Coyote Blog

From San Francisco, of course.  Via Maggies Farm's great daily link roundup

If the commission approves the ordinance at its meeting tonight, San Francisco could soon have what is believed to be the country's first ban on the sale of all pets except fish.That includes dogs, cats, hamsters, mice, rats, chinchillas, guinea pigs, birds, snakes, lizards and nearly every other critter, or, as the commission calls them, companion animals.

"People buy small animals all the time as an impulse buy, don't know what they're getting into, and the animals end up at the shelter and often are euthanized," said commission Chairwoman Sally Stephens. "That's what we'd like to stop."

This is the same city that is replacing Cokes with Soy Milk in its vending machines.  Oddly, when you read the pet article, it turns out their main concern is with hamsters, that get euthanized a huge rates as people who initially think they are cute wake up one day and realize they are just irritating rodents.  One wonders then why they ban on all animals just to get at one kind.  And why are fish OK but dogs are not?

I think I blogged this the other day but I want to repeat the un-ironic comment made by a city official on the soda ban in vending machines:

"It's entirely appropriate and not at all intrusive for city government to take steps to discourage the sale of sugary sodas on city property."

One wonder if any limitation on individual choice (save perhaps on abortion) would be considered inappropriate or intrusive by these folks.

As someone who once spent nearly a hundred hours to defeat a $20 Department of Labor claim, mainly to fight the precedent, I can sympathize 100% with Wal-Mart spending millions to fight a $7,000 OSHA claim.  Note that despite all the OSHA wailing about not understanding why Wal-Mart is fighting so hard and causing them so much trouble, they admit at the end that they are trying to set a precedent for future actions.

For several years I worked for Emerson Electric, which among its many divisions owned a ladder manufacturer.  If there ever was a product that simply is what it is, totally WYSIWYG, it's a ladder.  But it turns out in this age of personal responsibility that anyone who ever gets hurt using a ladder, usually doing something stupid, will sue the ladder manufacturer for his or her injury.  Emerson fought every one, all the way to trial and sometimes appeal.  Lawyers said they were crazy, that in any given case, it would be cheaper (considering legal fees) to just settle.  But Chuck Knight (Emerson CEO) knew that these were not individual cases, they were multiple events in an ongoing "game," and game theory gives a different answer.  Fight enough of these, and tort lawyers looking for a quick buck with little work and cost will choose to spend their time elsewhere.

My new column is up this week at Forbes.  This week it discusses the regulatory burden on small businesses.  Here is an excerpt:

Typically taxation issues get a lot more attention than these regulatory issues in discussions of government drags on the economy. But these small regulations, licenses, and approvals consume management time, the most valuable commodity in small businesses that typically are driven by the energy and leadership of just one or two people. If getting a certain license is a tremendous hassle in California, large corporations have specialized staff they throw at the problem. When a company like ours gets that dreaded call that the County wants a soil sample from under the parking lot, odds are that the owner has to deal with it personally.

So the ultimate cost of many of these silly little regulations is that they each act as a friction that wears away a bit more available time from entrepreneurs and small business owners. The entrepreneur who has to spend two hundred hours of her personal time getting all the licenses in place for a new restaurant is unlikely to have the time to start a second location any time soon. Since small businesses typically drive most new employment growth in the United States, can it be a surprise that new hiring has slowed?

Incredibly, after the column was in the can, I experienced another perfect example of this phenomenon.

In the camping business, July 4 is the busiest day of the year.  This year, on July 3, I got a call from one of my managers saying that the County health department had tested 20 ground squirrels in the area and found one with the plague.  I know this sounds frighteningly medieval, but for those of you who live out west, you may know that some percentage of all the cute little western rodents, from prairie dogs to chipmunks, carry the plague.  Its why its a bad idea for your kids and dogs to play with them.

Anyway, in the past, we have usually been required to post warnings in the area giving safety tips to campers to avoid these animals, what to do if one is bitten, etc.  At the same time, we then begin a program of poisoning all the lairs we can find.  It's about the only time any government body anywhere lets us kill anything, because only the hardest core PETA types will swoon over rubbing out a rodent carrying the black death.

But apparently, in the past when these mitigation approaches applied, the county health department was not in a budget crunch and in need of high-profile PR stories that would reinforce with taxpayers the need to fund their organization.  This time the health department marched out and closed the campground on July 4 weekend, kicking out campers from all 70 sites.  We spent the day dealing with angry customers, refunding money, and trying to find them new lodging on a weekend where most everything was booked up.  Fortunately we have a large overflow area at a nearby campground and offered everyone a special rate over there.

It is hard to imagine that, given the whole year to test, they just suddenly happened to find a problem at one of the busiest sites in the LA area on the busiest weekend of the year, particularly since they simultaneously changed their mitigation approach from notification to closure.   I have tried hard to find the original time stamp on the press release they sent out.  I can't prove it, but it sure seemed like a lot of media had the story before we (operating the campground) had been informed of a thing.  Incredibly, the health department was directing the campers to a nearby campground that was easily close enough to our campground to share the same rodent populations.  But that campground had not had a positive plague test.  Why?  Because that campground has not been tested recently, at least according to the official who brought us the news.  We're in very good hands.

Rather than starting a new blog,  I think I warned you that I would be doing model railroad layout updates here as a reference for fellow hobbyists.  You are welcome to blow right on past if the hobby is too geeky for your taste.

