Coyote Blog

This is an offer to other bloggers out there.  I still have some marketing budget left, and would be happy to send out a few more free review copies of my book BMOC.  Just email me at Coyote -at- CoyoteBlog -dot- com with your name and address and the web address of the blog you write for and I will send you a copy.  I reserve the right to cut the list off if it gets too expensive long.  I would especially love to hear from bloggers who have supported this site from the early days.

All I ask is that you actually think you might read the thing if you ask for one.  I don't require that you write about the book as a pre-condition.  You will write about it or not just like you have linked this site -- if there is something worth talking about, I am sure you will do so.  If not, well I'm a live-and-let-live libertarian, so that's cool too.

By the way, I am going to serialize the first several chapters on the blog in the coming days and weeks, so everyone can get a taste.

Kevin Drum opines:

What happens when you combine "fast track" procurement, minimal
oversight, pork-based contracting, and a comprehensive lack of
responsibility for results? Well, you get the Bush administration, of
course. More specifically, you get the Coast Guard's disastrous
Deepwater program. Nadezhda runs through the grim details.

This is perhaps the single greatest fallacy that props up big government.  Specifically, the notion that corruption, inefficiency, and stupidity are failures in government related to certain individuals.  The implication is that if only "our party" was in control, big government would be great.  Except that both parties have had their chances in alternating fashion for 70 years (what I would call the era of really big government) and government has been a mess regardless of who has been in control. 

People like Hayek and Friedman have written who books about it, so I want try to elucidate the whole theory, except to summarize that the nature of incentives in government, particularly the big sacrifice-one-group-for-another government we have today, will ALWAYS lead to massive failures.  Period.

I wrote over a year ago that statism always comes back to bite its creators, because no matter how beautiful the machinery of government control, you can never control for the human beings who get behind the levers.  At that time I pointed to three fallacies, of which the third is particularly relevant to this post:

• You don't have the right to make decisions for other people.
  Period.  No matter how high-minded and idealistic you want to portray
  it, at the end of the day you are proposing to use force to coerce
  another man into doing your will.  You may stop them from using force
  or fraud against others, but an adult may make decisions for
  themselves, even if they are bad.  I am reminded of a great line from
  the HBO show Deadwood, "Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?"

• You can't make better decisions for other people, even if you
  are smarter, because every person has different wants, needs, values,
  etc., and thus make trade-offs differently.  Tedy Bruschi of the
  Patriots is willing to take post-stroke risks by playing pro football again I would never take, but that doesn't mean its a incorrect decision for him.

• Technocratic idealists ALWAYS lose control of the game.  It may
  feel good at first when the trains start running on time, but the
  technocrats are soon swept away by the thugs, and the patina of
  idealism is swept away, and only fascism is left.  Interestingly, the
  technocrats always cry "our only mistake was letting those other guys
  take control".  No, the mistake was accepting the right to use force on
  another man.  Everything after that was inevitable.

Steven Milloy, author of the indispensable Junkscience.com, points out that Harvard's Ascherio and WIllet, authors of the study on which NYC's transfat ban was based, have also identified dangers of a similar magnitude and with similar statistical significance (the latter admittedly low, but it was low for their transfat conclusions as well) of:

• Sunflower oil
• Red meat
• Dairy products
• Soft drinks

If NYC is consistent in its logic, then it must ban these other substances.  These substances showed the same level (or greater) of health risks at the same level of scientific proof by the same study authors. 

Now that the Board has deemed their dubious trans fats research
suitable for dictating public policy, New Yorkers ought to hope that
Ascherio and Willett don't press the Board to implement some of their
other published research that is similar in "quality" to their trans
fats work.

 

New Yorkers could, for example, see restaurants
banned from serving potatoes, peas, peanuts, beans, lentils, orange
juice and grapefruit juice. Ascherio-Willett reported an increase in
the risk of heart disease among consumers of these foods in the Annals of Internal Medicine
(June 2001). Although none of those slight correlations were
statistically meaningful -- and, in all probability, were simply
meaningless chance occurrences -- a similar shortcoming didn't seem to
matter to the Board when it came to their trans fats research.

What is the difference between "populism" and "fascism by the majority"?    I sure can't see any difference.

