I strongly believe that legislators need a huge raise. They currently make $31,140 per year for what is at least a full-time job. Per-diem can bump this up a bit, but it’s still not enough considering the amount of work they do: if the state of Minnesota were a company, its revenues would be about the same as companies like Kohl’s and Whirlpool. Considering that legislators are in session for one half of the year, and they have plenty of opportunities for legislative work the other half, they have to give up pretty much give up any existing full-time job to be a legislator. This is a very tough thing to do, which is why so many legislators have jobs where being absent for half the year is easier.

No, what I don’t like about this amendment is a special hatred I have for that mythical bugaboo the “Non-partisan commission”. Every time I see a proposal to take some contentious debate out of the hands of legislators – be it pay, redistricting, or what have you — and put in the hands of commissions, I want to pull my hair out. There is no such thing as “non-partisan”. Every home, every workplace, every organization is political. What you get with “non-partisan” commissions is a lack of team uniforms: you don’t know who is on which side. Rest assured, however, that they are on a side. At least when legislators are debating, you know who is doing what and you can hold them directly accountable. How do constituents hold non-partisan commissions responsible?

I understand why the legislature is taking this route: who would want to be the subject of countless investigative news stories about how they are voting themselves more money? Even so, consider this: the legislature just took a very hard stand in favor of expanding our rights (and that’s something I would have happily voted for in an amendment). How hard can it really be to convince the public you need a raise?

• Current Mood: Stormy
• Currently Listening To: "Wild Thing", Jimi Hendrix

But a funny thing happen: they blew the roof. And now what do we have? Well, half of Congress thinks that the roof was wasteful to begin with. The other half thinks that as long as they have a tarp over their room, it’s all good.

Thus, it is clear, that as a governing tactic, the sequestration has been an utter failure. The whole point was to make the pain so great to both sides (defense spending cuts for Republicans, social program cuts for Democrats) that neither side would want to go over. So what happened? Turns out the majority of the Republican caucus in Congress is happy to throw defense spending out the window. And Democrats are so milquetoast that FAA delays will cause them to buckle, but cuts to Head Start won’t. So we have pain all around, and Congress willing to do nothing unless it affects them personally.

As a tactic it was bad, but as an overall governance strategy it’s worse. Because this presages the next round: no budget deal unless the debt ceiling can be taken hostage again. So we’ll have more uncertainty, more chaos, and more stupid policy. Because Ted Cruz!

I ascribe most of the blame here to Republicans: they are insisting on a tax posture that is unsustainable given our commitments to retiring Baby Boomers. It’s that simple. Nevertheless, Democrats have been A+ enablers every step of the way, including President Obama for signing that FAA funding bill.

As for those people who claim that the lack of more widespread fallout from the sequester proves that government spending is too high, well, I can cut off 5% of your body, perhaps your hand, and you’ll live. But that sure doesn’t prove you weren’t using it before.

• Current Mood: Stormy
• Currently Listening To: "Tonight, Tonight", The Smashing Pumpkins

I bought a new 1TB drive and successfully used Clonezilla to copy the data from the old drive to the new one. Clonezilla isn’t sophisticated enough to allow you to input new partition sizes when you clone from a smaller drive to a larger drive; it simply increases the partition sized proportionally. Since my new drive was four times bigger than my old, all the partitions were four times bigger. That was perfectly fine with me. However, once I rebooted from my new drive, the two non-system partitions showed the right size, but my C drive did not: it showed the old size.

I did some Googling and many sites said it was an error with the Host-Protected Area (HPA). A couple utilities were available to try to “fix” it, but they were unclear and didn’t seem to fix the problem. At that point, I stumbled across another solution: using gparted to update the partition table.

I grabbed my old Ubuntu live CD, booted from it, and used gparted to make a slight change to the C partition: I shrunk it a bit, applied the changes, then put it back to it’s correct size. After booting, voilà! It was finally showing the correct size.

So the TL;DR is this: if you clone a drive to a larger one and it is showing the wrong size in Windows, use gparted to change it slightly and then change it back. All will be well.

