Dispatches from District 48
Archive for 2008
Year Food spending as share of disposable income 1929 23.4% 1939 21.3% 1949 22.1% 1959 17.8% 1969 13.7% 1979 13.4% 1989 10.9% 1999 10.2% 2000 9.9% 2001 9.9% 2002 9.8% 2003 9.8% 2004 9.7% 2005 9.8% 2006 9.9%
My sense is the same pattern would emerge for gasoline prices, electricity (if you had it), phone service (if you had it), cross-country transportation, air conditioning, etc.
Here is something I really, really did not know, or probably even want to know, before a friend emailed me a link today:
In the 2001 United Kingdom census, 390,000 people - 0.7 per cent of the population - listed Jedi as their religion.
They are not alone - 20,000 Canadians also listed their religion as Jedi in 2001...
Some may list such a choice only as a joke, but there are apparently real churches set up in the model of the Jedi religion as detailed in the Star Wars franchise:
The two cousins and Barney Jones' brother, Daniel, set up the Church of
Jediism, Anglesey order, last year. Jedi is the faith followed by some
of the central characters in the "Star Wars" films.The group, which claims about 30 members, says on its website that
it uses "insight and knowledge" from the films as "a guide to living a
better and more worthwhile life."
Oh, but it gets even better:
A man who dressed up as Darth Vader has been spared jail time for assaulting the founders of the Jedi Church in Britain.
Twenty-seven-year-old Arwel Wynne Hughes was given a suspended sentence for the crime by a judge in Wales on Tuesday.
Prosecutors told Magistrates' Court in Holyhead that Hughes attacked
Jedi church founder Barney Jones - a.k.a. Master Jonba Hehol - with a
metal crutch, hitting him on the head.He also whacked Jones' 18-year-old cousin, Michael Jones - known as
Master Mormi Hehol - bruising his thigh in the March 25 incident.
Wow, I am not sure how I missed this seminal work, but I discovered it today via Steven Levitt. The work is titled "On the Efficiency of AC/DC: Bon Scott versus Brian Johnson" by Robert J. Oxoby of the University of Calgary Economics Department.
Our treatment variable in the experiment was the type of music played while individuals were making their decisions. As demonstrated by Bernardi et al. (2006), different musical styles can have different physiological effects in individuals. These effects, along with emotional responses, may result in different patterns of decision making regarding distributing money between oneself and another. In our Bon Scott treatment, participants listened to "It's a Long Way to the Top" (featuring Bon Scott on vocals) from the album High Voltage. In our Brian Johnson treatment, participants listened to "Shoot to Thrill" (featuring Brian Johnson on vocals) from the album Back in Black....
our analysis suggests that in terms of affecting efficient decision making among listeners, Brian Johnson was a better singer. Our analysis has direct implications for policy and organizational design: when policymakers or employers are engaging in negotiations (or setting up environments in which other parties will negotiate) and are interested in playing the music of AC/DC, they should choose from the band's Brian Johnson era discography.
I have this picture of AC/DC music blasting out on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade
(the whole story behind this "study" is here)
Our governor is pushing for a one percentage point increase in the state sales tax as well as increased developer impact fees to fund a series of transportation projects. Like most modern transportation bills, they are sold as a way to improve state road and highway capacity (something most people support), but it turns out that these projects are but window-dressing. Much of the money in the proposed bill goes to a series of dubious mass transit projects, including the oft-discussed mythical passenger rail line between Tucson and Phoenix. None of these projects make sense in spread out, low density cities like Phoenix or Tucson that have no real city core, which is why they face a lot of opposition.
Well, our governor has cut a deal to try to get more support for her pet projects, and boy does it look ugly:
Some Republican
state lawmakers on Monday blasted a "backroom deal" between Gov. Janet
Napolitano and a Valley home-builders group that would exempt
residential developers from sharing a portion of the costs of a major
transportation initiative in exchange for a $100,000 contribution to
boost the signature-gathering campaign.Under the agreement, the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona
agreed to withdraw their opposition to a state trust-land initiative
backed by Napolitano. In return, developer impact fees would no longer
be part of the transportation initiative's approach to raising money.