I love it when I see stuff like "take on the oil companies" or "take on the drug companies."  The oil companies make about an 8% profit in a good year.  Drug companies are a bit higher, but not that much.  Let's say the government runs their profit down to zero.  That would then yield everyone about a 6% discount at the pump (presumably gas taxes would not go down, thus the lower percentage) and an average 12%-ish discount on drugs.  Is it really the Democrat's intention to trash incentives in these critical industries for future long term investment (oil exploration in one, drug R&D in the other) so politicans can hand out a 6% discount to the voters? 

This is a pretty funny video a reader sent me called "state employees."  Pretty much the video version of a "blonde" joke I heard years ago.

During the last election, politicians and pundits made a lot of hay trying to argue that the labor market was somehow broken and not functioning like it always has.  First, the argument was that we were having a "jobless recovery."  Then, when employment took off, the argument was that wages were somehow broken and trailing productivity.  Whether this was a secret plot by GWB or by Wal-Mart was never quite made clear.

Well, it turns out that the job market works like it always has.  In a cyclical economic recovery, employment and productivity gains always precede wage gains.  Wages tend to go up late in the cycle, after excess available labor is soaked up:

After four years in which pay failed to keep pace with price
increases, wages for most American workers have begun rising
significantly faster than inflation.

With energy prices
now sharply lower than a few months ago and the improving job market
forcing employers to offer higher raises, the buying power of American
workers is now rising at the fastest rate since the economic boom of
the late 1990s.

The average hourly wage for workers below
management level "” everyone from school bus drivers to stockbrokers "”
rose 2.8 percent from October 2005 to October of this year, after being
adjusted for inflation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only a year ago, it was falling by 1.5 percent.

I am not one to really accept the "active bias in media" argument (I believe in a more passive bias based on reporters failing to apply skepticism to stories that fit their view of the world).  However, the bias crowd predicted that reported economic news would suddenly improve after the election and that certainly seems to be the case.

One final note - be careful of folks who are claiming that wages have not kept up with inflation for years.  Make sure they are using "total compensation, including benefits" and not just "wages."  The former number has consistently outpaced inflation.  These numbers diverge because the portion of compensation paid out in non-cash benefits has been growing as a percent of total compensation.

Richard Paey lost his appeal, and so will likely spend the next 25 years in jail for self-medicating pain relievers.  All parties, both prosecution and defense, agreed the painkillers were solely for his use and no drug distribution was involved.  Of course, its for his own good.... somehow or other.

For most of this country's history, prison was for people being punished for hurting others.  Their incarceration protected the rest of society from them.  Today, though, we are increasingly filling the prisons with people whose actions affected only themselves.  In particular, thousands languish in jail for petty drug possession charges, crimes that if they hurt anyone, hurt only themselves.  (Drug war proponents argue that few go to jail for marijuana use.  Sortof.  Actually, only a small percentage of marijuana possession arrests go to jail,  but there are three quarters of a million marijuana arrests every year.  A small percentage of a big number is still a big number)

I am reminded of the old George Carlin joke "do you know the worst thing that can happen to a kid that smokes marijuana?  He can go to jail!"  I find this wholly parallel to Mr. Paey's situation.  The Florida legislature thinks Mr. Paey is ruining his life by using too many painkillers for his, uh, pain.  So their solution is to .. ruin his life even worse, by throwing him in the prison for the rest of his useful life.  Good plan.  Next up: lobotomies for people who still insist on smoking.

This is one of those tough cases made to make judges look bad.  The Florida legislature bent over backwards to make sure that judges had absolutely no discretion in reducing the sentences of people like Mr. Paey.  And the judges acknowledged they were beaten, and would have to let Mr. Paey's sentence stand.  Where are those activist judges when you need them?  Well, there was one in the dissent:

With no competent proof that [Paey] intended to do anything other
than put the drugs into his own body for relief from his persistent and
excruciating pain, the State chose to prosecute him and treat him as a
trafficker in illegal drugs. Instead of recognizing the real problem
and the real behaviors that led to his real crimes and holding him
appropriately accountable, the State decided to bring out the artillery
designed to bring down the drug cartels....

The sentence in this
case for a lone act"”the mere possession of unlawfully obtained medicine
for personal use"”is illogical, absurd, unjust, and unconstitutional...

