It so happens that the claim that government is bigger under President Obama than any time in history — an oft-repeated trope — is actually not even true. Not counting the military, there were 3,054,000 federal employees in 1988, the last full year conservative standard bearer Ronald Reagan was in office. In 2011, there were 2,756,000 — a reduction of 10% from Reagan.

Sure enough, the linked table of government data does, in fact, indicate a reduced federal workforce. But that’s not the problem (and frankly it’s not a terribly accurate measure given that Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen and other large contractors contribute a significant number of FTE jobs that are “off the books” so to speak in such a count. Make no mistake, these are people who work full-time for the federal government, but because their checks are written by private companies, they just don’t count.

Even if you suspend disbelief and pretend the Federal workforce has shrunk, that is only one measure of the Federal government’s size (and not a very good one, frankly). So what would be a better way to examine government?  Let’s start with the federal budget which currently stands at almost $3,800,000,000,000 ($3.8 trillion.)

But let’s put that in better context.

In 1929, the average amount spent per US resident was $31.39. Per capita income at that time was $697. So government spending on your behalf would have worked out to about 4.5% of what you made. (NOTE: That wasn’t your tax bill. That was just what was spent on a per capita basis.)

In 2012, the average amount spent per US resident was $11,260.33. Per capita income sits around $42,693. Government spending per capita works out to about 26% of what the average person makes.

If per capita income had risen at the same rate as per capita spending, the average worker would be taking home $250,000 per year.

But that’s still not quite the perspective we’re looking for, so try this:

If per capita income had risen at a rate equal to the growth of total government spending since 1929, per capita income would be $647,081.

Yup, that’s right. That $697 dollars you were making in 1929 would have grown to almost three quarters of a million dollars per year.  Instead, while per capita income in the US has multiplied by a factor of 61, government spending has jumped 928 times what it was in 1929.

Still not impressed by how large government has become? Then try this on for size:

In 1929, the population of the United States hovered around 121 million people. Today we’ve grown to 314 million people. That’s not quite triple our population in 84 years.

However, if the growth rate of the US population kept up with the growth of government spending, there would currently be 112.6 billion of us here in the US – that’s roughly 15 times the size of the entire world population right now.

But now comes the really scary number:

If you add up the value of everything single thing bought, sold, and produced in the US – our entire economic output – our country generated around $103 billion dollars in 1929.

In 2012, that number has grown considerably. Our Gross Domestic Product last year was $15.5 trillion.

Had our economy kept pace with the growth of government, however, our economic output would total a little over $96 trillion.

Now someone will say comparing growth rates of these three things is comparing apples to oranges, but I’m not saying these things are equivalent.

All I wanted to do, and hope I have done, is illustrate the growth rate of other key indicators relative to the growth of government spending.

When people try to tell you that government isn’t bigger, use this to give them some perspective.

(As a couple of housekeeping notes, the data and charts are available as an Excel Spreadsheet for anyone who wants them. All data comes from either www.usgovernmentspending.com or Google’s Public Data project. Both cite Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Department data as their source.)

I know autocorrect has been seeing a lot of other people, and has developed a rather sketchy reputation. But that’s not why we split.

We just realized that we don’t see the world the same way. When I type its, i mean its. I grew tired of constantly being told that “it’s” was a possessive. It’s not.

Perhaps the final straw was the constant bickering over autocorrect’s constant efforts to make me use “we’ll” instead of “well”.

Oh well!

We tried a number of things to make life better. For a short time, manual shortcuts worked to jumpstart our relationship. In the end it just wasn’t enough.

I wish autocorrect well, and hope it finds someone special.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree that the sands are shifting (and that is a very, very good thing) to a place where SSM is starting to be seen as a winning issue for GOP candidates, rather than an unquestionably losing one. Portman, however, seems to be someone who is opportunistically exploiting that.

