Coyote Blog

David Stern is putting a gun to the head of Seattle taxpayers:

NBA commissioner David Stern is putting the screws to Seattle
in his attempts to get the community to provide taxpayer subsidies that
are lucrative enough to keep the team from departing the "Emerald City"
to even greener fields in Oklahoma.

Stern blasts city officials
and the overwhelming majority of voters in the city for passing a law
requiring (gasp!) that any funds used to help build an arena earn the
same rate of return as a treasury bill. "That measure simply means
there is no way city money would ever be used on an arena project,"
Stern said. Effectively, Stern has just confirmed what sports
economists have known all along: taxpayer spending on sports
infrastructure is unlikely to provide significant returns on the
investment.

We went through the exact same thing here in Phoenix, with various outsiders and city politicians chiding the voters to voting down taxpayer funded palaces for the Cardinals and Coyotes  (eventually, they found a sucker in the local city of Glendale).  In the past, I have written about sports team and corporate relocations as a prisoners dilemma game.

To see this clearer, lets take the example of Major League Baseball
(MLB).  We all know that cities and states have been massively
subsidizing new baseball stadiums for billionaire team owners.  Lets
for a minute say this never happened - that somehow, the mayors of the
50 largest cities got together in 1960 and made a no-stadium-subsidy
pledge.  First, would MLB still exist?  Sure!  Teams like the Giants
have proven that baseball can work financially in a private park, and
baseball thrived for years with private parks.  OK, would baseball be
in the same cities?  Well, without subsidies, baseball would be in the
largest cities, like New York and LA and Chicago, which is exactly
where they are now.  The odd city here or there might be different,
e.g. Tampa Bay might never have gotten a team, but that would in
retrospect have been a good thing.

The net effect in baseball is the same as it is in every other
industry:  Relocation subsidies, when everyone is playing the game, do
nothing to substantially affect the location of jobs and businesses,
but rather just transfer taxpayer money to business owners and workers.

The Sports Economist writes about this move in the context of another economic game:

Indeed this is a classic example of the time inconsistency problem for
which Finn Kydland and Ed Prescott (my graduate school macro
professor!) won the Nobel Prize in 2004. Stern would like to threaten
Seattle with the permanent loss of their NBA team in order to secure
taxpayer concessions now. But should the team move, the NBA has every
reason to want to back off its previous threats and relocate a team
back into to the area due to the size, location, and income levels of
the city. Even having lost a team, Seattle will likely remain a better
candidate for a successful franchise than smaller and poorer cities
such as New Orleans or Memphis. Certainly Seattle should not fall for
Stern's bluster.

I have written a number of times about the growing ranks of RVers who have completely abandoned a permanent address and spend their entire life on the road.  I know these folks because I hire about 400 of them every summer to run our campgrounds and recreational facilities.  It is a fascinating subculture, that in some ways mirrors the habits of a great nomadic tribe that roams all over the country but comes together in a few camps to meet and interact in the winter (e.g. Colorado River between Yuma and Quartzite).  The numbers are large:

The Census says more than 105,000 Americans live full-time in RVs,
boats or vans, though one RV group says the number is more like half a
million. Because of their nomadic ways, pinning down their number with
any certainty is difficult.

The AP has an article about how difficult it is becoming for some of these folks to vote, since a number of states are beginning to require a permanent physical address  (most of these folks have PO Boxes run by companies that forward their mail).

A total of 286 people who live full-time in their recreational vehicles
were dropped from the voter rolls in one Tennessee county over the past
two years because they did not have a genuine home address, only a
mailbox. That has left them unable to vote in national or local
elections....

But some elections officials say that voters should have a real
connection to the place where they are casting ballots, and that RVers
are registering in certain states simply to avoid taxes. Some of them
rarely, if ever, set foot in those states.