I
suggest that it is cruel for a man with an undisputed medical need for
a substantial amount of daily medication management to go to prison for
twenty-five years for using self-help means to obtain and amply supply
himself with the medicine he needed. I suggest it is cruel for
government to treat a man whose motivation to offend sprang from urgent
medical problems the same as it would treat a drug smuggler motivated
to obtain personal wealth and power at the expense of the misery
his enterprise brings to others. I suggest that it is unusual,
illogical, and unjust that Mr. Paey could conceivably go to prison for
a longer stretch for peacefully but unlawfully  purchasing 100
oxycodone pills from a pharmacist than had he robbed the pharmacist at
knife point, stolen fifty oxycodone pills which he intended to sell to
children waiting outside, and then stabbed the pharmacist.

Update:  Radley Balko has more stories about ridiculous drug sentencing.  He also has comments on Paey's case:

I'd add only a few of things to Jacob's post
on Richard Paey's horrible story below.  First, Paey's 25-year sentence
stems from two troubling decisions on the part of the prosecutor.
Prosecutor McCabe threw the book at Paey because,  (1) he refused to
admit he's an addict (and he wasn't, any more than a diabetic is
"addicted" to insulin), and (2) because he'd done nothing wrong, he insisted on his constitutional right to a jury trial.  The latter is an absurdity that often creeps up in a modern criminal justice system so rife with plea bargaining.  Charge stacking"and overcharging, combined with the possibility that you could even get extra time even for the charges you're acquitted of, mean that insisting on exercising your right to a trial is usually going to cost you. 

Second, as I noted a few months ago,
when police apprehended this paraplegic, frail man -- along with his
wife and two kids -- they brought the SWAT team in full paramilitary
gear. 

And third, why after Paey talked with New York Times columnist John Tierney
did prison officials moved him to a higher-security prison, several
hours from his family?  Paey says it's because a guard complained
about  what he said to Tierney, and was punished.  If that isn't true,
it'd be interesting to hear the official explanation for
suspiciously-time decision to move Paey to a higher-security facility.

I saw this site described as the YouTube for Data.  It will be interesting over time to see if the data sets uploaded to this site are trustworthy, but its a cool idea.  I tried my hand at uploading some data.  I am not sure why the graph is showing those spikes - they don't exist in the data.

Update: I figured out my mistake and my better chart is here.

In the WSJ ($) today there is an article about the assignment of family chores perpetuating traditional gender roles into the next generation:

The latest research suggests I'm not alone. The way parents are
divvying up and paying kids for chores suggests this is one family
battle that will extend well into the next generation and beyond.

A nationwide study by the University of Michigan's
Institute for Social Research shows boys ages 10 through 18 are more
likely than girls to be getting paid for doing housework -- even though
boys spend an average 30% less time doing chores. Boys are as much as
10 to 15 percentage points more likely than girls at various ages to be
receiving an allowance for doing housework, says the institute's newly
completed analysis of data on 3,000 children ages 10 through 18.

Boys may be handling more of the kinds of chores that
are regarded as a job that should be paid, such as lawnmowing,
speculates Frank Stafford, the University of Michigan economics
professor heading the research. Chores such as dishwashing or cooking,
often regarded as routine and done free, may fall more often to girls.
(The analysis is based on aggregate samples, and doesn't compare
treatment of siblings within individual families.)

Fortunately, the Coyote cubs are fighting these gender stereotypes.  My son does the dishes at night and does the family's laundry once a week (which is great, except you have to make allowances for a 12-year-old boy doing your laundry, like shrunken shirts).  My daughter just wants to lay around all day on the couch.  I thought this was a problem, but maybe she is just trying to break through gender stereotypes and be like her dad. 

This boy from the article seems to have mastered my personal approach to household chores:

Ms. Barlow says. "[my son will] be the first guy to weasel out of his chores.
He'll say, 'Oh, I dropped a plate, you probably don't want me to handle
those any more.' "

So young and he has already learned that critical male skill of learned incompetence.  Who says the schools today are broken?

From our American point of view, we usually think of the attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor fifty-five 65 years ago as the main Japanese objective at the time.  In fact, the attack on Pearl Harbor was merely a screening move, an attempt by the Japanese to limit the US's ability to respond to its main objective -- seizure of resource-rich targets in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. 

The Japanese in 1941 shared many of the beliefs that are disturbingly common today.   They believed that their country had to be "self-sufficient" in key industries and resources.  And, they had a huge distrust of foreigners and international trade.  Lou Dobbs would have been very comfortable with them.  The end result of believing in self-sufficiency was that Japan eschewed peaceful trade as a way to gain resources in favor of colonialism and military intervention.  To some extent, the European colonialism of the 19th and early 20th centuries stemmed from the same beliefs.

