Utopia Down Under

A point of perspective: Back home, in the US, we're considering rolling back the healthcare reform bill. It doesn't even get us universal healthcare - it just gets us slightly better chances (not 100%) that we might receive healthcare if we've paid the insurance for it.

The Australian Deal

Australia and US dollars trade at about 1:1 with minor variation. When I transferred $200 Australian here I paid? $197 US.

In Australia, here's what every citizen gets - not just their government - everyone:

• Healthcare. It's largely free. You get sick the government pays for the care.
• $14.73/hr minimum wage - nearly double the highest state minimum wage in the US, almost triple the lowest (if you're paid hourly rather than full-time, you make more - $15.51/hr).
• Minimum 4 weeks vacation/year.
• A retirement pension, even if you never saved any money. Retirement/"Age Pension"
• If you're unemployed you make $15761.20/year or about $7.58/hr, forever. If you never find another job, you still receive a living wage - enough to cover rent in a suburb (but almost certainly not in a city, where a studio runs $1800/mo). Unemployment/"Newstart" Rent Assistance 

There are details to these where you might get paid more or less based on whether you need more (kids, single parent, renting) or less (live with your parents, ~$5/hr), but the numbers don't vary that much.

So just to be clear, if you lose your job in Australia, you'll be fine. If you come down with cancer at 21 before you ever wondered "What healthcare provider should I have?" you're covered. And if you never really make it big - enough to really save up - in retirement... you'll be fine.

Well Then It's a Disaster

So the assumption by the kind of person that votes for the kind of person that prevents the US from having any of this is, "Then the entire economy must be in tatters." Well let's check.

Unemployment. Economists say the ideal unemployment rate is 5%, meaning 95% of those wanting to work have jobs and the other 5% are available to employers needing workers. In Australia it's 5.3%. In the US it's 9%; in some parts of the US it's 15% and in some counties it's over 30%.

Non-Employment. Economists abuse the word "unemployment" to only mean people looking for work, when intuitively it means "does not have a job." They use other names for that, so what's that number? In Australia 49% of the population does not work. Those lazy bastards, much lazier than the 54% who don't work in the US.

Taxes. Well then taxes would have to be insane, right? Australia tax brackets - as a point of summary, an Australian making $80,000/year pays 22% of their total income, or $17550, in taxes. A Californian making the same pays Payroll tax (Social Security and Medicare), Income Tax, Unemployment Insurance, and State Income Tax, totaling 49% - a calculation so complicated it merits its own spreadsheet. Note that the Californian still has to pay for their healthcare after all that.

I'll update this with a bit more info and some conclusions later on. But seriously America... get your sh** together.

Updates

To compare with the US spreadsheet for $80k, I've created another that shows several income levels under the Australia tax regime. Both spreadsheets assume you rent an apartment, live alone, and have no kids, because I'm self-centered. The resources to build out a version for married with a mortgage and 3 kids are linked from this post and the spreadsheets, so if you build one, please share.

Australians point out to me that healthcare in Australia has 2 major caveats:

• There is essentially a $500 annual deductible. That is, the first $1000 worth of care in a year you pay 50%; the remainder is on the government. However, there is a debate in which they are considering eliminating this deductible.
• Many Australians fret at the long waits for doctor's appointments and go to pricier doctors instead. When they do, they exceed the limits the government will reimburse. When that occurs, the government kicks in the maximum and you pay the rest. Often these private doctors charge about double. So there is an inconvenience to free care, and occasionally an undue lack of urgency. On the other hand, these private visits are often so expensive in part because they're lavish - they involve spa treatments etc.

I need to include a comparison to MY healthcare's caveats. I called my healthcare plan and this is literally what they told me - I'm not exaggerating what they said or misreading my plan. This is the plan I pay for with Anthem Blue Cross:

• If I have a heart attack, it's my job (yes, struggling in the hospital) to gather up the relevant paperwork and submit it to them as a claim.
• If it occurs overseas, not only is it my job to do that, but also to cover the full costs of coverage myself in the meantime, and they will optionally reimburse me for what they deem as covered.

Australians have to worry about a $500 deductible that may be legislated away. I have to worry about owing $500,000, how to gather what paperwork to send to who, what lawyer to sue my healthcare company with to recoup my costs, and whether I'll live long enough to see the court case through.

Crazy Neighbors

There's some crazies across the street that amuse me with some amazing shouted quotes periodically.

You listen to me. I'm a woman. I don't care if my parents still treat me like I'm a child. You shut up! I'm a woman. I'm one of the most beautiful women in the universe!

-Ugly woman who lives across the street, to a man driving away

Challenge: Get Jobs Numbers in Real Time

E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post can be a bit Keith Olbermann in his rants, so read with a step back:
The Last Labor Day?

But he makes a great point: People too often view the stock market as the real measure of the economy. He notices that the President addresses it, that many news shows hold him and Congress accountable to it, and that many news stories treat a major turn in the stock market as though it were indicative of the entire economy.

He goes on to make the obvious point that this is not the case - the fact that less than 10% of the US population capable of seriously investing in the stock market are doing better or worse on average isn't very relevant to the economy as a whole. And if you take bubbles into account, the stock market can jump up and down with no relevance to the economy - it can even say things are going well when they're really falling apart.

What matters is employment as a whole - are people working, and what are they doing?

He points out that the stock market is used instead because it's available in real-time.

