are no longer safe at all. In the gerrymandered scenario above, if the national electorate swings more than 8 points in the Democrats' direction, the Democrats could potentially win all 10 of the districts above.
If you look at the latest congressional generic ballot, you'll see that Democrats currently ( as of 12/29/17 ) have a 12.9% advantage over Republicans.
You can click here for the most recent generic ballot results.
Of course, these generic polls are no guarantee that the Democrats will have such a large advantage come Election Day 2018, but I think there is a very good chance that the Democrats will be able to win a lot of those "fairly safe" Republican districts that were created by gerrymandering. The Republicans may think their gerrymandering efforts will ensure that they'll keep control of the House of Representatives for years to come, but I think they are sitting on a gerrymander bomb that is about to go off in 2018.
Rich
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)