I guess they need a real connection to their state, kind of like, say, Hillary Clinton had to New York when she ran for the Senate there.  I know that the immediate reaction from many of you may be that this is
somehow weird and, being weird, it is OK to lock them out of voting.
But I can attest these folks are all quite normal people who are
seduced by the ability to live anywhere they want, on the spur of the
moment, and who revel in being able to simplify their life enough to
fit all their worldly goods into an RV and hit the road.

This part is total BS:

David Ellis, the former Bradley County Election Commission director who
started removing full-time RVers, said they have no connection to the
area and are simply "dodging their responsibility to pay their fair
share" of taxes.

RVers pay taxes in the states in which they work, not in their home state  (just like everyone else, by the way).  RVers, who rent their living site, pay the same property taxes (ie zero) that any other renter pays.

For the record, none of my folks have reported a problem.  However, these problems are just going to get worse.  Crackdowns both on illegal immigration and hypothesized terrorism are making more difficult to complete any number of basic tasks, like banking, without a permanent physical address.

I again heard someone on NPR today lamenting the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US.  It got me thinking about a couple of things:

1. When I had my political awakening in high school debate in the 1970s, all of the complaints from the left were about how horrible blue collar workers had it in manufacturing jobs.  At that time, manufacturing jobs were labeled by leftish critics as dirty and dangerous, and, most common, as repetitious and boring (in the Fredrick Taylor legacy).  OK, so now that they all have nice clean service jobs, we are unhappy that they don't have those old manufacturing jobs?  These are folks whose agenda has nothing to do with the words they are actually speaking, and everything to do with creating dissatisfaction to facilitate government takeover of economic functions
2. While I am sure the service sector is overtaking manufacturing (in the same way manufacturing overtook agriculture), to some extent the statistics are misleading.
   

   Let's take an automobile assembly plant circa 1955.  Typically, a
   large manufacturing plant would have a staff to do everything the
   factory needed.  They had people on staff to clean the bathrooms, to
   paint the walls, and to perform equipment maintenance.  The people who
   did these jobs were all classified as manufacturing workers, because
   they worked in a manufacturing plant.  Since 1955, this plant has
   likely changed the way it staffs these type jobs.  It still cleans the
   bathrooms, but it has a contract with an outside janitorial firm who
   comes in each night to do so.  It still paints the walls, but has a
   contract with a painting contractor to do so.  And it still needs the
   equipment to be maintained, but probably has contracts with many of the
   equipment suppliers to do the maintenance.

   So, today, there might be the exact same number of people in the
   factory cleaning bathrooms and maintaining equipment, but now the
   government classifies them as "service workers" because they work for a
   service company, rather than manufacturing workers.  Nothing has really
   changed in the work that people do, but government stats will show a
   large shift from manufacturing to service employment.

3. I am tired of the whole McJobs meme.  Have you been in a McDonalds?  How many middle age auto worker types do you see working there?  None?  What you see are young people and recent entrants to the job market, including new immigrants.  What these people need more than anything is real experience with the basics of holding a job, including showing up reliably, working in a structured environment, following a process, and providing customer service.  Sure, they would prefer that to happen at $60 an hour, what they really need, and are getting, is a credible work experience they can use to go get higher paying jobs in the future.

I don't know if this has made the blog rounds yet (I have been out of touch and have not gotten through me feed reader today) but this is perhaps one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard.  It's a 40 second interview with a woman named Geri Punteney in Iowa about Barack Obama on the left of this page  (ironically, NPR makes you listen to a brief commercial before you hear the clip).

You really, really need to take the time to listen.  I will include an excerpt below, but you won't get the full effect of the woman absolutely in tears through the statement, crying because she had gotten to touch someone she had seen on TV.

A few weeks ago, at the home in Oelwein, Iowa, she shares with her mother, Punteney said she'd been inspired to see Obama when he came to the area.                        

"I'd seen the commercials," she said. "And he just seemed sincere, like he's for people like my mom, my brother and me."                        

