Kevin Drum

Real Men Know What a Codec Is

| Fri Jun. 20, 2014 3:00 PM EDT

Tyler Cowen points today to a list of words that show the biggest disparities in recognition between men and women. Men, for example, are pretty familiar with humvee, claymore, and scimitar. Women are pretty familiar with taffeta, wisteria, and bodice. No big surprises there. But here's the #1 word on the male list:

codec (88, 48)

Seriously? We're supposed to believe that 88 percent of men are familiar with the word codec? True, this is only a test for recognizing a word, not necessarily for knowing what it means, but still. Something is wrong with this picture. Even taking into account the number of gamers and audiophiles who end up having to muck around with codecs, I'd still guess that no more than 10-20 percent of the men in America have ever come across the word.

But then again, maybe I'm wrong. Is it possible that among American males, knowledge of codecs is as widespread as knowledge of carburetors used to be?

Advertise on

Is a Government Shutdown Over Coal in Our Future?

| Fri Jun. 20, 2014 12:15 PM EDT

Brian Beutler thinks Republicans are likely to force yet another government shutdown, this time over the EPA's proposed restriction on coal-fired power plants. But unlike the last shutdown, which came last September because it literally seemed like their last chance to prevent Obamacare from taking effect, they have more leeway this time around:

I think history and reason both suggest they will not shut down the government before the election—but that their vehement interest in emitting as much carbon pollution as possible, combined with the likelihood that they'll win several Senate seats in November, presages a dramatic confrontation between Republicans Congress and the White House either right after the election or early next Congress.

....The crucial difference between last September and the coming one is that Republicans (particularly the hardline/opportunist faction) were staring down the imminent launch of the Affordable Care Act on October 1, 2013....The EPA rule is nothing like that. Or, at least, it isn't there yet. If Republicans cave now, or simply punt a confrontation over it until after the election, they'll have sacrificed nothing other than the opportunity to pants themselves in front of God and everyone a month before the election. And if they win a bunch of seats in November, their hands will be strengthened when they actually do go to the mattresses during this year's lame duck session of Congress or in early 2015.

This makes perfect sense. That doesn't mean Republicans will do it this way, of course, since common sense has been in short supply in the GOP caucus lately. Still, the recent election of relatively non-insane folks to the House leadership suggests just enough adult presence to keep the yahoos in line and the government open at least through November. After that, it's anyone's guess. If they're really going to do it, though, it might be best to wait until late next year so they can force all their presidential candidates to weigh in. That should do maximum damage to the GOP brand, which seems to be their real goal here.

It May Finally Be Time for an Independent Kurdistan

| Fri Jun. 20, 2014 10:49 AM EDT

Iraq's civil war may be a humanitarian crisis for most Iraqis, but for the Kurds in northern Iraq it represents an opportunity:



Jonathan Dworkin, an infectious diseases doctor who has written about Kurdistan for me at the Washington Monthly blog in 2006 and then again here at MoJo in 2011, believes that the dream of a multi-ethnic Iraq is at the root of our failure there:

A more creative American policy would acknowledge the reality of what the Kurds have built, which is a prosperous and peaceful nation state in the mountains of Northern Iraq. It’s a nation whose soldiers and diplomats worked amicably alongside Americans through all the darkest episodes of the Iraq wars. It’s a nation where not a single American soldier died during ten years of bloody military involvement in Iraq, despite occasional terrorist attacks.

....The usual criticism of the view that Iraqis would be better off apart is that the regional neighbors would never allow it. In the case of the Kurds, that basically means Turkey. But the situation between Kurds and Turks has changed a lot in recent years. Last year a pipeline was completed that will allow Kurds to export oil directly to Turkey, bypassing Baghdad and greatly enhancing their economic independence. As one Turkish official involved in the oil deal recently put it in a Washington Post article on the topic, when it comes to Kurdish independence, Turkey “has bought that option.” No doubt many in Turkey would prefer the status quo to an independent Kurdistan, but the economic boom in Sulaimania and Erbil is evidence itself that money is trumping ideology in Turkey.