In 2004 Portman supported a Constitutional ban on SSM; not just a ban against it. He wanted it enshrined in the Constitution.  He has defended DOMA. In 2009, he opposed a law that would have allowed gay couples in DC the right to adopt.  He has actively opposed gay rights for a decade at least.  But then there is this:

“[W]hat happened to me is really personal. I mean, I hadn’t thought a lot about this issue. Again, my focus has been on other issues over my public policy career.”

Huh?  You were that active in voting on an issue you really hadn’t thought a lot about? So your default position on issues you don’t think about is to deny people rights?  Really?

Reconciling his past opposition to SSM and his current conversion is almost impossible. His explanation is that his son Will came out two years ago and that profoundly changed his mind.

But less than two years ago, at a speech to the University of Michigan law school, a full third of the school got up and walked out of his speech in protest of his positions on gay rights.  That was, if his timeframe is to be accepted, after his son came out.

Granted I am a reliable cynic, but it seems to me that Portman, who is bandied about as a potential POTUS contender in 2016, is seeing the writing on the wall.

A poll out last week notes that Republicans oppose gay marriage 69-23.  There is a relatively small wing of the GOP that will support candidates who are openly in favor of SSM.  However, if properly aligned, that small minority could be enough to win a fractured primary field.  Getting a base of 23%, and being able to cobble together enough support among the remaining 77% to provide a winning coalition – especially in a field of 6-10 candidates – could be winning math.

Portman’s dramatic reversal may be real.  I sincerely hope it is. Even if it’s not, it is certainly cause for those in the GOP that think like me to be happy. The party is, slowly but surely, being dragged toward its stated position of personal freedom on this issue.

But I have seen enough in politics to be more than a tad jaded.  I suspect that Portman may be looking at electoral calculations, more than personal or moral ones, in announcing this dramatic reversal at the beginning of a Presidential cycle.

As I am skimming the news this morning, I happened upon what might otherwise just be a routine report of police finding a missing person who was unfortunately dead.  But then you get to the detail that really makes the story cringeworthy.

The corpse was found on Tuesday after hotel guests complained of low water pressure.

You read that right. The body, it seems, was found in a water tank on top of the hotel. A water tank, that by implication, seems to have been feeding the showers.

Let that sink in for a few minutes…. I’ll wait…

Now here’s the really foul part…  The girl had been missing for three weeks.

So what does that tell you?  It tells me that every guest who stayed in that hotel – for twenty-one days – had been showering in dead girl.

If that doesn’t gross you out and make you want to carry your own one gallon jugs of stream water to bathe in, I just don’t know what would.  From now on when I check in at hotels, the first question I will ask is whether their showers are certified to be dead body free.

Now my challenge will be figuring out what categories to post this under…

UPDATE: A friend on Twitter shared this additional link to the story including the best passage ever in a news article.

Guests at the Cecil Hotel, famous for having hosted serial killers Richard Ramirez – nicknamed the Night Stalker – and Jack Unterweger, are likely to have bathed, drank and brushed their teeth using water from the rooftop tank where Canadian tourist Eliza Lam’s body was found floating. …

Disgusted guests have expressed their horror at the discovery of the body, with one British tourist telling CNN: ‘The water did have a funny taste’.

Sabrina Baugh, a British tourist told journalists: ‘We never thought anything of it. We thought it was just the way it was here.’

That is so disgustingly awesome.

Jatravartids are small blue creatures of the planet Viltvodle VI with more than fifty arms each. They are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented aerosoldeodorant before the wheel (though their wheels are the wrong shape; a bike with literally square wheels can be seen).

Many races believe that the Universe was created by some sort of god or in the Big Bang. The Jatravartians people, however, believe that the Universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. They live in perpetual fear of the time they call “The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief” (their version of the End of the Universe). The theory of the Great Green Arkleseizure is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI.

So I got to thinking earlier today that our theory of the Big Bang is really no different.  If you accept the fact that the universe exploded into existence and is traveling outward at great velocity, you have bought into a theory that is, on the surface, the Big Sneeze Theory – one big event and all the stuff in the universe goes flying.