I have been a big Windows Vista detractor, and continue to be skeptical that Vista offers the average corporate user any advantages over XP, while carrying substantial disadvantages in terms of legacy equipment and software compatibility.
But, credit where it is due, service pack 1 combined with better graphics drivers have at least apparently eliminated the Vista-XP gap in gaming speeds, with graphics applications performing now nearly as well in Vista as in XP.
Over at Climate Skeptic, I discuss a recent claim by ABC that year-to-date tornado frequency has nearly doubled vs. 2007, and that this is because of global warming. I will take their word for it that tornado frequency is up, but there is one tiny problem: The US in Jan-Apr of this year was almost a full degree cooler than last year. So if tornado frequency is up, and ABC is correct that yearly changes in this metric are due to changes in global temperature, then it can only mean that global warming reduces, rather than increases, tornadoes.
WSJ, via Libertarian Leanings:
One of the worst places, in
term of frivolous lawsuits, was Jefferson County. It became renowned as
the lawsuit capital of the country, with more plaintiffs than
residents. This is the infamous county where one pharmacist was named
in more than 1,000 lawsuits. In one legendary case against a
pharmaceutical company that sold the diet pill Pondimin (part of the
weight-loss combination known as fen-phen, which was later banned), a
Jefferson County jury awarded $1 billion to the family of a woman who
had taken the drug.But four years ago, Mississippi transformed itself
from judicial hell hole to job magnet, a story that is instructive for
other states trying to attract jobs in turbulent economic times. The
lessons here are especially timely, because the pro-growth tort reform
trend that was once spreading across the country may soon reverse
course....Almost overnight, the flow
of lawsuits began to dry up and businesses started to trickle in.
Federal Express invested $1 billion in a new facility in the state.
Toyota chose Mississippi over about a dozen other states for a new $1.2
billion, 2,000-worker auto plant. The auto maker has stipulated that
the company would pull up stakes if the tort reforms were overturned by
the legislature or activist judges.That hasn't happened. About 60,000 new jobs have
arrived in four years "“ not a small number in a workforce of about 1.3
million "“ and a sharp improvement from the 30,000 jobs lost in the four
years before Mr. Barbour took office. Since the law took effect, the
number of medical malpractice lawsuits has fallen by nearly 90%, which
in turn has cut malpractice insurance costs by 30% to 45%, depending on
the county.
Paula Brown is on the front lines of building the nanny state. Her son and his friend built a bicycle ramp out of rocks and old boards in the street in front of Ms. Brown's house. The youthful construction couldn't stand the stresses involved, and the boy's friend suffered a nasty crash, sending him to the hospital with multiple broken bones. Ms. Brown, who was present in the house as the boys built their jury-rigged Evil Knievel ramp, believes that the government needs to be doing more:
"We've got good drinking and driving laws here, but why no helmet laws?" asked Paula Brown, Cam's mother.
The Browns moved to Scottsdale in August from Vancouver, where helmets are required for bikes, skateboards and scooters.
"We make our kids wear helmets for anything on wheels," Brown said.
Tammy Blackwell, Tristan's mother, also would support a helmet law
for kids. "My husband and I went out and bought helmets for ourselves
because of this."...She complains that, since Scottsdale doesn't have a rule, peer-group pressure is more compelling to kids than common sense.
Evidently the city's modest signs recommending helmet use and the
more existential, "Skate at Your Own Risk" aren't making a dent.
The real logic gap in this story is that the kid who was hurt was wearing a bike helmet at the time. So the severe injuries involved had nothing to do with helmet wearing, and everything to do with the lack of adult supervision by Ms. Brown.