• Current Mood: Headache
• Currently Listening To: "Let Down", Radiohead
• Currently Reading: "Brave New World", Aldous Huxley

To tell you the truth, I don’t remember all that much about it, being something like 15 years ago. Having gone to a Catholic school, there was no issue with the fact that Stenzel’s presentation is explicitly religious: we were going to have to attend whether we wanted to or not (if you want to hear what it’s about, just use the Google). Based on this news story and what I remember of the presentation, she really hasn’t changed her spiel very much. It really is little more than polished slut-shaming. The good thing is that I remember my friends and I generally dismissed it as a bunch of nonsense, because that’s what it is: the belief that adults are incapable of having healthy sexual relationships outside of marriage.

Unfortunately, despite the fairly obvious ridiculousness of the presentation, there is an insidious undercurrent that runs through a great deal of these kinds of teachings. So much so that, even though the claims that condoms don’t work were very easy to dismiss as hogwash, the overall antagonistic and guilty view of relationships was another brick in the way that quite honestly distorted my views of what healthy relationships looked like for many years afterwards.

A huge part of the reason I don’t consider myself religious is precisely because of this message. It’s hard to reconcile messages from, for example, the Christian Social Justice class we took, with the belief that making sexual health choices is sinful, an example of your base animalistic nature, or proof that your parents hate you. Talking down to young adults who are capable of knowing better isn’t just a terrible way to make your point, it’ can make people feel incredibly uncomfortable, which isn’t exactly the point of religious beliefs.

Fortunately, with the internet and the other resources available these days, it’s much easier to see that yes, when a woman decides to use birth control it doesn’t mean she’s a slut sleeping her way to popularity. After reading stories like these, however, it’s clear that there are still people who put credence in the terrible message that people like Stenzel propagate.

• Current Mood: Friday
• Currently Listening To: "Lucky", Radiohead

Obviously, families are not countries. But in what ways are they different? One obvious explanation for why families can’t perpetually run deficits is that people don’t live forever: if I spend more than I make year after year, piling on more and more debt, eventually I’ll want to retire, or I’ll be fired, or some other event will cause lenders to dry up my credit and the bill will come due. Countries, though, don’t have lifespans, don’t face mandatory retirement, and are otherwise untroubled by the harsh realities of mortality. As long as lenders are around, they can accumulate debt.

“But wait!” one might say. “That’s just debt piling on for our children and grandchildren!” Is it, though? Imagine I came up short $100 every month, but every month, somebody offered to loan me that $100 with the stipulation that I pay $99 back at some point in the future. I could do that pretty much forever. Unrealistic? Not at all: the U.S.’s real interest rates are negative at the moment. People are paying us for the privilege of lending the government money. True, this won’t last forever, but even if interest rates turn positive, as long as income grows faster than interest, we’ll come out ahead. I can pay $102 to borrow $100 now, but if I’m making $103 in a year, I’m still winning.

Okay, so what about cautionary tales like Greece? It’s fine to borrow when interest rates are low, but what if they spike to 7, 10, 15%? That’s incredibly unlikely, since unlike Greece, we control our own currency. We can print more if we want to. And while going crazy with the printing presses isn’t a good idea, moderate inflation can be. This is precisely the reason why the gold standard is such a poor idea: when you can’t control your currency, you have wild swings. When you can control it, you can balance things out. Arguing that the gold standard is better than fiat currency because bad things can happen with fiat money is like arguing people shouldn’t have guns because they can do bad thing with them, which is an argument most goldbugs would have a bit of a problem with.

When you get down to it, deficit scolds are arguing from a point of morality, not of empiricism: Easy money and debt are sinful, as Paul Krugman puts it. And while it may make yourself feel good to argue morality when it comes to budgeting, we need to be reminded time and gain that economics is not a morality play. What matters is what works, not what feels right or wrong.

• Current Mood: Sore
• Currently Listening To: "I Can't Quit You Baby", Led Zeppelin

The most likely explanation is that Obama really, really wants a budget deal. The charitable explanation is that he believes that once there is a deal, Republicans will stop harping about the deficit, taxes, etc. I think that has a probability of less than zero, but there are true believers in the world and he may be one of them. The other explanation is that he knew this would be rejected and would simply make the Republican insistence on no new taxes ever look even worse in the public’s mind. Whether or not this was his intention, it appears to be the current outcome.