But as I was thinking that, and browsing the net for randomness (as I am apt to do), I came upon a related theory. A physicist has suggested that a “bubble” moving at the speed of light could simply wipe us all away before we even knew what happened.

According to Discovery News, Lykken said if this happens, it’ll happen at light speed, which means if anyone is around to witness it — our solar system will be long gone — they’ll be gone before they realize it.

So despite our best science, we actually haven’t advanced much beyond the sneeze and hanky wipe theory that Adams attributes to the primitive, body odor-challenged inhabitants of a backwater planet.

Granted, we haven’t attributed the big sneeze and to a much larger alien (unless you count God), but it kind of makes me feel a little less confident in our scientists.

My former colleague Patrick Ruffini, on Sunday, seemed to take issue with at least part of that when he chided Stuart Stevens – Romney’s brain trust – for suggesting that money can solve our tech problems.

What really troubles me about Stevens’s comments is his dismissive statement that “technology is something to a large degree you can go out and purchase.” No, it’s not. Technology is not about the tools. It is about people. It’s about creating a culture that drives metrics over hunches and BS “message of the day” fire drills.

Stevens will be the last general strategist of his kind not because he didn’t tweet, but because he thought of technology and data as some cool toy you could buy, not as the very foundation of a strong organization.

I would actually challenge Ruffini on that to a degree.  If poor tech is the problem, you can, in fact, invest in better tools.  But part of the GOP’s problem is it has not recently invested heavily in tools.  The period when it did (roughly 1996 through 2006) was marked by a significant improvement in tools.  The RNC database that eventually led to Voter Vault and microtargeting, and scared the Democrats into stepping up their game, was a result of that investment.  The GOP Team Leader program, the Bush re-elect effort, and many, many wins at the state and federal level were all a result of that investment – better data, better tools, better ideas.

Like the hare that naps and lets the tortoise win the race, however, the GOP got complacent.  It seemed to believe the headlines after 2004 that said the Dems may never be able to catch up with our data and microtargeting supremacy.  Those same headlines are being written now about the Dems, and I find them absurd. No party has a lock on tech, ideas, or success. Tech, especially, is a fickle beast and steer erratically between the latest good idea.  The GOP began to learn that when the 2008 Obama campaign took what the right had done and built on it.

So do I agree with Stevens that we can simply spend our way to competitiveness?  The answer to that requires a bit more framing.

We need to think of our problem differently. In politics, like technology, there are two camps. One, we’ll call it the open-source approach, creates a larger more vibrant community (of either activists or technologists).  The other, for-profit model is still perfectly legitimate, but doesn’t invite as many to participate and becomes much more expensive to maintain.

Think of the left’s activism as Linux, MySQL, and Drupal and the right’s as Microsoft or Oracle.  One innovates faster and has a larger community, one is limited in functionality to what they’re willing to invest in, rather than what the crowd can come up with.

There is nothing that says the right cannot compete with a Microsoft model.  They can, quite reasonably, invest huge sums of money in closed platforms, and be competitive.  That was Stuart’s point, and I agree that it is a viable – though certainly not the best - option.

One way or another – whether we follow the Stevens model, or something much more open and inclusive – the right must undergo a major attitudinal change.

If we want to follow Stevens model and closely guard the source code and hardware for GOP 16, then the donor culture on the right still needs to stop thinking in two-year cycles of TV ads and invest heavily in organizations that will be continually innovating, continually coming up with new, but still largely proprietary products.

What you cannot do, in Stevens model, is what the GOP has done for the last six years. You cannot release Windows Vista and expect it to keep you viable for a decade.

We would need to follow something more closely resembling the Apple model – a locked down platform that meets the needs of 90% of consumer (jailbreakers excluded), but one that still guards the source.  Voter Vault, in many ways, originally took that approach.  It protected the kernel while still meeting the needs of the users.  The problem is the GOP didn’t innovate when the needs of the users began to change.  Rather than enabling Voter Vault to be integrated with state, county, local, and issue advocacy campaigns through tools that would connect to the data, and share the benefit of all that data collection – Voter Vault became the iPhone without the ability to add apps.