Kevin Drum is discussing a book by Larry Bartels that argues the bottom third of the US population (as measured by income) are disenfranchised, as their preferences seem to have no discernible effect on legislative votes. I have not read the book, but I find this an astounding assertion on its face, particularly given that the US government is nearly entirely paid for by the other 2/3. We exploiters don't seem to be doing a very good job of taking advantage of our oligarchy. (By the way, if "oppressed" is defined as having one's preferences have no impact on Congressmen, then add us libertarians into the oppressed).
On the other hand, I would say that if an affluent neighborhood had 50,000 of its citizens per month randomly stopped and frisked in the street, we might see a little more pressure for police and prosecutorial reform. I just finished Cop in the Hood, in which Peter Moskos spends a good portion of the book discussing these same issues of probable cause and street searches.
First it was breast implants, then thimerosal, and now it is phthalates. Each have been attacked in turn by the junk-science / media / tort law complex. Nobel Prize-winning chemist William Knowles wrote this week:
Lawmakers -- representing the concern of parents influenced by certain
environmentalists -- are calling for an outright ban of phthalates from
children's toys because of the misguided belief that by exposing
children to toys made with these chemicals we are putting their health
at risk.Phthalates have a long history of attacks by environmental groups
dating back more than 30 years. Even then babies were of prime
consideration. Few chemicals have undergone such extensive testing and
survived as being safe. In fact, diisononyl phthalate, the most
commonly used phthalate in children's toys, has been subjected to more
than 200 tests....Today, with no new scientific evidence, we are again challenging
phthalates as dangerous to babies and threatening to ban them. These
are products that have survived the toughest test of all, the test of
time. There is no evidence that babies or anyone else has ever been
harmed by them.Eliminating phthalates from consumer products would be a true
challenge. Even more worrisome, however, is the notion that any
replacement would ever be able to pass the extreme scrutiny diisononyl
phthalate and other phthalates have.There is nothing wrong with examining the products our children
come into contact with to be sure they pose no health risks. However,
in this case, it would be a great mistake to ban what has been proven
to be a benign product without some further scientific evidence.
Part number whatever in a series. Today's danger to consumers and the Republic is: people offering to drive others around without a license.
A man who said he thought he was just helping a woman in need is accused of running an illegal taxi service. Miami-Dade
County's Consumer Services Department has slapped Rosco O'Neil with
$2,000 worth of fines, but O'Neil claims he is falsely accused.....The 78-year-old said he was walking into a Winn-Dixie to get some
groceries when he was approached by a woman who said she needed a ride."She asked me, 'Do I do a service?'" O'Neil said.
"I told her no. She said, 'I need help getting home.'
"O'Neil told the woman if she was still there when he finished his shopping, he would give her a ride. She was, so he did.
As
it turned out, the woman was an undercover employee with the consumer
services department targeting people providing illegal taxi services."She
said the reason she targeted him (is because) she saw him sitting in
his car for a few minutes," said Ellen Novodeletsky, O'Neil's attorney.After
O'Neil dropped off the woman, police surrounded him, issued him two
citations and impounded his minivan. On top of the fees, it cost O'Neil
an additional $400 to retrieve his minivan from the impound lot.There are no prior complaints that O'Neil was providing illegal transportation for a fee.
I don't care if he was running a business or being a good Samaritan -- I see no possible reason that this type of transaction should be illegal.
Last week I tried to explain why the choice of plant, whether it be a food plant or a non-food plant, that is used to make ethanol is mostly irrelevant to whether ethanol mandates raise fuel prices, at least with current technologies. I wrote:
Food prices rise not because food is converted to ethanol per se, but
because the amount of grains going into the food supply decreases. The
issue is the use of farmer's time and resources and the use of prime
cropland to grow plants for fuel rather than food for consumption. The
actual crop used to make the fuel, whether corn or switchgrass, does
not matter to food prices -- it is the removal of farmers and cropland
from food production that matters. The only way cellulosic ethanol is
likely to improve food prices in substitution for corn is by being more
efficient per acre in fuel yields than corn (which may turn out to be
the case, but has not yet been proven in this country). But even so,
incremental improvements in yield don't help much, because we are
talking about enormous (40-50% or more) amounts of US cropland that
would have to be dedicated to fuel, whatever the plant technology, to
meet the current ethanol mandates.