Many people feel politicians may not be the first place to turn when in dire need of help. But Punteney said she was confident Obama could do something to make her feel better.                     
"I never had anyone pay attention to me and my needs "” and he held my hand," she said.

He can do something to make me feel better?  Barf.  Can it really be that my future freedom and prosperity depend on how this woman votes?  Have we really given this woman so much power over the rest of us?  Have we really throttled back the most productive in society so this woman can feel like she is keeping up?  Have I really become the sacrificial lamb to this woman's need to feel better?

And, oh by the way, in case I have not gone off on this rant in the last five minutes or so, Obama can care because he can promise you whatever you desire, and then he can force me to pay for it.  Unlike people in private life who really do care, politicians don't actually pay for their promises because they can force other people to do it for them.  Worse, politicians like Obama reap the praises of women like this for being caring, while vilifying people like me who are productive and make his caring possible.  It just makes me sick.

Oh, and how much did Obama really care?  Not much, it seems:

I brought a tape recorder to Punteney's house and played her moment
with Obama back for her "” and his suggestion that he'd write her
brother a note. He never did.                        

"He
didn't have time, I guess," she said. "I understand. You know, he was
bombarded by so many people. But just knowing he knows "” that's more
important than a note."

So here it is:  Cares enough to spend Coyote's money:  Yes.  Cares enough to actually expend some effort himself:  No way.

Indeed, Punteney seemed to get just what she wanted from Obama. She got noticed.

How about a trade, Ms. Punteney?  If I promise to get you to an Oprah show, will you promise not to ever vote?

Update: Yeah, I know, her brother has leukemia, which is sad.  The lack of portability of his health insurance is also pain, a result of WWII wage control policy and subsequent tax policy that encouraged the practice.    Sorry, but this need to be touched and noticed by a second or third term Congressman is pathetic. 

Over at Climate Skeptic, I post my single best argument why you shouldn't be panicked about anthropogenic global warming.

I almost never ever post on politics and political races, but I had an interesting conversation the other day.  As a secular libertarian, I find no one (beyond Ron Paul) among the Republican candidates even the least bit interesting.  I trust none of them to pursue free market and small government principals, and several, including McCain, Giuliani, and Huckabee, have track records of large government intrusiveness.

What I found interesting was a conversation with a friend of mine who self-identifies as a Christian conservative  (yes, I know it is out of vogue, but it is perfectly possible to have quality friendships with people of different political stripes, particularly considering that I am married to a New England liberal Democrat).  My Christian conservative friend said he found no Republican he was really interested in voting for.

I find it interesting that the Republicans (again with the exception of Ron Paul, who I think they would like to disavow) unable to field a candidate that appeals to either of its traditional constituencies.  It strikes me the party is heading back to its roots in the 1970s in the Nixon-Rockefeller days.  Yuk.

Update:  Which isn't to necessarily say the Democrats have everything figured out.  For example, in response to a Republican President thought to be over-reaching, secretive, and overly fond of executive power, they seem ready to nominate Hillary Clinton, who may be one of the few people in the country more secretive and power-hungry.  Anyone remember how she conducted her infamous health care task force?  I seem to remember she pioneered many of the practices for which Democrats tried to impeach Dick Cheney this week.

I almost never ever post on politics and political races, but I had an interesting conversation the other day.  As a secular libertarian, I find no one (beyond Ron Paul) among the Republican candidates even the least bit interesting.  I trust none of them to pursue free market and small government principals, and several, including McCain, Giuliani, and Huckabee, have track records of large government intrusiveness.

What I found interesting was a conversation with a friend of mine who self-identifies as a Christian conservative  (yes, I know it is out of vogue, but it is perfectly possible to have quality friendships with people of different political stripes, particularly considering that I am married to a New England liberal Democrat).  My Christian conservative friend said he found no Republican he was really interested in voting for.

I find it interesting that the Republicans (again with the exception of Ron Paul, who I think they would like to disavow) unable to field a candidate that appeals to either of its traditional constituencies.  It strikes me the party is heading back to its roots in the 1970s in the Nixon-Rockefeller days.  Yuk.