As an island nation, Japan had developed a rich and complex social
structure. It resisted westernization by sealing itself off from
contact with the outside world, particularly Europe and the United
States. By the early twentieth century, though, Japan's efforts to
achieve self-sufficiency were failing, for the nation lacked its own
raw materials and other resources. Some members of the ruling class
argued that Japan could grow and prosper only by modernizing and
adopting Western technology. Japanese nationalists, though, advocated a
different path: the establishment of an empire that would not only
elevate Japan's stature in the eyes of the world but also guarantee
access to the resources the nation needed. Moreover, many members of
the nation's traditional warrior class"”the Samurai"”were embittered by
the aftermath of World War I. Japan had backed the victorious Allies,
but the Samurai believed that in the peace negotiations following the
war the United States and Great Britain had treated Japan as a
second-class nation. They, too, longed to assert Japan's place in world
affairs.   [answers.com]

After WWII, the Japanese gave up colonialism and military intervention in favor of arms-length trade.  And, as a result, grew through peaceful exchange into being the wealthy world power that militarism and "self-sufficiency" could never achieve.

Postscript: Some might argue that the Japanese were forced to give up on trade in favor of militarism by the US embargoes.  This is a particularly popular explanation among the "America-is-the-source-of-all-evil" academics, that the Japanese would have peacefully traded for all their needs if only we had let them.  This viewpoint is silly, and completely ignorant of the goals and philosophies of those running Japan.

The Japanese desire to be resource self-sufficient is always there, and the embargoes were a result of previous military adventures by the Japanese to gain colonies by force in Korea and China, as well as Japanese threats to invade southeast Asia.  Japanese militarism to achieve "imperial self-sufficiency" predated western embargoes by many, many years.  The western embargoes may have forced the Japanese hand to move quicker than they might have, but their moves into resource-rich Indonesia were probably coming soon anyway, just as similar moves in Korea and China had been going on for a decade.

To be fair, today's self-sufficiency advocates are passive and xenophobic rather than aggressive and xenophobic, as the Japanese were.  This is at least a small improvement, and means that they prefer to quietly sink into squalor rather than going out with a bang (two bangs?) as the Japanese did.

Update:  Memories of the Pearl Harbor attack.  And the Arizona Republic comes through with a good series on the death of the USS Arizona.

No state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws  - 14th Amendment

The Arizona Republic had an article in the lead position on the business page that really got me fuming.  Here is the headline:

Bioscience push paying off.  But analysis says Arizona must do more

Apparently the Arizona and Phoenix governments decided several years ago it was their job to preferentially invest in getting biotech companies to move to Arizona.  And this article was about a consulting study the government engaged to see how they were doing against this original plan. 

Arizona's lucrative bet on the biosciences is yielding more high-wage
jobs, federal research dollars and new buildings that are expected to
birth scientific breakthroughs for decades to come.

But the state needs to accomplish a lot more to establish a thriving
research-based economy, particularly providing enough money, lab space
and support that will allow small research companies to grow and
prosper.

The study can be summarized as "The government spent lots of money.  Biotech jobs increased in Arizona, though we can't establish a link between the government spending and the job growth.  The government needs to spend even more money in the future."  These conclusions are from Battelle, a technology consulting company whose fortunes depend almost entirely on government spending for technology projects, and, magically, they came to the conclusion that government needs to spend a lot on technology projects.

Equal Protection

I seldom hear this argument about corporate welfare, but what the hell ever happened to the equal protection clause?  From the perspective of an Arizona corporation, my government is taxing me and every other business and handing our money over to businesses that call themselves "biotech."  What suddenly gives these other businesses such favored status?  Why is biotech somehow more desirable such that they are more equal under the law?   Or, for those of you on the Left who don't think businesses have equal protection rights, what about Arizona workers?  Why are workers in every other industry taxed so biotech workers can have more secure, higher paying jobs? 

The Worst Investor

Government is the worst investor.  I won't go into how bad they are historically at picking winners, but will make a different point this time.  Consider this hypothetical: 

You have some money to invest in real estate, and engage a consultant to invest your money for you.  The consultant comes back and says that he chose to invest in the most sought-after single property in town, where hundreds of other people were bidding against you for the project, but eventually you outbid them all and got it. 

What would be your reaction?  Mine would be rage and horror.  Why the hell did my consultant choose the project with the most competition, so prices were bid up into the sky?  How am I ever going to get a good return from that?  (Ask yourself what return the Japanese got for their high-profile real estate purchases of the eighties and nineties).