Would it be possible to succeed with a tool that is still a walled garden, but one that meets the needs of its users?  Just ask Facebook.  They have made a huge business from that model.

So while I respect Patrick’s view, and agree with him that a more open model would be better, I disagree that there is absolutely no other option.  The Stevens approach could be successful, but it would still require a major cultural shift, and would be less likely to produce good outcomes.

Republicans in Congress passed a bill that requires the Postal Service to fund 75 years worth of health benefits for every employee, and even for employees that don’t yet exist.  They were given 10 years to do this. It is causing massive cash problems for the Postal Service and that’s why they have to cancel service. It’s all Republicans faults and it’s just because postal workers are unionized.

There’s a whole lot of BS in that, so let’s unpack it slowly lest the sticky goo get all over us.

First, it is true that Congress passed a law requiring full funding of the Postal Service health benefit program for every employee until they die.  It was NOT, however, Republicans in Congress that agreed to give them that benefit. The Postal Service made a concession to unions to pay for full health care benefits for employees until they died.  That was a collective bargaining concession that a lot of dumb companies have agreed to, and many of them have been brought down by it.  Case in point, General (now Government) Motors or GM.  In the mid 200os, Warren Buffett was asked by Charlie Rose if he was interested in buying GM.  Buffett’s response, in short, was no. GM, he explained, used to be a car company, but had become a pension and benefit operation with a small car unit attached.  There was no way to save GM without serious concessions from the Unions.

He clearly didn’t know about Barack Obama back then.

Flash forward to the Postal Service and you have the same issue – free health care, and pension benefits, until you die.

That is a serious problem when health care costs rise exponentially each year, and people stop sending mail.

So Congress says, “Hey, who will get stuck with the bill if the Postal Service collapses and can’t keep paying those costs out of current revenue?”  Yup, you guessed it, the taxpayer.

They pass a law that says USPS must put cash aside from current revenue to cover that expense in the event of a USPS failure.  They gave them ten years to fund the pot because they had no idea if the USPS would last for twenty.

So the USPS keeps putting cash aside and all is going fine – except for the fact that costs keep rising (yes, despite ObamaCare, costs keep going up and are expected to for the foreseeable future) and the USPS keeps losing business and has to put less in than planned because they’re broke.  Discovering that their “free health care for all forever” plan is eating them alive, they recently announced a reduction in Saturday service to cut costs.

To be clear, if Congress had made Enron or any other big company fully fund pension plans, the left would be cheering.  If a company had to keep a big pile of money on hand so every employee would be taken care of in case of a bankruptcy, the left would be jumping up and down.

In this case, however, the howls can be heard in China.  The right, they wail, is trying to kill off unions and shutter government (never mind that they’re also the first to point out that USPS isn’t actually government to begin with).

The reality is Congress (perhaps for the first time ever) was actually trying to keep the taxpayer from getting screwed if the Postal Service went belly up.  The postal employees would have been left with nothing or the US taxpaying population would be asked to cover an employee benefit liability currently estimated at about $100 billion.

For once, they did the right thing.

All of that said, let’s now address the “75 years” and “employees who aren’t born yet” nonsense.

The funding requires enough money to pay these benefits until an employee is dead.  In the case of the US, life expectancy is around 79 years. So an entry level employee at 18 or 19 years old would need to be covered for almost 60 years – not 75.  Again, that’s the deal the USPS made with them.  Don’t blame Congress for them taking that on.

As for the “employees not yet born” issue, those are not funds paid in.  Funds are only paid in on the actual employees.  However, for business planning purposes, the USPS has to estimate how much an employee will cost them to do business now and in the future.  For that reason, they have to assume that the person working for the postal service 20 years from now will need to be covered, even if they’re not yet born.