Update:  Which isn't to necessarily say the Democrats have everything figured out.  For example, in response to a Republican President thought to be over-reaching, secretive, and overly fond of executive power, they seem ready to nominate Hillary Clinton, who may be one of the few people in the country more secretive and power-hungry.  Anyone remember how she conducted her infamous health care task force?  I seem to remember she pioneered many of the practices for which Democrats tried to impeach Dick Cheney this week.

Via Hit and Run, this is an incredible site for stat-geeks to fool around.  Top 101 city lists.

#1 Average Sunshine!  I have also lived in the 4th least sunny city.  Sunnier is better.   Seattle is not among the rainiest in terms of total inches, because it never rains very hard.  If you could measure rainy as "number of hours per month that rain is falling", Seattle would be right up there.  In places like Houston, you get a lot more volume of rain, but you get a whole years worth in just a couple of hours.

Other interesting ones:

• Size of government:  Largest local government salary and wages per resident.  Every man, woman, and child in Cambridge MA spends $3,532 a year towards the salary of a City of Cambridge government employee.
• Property taxes per resident (look at the map, all but 8 of 101 in the northeast)
• Living your whole life in the same spot
• The average woman in St. Louis weighs over 165 pounds?
• Counties with a net exodus are still dominated by the upper midwest, but look at people moving out of coastal California!
• I have often argued that the numbers of people without health insurance are skewed by new and illegal immigrants.  Check out this map of places with the most uninsured - they all seem to border Mexico
• Chicago was named the windy city because of its politics, not because of actual wind

I just wish they had a better explanation of the metric and the data source for each

Bummer:

General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM) today announced it will record a net
noncash charge of $39 billion for the third quarter of 2007 related to
establishing a valuation allowance against its deferred tax assets
(DTAs) in the U.S., Canada and Germany.

Not everyday you can restate your balance sheet by $39 billion.  Apparently, if you lose money long enough, then FASB rules assume that there is a good chance you may never use your tax-loss carry-forwards, so they have to be written down.

1. I really like my new iPod touch as a movie player for trips.  With an add-on double-A battery for extra life, it beats the hell out of portable DVD players.  It is a decent Internet surfer over WiFi though I am still looking for something a bit larger.
2. Anyone who fetishizes Apple's design capability has never tried to sync two iPods from one computer.  It can be done, with a klugey shift-click open to iTunes that brings up a "pick library" menu, but it really blows.  Also, they obviously have not had to endure QuickTime popups 415 times a day that say "Some of your Quick Time software is out of date.  You can fix this problem by updating the the latest version."  When one clicks "Do it now," one invariably gets the error message that the servers are busy (if the system does not crash entirely.
3. The new iPod classics still suck.  I tried them again at Best Buy.  The menu is laggy as hell and very hard to make selections or browse.  It is no accident that new-in-box generation 5.5 iPods are selling for more on eBay than new generation 6 iPods with the same or more memory.

You have probably seen the stories about the creepy, mandatory reeducation program for University of Delaware students.  If you have missed the story, or want more, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is all over it -- here is a roundup.

However, if you don't have time to go through it all, here is a couple of examples I took right from their curricula.  Note that the following goals for the program are set in the context of, as the university puts it, "treatment" for students incorrect beliefs and worldviews.   This is from the Central Complex residence hall:

Look at 2B and C for example!  Its coincident timing, but look at stuff above in the context of this post, which I wrote before I even saw this.  Could there be a more resounding confirmation of this:

I have to lay a lot of this failure on universities like my own.
Having made students jump through unbelievable hoops just to get
admitted, and then having charged them $60,000 a year for tuition,
universities feel like they need to make students feel better about
this investment.   Universities have convinced their graduates that
public pursuits are morally superior to grubby old corporate jobs (that
actually require, you know, real work), and then have further convinced
them that they are ready to change to world and be leaders at 22.  Each
and every one of them graduate convinced they have something important
to say and that the world is kneeling at their feet to hear it.  But
who the f*ck cares what a 22-year-old with an Ivy League politics
degree has to say?  Who in heavens name listened to Lincoln or
Churchill in their early twenties?  It's a false expectation.  The Ivy
League is training young people for, and in fact encouraging them to
pursue, a job (ie 22-year-old to whom we all happily defer to tell us
what to do) that simply does not exist.  A few NGO's and similar
organizations offer a few positions that pretend to be this
job, but these are more in the nature of charitable make-work positions
to help Harvard Kennedy School graduates with their self-esteem, kind
of like basket-weaving for mental patients.

If you read through the whole document, which is nearly impossible because it is a classic example of academic mental masturbation, you will see the curriculum is dominated by this sustainability notion

Somehow none of the residence halls chose "the role of capitalism and individual entrepreneurship in creating wealth."  Remember that these are all areas that the university has declared that students require "treatment" if their views do not conform with the university orthodoxy.  They are expecting that all students must share all of these beliefs.  For real creepiness, read about the student that the RA conducting this curriculum actually felt the need to report to university officials because her attitudes were so "out of whack".  She was reported for saying obviously horrendous things like this answer:

1) When were you first made aware of your race?

"That is irrelevant to everything. My race is human being."

Fortunately, the University of Delaware killed the program after a firestorm of national outrage.  If you have read the FIRE blog long enough, you will suspect that Delaware will find some way in the future to sneak it back in.

My post of the vacuousness of student activists, written before I even saw this, is here.

Update:  How did I miss this great quote, from the university's Office of Residence Life Diversity Education Training documents:

"A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the
basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. "˜The term applies
to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the
United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or
sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists,
because as peoples within the system, they do not have the power to
back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination"¦.'"

Over at Climate Skeptic, we can see Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, argue that the only way to really abate CO2 is for all the world's countries to be just like India.  I kid you not.  And, in fact I agree with him that if we really wanted to eliminate CO2 emissions with current technology, exactly this kind of poverty promotion program would be required.  I just don't think it's necessary that we adopt such a goal. 

As a postscript, I take on Mr. Stern's temperature forecasts of 2.5-3 degree C rise by 2050 and show why they make absolutely no sense in light of the last 100 years of empirical data.

One of my favorite bloggers, TJIC, has opened a cool-looking web-site selling comics and graphic novels for 20% off with free shipping.  The site is called HeavyInk.com and is worth a look if you are interested in that genre.  I know TJIC's other online business SmartFlix.com gets very good reviews for service from its customers.

An exception to the general use of "a" and "an" is before a word like "used."  For example, we say "a used car" rather than "an used car" despite the fact that "used" starts with a vowel.  Is there a name or general rule for this exception?  My guess it is because "used" begins with the "y" consonant sound, so we treat "used" like we would "Yugo".

My friend Brink Lindsey is usually pretty measured in his writing.  So it was entertaining to see him take Paul Krugman out to the woodshed:

How can someone as intelligent and informed as Krugman
concoct an interpretation of the post-World War II era that does such
violence to the facts? How can someone so familiar with the intricate
complexities of social processes convince himself that history is a
simple matter of good guys versus bad guys? Because, for whatever
reason, he has swapped disinterested analysis and scholarship for
ideological partisanship. Here,
in a revealing choice of phrase, he paraphrases Barry Goldwater's
notorious line: "Partisanship in the defense of liberty is no vice."

To be a partisan is, by definition, to see the world partially
rather than objectively: to identify wholeheartedly with the
perspectives of one particular group and, at the extreme, to discount
all rival perspectives as symptoms of intellectual or moral corruption.
And the perspective Krugman has chosen to identify with is the
philosophically incoherent, historically contingent grab bag of
intellectual, interest group, and regional perspectives known as
postwar American liberalism.