But this is exactly what Arizona has done.  They picked the sector to subsidize and fight for corporate relocations - biotech - that every other state and municipality in the US has also chosen as their highest priority.  They even admit this in their report:

Battelle representatives said Arizona's challenge is that bioscience is
an ultracompetitive field, and states across the nation are pursuing
initiatives to bring the good-paying jobs that the sector promises.

In business school, I would get an "F" for this.  Choosing to subsidize biotech means that for every potential company relocation, Arizona and Phoenix are up against ten other cities and states also throwing subsidy and tax abatement packages out there.  Stupid.

Circle Jerk

It just symbolized for me how stupid all this is when I saw that the big payoff of this state government spending was to attract ... federal government spending:

National Institutes of Health grants issued to Arizona-based
institutions jumped 30 percent from 2002 through 2005. That funding
growth outpaced the nation's top 10 research states.

No Linkage of "Investment" to "Returns"

When private firms make investments, they carefully track the returns from this investment to see if it was worth it.  However, when government makes what it calls "investments", this is impossible.  The study claims that biotech jobs in Arizona have risen faster than the national average, but shows no link to the government spending that had taken place.  Probably because there was little relation.  The fact is that just about any job sector you can name in Phoenix -- from electronics to garbage sorting -- has grown faster than the national average because Phoenix as a whole has grown faster than the national average.  Taking credit for the rising tide is a classic politician behavior.  Companies and individuals are moving to Phoenix because they like the climate and relatively low taxes and regulation, of which the latter are only hurt by corporate welfare programs for favored few.

Prisoner's Dilemma

I have written before how much the government subsidization of corporate relocations looks like a prisoner's dilemma game. 

I hope you can see the parallel to subsidizing business relocations
(replace prisoner with "governor" and confess with "subsidize").  In a
libertarian world where politicians all just say no to subsidizing
businesses, then businesses would end up reasonably evenly distributed
across the country (due to labor markets, distribution requirements,
etc.) and taxpayers would not be paying any subsidies.  However,
because politicians fear that their community will lose if they don't
play the subsidy game like everyone else (the equivalent of staying
silent while your partner is ratting you out in prison) what we end up
with is still having businesses reasonably evenly distributed across
the country, but with massive subsidies in place.

The practice of state governments spending massive amounts of tax money to move a few jobs over the state line, and then having other state governments spend even more money to move the jobs back, is a war of escalation that leaves everyone worse off except a few players with political pull or who work in a fair-haired favored industry.

It's all About the Sex Appeal

Here is the bottom line:  Programs like this are for politicians.
Period.  They benefit politicians by giving them things they can say in
elections, like "I brought biotech jobs to Arizona,"  which sounds
better than "I brought garbage-sorting jobs to Arizona."  This in
effect answers the equal protection question of "why biotech?"  The
answer is that biotech is currently sexy, and politicians in their focus
groups have found that tbiotech resonates the best among voters.  All of
which makes for a really crappy approach to "investing."

I am not a big fan of Arizona's John McCain.  I beyond my problems with the McCain-Feingold disaster, I have always suspected him of being a big-government populist, willing to intervene on any issue in the boardroom or the bedroom.  Matt Welch has taken the time to try to decode McCain, and comes to a similar conclusion.

Readers of this blog know that I consider most campaign finance laws to in fact be carefully crafted incumbent protection acts.  Incumbents in major political offices get millions and millions of dollars in free advertising just from their day-to-day ability to get on the evening news.  This free publicity combined with strong name recognition means that upstarts often have to seriously outspend the incumbent to have a chance of defeating them.  So campaign finance laws act as a powerful protection device for these incumbents, limiting the amount upstarts can spend while in no way limiting the incumbents's ability to use their office (and taxpayer money) to shamelessly promote and publicize themselves.

And there is no one better at using elected office to shamelessly publicize himself than new NY Governor Eliot Spitzer.  So absolutely no one should be surprised at this:

Moving swiftly in his efforts to change the culture of
Albany, Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer said Thursday that he would
unilaterally stop accepting campaign contributions greater than
$10,000, which is less than a fifth of the $50,100 in individual
donations currently allowed by state law.

Mr. Spitzer also said that from now on he would refuse to take
advantage of several notorious loopholes in the state's campaign
finance laws that allow corporations and limited liability companies to
circumvent donation limits by contributing through subsidiaries and
other related entities.