I almost didn't post this the first time around, because I thought it was so obvious. But on Sunday the NY Times blundered right into the same silly assertion:
This does not mean that Congress should give up on biofuels as an
important part of the effort to reduce the country's dependency on
imported oil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. What it does mean is
that some biofuels are (or are likely to be) better than others, and
that Congress should realign its tax and subsidy programs to encourage
the good ones. Unlike corn ethanol, those biofuels will not compete for
the world's food supply and will deliver significant reductions in
greenhouse gases.
Of course, the ability to produce such biofuels with these magic powers has never actually been demonstrated, but I am all for them when and if someone invents them. Efficient conversion, for example, of corn stalks, rather than corn itself, to fuel would be great and would solve this trade-off. This technology does not exist today -- and only a lot of hand-waving can translate cellulosic ethanol successes in switchgrass to corn stalks. Also recognize that even this has costs hidden to us non farmers, because corn stalks are used for a variety of purposes today. My guess is that cellulosic ethanol from corn may be economically feasible, but only after some genetic modifications of the plant itself.
A week or so ago, I discussed federal energy subsidies and hypothesized, without a lot of facts, that a lot of them go to failing alternative energy projects rather than to oil company shareholders. I asked readers if they had any more information, and the discussion is here.
But ask and ye shall receive, and the WSJ has an article today on federal energy subsidies and where they go. The answer is: in bulk dollars, a lot of them go nuclear, hydro, and traditional fossil fuel production. However, it is interesting to look at them on an output basis:
For electricity generation, the EIA concludes that
solar energy is subsidized to the tune of $24.34 per megawatt hour,
wind $23.37 and "clean coal" $29.81. By contrast, normal coal receives
44 cents, natural gas a mere quarter, hydroelectric about 67 cents and
nuclear power $1.59.The wind and solar lobbies are currently moaning that
they don't get their fair share of the subsidy pie. They also argue
that subsidies per unit of energy are always higher at an early stage
of development, before innovation makes large-scale production
possible. But wind and solar have been on the subsidy take for years,
and they still account for less than 1% of total net electricity
generation. Would it make any difference if the federal subsidy for
wind were $50 per megawatt hour, or even $100? Almost certainly not
without a technological breakthrough.By contrast, nuclear power provides 20% of U.S. base
electricity production, yet it is subsidized about 15 times less than
wind. We prefer an energy policy that lets markets determine which
energy source dominates. But if you believe in subsidies, then nuclear
power gets a lot more power for the buck than other "alternatives."The same study also looked at federal subsidies for
non-electrical energy production, such as for fuel. It found that
ethanol and biofuels receive $5.72 per British thermal unit of energy
produced. That compares to $2.82 for solar and $1.35 for refined coal,
but only three cents per BTU for natural gas and other petroleum
liquids.
I will repeat what I said in my earlier post, just so no one is confused about my position:
I personally don't care where [the subsidies go]. I am all for eliminating all
of this subsidy mess, equally, whether it's for oil exploration or
energy-from-donkey-poop or for CEO salary enhancement.
Kevin Drum and I seldom agree on business and economics related issues, but we both agree that consumer loyalty programs suck. Here is Drum on loyalty programs, and here is my extended screed.