They plug that estimate into a formula that tells them what future costs might look like.  It’s really no different than weather forecasting, climate modeling or any long range estimation.  You make assumptions based on current data.  What you don’t do, and what the postal service does not have to do, is make payments on someone who isn’t a human yet.  It’s not happening, so stop repeating that.

Hope that clears some of this up.  If you really want to dive into it, here is the Congressional Research Service take on it from 2011.

First, I love music.  I have preferred genres and artists, sure.  Everybody does.  But I have found very little music I can’t listen to, and am not willing to explore. I have listened to everything from Air Supply to Zebrahead.  I love the melodic expression of emotion whether that’s uplifting love, stomping heartbreak, vitriolic anger, or melancholy sadness.

Second, I have been a big fan of what I call “electronic noise” for a very long time.  When we were kids, my friend Travis turned me on to a band called Negativland.  They can best be described as ‘experimental artistic noise with samples’.  That was followed by recommendation from my friends Tobi (who introduced me to Skinny Puppy) and Mandy (who brought me bands like Laibach, Borghesia, and Pigface).  I spent a good deal of time with grunge and techno, but ventured well beneath the mainstream surface of Fat Boy Slim, Moby and Darude, and really dug into stuff primarily identified by the people around me saying, “Oh my god, what is that noise you’re listening to.”  Thus my own category of electronic noise was born.

Over the lat few years, the time and money constraints of kids have dramatically reduced the amount of free cash I dump into music.  Spotify, however, has been fantastic as a tool of music discovery. Recently I have really jumped into dubstep in a big way.  Over the last couple of months, I have listened to hundreds of tracks from dozens and dozens of artists.  I jumped into dubstep after reading an article that described the genre as one older listeners don’t get. The music was characterized as sample of random noise laid over driving bas rhythms and electronic loops.

You had me at random noise.

I had to dive in.  How could I not?  That same description was used for most of my favorite music since I was about 16. If this was the latest expression of melodic electronic noise, I had to see what the fuss was all about.

It’s at this point in the post I could start sounding like the curmudgeon.  My internal grumpy old man could pop out and say “This is a hopped-up perversion of my beloved techno but with more static samples laid on top.”

I’m not going to do that.  Instead, I am going to go the opposite direction.

Dubstep, for the most part, is terribly, terribly boring.  The vast majority of my listening has been defined by lilting vocals, beats per minute that would make heart surgeons think the patient had flatlined, and less noise than simple cheesy sound effects (enough with the sirens, guys).  Most of the best dubstep I have found (and there is some REALLY good music if you can stand to dig it out) mixes old school techno with dubstep’s signature WUB-WUB-WUB to produce a MUCH faster, MUCH better dubstep experience.  When you get the BPM cranked up to a nice respectable level (my favorite stuff tends to be in the 140-160 range) you really start to get a good flow.

While a lot of dubstep flirst with 130-140 BPM, it rarely sustains that level of activity for more than a few seconds.  If a club DJ was spinning straight dub tracks, you’d quickly realize that alcohol really is a sedative, not a stimulant.  I’ve begun to think the market for Red Bull, Four Loco, and energy drinks generally is simply a result of people trying to stay awake while listening to dubstep.  If I were a sleep therapist I would prescribe dubstep to people who don’t respond to medication.

Allowing my internal grumpy old man to roll out, I can sum up my reaction to dubstep by saying “You call that artistic, aggressive noise?  Back in my day we had REALLY artistic, aggressive noise. We had bass so deep it broke the Earth in Arizona and created the Grand Canyon.  We had beats so fast they made the world spin, and it still hasn’t stopped.”

Dubstep does have some really great tracks if you put on your headlamp, grab a pickaxe, and start digging for them.  My personal favorite is this mix from Swedish House Mafia and Knife Party (http://open.spotify.com/track/5GQQ5pCrE9POxtxGG1inxq if you’re on Facebook).  It has a dull lull in the middle where the vocals drop in, but overall it sustains a good BPM throughout and carries an upbeat vibe that’s fun to listen to.  Bumpy Ride by Omnitica is also a fun track.

