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A $50 Lesson

I recently asked my friend’s little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, ‘If you were President, what would be the first thing you would do?’

She replied, ‘I’d give food and houses to all the homeless people.’

Her parents beamed with pride.

‘Wow…what a worthy goal.’ I told her. ‘But you don’t have to wait until you’re President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I’ll pay you $50. Then I’ll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house.’

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, ‘Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?’

I said, ‘Welcome to the Republican Party.’

Her parents still aren’t speaking to me.

https://taxicabdepressions.com/?p=1193
The Pig Trap
Posted: 14th April 2014 by Taxi Hack

Kevin put the truck in park and told me to hop out with him. There were three eight-foot pieces of crude steel tubular fencing that looked sort of like the metal barricades that get put up at parades for crowd control, but about five or six feet high, and forming half a hexagon They were obviously hand-made; they just didn’t have the finish of a commercial product. Kevin grabbed the last two buckets out of the back of the truck and told me to bring him two more beers.

In front of the steel tubing was a shallow concrete “bowl” that I believe was the top of a large birdbath, sunk into the dirt. Kevin filled it with loose corn and small ears of corn, then dumped in the contents of the second bucket. This bucket contained table scraps, potato peels, onion butts, bacon grease, and other household garbage, and it smelled pretty ripe. I asked Kevin what was up with the fencing, and he told me this was a pig trap. He then opened the two beers and dumped them in the bowl, saying that pigs love beer.

Kevin explained that pigs are highly intelligent animals, and can be quite dangerous. They are powerful beasts, very fast, and armed with fearsome tusks that can gore a man to death in short order. He said that commercial traps are available, but pigs are smart, and will often be wary of a new metal object suddenly appearing in their environment, and his home-made trap was much more effective. He told me that these three sections are left up year round, and over time, the pigs learn that this metal object poses no threat, and there is frequently delicious corn, slop, and beer to be had here. The scent of the slop and beer travels a long way across the property, and over time, the pigs are conditioned to not fear the strange metal object. Kevin showed me how they had formed a soft trail around one end of the fencing as they came in and out to the bowl.

When the time comes to harvest a pig, Kevin adds a section of the fencing, refills the bowl a few times, and the pigs ignore the new section of fencing. A week or two later, he adds another section, and keeps the bowl full. Finally, he puts the last section up right on the trail they created, and this section has the trap door in it.A screw eye is twisted into the end of a corn cob, and a cable is attached to it, and is connected to a pin that drops the door. As soon as a pig picks up the corn, the pin is pulled, the door is dropped, and the pig, and perhaps one or two or three others of his group, are trapped. In the morning, Kevin can simply walk up to the cage and dispatch the beasts with a handgun, without risk of personal injury or spending a lot of time stalking the animals in the woods with a high-power rifle.

I can’t get Kevin and the pig trap out of my head, because it is a perfect metaphor for the surveillance state our government has built. It has been erected slowly over time, one piece at a time, so as to not panic the populace. And the government seems to have been wildly successful, because the American population at large seems completely unphased and unalarmed at what has been built over the last twenty or thirty years.

In one of Edward Banfield’s works, he provides a list of quotations from
‘public intellectuals’ on the future of the labor force (e.g., courtesy Paul Goodman, “for the uneducated, there will be no jobs at all”). Banfield’s dissection of this, and his presentation of regnant models of the labor market, begins with, “You may notice that none of the forgoing is an economist…”. So, we get the wisdom of sci fi aficionadoes.

About 15% of the working population consists of ‘office and administrative support’ personnel (some private sector, some public). In re Parkinson’s law, public sector workers account in toto for about 14% of the whole working population. No clue how many you think have been stashed in those jobs by civil service managers and private-sector supervisors in some sort of philanthropic exercise.

This pdf document gives you a snapshot of the employment situation in 1999, when the employment-to-population ratio was at its postwar peak.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa1999/CPSAAT3.PDF

You will note that at that time, employed persons accounted for 89% of the non-institutional male population between the ages of 25.0 and 55.0 and 74% of the non-institutional female population. You will notice that the most granular statistics are for sets of 5 age cohorts (25-29, 30-34, &c). You will notice for the women that all 5-year sets have employment levels between 72% and 76% and that for the men all the sets have employment levels between 84% and 91%. In both cases, the age range with the lowest level of employment are those between 50.0 and 55.0.

Here is the data for 2018:

https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea08a.htm

You will note that the employment to population ratio for men between 25.0 and 55.0 has the last several months been fluctuating slightly around 86.1%. That for women has been fluctuating around 73.3%. The more granular date is in 10-cohort sets. There is no discernible age-related variations in employment levels for women. In all three sets (25-34, 35-44, 45-54), employment levels are just north of 73%. You will notice some slight variation for the men, with the 35-44 cohorts having employment levels around 88%, the 45-54 cohorts having employment levels just shy of 85%, and the 25 to 34 cohorts having employment levels just shy of 86%.

What these data show is that about 3% of the male population are hors de combat for some reason. The loss in employment is manifest in all age sets. It’s higher for the 25 to 34 set (four % points shaved off) than it is for the 35 to 44 set (two % points shaved off) or the 45 to 54 set (two % points shaved off). Whatever the cause of it, it is rather florid to refer to a reduction in employment levels from 90% to 86% with the phrase “and recent stats seem to show far fewer men 25- 35 are employed. “

The “Electronic Health Record” is an example of this idea run amok. I used to be an enthusiast for medical informatics. There were a number off success stories 30 years ago when I was active in the American Medical Informatics Association but the lunatics have taken over. The Obamacare implementation showed all the signs of low bidder and it was all about billing and not clinical care.

I also used to review medical records in med-mal cases. The EHR and risk managers have made them almost useless.