There are practical benefits as well to an independent Kurdish state. Kurdistan would provide America with one good ally, rather than a series of fake ones. The Kurds already field a tough and self-motivated defense force to counter terrorist threats from neighboring parts of Iraq, and unlike our allies in the Persian Gulf, they have been a consistent enemy of Al Qaeda in all its varied permutations. Their government would provide useful intelligence and a quiet diplomatic channel to Iran. Importantly, they would free us from the absurdity of supporting yet another Arab dictatorship. Maliki would become Iran’s problem, which is appropriate, as he is largely their creation.

Back in the day, Joe Biden was a proponent of creating a loosely federal Iraq, with Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite states that had considerable freedom from central control in Baghdad. There were, and still are, a lot of problems with that idea, but an independent Kurdistan would be the easiest first step. For all practical purposes, Kurdistan has been operating independently for years; it's stable and prosperous; it has a working army; and it's strongly pro-American. Figuring out the borders would be a challenge, but not an impossible one. If it's really true that Turkey wouldn't go ballistic over the prospect (out of fear that it would cause internal problems with its own Kurdish population), it's a prospect worth considering. And Karl Vick of Time reports that it really is true:



Perhaps an independent Kurdistan is a more realistic possibility than most of us think.

House Votes to End NSA Backdoor Searches

| Fri Jun. 20, 2014 12:29 AM EDT

In theory, the NSA is not supposed to spy on Americans without a warrant. However, if they claim that they're really spying on a foreigner who just happens to be talking to an American, they can collect both sides of the conversation and put all the information in one of their giant databases. And once the American information is in their database, they can search for it because, technically, they're not collecting anything they aren't allowed to. They're just searching for stuff they've already "inadvertently" collected.

To you and me, this is laughable sophistry. To the NSA, it's just another day at the office. Today, however, the House voted to end these "backdoor" searches:

The House, by a 293-123 vote late Thursday, approved a bipartisan proposal to limit the NSA’s surveillance programs by requiring the agency to get a court-ordered warrant to search U.S. records in its possession.



This hasn't made it into law yet, and I'm sure we can expect the usual process of watering down as the Senate gets involved and tricky little words get inserted here and there. But it's a start.

Supreme Court Narrows Scope of Software Patents. Slightly.

| Thu Jun. 19, 2014 1:29 PM EDT

The Supreme Court unanimously tossed out an egregiously vague software patent today, and that's good news. Unfortunately, it was a fairly narrow ruling that didn't provide much guidance about which software patents are and aren't valid. Tim Lee explains:


....[But] the Supreme Court rejects Alice's patent because "each step does no more than require a generic computer to perform generic computer functions." But many computer programmers would point out that this describes all software.

Software is nothing more than a long list of conventional mathematical operations. If you think a list of conventional operations isn't patent-eligible, that implies that any "invention" you can implement by loading software on a generic computer isn't patent-eligible. The problem is that judges lose sight of this fact as software gets more complex, leading to a de facto rule that only complicated computer programs can be patented.

This problem is hardly unique to software. An ordinary physical invention, after all, is usually just a collection of previously known parts put together in an innovative way. So when do you decide that the invention, taken as a whole, is truly innovative? It's a judgment call.

Now, I happen to think that this judgment is harder in the software realm than elsewhere, and that patent offices are inherently less competent to judge software implementations than other inventions. The algorithms themselves are typically impenetrable, and deducing prior art is all but impossible. At a guess—and that's all I can do since there's really no data available—I'd say that hardly any software inventions are truly innovative. They're simply solutions to problems that are put in front of a coding team. For the vast bulk of them, any other coding team given the same problem would probably come up with a pretty similar solution.

Unfortunately, it's essentially unknowable whether I'm right or wrong about that. What's not unknowable, however, is what the world would be like without software patents. That's because we used to live in such a world, and guess what? Software development thrived. So it's hard to see what benefits we get from all this. It's great for patent trolls, and I suppose it works OK for giant corporations that use their patent portfolios as bargaining tools with other giant corporations, but that's about it. So why bother?