I play violent video games. I watch violent movies. I have read tales of fantasy, violence and destruction most of my life.  I also listen to rock music – the harder the better – and have for most of my life.

Various media outlets and commentators have identified all of these things as contributing factors in the violent outbursts of the unhinged.  Given that I participate in not one, but ALL of them; given that I have participated in them for thirty years; and given that I am a guy who spends much of his day in front of computer and TV screens, I should be a powder keg just looking for a spark.

But despite all of that, I have not once opened fire in a shopping center, taken up arms against an employer, or gone on a school rampage.

I do own guns. I hunt with them. That’s it.

I work, a lot.  When I have time, I play video games…. with friends… and with my kids…  None of them have opened fire at a mall.

So it amazes me to see so many people blaming the games, the movies and the music for the acts that horrify us on our TV screen.  They call for video game content restrictions, or labels on moves, music and games.  And yet the senseless tragedies continue because all of our handwringing is applied to the wrong question.

Rather than ask “what outside influences caused that guy to be violent” we should be asking the question “why does one person exposed to that level of violent content show no tendency toward actual violence while another does.

That variable – for all the talk of guns, and high capacity magazines, and violent games/movies/ music – is what we must endeavor to identify and address.

“Its channel selection is limited to 29 over-the-air channels and Bloomberg TV. It doesn’t include the other cable networks I frequently watch. … A day pass costs $1 and gives you 10 days to watch up to three hours of recorded shows. You can pay $8 a month for unlimited live viewing and 20 hours of storage, or $12 for 40 hours. Or you can pay $80 for a full year and 40 hours. That annual price is less than what I pay my cable company for TV each and every month. It’s a great deal for people who mostly watch broadcast television and not a lot of sports.”

You know what is 100% free and doesn’t require any payment to the cable industry? Broadcast TV. This guy is suggesting people pay money every month – albeit to a different company – to watch something that is broadcast OVER THE AIR. The reason Aereo thinks it is legal is because they are just retransmitting something you can already pick up through your TV. It’s the act of retransmission that is illegal without permission.

If you want to get rid of cable – as the title implies – this completely fails to do that. The author even says so. Now, if you would rather pay a different company for something you can already get for free, maybe he is on to something.

Perhaps they should retitle this piece “Aereo makes it tempting to give someone else money you don’t need to be spending on something that’s already free.”

The problem, you see, is that everything on your TV is not cable. Some of it is good old-fashioned, pick-it-up-with-rabbit-ears broadcast TV.  For those born after 1990, let me explain. The rest of you can jump down a paragraph.

There are some channels that ‘broadcast’ TV.  That is, they transmit it over the open airwaves, and any chucklehead with a digital TV can pick it up FOR FREE.  (Yes, it has to be digital. I don’t have time to explain why.) ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, etc are all broadcast channels. So the two programs he mentions (Downton Abbey and Revenge) are already free without a subscription service of any kind.  Don’t believe me? Disconnect your cable box, switch the input to “TV” and see what you pick up. Fun, isn’t it.

I find it hysterically amusing that “ABC News” – which is affiliated with a broadcast station – has an article suggesting that you need to pay to get an ABC show that they deliver for free (Revenge is an ABC program).

Why would ABC do something that ridiculous? Because here is the real rub in all of this.  The broadcasters, who deliver all their shows for free, over the air, are also demanding retransmission payments from cable companies that make those same shows available to you without requiring you to switch inputs on the TV.  In fact, they are demanding ever-larger payments from cable companies. In some cases, I have been told by cable company reps, those increases can be more than 400%.

Broadcasters are a big chunk of the reason your cable bills go up all the time. They are charging you for something you can already get for free.  And as more people watch it for free, the broadcasters raise the rates on those still willing to pay.

Then they have the brass stones to run an article like this one that suggests you can pay someone else to get the stuff they air for free.

There are ways to get rid of cable. They don’t work for most, but they exist.  However, if all you are watching are broadcast channels, you certainly don’t need to be paying Aereo or anyone else for it.