I can't answer the question in the post title -- apparently no one has told me all the rules, but I would have called this a "bribe" rather than a "gracious gesture," as Kevin Drum does:
The latest rumor making the rounds is that maybe
Barack Obama will pay off Hillary's $11 million loan to her campaign if
she quits the race. I suppose that makes some kind of sense "” and it
would be a gracious and unifying gesture from Obama
If Newt Gingrich had paid a fellow politician $11 million to drop out of the Spearker's race against him, that would have been a, what? Gracious gesture? I doubt it.
Three trends on college campuses all came together in the case of Keith Sampson:
Here is an excerpt from his story:
IN November, I was found guilty of "racial harassment" for reading a public-li brary book on a university campus.
The book was Todd Tucker's "Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting
Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan I was reading it on break from my
campus job as a janitor. The same book is in the university library.Tucker recounts events of 1924, when the loathsome Klan was a dominant
force in Indiana - until it went to South Bend to taunt the Irish
Catholic students at the University of Notre Dame.When the
KKK tried to rally, the students confronted them. They stole Klan robes
and destroyed their crosses, driving the KKK out of town in a downpour.I read the historic encounter and imagined myself with these
brave Irish Catholics, as they street-fought the Klan. (I'm part-Irish,
and was raised Catholic.)But that didn't stop the Affirmative
Action Office of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis from
branding me as a detestable Klansman.They didn't want to hear
the truth. The office ruled that my "repeatedly reading the book . . .
constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and
insensitivity to your co-workers."A friend reacted to the finding with, "That's impossible!" He's right. You can't commit racial harassment by reading an anti-Klan history....
But the $106,000-a-year
affirmative-action officer who declared me guilty of "racial
harassment" never spoke to me or examined the book. My own union - the
American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees - sent an
obtuse shop steward to stifle my freedom to read. He told me, "You
could be fired," that reading the book was "like bringing pornography
to work."
This week, we have been given a chance to see a real contrast. Two consumer staples, gasoline and food, have both seen their prices go up substantially over the last several months. Both price spikes have been due to a combination of market forces (particularly increasing wealth in Asia) and US government policy that has the effect of restricting supply.
However, the political response from Congress has been completely different. In the very same week that Democrats in Congress have introduced bills to punish oil companies for high prices with windfall profits taxes, they have passed a farm bill that rewards farmers who are already getting record high prices with increased price supports and direct subsidies. This despite the fact that on a percentage basis, the increase in crop prices has been far larger than the recent increase in gas prices. The contrast in approaches to two industries in very similar situations couldn't be more stark.
The only reason I can come up with is votes: There are a lot more farmers and people who feel themselves dependent on the agricultural industry than there are oil workers. The oil industry is incredibly efficient on a revenue per employee basis, and I guess that comes back to haunt them. There is no oil industry equivalent of the Iowa Caucuses to cause politicians to fall to the ground groveling and shoveling out taxpayer money to buy votes.
Inventory theory says that the amount of total inventory that needs to be held to satisfy demand is proportional to the number of inventory stocking points. The most efficient (from purely an inventory size standpoint- there are other efficiency issues that mitigate against this) is one big single shared inventory. The least efficient is every individual holding his/her own inventory. Glen Reynolds points to this effect in food:
I SAW A FEATURE BY TONY CAVUTO last night on food stockpiling, in which
one of his correspondents explained how he'd spent $1500 at Costco
stocking up against shortages. You know, if you have stories like this
on TV regularly, you'll get food shortages at stores even if there's no
actual shortage in supply, because today's just-in-time inventory
practices mean that there's no real slack for sudden increases in
demand. The empty shelves will then promote panic and more stockpiling,
setting the stage for the equivalent of a bank-run on grocery stores
even if there's no actual reason.