About Half of Obamacare Exchange Enrollees Were Previously Uninsured

| Thu Jun. 19, 2014 11:40 AM EDT

A new Kaiser survey shows that 57 percent of those who bought health insurance on Obamacare exchanges were previously uninsured. That's about 4.5 million people who gained private insurance via the exchanges, and the vast majority of them say they would have remained uninsured if not for Obamacare. If this number is correct, it suggests that the number of newly insured by the end of the year will be a little higher than I've projected before—perhaps around 11-13 million.

But is it correct? Sarah Kliff provides the chart on the right showing the wildly different estimates from different sources, and explains that much of the divergence is due to different organizations asking different questions:

McKinsey asked people to identify the insurance they had "most of the year" in 2013....The RAND estimate relies on the research firm's ongoing American Life Panel....It found that, when it reached out to them mostly in early March, that 36 percent of those who had exchange coverage were, in earlier surveys, uninsured.

....Health and Human Services has estimated 87 percent of certain Obamacare enrollees lacked coverage when they signed up. This figure comes from a question on Kaiser Family Foundation report....asked survey respondents this question: "Before you began coverage under your current health insurance plan, were you covered by a different plan you purchased yourself, were you covered by an employer, by COBRA, did you have Medicaid or other public coverage, or were you uninsured?"

To a certain extent, there is no right answer. The basic problem is that the pool of uninsured has a lot of churn: people are covered for a while, then lose their jobs, then get another job, etc. So if you had insurance last August, but lost your job and signed up for Obamacare in November, do you count as previously uninsured? According to McKinsey, no. According to Kaiser, yes.

My own guess is that the Kaiser methodology is probably the closest of the four to what we'd normally think of as "uninsured," and its sample size is big enough to be reliable. In any case, when you combine these surveys with the Gallup results, the most likely number seems to be somewhere around 50 percent. Given the inherent subjectivity of the topic, that's probably about as good an estimate as we can get. There's just no reliable way to get precision any higher.

Advertise on

Obama: Ask First, Shoot Later

| Thu Jun. 19, 2014 10:23 AM EDT

Congratulations to the LA Times copy desk for the brilliant front-page headline on the right (print edition only). In the obligatory bland tones of a straight news piece, it perfectly captures both President Obama's approach to military intervention as well as the approach of the war-is-always-the-answer faction of the Republican Party. And the accompanying story isn't bad either:



....Obama's approach — the persistent "and then what?" question — reflects his deep skepticism about the ability of military intervention to fix entrenched problems, a suspicion that some note has grown, or at least solidified, during his tenure.

....That view won support Wednesday from the general who was the architect of the so-called troop surge under George W. Bush. The U.S. should reengage militarily in Iraq only if the country's sectarian communities reach a political agreement, retired Gen. David Petraeus said at a conference in London. "This cannot be the United States being the air force for Shia militias, or a Shia on Sunni Arab fight," he said.

At least there are a few people still left in Washington who understand this. Now we just need a few more.

Low Inflation Continues to Disappoint Inflation Hawks

| Wed Jun. 18, 2014 3:16 PM EDT

Perhaps you've read that inflation is up recently. Last night, for example, NBC News breathlessly told me that the price of eggs had gone up 13 cents over the past year. Does this mean that the inflation worries we've been hearing about continuously for the past four years are finally coming true?

I'd be happy if they were, since I think higher inflation would do the economy some good. Sadly, though, inflation remains well anchored. Despite the higher numbers of the past two months, the Fed's latest projections have increased tenth of a percentage point. Or, if you take the average of their range, by one twentieth of a percentage point, from 1.55 percent to 1.6 percent.

And how about 2015? They're projecting 1.75 percent. And 2016? A whopping 1.8 percent. In other words, they believe that we'll continue to undershoot our inflation target for at least the next three years.

At the same time, their projection of GDP growth has plummeted from 2.9 percent to 2.2 percent. And their projections for 2015 and 2016 continue to hover around an anemic 3 percent.

