Tag: AP

Those Liberals at the AP

The far-left journalists over at the AP make the hard calls and reports that there is trouble at the mill, everyone:

LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday waded into waters in which past British governments have foundered, promising fundamental changes to the country’s expensive and over-stressed public health care system.

I see. Crazy expensive socialist medical care. Only Lord Jesus can Know how much that stuff costs. Or, you can throw your lot in with pointy-headed statisticians and find out that it costs about $2317 per capita for the UK to provide universal, essentially free care to everyone (free as in beer, it is obviously paid for through various taxes and etc…). The US? We pay $5711 per capita. More than twice as much.
Now, of course, that would all change if we look at percent GDP, right? The US is such a giant economy and all. Actually, no. The US spends ~15% of GDP on healthcare, UK: ~8%. So it’s roughly half as expensive, whether considered as a function of the overall economy or strictly in terms of what’s spent per individual. And but so they all get access to healthcare. In the US, well, the GOP assures us that the market will take care of that any minute now.

Now we come to “over-stressed,” which must mean that outcomes are terrible in Britain when compared to the US, which (as we’re told repeatedly) has the finest care anywhere. They must be choking the streets with bodies over there if they spend half as much and then funnel that through some socialistic nightmare of a healthcare bureaucracy. Not so much: turns out they live longer, have lower infant mortality, and, of course, have universal access to free-as-in-beer healthcare 24/7, all without having to use the ER as their primary care physician or being told to just go die in the streets already. In fact, we typically rank in the low end of developed nations, not even within spitting distance of dread France, and always well behind the UK.

So, AP wrong on “expensive,” wrong on “over-stressed.” But they did get the current PM’s name right (though notably not his party affiliation; can’t go around limning the word “conservative” with “fundamental changes” and “foundered,” now can we?). So there’s that.

We are the AP, we are a for-reals, big-timey news agency. Without us you wouldn’t even know what was happening two towns over. Thus, re-using our content costs money, because our content is valuable. You, you are just some guy who runs a multi-million dollar company or some a-hole with a blog. Your content is meaningless pablum slathered on the walls of the digital romper room that is “the internet”. It is valueless and thus we are able to reproduce it in any way we choose.

InclinedPlane, Hacker News commenter, distilling what the AP meant to say in response to this.

Zing!

Man, ever since they sold out to Amazon, the one-day-one-deal sales machine Woot has totally fallen into line with the dictates of the man and/or Our Corporate Paymasters:

So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through [the AP story on Woot’s acquisition], and comparing your post with our original letter, we’ve figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create.

Dare I say hoisted on their own petard? I feel a sudden and strong urge to buy some random bag of crap. Or, perhaps, a bandoleer of carrots.

Company Store

BP is housing hundreds of oil-spill clean-up workers on the Louisiana coast in “flotels” – 40-foot-long corrugated steel boxes that contain dormitory style beds

I hope they’re deducting a generous room and board allowance from what is inevitably temporary and benefits-free pay, which, of course arrives in the form of scrip. Spendable at company stores everywhere! Ask your employer about scrip!

You suck 16Bbl, and what do you get? Why, it’s great, and great looking and can be towed to an oil spill near you. Who says they’re not innovating?

What we tend to forget in journalism is that we got in the business to check facts, not just to tell people what Obama said and what Gingrich said. It is groundless to say that Kagan is anti-military. So why not call it groundless? This is badly needed when people are being flooded with information.

Ron Fournier, AP Washington Bureau Chief.
So why not call it groundless indeed? And, all the better, it turns out these “fact check” pieces are actually popular and more frequently clicked. Who knew?
Manna, via The Plum Line