The exact same thing happened in the early 1970s with gasoline**. Imagine that there are 100 million cars, and each fills up when the tank is 1/4 full. On average, then, every tank is 5/8 full. If tanks are all 16 gallons, then there are a billion gallons of gas in people's personal gasoline "inventory." Now imagine due to some perceived crisis everyone changes their policy and fills up when the tank is only half empty. Then, on average, every tank is 3/4 full, giving a total inventory of 1.2 billion gallons. If this panic occurs over a period of a few days, suddenly there is an incremental demand, above and beyond normal demand, of 200 million gallons to expand personal inventories. That as much as 30,000 tanker truck loads of extra demand at retail in a few days. When stations run out, and people change their policy to fill up at 3/4 (as many did in those times, in panic) then that causes another 200 million gallons to disappear into personal inventories. Logistics systems are not built to handle these demands.
**Postscript: By the way, don't let the US government off the hook. In the wake of the 1972 oil crisis, the main Congressional "contribution" was to pass a law that mandated oil companies deliver gasoline to each geographic area (probably by county, but I am not sure) in the same proportion as they did in the previous year. A sort of directive 10-289 for gas distribution. Well, we all know that things change, and among the biggest changes was the fact that with uncertain supplies and higher prices, a lot fewer people were driving on highways. Because of Congress's action, rural interstate gas stations were swimming in gas, and the cities were out. In a cruel but totally predictable twist, a number of the Congressmen who voted for this law later demagogued against oil companies for their poor distribution of gasoline that summer.
If you need any further evidence that politicians consider themselves our masters rather than public servants, read this from Cory Doctorow:
The State of Oregon is sending out cease and desist letters to sites
like Justia and Public.Resource.Org that have been posting copies of
Oregon laws, known as the Oregon Revised Statutes.We've sent Oregon back two letters. The first reviews the law and
explains to the Legislative Counsel why their assertion of copyright
over the state statutes is particularly weak, from both a common law
perspective and from their own enabling legislation....Particularly galling is the fact that Thomson West has also
made a copy of these statutes and has done so without a commercial
license, but the Legislative Counsel explicitly told Tim Stanley of
Justia that they weren't going to send cease and desist letters to
West. Evidently, it is much easier to pick on the little guys.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse -- but we will only tell you what we want you to know. How anyone can consider the text of public laws not to be in the public domain is amazing to me.
Several companies have been discovered to have benefited from what is in effect slave labor in certain countries. I have never had a problem with folks in poor countries freely opting to take jobs at factories for less money than our privileged middle class attitudes think to be "fair." But there have been examples of governments using their coercive power in a cozy relationship with certain companies, forcing people to provide their labor to companies for wages below what they would freely accept. It is an obscene form of modern slavery.
Today's example, though, does not come from Myanmar or China, but from San Francisco, California, USA, where the government is forcing its citizens to work for free to benefit itself and a few favored corporations to produce products for export.
The resale of recycled materials is apparently big business for a few government contractors:
"When we look at garbage, we don't see garbage, O.K.?" said Robert
Reed, a spokesman for Norcal Waste Systems, the parent company of
Sunset Scavenger and Golden Gate Disposal and Recycling Company, the
main garbage collectors in the city. "We see food, we see paper, we see
metal, we see glass."...Jared Blumenfeld, the director of the city's environmental programs,
addressed one of the main reasons the city keeps up the pressure to
recycle. "The No. 1 export for the West Coast of the United States is
scrap paper," Mr. Blumenfeld said, explaining that the paper is sent to
China and returns as packaging that holds the sneakers, electronics and
toys sold in big-box stores.
This "No. 1 export product" is wholly a product of major government subsidies. Reading the article, you get a sense for the enormous amount of extra capital and operating expenses the city pours into the recycling program. Here is just one example:
San Francisco can charge more for its scrap paper, he said, because of
its low levels of glass contamination. That is because about 15 percent
of the city's 1,200 garbage trucks have two compartments, one for
recyclables. That side has a compactor that can compress mixed loads of
paper, cans and bottles without breaking the bottles. (These specially
designed trucks, which run on biodiesel, cost about $300,000 apiece, at
least $25,000 more than a standard truck, said Benny Anselmo, who
manages the fleet for Norcal.)