Note that he only took these steps just days after he was elected governor the first time.  Spitzer knows that no one can probably offset the PR advantage he wields, but to be on the safe side, this is the opening shot to make sure that no future challenger is going to have the cash to threaten his position in office.

Generally, Eliot Spitzer irritates the hell out of me.  But I will say for one brief period in college, Spitzer, as the butt of a huge campus-wide joke, brought be great mirth.

The word "censorship" is used all-too-often in this country.  I take a much more narrow definition of censorship.  In my mind, only the government can be guilty of true censorship, which I define as using the coercive power of government to prevent certain forms of speech.  By even this narrow definition, the recent threats against Exxon by Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe come awfully close to censorship:

We reprint the full text of the letter here,
so readers can see for themselves. But its essential point is that the
two Senators believe global warming is a fact, and therefore all debate
about the issue must stop and ExxonMobil should "end its dangerous
support of the [global warming] 'deniers.' " Not only that, the company
"should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public
its funding history." And in extra penance for being "one of the
world's largest carbon emitters," Exxon should spend that money on
"global remediation efforts."

The
Senators aren't dumb enough to risk an ethics inquiry by threatening
specific consequences if Mr. Tillerson declines this offer he can't
refuse. But in case the CEO doesn't understand his company's jeopardy,
they add that "ExxonMobil and its partners in denial have manufactured
controversy, sown doubt, and impeded progress with strategies all-too
reminiscent of those used by the tobacco industry for so many years." (Our emphasis.) The Senators also graciously copied the Exxon board on their missive.

This
is amazing stuff. On the one hand, the Senators say that everyone
agrees on the facts and consequences of climate change. But at the same
time they are so afraid of debate that they want Exxon to stop
financing a doughty band of dissenters who can barely get their name in
the paper. We respect the folks at the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, but we didn't know until reading the Rockefeller-Snowe
letter that they ran U.S. climate policy and led the mainstream media
around by the nose, too.

While I tend to believe that the warming camp is correct that manmade CO2 is creating or will create some global warming, there are a lot of very very good reasons to be skeptical of the magnitude of their warming estimates and their hysterical calls for massive government intervention in the world economy.  I call this the skeptical middle ground on climate.  (Update: more reasons to be skeptical of current "consensus" models here).  A skeptics guide to An Inconvenient Truth is here.

I finally saw Casino Royale this weekend, and though it has been said in many other reviews, I will repeat it:  This is the best Bond ever.  More than just changing Bond actors, the movie represents a retooling of a Bond franchise gone way, way astray in the Roger Moore years.  Pierce Brosnan did a good job bringing Bond back to reality, but he was still too pretty-boy to really portray the ice-cold, very serious Bond of the books.  The double-0's are supposed to be hired as assassins (license to kill, remember) and not because they look good in a tux.  Bond in the book Casino Royale, for example, doesn't even want Vesper Lynd around because he refuses to be distracted by women on duty.  The Bond of recent movies seems to do nothing but get distracted by women on duty.

Casino Royale was always my favorite of the Bond books, and I am pleased that it was this book that brought the franchise into a new era.  Yes, Q and the gadgets are gone, and even some of the classic lines are mostly absent (though shaken not stirred draws a funny joke).  In their place is much sharper and more interesting dialog.  Judie Dench finally gets a role as M that does justice to some of her acting talents.  And  Daniel Craig is fabulous.   

This is also by far the closest any Bond movie has stuck to it's namesake book.  The book was a bit light on action, so rather than try to work it in where it does not belong, they grafted the action onto the front of the movie, which is essentially a prequel to the action in the book.  The book begins about where Bond gets approval to go after LeChiffre in a card game, and from that point forward it follows the book almost exactly, with some minor updating.  The only small amount of pain was seeing Bond playing Texas hold'em rather than Baccarat, but after seeing the movie, poker works much better than Baccarat did in the book - the element of bluffing adds to the tension.

Don't worry, the action is still there.  The opening chase scene is fabulous, all the more so because it is mostly free of gadgets and aircraft and missiles and... you get the idea.  Instead, you get Bond at his most ruthless as well as the improvisational Bond we haven't seen since Sean Connery.  First movie in a while I immediately wanted to see again.  And first action movie in forever where the plot made any sense and the writing was sharp.

Thanks to all those who have bought my new novel BMOC and sent such nice comments.  While the rank fluctuates up and down, we were doing pretty well late on Friday.