Of course, over the period that Krugman is addressing, the contents
of that grab bag have changed fairly dramatically: from
internationalist hawkishness in World War II and the early Cold War to
a profound discomfort with American power in the '70s and '80s to a
jumble of rival views today; from cynical acquiescence in Jim Crow to
heroic embrace of the civil rights movement to the excesses of identity
group politics to a more centrist line today; from sympathy for
working-class economic hardship to hostility to working-class culture
and back again. Yet with a naive zeal that leaves even Cuomo visibly
nonplussed at several points in the interview, Krugman embraces the
shifting contents of this grab bag as the one true path of virtue.

I missed this two-year-old post from Don Boudreax at Cafe Hayek, but it is an excellent two part look at the 1975 Sears catalog aimed at answering the question, "Are we wealthier today?"  Part 1 just browses the catalog; part 2 is really interesting in that he compares the hours of work required today vs. 1975.  One interesting conclusion is that the comparison can be difficult because even some of the best items in 1975 are not as good as the economy models today.  And he does not mention things like reliability.  How often did the TV repair guy come to your house in the early 70's, with his big box of tubes.  My Sony in my bedroom has been operating flawlessly since 1995.  For example:

Sears lowest-priced garage-door opener: 20.1 hours of work required in
1975 (to buy a ¼-horsepower opener); 8.57 hours of work required in
2006 (to buy a ½-horsepower opener; Sears no longer sells garage-door
openers with less than ½-horsepower.)

Because the government has put itself in the job of redistributor-in-chief, and there is just too high of a financial return from influencing who are to be the beneficiaries, and who are to be the sacrificial lambs.  This is particularly the case when Congress can aim dollars at a small group who will give back generously in return, and where the costs are dispersed across large numbers of people, generally consumers or taxpayers or both:

Dan Morgan has another excellent Washington Post report
on our tangled web of farm subsidies, tariffs, government purchases,
and so on. This time he examines the sugar industry's political
contributions"“"more than 900 separate contributions totaling nearly
$1.5 million to candidates, parties and political funds" in 2007 alone.
Most of the money went to Democrats, apparently, which might explain
why Democrats opposed more strongly than Republicans an amendment
to strike the sugar subsidy provisions from the bill. Morgan delights
in pointing out members of Congress such as Rep. Carolyn Maloney of
Queens and Manhattan and Rep. Steven Rothman of bucolic Hackensack and
Fort Lee, New Jersey, who received funds from the sugar magnates and
voted to protect their subsidies despite the fact that they would seem
to have more sugar consumers than sugar growers in their districts....

So $1.5 million is a lot of money, and it seems to have done the trick.
But . . . is it really so much money? According to Morgan, the sugar
provisions in the farm bill are worth $1 billion over 10 years. That's
a huge return on investment. In what other way could a business invest
$1.5 million to reap $1 billion?

The real campaign finance reform that is needed is to get the government out of the business of naming winners and losers.

Update:  More on the sugar fiasco here.

Under the current system, the government guarantees a price floor for
sugar and limits the sugar supply "” placing quotas on domestic
production and quotas and tariffs to limit imports. According to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, sugar supports
cost American consumers "” who pay double the average world price "” more
than $1.5 billion a year. The system also bars farmers in some of the
poorest countries of the world from selling their sugar here.

The North American Free Trade Agreement is about to topple this
cozy arrangement. Next year, Mexican sugar will be allowed to enter the
United States free of any quotas or duties, threatening a flood of
imports. Rather than taking the opportunity to untangle the sugar
program in this year's farm bill, Congress has decided to bolster the
old system.

Both the House bill, which was passed in July, and the Senate
version, which could be voted on as early as this week, guarantee that
the government will buy from American farmers an amount of sugar
equivalent to 85 percent of domestic consumption "” regardless of how
much comes in from abroad. To add insult to injury, both also increase
the longstanding price guarantee for sugar.

