depth first search

I have a bit of a soft spot for the “Keep Austin Weird” campaign. What can I say? I’m a sucker for loose and mysterious confederations of local people campaigning under a banner of weirdness.

But that sort of begs the question: who’s turning Austin normal?

I came across one answer as I was reading up on the latest counter-proposal for the Cactus Cafe closure over at Student Friends of the Cactus Cafe. That in turn led to a series of Chronicle articles detailing the brutal budget slash and burn that the Union has faced under the direction of Andy Smith.

I guess Andy gets to retire after he’s eliminated everything unique about the Texas Union. Maybe when the Starbucks gets to expand into the gutted corpse of the Catcus Cafe, Andy will get free mocha lattes for life. But first Kinko’s has to take over for the UT print center, and we definitely need some kind of satellite Border’s bookstore.

Only then, Andy, will you have a career you’ll be proud to look back on.

Once I get my paperwork in order, I’ll be an official member of graduate student assembly. Though I’ve committed to avoiding politics on this blog, I’m going to make an exception for the issues tackled by the GSA. I was definitely not a student government type in my previous iterations as a student, but having just returned from my first meeting, I can definitely see the appeal. I’ve become a more political person over the years, so it makes sense that I would enjoy something like this kind of local (microscopic really) representative organization.

The fireworks came at the end of the meeting over the particular wording of a resolution in support of health care for graduate students on fellowships. As a matter of policy, not providing good health insurance options for fellowship students is ridiculous. These are often the better students (though not necessarily — luck plays a part), and they suffer a financial disadvantage (and a corresponding disincentive) over students coming into a program to TA or RA here at UT.

Part of the problem with this situation is that it arises due to global structural problems with health care in this country, and not necessarily bad policy on the part of educational institutions hoping to attract talent. The lack of any individual providers of any quality is a large scale issue being played out in small scales here and elsewhere. I suspect that providing health care to fellowship students is similarly problematic at other institutions, and so UT may not be as at risk of losing good students for this particular reason.

But this kind of argument elides the point that the the private insurance market can’t even support providing quality, value-oriented policies to a minimally risky population of graduate students on fellowship.

UPDATE: I wonder whether the situation is better for students who go overseas or elsewhere. Universities in other countries weren’t really on my radar when I was applying to graduate school (and got a fellowship — and paid for terrible insurance). In retrospect, I know of a few programs that really should have been, and I wonder whether my situation with regards to benefits would have improved had I considered other options. I wonder to what extent parochial world views limit brain drain due to things like insurance at the level of graduate studies.

When I was growing up my parents went through some lengths to make sure that I was well-rounded. The term well-rounded seemed to signify a kind of suburban trivium of sports, music, and various other school activities, though upon repetition, lost any kind of original meaning and because something more like an abstract concept — one that was easier to identify in the negative than as any sort of positive goal.

As I’ve grown older I’ve certainly dropped a lot of hobbies and have been slow in collecting new ones. My interests, perhaps naturally, have narrowed. I have a singular professional goal and a small number of things that I do for fun. However, working to become an expert at a small number of important things is a skill that, how should I say this … I am still trying to develop. I don’t think this is a product of my upbringing, at least not in any superficial sense.

One of the things I, sort of perversely and (a little) narcissistically, continue to do for fun is write blog entries on the web for the benefit of spam bots and perhaps a handful of friends and family. Part of the problem with my blogging is that my entries span a wide gamut from obscure non-general-audience computer science stuff to food/photo blogging for everyone. In between you’ll find the odd book related entry and many entries on politics.

Well-rounded blogs are not as desirable as well-rounded children.

So as an effort to practice trying to sustain a narrow focus, I’m going to cut it out with one category of entries — the entries on politics. This has numerous benefits beyond just improving my own ability to focus. For one, whenever I look back at some politically themed entry I wrote in the past, I feel a small amount of shame. They just aren’t really that good. If I have a point, it’s usually something that seems clever until I come back to it a week later.

[Aside: I'm beginning to believe that part of the problem with political discourse in this country is that there is entirely too much of it. I'm sure that some of my political beliefs are not really the product of rigorous reasoning and more the result of simple repetition.]

Another reason is that there are plenty of good political blogs out there, most attached to money making outfits with some caché and bullpens full of professional supporting staff (or so I imagine). This isn’t really the same wild west environment that prevailed when I started putting words online circa 2000 or so. The wheat has already been separated from the chaff. I know which category I fall into.

So from now on I’ll relegate my left-leaning political sensibilities to shares in the sidebar and the odd Quote of the Day/Twitter. I expect the book/food/photo/CS blogging to continue.