It's still not too late to buy a copy of BMOC for Christmas! 

For a while now, I have meant to publish a guide to Walt Disney World (WDW).  For a variety of reasons related to a recurring family reunion, I have spent at least 50 days at WDW in 10 trips over 25 years.  Over those years, I have learned a fair amount about surviving WDW.  Since we may not be going back for a while (the crowds are just too crazy, see below) I thought I would
share some of my experience.  My thoughts, review, and tips on Disney World are below the fold.

Note:  I have made updates in blue from my October, 2008 trip.

Continue reading ‘Disney World Reviews and Advice’ »

I still get a lot of email and
commentary on my posts explaining why a trade deficit does not
necessarily result in a build up of debt.  Its a mistake that
protectionists like Lou Dobbs make, either accidentally or on
purpose, to confuse the trade deficit with a debt (Dobbs, in the linked article, claimed that we had $5 Trillion in accumulated trade debt).  In another
attempt to explain this, I want to present a thought experiment.

In our hypothetical, a regular old
American guy named Joe walks into a Wal-Mart to buy new Plasma TV.
Lets assume that Joe is presented with two choices, a Chinese-made TV
and an American-made TV.  The American TV is $2000 and carries a
brand Joe recognizes;  the Chinese TV is $1800 and is a brand Joe
does not recognize.  As far as he can tell, both are featured
similarly.

Joe may choose to take a chance with an
unknown brand to save $200, or he may not.  Let's see what happens
either way.  If Joe picks the Chinese TV over the American TV, the US
trade deficit will likely be worse, by whatever Wal-Mart has to pay
to restock the shelves.  But, while the trade deficit may be worse if
Joe buys Chinese, is there any additional debt created by buying
Chinese rather than American?

Well, Joe doesn't have more or less
personal debt either way.  Whether he is paying with cash or
financing the TV, this decision is unaffected by whether he buys
Chinese or American.  He may happen to buy Chinese and take on debt
to purchase the TV, but the decision to take on debt has nothing to
do with the fact that it is an import.  If he had bought the American
TV, he presumably would have taken on debt for that purchase as well.
In fact, if anything, since the Chinese TV is cheaper, Joe's
personal debt is reduced by buying Chinese over American.

In fact, the only way in which Joe's
personal debt could be said to be increased by Chinese imports is if
the $200 price differential was enough to change his mind from
not-buying a TV to buying one, and he then financed the purchase.
But this is only going to occur in a small percentage of
transactions, and besides, it would be unfair to call something so
empowering "“ ie giving Joe the power to get something he really
wants that he would otherwise been unable to "“ as a negative.
(Update: I do think this is sortof the logic trade opponents
use.  They argue that "rampant consumerism"is causing an increase
in consumer debt which is kindof sortof tied up in some way with this
whole cheap Chinese goods at Wal-Mart thing, so therefore trade
causes debt.  This may sound good rhetorically at an
anti-globalization rally but makes no sense scientifically).

Now let's take Wal-mart.  Assuming they
know how to price items, they will make a gross margin on either the
Chinese or the American TV.  How, then, can having to restock the TV
Joe bought by buying one from an American factory for say $1400
affect Wal-Mart any differently than paying the same (or less) money
to a Chinese company?  The answer is that it has no effect.  Buying
Chinese vs. American has no effect on Wal-Mart's debt.

So let's say Joe bought the Chinese TV,
and the Chinese end up with $1400 (the factory price) in US currency
courtesy of Wal-Mart.  If they don't need anything in the US, they
will trade this currency for yuan to someone in China who does want
to buy something in the US.  Let's assume that these dollars are all
incremental, so none go to buying exports from the US or goods to be
consumed in the US.  Let's assume that it all gets invested as
profits, and further, let's assume that it gets invested 100% in US
debt securities.

Aha!  People want to say to me.  There
is the debt!  Chinese are buying up US bonds.  And so they are.  But
trade did not cause or create the debt.  Just because Chinese trade
dollars are reinvested in debt securities does not mean trade cause
the debt.  In fact, the US government debt would exist with or
without Chinese trade, courtesy of the tax and spend whores of both
parties in the US Congress.  If the Chinese had not bought the debt,
someone else would have, and the debt still would have existed.  In
fact, the US debt would likely have just been a bit larger and a bit
costlier without Chinese buyers to bring down interest rates.