The bills encourage the government to operate the program at no cost
to the budget, by selling the surplus sugar to the ethanol industry.
That's not likely. Ethanol makers will never accept paying anywhere
near sugar's guaranteed price. According to rough estimates from the
Congressional Budget Office, supports for sugar in the House bill could
cost taxpayers from $750 million to $850 million over the next five
years.

In my roundup of music recommendations that have been given me by readers, I somehow forgot probably the most important one.

The House version of the bill spends $14 billion.  The Senate version spends $15 billion.  So what is the compromise between the two.  14.5?  No, spend $23.2 billion!

Activist:  A person who believes so strongly that a problem needs to be remedied that she dedicates substantial time to ... getting other people to fix the problem.   It used to be that activists sought voluntary help for their pet problem, and thus retained some semblance of honor.  However, our self-styled elite became frustrated at some point in the past that despite their Ivy League masters degrees in sociology, other people did not seem to respect their ideas nor were they particularly interested in the activist's pet issues.  So activists sought out the double shortcut of spending their time not solving the problem themselves, and not convincing other people to help, but convincing the government it should compel others to fix the supposed problem.  This fascism of good intentions usually consists of government taking money from the populace to throw at the activist's issue, but can also take the form of government-compelled labor and/or government limitations on choice.

I began this post yesterday, with the introduction above, ready to take on this barf-inducing article in the Washington Post titled " Fulfillment Elusive for Young Altruists In the Crowded Field of Public Interest."  Gee, who would have thought it difficult for a twenty-something with no real job experience to get someone like me to pay you to lobby the government to force me to pay for your personal goals for the world?

Fortunately, since it is a drop-dead gorgeous day outside, TJIC has already done the detail work of ripping this article apart.  Here is one snippet, you should read the whole thing:

So the best they can imagine doing is "advocating".

Here's a hint: maybe the reason that your "sense of adulthood"
is "sapped" is because you haven't been doing anything at all adult.

Adults accomplish things.

They do not bounce around a meaningless series of do-nothing graduate programs, NGOs, and the sophisticated social scene in DC.

If you want to help the poor in Africa, go over there, find
some product they make that could sell here, and start importing it.
Create a market. Drive up the demand for their output.

Or find a bank that's doing micro-finance.

Or become a travel writer, to increase the demand for photography safaris, which would pump more dollars into the region.

Or design a better propane refrigerator, to make the lives of the African poor better....

One thing that disgusts me about "wannabe world changers" is that
mortaring together a few bricks almost always is beneath them - they're
more interested in writing a document about how to lobby the government
to fund a new appropriate-technology brick factory.

Special mutual admiration bonus-points are herein scored by my quoting TJIC's article that quotes me quoting TJIC.

I will add one thing:  I have to lay a lot of this failure on universities like my own.  Having made students jump through unbelievable hoops just to get admitted, and then having charged them $60,000 a year for tuition, universities feel like they need to make students feel better about this investment.   Universities have convinced their graduates that public pursuits are morally superior to grubby old corporate jobs (that actually require, you know, real work), and then have further convinced them that they are ready to change to world and be leaders at 22.  Each and every one of them graduate convinced they have something important to say and that the world is kneeling at their feet to hear it.  But who the f*ck cares what a 22-year-old with an Ivy League politics degree has to say?  Who in heavens name listened to Lincoln or Churchill in their early twenties?  It's a false expectation.  The Ivy League is training young people for, and in fact encouraging them to pursue, a job (ie 22-year-old to whom we all happily defer to tell us what to do) that simply does not exist.  A few NGO's and similar organizations offer a few positions that pretend to be this job, but these are more in the nature of charitable make-work positions to help Harvard Kennedy School graduates with their self-esteem, kind of like basket-weaving for mental patients.