Anyone really think they are making enough extra money on scrap paper to cover this (at least) $4.5 million incremental investment ($25k x 15% x 1200)? Suspiciously absent from the article is any mention of costs or budgets. City recycling guys have given up trying to defend recycling on the basis of it being cheaper than just burying the material. The city is subsidizing this material a lot.
But it's not enough. Even with these enormous subsidies, the city is not producing as much recycled materials to meet its goals. So it is going to make its citizenry provide it more labor. For free.
...the city wants more.
So Mr. Newsom will soon be sending the
city's Board of Supervisors a proposal that would make the recycling of
cans, bottles, paper, yard waste and food scraps mandatory instead of
voluntary, on the pain of having garbage pickups suspended.
The city is going to coerce every single resident to labor for them each week, just so San Francisco and Norcal Waste Systems can have more scrap paper for export. This is a labor tax of immense proportions. I know, whenever I make this point about recycling, everyone wants to poo-poo it. "Oh, its not much time, really." Really? Lets use the following numbers: Five minutes per day of labor. One million residents. $20 per hour labor value (low in San Francisco). That is $608 million if forced labor. I'm not sure even Nike has been accused of using this much forced labor.
Anticipated Rejoinder: Yeah, I know, the response will be "It's not for the exports, it's to save the environment." OK, here is my counter:
Arizona required emissions inspections of vehicles, but only for vehicles in the cities of Phoenix or Tucson. So, as you can imagine, they only have testing stations in Phoenix and Tucson.
Our company is headquartered in Phoenix. That is our legal address and the address on all our titles and registrations and licenses and such. Because all of our vehicle registrations show the company headquartered in Phoenix, then the state of Arizona treats all our trucks as being located in Phoenix. As a result, we are required to get emissions tests each year on about 20 vehicles.
But wait. None of our vehicles are actually in Phoenix. In fact, none have ever even crossed into this county. They are all in places like Flagstaff and Sedona and Payson that have no emissions requirements, and therefore, no testing locations. As a result, I am apparently required to, once a year, have all of our trucks driven to Phoenix for an emissions test that they are not actually required to have based on where they operate. In additions to the cost of the test itself, and any repairs mandated by the test, it costs us 400 miles x $0.55 per mile gas and depreciation plus 8 hours x $12 hour labor for the driver or $316 per vehicle to get them to the test site and back. A sort of annual pilgrimage to worship at the alter of mindless bureaucracy.
Recognize that none of this was obvious to me at 8AM this morning. I spent my entire morning not worrying about my 500 employees and not improving productivity and not pursuing some projects we are considering for expanded customer services, but trying to figure this situation out. All because some state legislators didn't realize that maybe corporate vehicle fleets are not necessarily registered in the location in which they are used.
I still think there must be a legal way to show my vehicle domiciled at one physical address but have the mailing address be my corporate office in Phoenix. But if there is, I have not found anyone who will admit it.
I am exhausted by people making policy suggestions by looking at small parts of complex inter-related systems in isolation. One such example is the recent response of some ethanol mandate defenders to recent charges that corn-based ethanol is net harmful to the environment and its mandated and subsidized use is driving up world food prices.
The response by some (certainly not in the corn lobby, of course) has been that our problems would all be solved if we switched to cellulosic ethanol, which is generally made from non-food plants. Supporters argue that this eliminated the food for fuel problem.