What about the New York Times Op-Ed page turns conservatives into blithering idiots? A movie review? Really? Healthcare, recession, unemployment, and two overseas conflicts and this is what Douthat chooses to write about?

Telling I suppose, in its own peculiar way.

UPDATE: The column seems well received elsewhere. I don’t necessarily agree with these. For starters, it seems kind of dangerous to associate morality plays with a particular ideological stance. It seems tantamount to claiming that the human condition is socially conservative. Really the human condition is just what it is.

If I were a senior enjoying the benefits of a big government run single payer health care system, I would not be protesting against the president’s health care reform agenda. Presumably, a lot of what Medicare provides is mandated by law, and not under the discretionary authority of the executive branch, but as we saw in the last administration, making sure that some key appointments go to incompetent or ideological people can go a long way towards turning a working program into a nightmare.

I’m just saying.

I don’t have anything to add to the debate, which seems to have died down quite a bit. I will say that I’m puzzled by the apparent power dynamics of the entire episode. Presumably the Cambridge Police Department answers to some sort of civil authority, and when an officer wrongly arrests a prominent (and well connected) member of the community, I sort of imagined that (I’m going to be crude) shit from the resulting storm would roll downhill. Instead, there seems to be quite a bit of insulation between the officer involved and the local political power dynamic prevailing in Cambridge.

Maybe Cambridge isn’t the kind of city for back room reprisals. Or maybe the budget for the Cambridge Police Department will be DOA when the next fiscal year rolls around.

I was pleased to find plenty of convincing responses to this piece on health care reform. The only thing I’d add is that a lot of debate about health care seems to involve arguments against approaches that are not actually being considered. You can write a screed against a big single-payer, government run program, but you’d be wasting your time in some sense because, well, such a plan doesn’t really fit in the collection of proposals that can feasibly be passed.

A trickier, and less honest approach is to obfuscate what kind of health care reform you are arguing against in order to disguise the fact that your arguments don’t make a lot of sense in the context of the current policies actually under consideration. Being good at broad, ideological obfuscation should not be a sufficient condition for popular opinion making, but unfortunately it seems to be.

I think this is the most amazing interview on healthcare reform I’ve seen.

Andrew Sullivan posts this comment from a reader:

The economic argument against the public option is simple. Yes, it may reduce monetary outlays, but it will do so by forcing providers to accept prices lower than what they would in a competitive market. The public option can do this because it will be subsidized by taxpayer money. Thus, the public option will crowd out other insurers and achieve monopoly pricing power. Once monopoly pricing power is achieved, then you will see a decline in both quality and supply of health services. The key is the lack of supply. At the monopoly price, the number of people willing to provide heath services will be suboptimal. This is why you have to wait six months for a CAT scan in England. Effectively, supply is rationed. And yes, “costs” will be lowered, but only if you just count cash outlays. If you count the implicit cost of the having to wait too long for health care services or receiving lower quality care, then it’s not such a bargain. No free lunches I’m afraid.

This is textbook economics as to what happens with monopoly pricing. Don’t need to be an ideologue at all to believe this.

The comment seems to ignore its own analysis. If the implicit costs of care result in rationing under the public option, then people who can afford better care will move to private insurance, which pays more, and so has access to a wider supply of medical providers.

UPDATE: Some follow-up analysis here.

I really cannot comment on the Iranian election itself, but I think I can comment somewhat on the popular pundit reaction to the election. Fortunately, Matthew Yglesias captures most of my thinking in < 140 characters:

People who now think Obama is insufficiently concerned with the Iranian people used to think we should drop bombs on them.

I’m not sure that one party in the dispute is particularly better from the point of view of American interests. From what I’ve read the opposition party is somewhat more moderate (whatever that even means in the context of a theocratic dictatorship). The fact that there are protests at all, and relatively non-violent protests (compared to the size of the demonstrations) as far as I can tell, seems like a good thing for Iranian liberals (whatever liberal means in Iran).

My point in making these observations is that all wonkish terms that we would normally use to describe the ebbs and flows of western style democracies don’t seem to fit this scenario, and reading the news analysis on this issue is more a study in failures of translation and the corresponding deconstruction of political language than an informative view into what is really going on.

Of course, given my lingering discomfort with religion, I’m sort of the last person who could hope to understand any side of the Iranian mindset.

ASIDE: Is it ironic that Iranians are relying on methods of communication that are a product of American entrepreneurial and technological ingenuity? Nevermind. This question sounds too much like “America is the best country on earth” and not enough like what I was trying to ask, which is whether we can conclude from Iranians’ use of things like Twitter whether they have a pro-western stance or not.