So what is being done to provide more pretend-you-are-making-an-impact-while-drawing-a-salary-and-not-doing-any-real-work jobs for over-educated twenty-something Ivy League international affairs majors?  Not enough:

Chief executives for NGOs, Wallace said, have told her: "Well, yeah, if
we had the money, we'd be doing more. We can never hire as many as we
want to hire." Wallace said her organization drew more than 100
applicants for a policy associate position. "The industry really needs
to look at how to provide more avenues for young, educated people," she
said.

Excuses, excuses.  We are not doing enough for these young adults.  I think the government should do something about it!

Update:  Oh my God, a fabulous example illustrating exactly what universities are doing to promote this mindset is being provided by the University of Delaware.  See the details here.

I remember a while back there was a TV show where people told the producers what kind of cool demonstrations they would like to see and the TV show delivered.  The one I remember was the guy that wanted to see a whole case of fluorescent light tubes dropped off a five-story roof onto a parking lot.

If I were asked, my fantasy would be to see 20,000 pounds of metallic sodium dropped in a lake.  Wish Fulfilled!  HT Maggies Farm.

I am a bit blog-awarded out, but having been nominated again, it would be embarrassing to get no votes at all.  Coyote Blog is in that Oh-so-prestigious category, "top 501-1000 blogs,"  the winning of which has always struck me as roughly equivalent to winning the NIT Men's Basketball Tournament ("We're number 66! Yeah!").

Anyway, drop me a vote so we don't get entirely embarrassed.

We have a strict no-console-game policy in the household.  Generally, when I see how other people's kids spend their time, I am pretty happy that we have stuck to this.  However, it has meant no Guitar Hero in the house. 

Well, finally, Guitar Hero III is out and is available in a PC version, though of course Amazon is back-ordered right now.

A while back, I solicited input on what bands a lover of classic rock should be listening to from the last 10 years.  I got about 40 responses.  Here are some of the more popular recommendations:

First, several people suggested Pandora.com, an internet radio station that will play music based on songs or bands you like.  I have used Pandora for a while and really like it.  I have found a number of albums I really love from this source.  For example:  Frank Zappa's "Shut up and play yer guitar" series of live guitar solos.   RadioParadise.com also had a number of supporters, and I am running it right now as I type.  It streams a fairly eclectic mix of old and new music.

Several bands / albums got multiple votes.  Those included:

White Stripes
Clutch
Corrosion of Conformity
Dream Theater
Queens of the Stone Age
Tool

I will try a selection and let folks know. 

Lot's of support for the most recent Rush efforts, which I already own and enjoy.  Ditto Stone Temple Pilots and the Black Crowes, though I am not sure their best work quite clears the 10-year-old hurdle.  Someone suggested Days of the New -- I own their first album and really enjoy it (acoustic grunge?).  I also own and enjoy both "Burning for Buddy" CDs that several folks recommended, if you are looking for something jazzier.

Lots more recommendations I will check out over time in the comments here.

Update: I asked my college roommate and CATO-ite Brink Lindsey the same question, because I know from several years of living in a confined space that he shared many of my musical tastes.  He writes:

From the mid 90s to the present, my favorite albums are:

Soundgarden, Superunknown
Garbage, Garbage
Kula Shaker, K
The Offspring, Smash
Beck, Odelay
Audioslave, Audioslave (this one's actually from after 2000!)
Kid Rock, Devil Without a Cause (yeh, it's rap but it rocks)
Green Day, Dookie
Linkin Park, Hybrid Theory (from 2000!)

Going back to the early 90s, Metallica's black album, Blind Melon's
self-titled album, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik, U2's
Achtung Baby, Nirvana's Nevermind and Unplugged, and Pearljam's 10 and
Vs. are all favorites.

None of this will allow you to claim you have current musical tastes.

Among current rock bands that I know of, I like the White Stripes.  But
that's about all I know.

Soundgarden / Metallica / Nirvana / Pearl Jam sort of represent the new end of my music collection, beyond which I am attempting to fill in the white space.

Email I received with subject line "Climate Skeptic"

"How stupid are you"

Outstanding.  I love scientific discourse.