So, to review, an average American
makes an incremental decision to buy Chinese rather than American,
the trade deficit gets worse, but no debt is created.  So I renew my
challenge to Lou Dobbs, who claims America has $5 trillion in trade
debt by asking a simple question:  Where?

A reader sent me this article on the new proposition F passed in San Francisco. 

Under the Sick Leave Ordinance, employers must provide one hour of paid
sick leave to an employee for every 30 hours worked. The Ordinance
limits the amount of paid leave to a maximum of 40 hours of paid leave
for "small businesses," defined as employers who employ fewer than 10
employees, and of 72 hours of paid leave for larger employers.

Note that this applies to everyone -- part time workers, day laborers, housekeepers, nannies, you name it.  Everyone gets an extra paid hour vacation for every thirty they work.

But Coyote!  How can you say its vacation - the law says sick leave.  Yes, I know, and I am sure supporters can fill any number of 30-second TV ads with heart-rending stories of people who got sick and needed paid time off.  But all of us who have actually worked in real jobs and real companies know how most sick days get used - they become extra vacation days.  Here is a guide to getting the most vacation possible out of your sick days.  For this reason, many companies have done away with the distinction of sick and vacation days and just call them "personal days."

But the law makes sure that employers can't ask any of those nagging questions like "you don't sound sick on the phone."  Because you don't actually have to be sick to take paid sick leave in San Francisco. 

Proposition F, the "Sick Leave Ordinance," also expands existing state
law "kin care" requirements so that covered employees must be permitted
to use paid sick leave to care for siblings, grandparents,
grandchildren and a "designated person" of the employee's choice.
Employees must be permitted to use any or all accrued paid sick leave for such kin care.

"Yep, old Uncle Ed is sick again.  I won't be coming in today but you still have to pay me."  And who's to say "care" for uncle Ed shouldn't include companionship in the form of some fishing.  After all, California recognizes a service animal designation for companionship only.

But just to make sure that the employer does not ask any nagging question when Uncle Ed needs care on nine Fridays in a row, the law includes this:

In addition, Proposition F prohibits an employer from taking any
adverse action against an employee who exercises his or her rights
under the Ordinance. An employee's mistaken but good faith complaints
of employer violations of this Ordinance are protected. Any adverse
action by an employer against an employee within 90 days of the
employee's exercise of a right under the Ordinance creates a rebuttable
presumption of employer retaliation....

The Office of Labor Standards Enforcement has authority to
investigate alleged violations of the Ordinance. If the Office
determines that a violation has occurred following an investigation and
hearing, it may order relief including reinstatement, back pay, the
payment of any sick leave unlawfully withheld and various
administrative penalties.

The Ordinance also permits civil actions by the Office of Labor
Standards Enforcement, the City Attorney, "any person aggrieved by a
violation" (the term could encompass affected employees but also any
person for whom the employee sought to care or aid), and "any other
person or entity acting on behalf of the public as provided for under
applicable state law." The prevailing party may recover all "legal or
equitable relief as may be appropriate to remedy the violation"
including, but not limited to, reinstatement, back pay, the payment of
any sick leave unlawfully withheld, liquidated damages, injunctive
relief; reasonable attorneys' fees and costs. Employees and plaintiffs'
attorneys who sue employers on behalf of similarly-effected employees
and the general public may be entitled to equitable and injunctive
relief, restitution, and reasonable attorneys' fees and costs.

So, any violations by employees will be called "good faith" mistakes and are protected from any punishment.  Employers, on the other hand, are liable for penalties and lawsuits should they make even a good faith mistake.  Attempting to determine if an employee is cheating on his sick day designations will be treated as "retaliation" and punished.  Note that while the office of labor standards have investigation abilities, all the investigative actions listed in their purview are employer violations.  For example, there is language about employers reimbursing employees for sick days they should have paid, but where is the language about employees reimbursing employers for sick days taken fraudulently?

This is exactly how the unemployment system works.  There is a heavy state enforcement arm, but only aimed at fraud by employers, not employees. Pick any state unemployment office at random and look at their web site.  They will probably have a link for filing complaints.  When you click on it, you will quickly see that the complaints they accept are only for employer fraud or impostor fraud, not employee cheating.  In fact, as I wrote here about people taking vacation on unemployment, I was threatened with a lawsuit by an employee and with fines by the state agency in California for even suggesting that an employee was lying when he said he was "looking for work" (when I knew for a fact he was on a winter-long vacation in Mexico).