Category Archives: Life

If You’ve Got It, Flaunt It

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A friend and I spent some time at the local arboretum yesterday. It’s a pleasant place to stroll around or sit on a bench discussing weighty matters or nothing at all.

Walking along one of the paths, we came upon this backyard view of somebody’s new house, apparently getting its finishing touches.

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What this country definitely needs is lower taxes on rich people. How can you afford to furnish such a place and pay your utility bills when the Federal government demands a punishing 15% of your long-term capital gains?

Baseball Isn’t Boring After All

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For many years, major league baseball has been amazingly boring. In fact, it’s been amazingly boring since around 11 p.m. on October 14, 1992.

That’s when the Pittsburgh Pirates lost the ’92 National League Championship Series to the Atlanta Braves. It was the 7th and final game of the series. The Pirates had entered the bottom of the 9th leading 2-0. With 1 out, the Braves made the score 2-1. With 2 outs and the bases loaded, an Atlanta pinch-hitter hit a single to left field. The runner on 3rd easily scored, making it 2-2. The runner on 2nd headed for home. There was a play at the plate. The runner beat the throw from Barry Bonds. Atlanta won 3-2 and went to the World Series.

Barry Bonds left to play for the San Francisco Giants and the Pirates had 20 consecutive losing seasons. Nothing they tried worked. None of their games were significant. Baseball was amazingly boring.

This year, mirabile dictu, the Pirates not only had their first winning season, they qualified for the playoffs. They won the National League wild card game Tuesday night. Thursday they began a 5-game playoff with the St. Louis Cardinals. Each team has won a single game so far.

All of a sudden, baseball is no longer amazingly boring. Where there were long stretches of tedium before, as the pitcher stared into space, the batter called time out, the pitching coach walked to the mound, as foul ball after foul ball went into the stands, there is now serious suspense. Is that 2-run lead safe? Will this pitcher make it through the inning? Can this batter get on base? It’s too scary to watch sometimes. Every throw and swing of the bat means something.

Baseball hasn’t changed at all, of course. But as with all things in life, context is crucial. Walking down the street, sitting on a park bench, eating a slice of pizza, anything at all can be meaningful, depending on the circumstances.

Patience and the Affordable Care Act

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It’s always bothered me that the Obama administration didn’t come up with a catchy name for the health insurance provisions of the Affordable Care Act. We’ve got “Social Security”, “Medicare” and “Medicaid”, so why couldn’t the administration come up with an equally helpful name for this thing, instead of leaving an opening for it to be called “Obamacare”?

I bet if Saint Ronald was still President, one of the first things on his agenda would have been to give his pet program a great name that would help sell it to the American people. But Obama apparently thinks he’s above such things.

Nevertheless, the important thing is that this landmark legislation is going into effect two days from now, regardless of what any misguided, foolish, cowardly and/or evil House Republicans do in the meantime.

I know people (including myself) who will probably be taking advantage of the ACA in the relatively near future, so I’ve been wondering how much it’s going to cost. Unfortunately, there are reports in the media that suggest what “average” premiums will be. There was one such unhelpful article in the New York Times today: “‘Affordable Care’ or a Rip-Off?”.

The problem is that you can’t know what a person’s or a family’s costs will be until you factor in where they live, how old they are and, especially, what their income is. Many or most people in this country, not just the poorest among us, will be eligible for subsidies from the government. In fact, if you’re eligible for a subsidy, you won’t even have to wait for the IRS to send you a check. The subsidy will be applied right up front when you pay your insurance premium (which means that some people won’t have to pay anything at all).

There is good news here. The health insurance premiums being discussed so far are generally cheaper than what people would pay for private health insurance today, and the premiums are going to be lower, often much lower, for many of us after the subsidies are applied.

So maybe everyone who’s interested should wait a couple days and then go to https://www.healthcare.gov/ to see the real numbers (and also see the pretty young woman with a big smile on her face). I’m sure we can all wait a couple more days.

Here’s today’s New York Times editorial on the importance of the ACA and the subsidies:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/opinion/sunday/dawn-of-a-revolution-in-health-care.html?

If you’re in the mood for even more good news, take a look at this column from Nicholas Kristof. Here’s his conclusion, supported by statistics from the World Bank, the Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development:

So let’s acknowledge that there’s plenty of work remaining — and that cycles of poverty in America must be a top priority at home — yet also celebrate a triumph for humanity. The world of extreme poverty and disease that characterized life for most people throughout history may now finally be on its way out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/opinion/sunday/kristof-a-way-of-life-is-ending-thank-goodness.html?

Art Is Long, Life Is Short, Lunch Is Important

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I took this picture a couple days ago. You might wonder what these people are doing:

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They were at an exhibit by the artist James Turrell. I’d read about him and written about him, so I figured I should go to the exhibit. It was at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the one that looks like this:


The part of the museum that looks like a funnel is open from the floor to the ceiling. The people on the floor were looking up at this large work by Mr. Turrell: 

Installation Views: James Turrell

Unfortunately, due to a combination of ignorance, impatience and bad timing, when we looked up at the ceiling, the view wasn’t that impressive and we didn’t hang around long enough to see if it got any better (which it did, since it was designed to go through a series of changes).

There were some other works by the artist on display, but the best one had a long line of people waiting to see it. The wait was said to be one hour, so we moved on. 

As someone once said, ars longa, vita brevis.

Lunch, on the other hand, was excellent.

More Insanity

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I started this blog 14 months ago, a few days after the massacre in Aurora, Colorado (the one in which 12 people were killed and 70 injured during a Batman movie). The title of my first post was “Insanity”.

Now we have another 12 people murdered in Washington, D.C. And their killer shot dead by the police.

According to an article called “Facing the Real Gun Problem” in the New York Review of Books, there have been 1.3 million Americans killed by firearms since 1960, either in suicides, homicides or accidents. The author of the article, David Cole, argues that we should strengthen background checks and improve gun safety in order to reduce the ongoing toll of death and injury. He thinks gun owners would support these kinds of measures if they could be convinced that their right to own guns wasn’t threatened.

For that reason, Cole doesn’t think we should try to ban assault weapons, since relatively few people are killed with assault weapons and gun owners fear that a ban on those guns would eventually lead us down a slippery slope toward banning all kinds of guns. I don’t agree with him about the assault weapon ban, but he makes some good points, including the need to decriminalize certain drugs and reduce our prison population. He believes that guns are here to stay in America, so we should do whatever we can as a nation to limit the carnage.

To get a sense of how guns are used every day to kill and maim, you can check out a blog called “The Gun Report” in the New York Times. One of their columnists, Joe Nocera, uses the blog to discuss gun-related issues, but he also presents a daily list of shootings from around the country. It’s a daily accounting of American insanity.

There are 19 incidents described in today’s entry of “The Gun Report”. Here are a couple, chosen at random:

Lance Wilson, 3, was shot in the head and killed at a mobile home park in Michigan City, Ind., Sunday afternoon. 24-year-old Zachariah L. Grisham, who is romantically involved with the victim’s mother, was charged with reckless homicide. Investigators found that Grisham and the victim had been playing a game, with the boy using his hand to pretend to shoot Grisham. During the game, Grisham took out a handgun and, thinking it was not loaded, pulled the trigger.

A man was shot in the face and critically wounded after a verbal altercation in the Caddo Heights neighborhood of Shreveport, La., Monday afternoon. Police said someone in a car opened fire on the victim, who was in a Toyota Camry. A white SUV was spotted leaving the scene.

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Facing the Real Gun Problem:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/20/facing-real-gun-problem/

The Gun Report:
http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/