Huh? Sure, in the narrowest possible sense, I guess, since we are no longer using food crops but rather grasses and such to make ethanol. But at any reasonably holistic level of analysis, this is simply absurd. Food prices rise not because food is converted to ethanol per se, but because the amount of grains going into the food supply decreases. The issue is the use of farmer's time and resources and the use of prime cropland to grow plants for fuel rather than food for consumption. The actual crop used to make the fuel, whether corn or switchgrass, does not matter to food prices -- it is the removal of farmers and cropland from food production that matters. The only way cellulosic ethanol is likely to improve food prices in substitution for corn is by being more efficient per acre in fuel yields than corn (which may turn out to be the case, but has not yet been proven in this country). But even so, incremental improvements in yield don't help much, because we are talking about enormous (40-50% or more) amounts of US cropland that would have to be dedicated to fuel, whatever the plant technology, to meet the current ethanol mandates. And remember, the net effect on fossil fuels may still be zero no matter how much land is dedicated, since no one has demonstrated large scale ethanol operations in the US that don't use more fuel to produce the ethanol than they produce.
Postscript: Related to this topic of thinking about economic systems narrowly, Lubos Motl discusses the supposed positive green impact on the economy in light of the open window fallacy.
Three Duke professors, two of whom were members of the infamous group of 88 who advocated a presumption of guilt for the lacrosse players in the Duke non-rape case, have written their own self-serving version of history in an "academic" magazine. The funniest part is where they claim that only trained experts like themselves are qualified to discuss any subject once the race card has been played:
"the most extreme marginalization was reserved for the faculty
whose professional expertise made them most competent to engage the
discourses on race and gender unleashed by the inaugurating incident "” scholars of African American and women's studies. Instead, administrators,
like the bloggers themselves, operated under the assumption that
everyone was an expert on matters of race and gender, while actually existing academic expertise was recast as either bias or a commitment to preconceived notions about the legal case. Some
faculty thus found themselves in the unenviable position of being the
targets of public discourse (and disparaged for their expertise on race
and gender) without being legitimate participants in it."
Beyond the hilarity of such a claim on its face, how does such a self-serving discussion meet the editorial standards of any academic publication? For though they claim to have "professional expertise," all they really accomplish is to reinforce my impression that the social sciences in general, and racial/gender studies departments in particular, have the lowest academic standards of any group on modern campuses. KC Johnson goes on to sample some of the outright mistakes, outrageous (and unproven) claims, and general lack of sourcing and footnoting that would likely have gotten them laughed out of most any university department with actual standards. As I wrote about the Ward Churchill affair:
And, in fact, in the rush to build ethnic studies programs, a lot of
people of very dubious qualifications were given tenure, often based
more on ethnic credibility and political activism than any academic
qualifications. Hell, Cal State Long Beach hired a paranoid schizophrenic
who had served prison time for beating and torturing two women as the
head of their Black Studies department. And universities like UC
patted themselves on their politically correct backs for these hirings.I could go out tomorrow and find twenty tenured professors of
ethnic/racial/gender studies in state universities whose academic
credentials are at least as bad as Churchill's and whom no one would dare fire. This has nothing to do with Churchill's academic work or its quality. UC is getting exactly what it expected when it tenured him.
As a libertarian, I don't really have a horse in the race, but what is it with the NY Times editorial page? Apparently, the right doesn't like the conservative writers, and Kevin Drum makes it clear that the left can be embarrassed by the liberal writers there:
I generally try not to read Maureen Dowd's columns because, you
know, they just don't pay me enough for that kind of hazard duty. But
today's column about Hillary Clinton was a train wreck of epic
proportions. I couldn't avert my eyes. Here's the final sentence:As
she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the
butterfly [i.e., Barack Obama], it's as though she's crushing the
remnants of her own girlish innocence.This would be
embarrassing coming from a 12-year-old. Shouldn't Dowd have an obscure
blog, not a biweekly column in the greatest newspaper in the world?
Sorry, no big idea in this post. I just thought that this definition of "victim" was kindof stretching the term a bit:
Authorities in Yavapai County say they're looking for additional
victims of a nude hiker who allegedly told women he encountered that he
was "getting close to nature."Yavapai County Sheriff's spokesman Dwight D'Evelyn says deputies
were called to a trail in Sedona on April 28 by two women who had been
confronted by the nude man. The man offered to take pictures of the
women.