Frankly, I think that negotiating with yourself in this manner is far too risky, since there was always the chance that this deal would happen. A small chance, but a chance nonetheless. In reality, what we probably need to do is expand Social Security and Medicare, not cut them. Cutting them gives you the penny-wise, pound-foolish outcome of poorer seniors who can’t retire and spend more money on expensive private health insurance. Not to mention the fact that Republicans will use his offer to claim in 2014 that “Democrats want to cut your Social Security”. Mark my words, it will happen.

One thing that I have learned in years of politics is that Democrats really, really want to get along and do the objectively right thing. While this earnestness can be endearing in some situations, when you are negotiating your core beliefs you have to know when you can compromise, and when you need to let your unreasonable opponents take the fall. Sadly, few elected Democrats take this lesson to heart.

• Current Mood: Friday
• Currently Reading: "Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang", Chelsea Handler

What made it thought-provoking wasn’t the fact that it sounds like a good idea: it’s very obviously a terribly, terribly stupid idea. No, the interesting thing comes from a more meta consideration. Why is an IPO a good idea for a company like Google, but a bad idea for any one individual person working at a place like Google? If IPOs are bad when applied to individuals, how did it come to be that individuals would discover that they can be successfully applied to corporate entities? In other words, where did this idea come from?

The other nugget I pull out of this story is a reminder that market entities like IPOs are just tools. They are not an end in and of themselves, like all market tools. When a market tool fails, you should discard it, not hold onto it for purely dogmatic reasons. That’s something that’s lost on a lot of people as well.

Anyway, just a couple of thoughts for this Thursday night.

• Current Mood: Friday
• Currently Listening To: "Coming Back To You", Leonard Cohen

All the same, progress shouldn’t rely on wishing evil upon others so they get some empathy. I’m glad that so many vehement opponents of Obamacare do not have chronic pre-existing conditions and have not been denied health insurance, and I hope they don’t have to go through that. But is it too much to ask to imagine what it is like for those families that are in that position, and maybe, just maybe, understand that this is the only progress that has existed on this issue for a long time? I’m not even going to get into the empathy for people who have been out of work for long periods of time due to no fault of their own other than living in a depressed economy: the average net worth of our members of Congress indicate that long-term unemployment is not something they have ever had to deal with.

I was raised to think about others and put myself in their shoes. I try to do so, although nobody is perfect. That means that even though I don’t have many issues that face people today, due to a combination of luck and good decisions, I understand that it can still go very differently for me due to things I can’t control. Hopefully, I don’t have to experience every different life possibility to understand how one might get there and how they could feel about it.

• Current Mood: Weekend
• Currently Listening To: "Doolin-Dalton", The Eagles

Let’s start with the standard picture: the overall effective tax rate. Little has changed in the past few years.

Minnesotans are paying about 11½% of their income in taxes, the same since 2000. It is even projected to go down a few ticks in the future.

Next is my favorite graph, that of tax incidence broken down by decile. The same as before, the wealthiest 10% pay a lower share of their income in taxes than the middle class:

No wonder Governor Dayton’s plan to raise taxes on the rich is popular.

There really isn’t much new in this report. Despite all the hemming and hawing over the past several years, the tax situation is mainly status quo in Minnesota.

• Current Mood: Sore
• Currently Listening To: "Love Sick", Bob Dylan

Why treat all programs the same? If a program is good, it should not be cut. If a program provides limited benefits, then it should be eliminated altogether, not given a haircut. The best course of action would be to take a look at the ROI on government spending and start eliminating from the bottom. What prevents this is twofold: first, there is the money that would need to be spent to determine efficacy, as well as decisions around what methodology to use, which are fair points. The other, of course, is that plenty of programs that have a lot of backers would end up on that to-be-cut list; I’m sure ethanol subsidies would look pretty poor from a ROI standpoint, but you can’t be a politician in the Midwest and oppose them.

Across-the-board military cuts? No, let’s eliminate weapons systems and programs that are unnecessary. Across-the-board social spending cuts? No, let’s eliminate duplicative and low-return programs, and may increase spending on the ones with a high return.

Fat chance of that happening, however. It’s politically easier to use a blunt hatchet.

• Current Mood: Snow
• Currently Listening To: "Stray Cat Blues", The Rolling Stones