It seems ridiculous but I think he may have found a simple truth. Why DO we use the stock market, and not jobs numbers, as indicators of how the economy is doing? When we get stock numbers we can all check them in real-time, whether you're a citizen, reporter or the president: finance.google.com. But getting jobs numbers is a lot murkier, never real-time, and your access to those numbers varies based on where you work.

So it's time to pose a challenge to the American public. Who among us can build a real-time indicator for employment in the US?

Giving it some thought, the first step is reporting. The most obvious approach is to ask people to report they took or lost a job, but it's not likely to succeed. On the other hand, employers already do report in with several governmental agencies when they hire a worker. There's a significant amount of paperwork that generally has to be filed within a tight timeline of when the worker is hired. So there's your source of data.

The remaining steps are accessing it in aggregate, and offering it in real-time. What's the best way? Do we ask the Obama Administration to offer their existing numbers up over an API? Is there an existing database we can ask for read access to? What's the best way to do this?

Update:
Monthly isn't real-time, but Google has monthly US Employment in millions, and with a lag time of 2 years, the US population.

If you assume the US population is now 314 million, some math for August:
140 million employed / 314 million = 44.6% employed, or put another way, 55.4% of the population of the US does not work.

There's a pointless number provided by the US Dept of Labor on the size of the Labor Force, but they don't count those not actively looking for work/those who have given up, which is ridiculous. Not a useful statistic. If you did use that number you'd get what you occasionally hear on the news: 9% unemployment, or put another way, of the <50% of the US that seeks work, 9% of those aren't finding jobs.

Overlearning the Game

A good article on politics and corruption:

http://andrewoneverything.com/the-overlearning-the-game-problem

Short on proposed solutions. Here are two:

1. The Severe/Ben Franklin approach: The founding fathers were in a time of revolution, and many were quoted as expecting more revolutions to occur that would throw out our Constitution in favor of an even better one in 50 years or so. With this you also throw out all the corruption of those who have not only "overlearned the game," but also those who have invested massive amounts of wealth to change society's rules so its wealth is diverted back to them. This seemed likely to those in the midst of a revolution, but not very likely to us, and, well... what would happen to all my stuff?

2. The Gradual/Videogame Cheater approach: Game authors attempting to fight cheating fight on a naive technical front first, and later a complex behavioral front second. The technical front is like many of the basics of campaign finance laws, like "You can't pay people to vote for you." The obvious hacks. But you eventually realize you're not really trying to stop obvious hacks, you're trying to stop creative, insidious ones too. So you model good behavior, and basically treat everything outside of it as cheating. The challenge is to include modeling very strong performance in that model so you don't risk punishing it if it arises legitimately.

Google is arguably working against SEO entities who "overlearn the game" and either google bomb or push their company's result to the top. The big difference between Google/Videogame companies and law is how nimble they are. The companies acknowledge there will be cheaters and have teams to quickly respond to new workarounds for the system. The law sits idle and a big messy Congress that can be corrupted by cheaters themselves is in charge of fixing it, in a really ugly process. Arguably Congress should continue to set the broad strokes like "Prevent campaign finance abuse," but a nimble more company-like organization within the government ought to be responsible for implementing that and quickly responding to new abuses.

Wall Street actually has a limited version of this model - the SEC is not an elected body - but it's somewhat limited in scope, and impotent when for example its powers are delegated to the OMB when it comes to Collateral Debt Obligations, and down comes the world economy.

I think Congress might be suited to setting the powers more broadly and the metrics for success on these nimble organizations, but they definitely aren't suited to creating the laws that actually trap the cheaters. They're just too slow, by design.

No Student Loans for Low-Pay Degrees

In 2015, if a private college can't show that at least 35% of graduates with a given degree can pay back their loans, students entering that major won't be eligible for student loans. Pretty smart program.

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/02/136897408/for-profit-colleges-face-new-rules

Not surprisingly, private colleges are upset about it - they want that free money to keep people entering majors they know don't lead many kids to successful careers.

It would be nice if a law went farther, and required students entering a major or considering majors to be informed of:

• Average employment rate
• Average employment rate within the chosen field
• Average salary in 1 year and 5 years
• Average time to repay
• Average delinquency rate

of past graduates as a whole. It's fine if people want to say they went to college for intangible hard-to-measure reasons, but when it's putting you in a tangible $100,000+ in debt, it's time to be serious.

Dying soon?

Dying soon? Put your life story into your grave, so people can listen to it with their cellphones when they visit:
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/30/136676964/technology-brings-digital-memories-to-grave-sites

MIT actually predicted this 40 years ago with Project Oxygen: http://oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/Overview.html

We would someday use "handheld devices" to get "location-aware data" about our environment, like whether there's a meeting going on on the other side of a closed door. In their version though, the data about the dead person was stored in the grave itself, rather than just having that position, RFID tag, or QR code associated with a website about the corpse.

One reason I dislike Daylight Savings Time

Suppose you're adding features to a site that stores times in local time. You're trying to calculate how many hours it's been since Nov 4, 2007, at 1:30am Eastern. You have to ask the question, Which 1:30am is it? The 1:30am before the clocks rolled back, or the one after?

Suppose a user enters a date and time of Mar 11, 2012, 2:14am. You'd have to return:

ERROR: Time does not exist.

Daylight Savings Time is stupid.