So: we have low growth, low price inflation, low wage inflation, and unemployment is still high. This is really not an environment in which spending cuts and lower deficits are the answer. More here from Mark Thoma.

It's Time to Acknowledge Reality: Obamacare is Working Pretty Well

| Wed Jun. 18, 2014 1:00 PM EDT

A new paper concludes that "rate shock" under Obamacare has been generally more modest than we thought:

Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find that the average prices increased by 14 to 28 percent, with similar changes in California and the federal exchange states; we attribute the increase primarily to higher premiums in exchanges associated with insurer expectations of a higher risk population being enrolled.

This doesn't take into account federal subsidies, which would lower this number even further. What's more, rates most likely would have gone up about 10 percent even if Obamacare had never existed. Taken together, this suggests that the average premium increase thanks to Obamacare has been very small. And of course, that small increase buys you a policy that in most cases is considerably more robust than older policies.

In related news, HHS reports that people who qualify for tax credits are paying an average of $82 per month for their policies. This is roughly a fourth of what they'd pay without subsidies. The chart on the right shows how this breaks down: more than two-thirds of those who qualify for subsidies are paying less than $100 per month. Fewer than 20 percent are paying more than $150. In a nutshell, then, we now know that (a) the system works, (b) enrollment targets were largely met, and (c) health insurance under Obamacare is pretty affordable. Matt Yglesias explains what this means:

[These] three factors together should end the phony war over Obamacare and let the real debate begin — not the debate over whether the program "works" but the debate over whether economic resources should be devoted to providing health insurance to people at the bottom of the income distribution or to providing tax cuts to people at the top.

....[Obamacare] is a large-scale effort to improve living standards for people in the bottom half of the income distribution by giving them additional economic resources. One of America's political parties doesn't like that idea in any non-health context and they don't like it for health care either. They think the money it costs to provide those subsidies should be taken away, and it should be given to high-income households in the form of tax cuts.


Yep. It's time to stop arguing over minutiae. Fundamentally, Obamacare "works." It's not perfect, but after nine months we can now say that it does indeed provide health coverage to the poor and the working-class in a reasonably efficient manner, and it does this largely by a combination of taxing and/or reducing payments to the relatively well off.

I think this is a good idea. Republicans don't. But this, rather than the cacophony of nonsense we've been subjected to over the past several years, is what we should be arguing about.

Has Hillary Clinton Evolved on Foreign Policy?

| Wed Jun. 18, 2014 11:43 AM EDT

In Hard Choices, Hillary Clinton says she disagreed with President Obama about the drawdown in Afghanistan; about arming Syrian rebels; and about getting tougher with Vladimir Putin. (She also thought we should have supported Hosni Mubarak more consistently and should have taken a softer line with the Israelis.)

At the same time, she also acknowledges that she made the wrong call on Iraq. This prompts an obvious question: Has the disaster in Iraq changed her approach to foreign policy at all? Presumably the answer is yes. At least, I hope it is. If the Iraq debacle doesn't change your mind, what would?

And this prompts a second question: Are there any concrete cases from the past few years in which her approach was less hawkish than it would have been a decade ago? Can she name one example where the Hillary of 2002 would have recommended intervention but the Hillary of 2009-12 recommended caution?

Maybe I'm wrong, but it strikes me that the answer is no. This is one of the reasons that Democrats need more primary choices in 2016. I've never really had anything against Hillary Clinton, but I'm hesitant about nominating someone who, as near as I can tell, acknowledges poor judgment on Iraq but hasn't let that actually change her views on much of anything. Maybe at her next town hall meeting, we could skip the endless nonsense about Benghazi, "dead broke," evolution on gay marriage, and so forth, and instead ask whether her foreign policy views have changed at all since 9/11. I'm not a huge fan of all of Barack Obama's foreign policy choices, but the more I hear from everyone else—including Hillary Clinton—the more I appreciate even the modest restraint that he's demonstrated. It's apparently a rare thing.