I have completed Version 1.0 of the track plan for an 18" by 9-foot shelf-style switching layout in N-scale.  I used the 3rd PlanIt CAD program to do the design.  Click to enlarge:

The layout has a number of features I wanted

• Staging area (not shown, around a corner to the left)
• Interchange with 2 other railroads
• Small yard
• Lots of industry space
• Space for urban scenery

The layout is an imaginary short line switching urban tracks in the Phoenix area, interchanging with both the Union Pacific and BNSF, set in modern day or perhaps backdated to pre-merger ATSF.  I have spent several weeks photographic rail lines and industries in the area and have a good idea of the look and feel I want.  I am going to build it in two modules which split just right of the diagonal interchange line.

Because I am a masochist, I am using code 40 hand-laid track with hand made turnouts using Fast Tracks fixtures.   While newer code 55 rail is a big improvement over older rail, it is still out of scale.  I may make the diagonal main line crossing at the junction code 55 just to emphasize the difference between main and branch line -- also because I don't really like building crossovers by hand and Atlas has a nice code 55 45-degree crossover I can use.

I am not going to run the largest modern diesels or any long passenger equipment so I am going to try to get away with #5 turnouts, except on crossovers where I will use #8 if I can make them fit.  I am still debating some issues like turnout control, so I will leave that for later chapters.   Minimum radius can be big - 18" or more, except on the interchange track because it has to tuck behind the backdrop.

You will see I have already planned some mirrors into the design.  That was something that always got visitor's attention on my old layout -- tracks or roads appearing to go on forever.  This time I will use it for the interchange track as well as the yard (a la John Allen).  I am also going to try to double the apparent length of my grain elevator with one.  As always, the hard part is hiding the edges.  The interchange track will be easy, and a highway overpass will likely work on the yard, but I have not yet figured out how to disguise the mirror at the elevator.

This weekend I hope to actually build the base of the modules, using 1-inch extruded foam insulation board glued to 1/4" Lauan plywood.  Stay tuned, I hope to have it all in pictures.

Unless you are from Mars, you probably know LeBron James is a free agent, being courted by a number of teams, ultimately deciding on Miami over his home town and former team in Cleveland.

This has been an odd auction for his services, because except for some tax issues (which certainly may have been a factor in going to Florida), price controls in the league effectively cap how much James can be paid.  And given his talent, it was clear that every team would be willing to pay him the max.  This has led to offers based mostly on non-monetary factors, with Cleveland mainly taking the Glenn Close approach from Fatal Attraction, basically saying it would have to commit suicide if LeBron breaks up with the city.

Many have commented on how much Cleveland, economically, had riding on James and that it may well get the biggest economic benefit, bigger certainly than Miami which has fairly indifferent and easily distracted fans, of any of the teams in the auction.  But with price controls, Cleveland lost because it was not able to bid for LeBron's services what he was really worth  (in fact, it was pretty clear that all the teams involved expected to have a huge consumer surplus from LeBron's acquisition, since his value to any team seems to be higher than the salary cap).

By the way, speaking of surplus or lack thereof, my belief is that New York has continued its tradition of offering long-term lucrative deals to disappointing players.  Having watched Amare Stoudemire for seven years, I can say that he is fully poised to be the next Stephon Marbery for the Knicks.  He can be brilliant, and he is very talented, but he has focus issues that are not going to be enhanced in New York and at times was thrown off-kilter by the media pressure in Phoenix where the press is a cupcake compared to New York.  He is not even much of an upgrade from David Lee, but he gets paid a lot more guaranteed money.

Ronald Bailey in Reason has the numbers. Note the data is for detected incidence rate.  Since detection continues to improve, the numbers likely understand the true drop in incidence rates.  Further, since people tend to live longer, and cancer rates are higher as we get older, there should be a demographic trend to higher rates, but in fact we see the opposite (I don't know if they do some kind of age correction, but it doesn't appear so).  This means, again, the improvement for, say, the average 50-year-old is understated.

The Free Market Project wonders why the government wants to make it harder for entrepreneurs to attract investment capital.

This is the same government that has no problem with the poorest people in our society, or anyone else, playing the lottery every week, or heading to an Indian casino or Las Vegas.  For certain, they don't have an income limit on who can contribute to a political campaign, despite the fact that there is generally no pay-off for that unless you're able to contribute thousands or bundle tens or hundreds of thousands in campaign donations....

My question is this: With the transparency possible using the Internet, why aren't average citizens able to spend small amounts of money (like, lottery ticket money) on seed-money investments?  With proper transparency and protections in place, why aren't entrepreneurs allowed to put their idea online so that the average Joe (or anyone) can look at what they're doing and invest in it if they like the idea?

Civ 5 is coming.

Years ago I coined a term for a number of people I deal with in business -- "arrogant ignorance."  I don't mind running into folks who are young and inexperienced and admit such -- in fact, I like educating and training people and sharing what limited knowledge I have accumulated.  But what really sets me off are folks who have no idea about the subject on which they are making decisions but act as if their judgment is beyond question.  This tendency seems to be reinforced by organizations that have few real performance metrics and where, as such, looking like one knows what he or she is doing is more important than actually doing anything.

More recently, I found that this effect already has a name - Dunning-Kruger, though I think my term is much more evocative.  Anyway, this is an interesting article on Dunning-Kruger and its legitimacy in describing actual human behavior.

Via Tyler Cowen

Matt Ridley discusses some of the themes from his new book the Rational Optimist.

I now see at firsthand how I avoided hearing any good news when I was young. Where are the pressure groups that have an interest in telling the good news? They do not exist. By contrast, the behemoths of bad news, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF, spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year and doom is their best fund-raiser. Where is the news media's interest in checking out how pessimists' predictions panned out before? There is none. By my count, Lester Brown has now predicted a turning point in the rise of agricultural yields six times since 1974, and been wrong each time. Paul Ehrlich has been predicting mass starvation and mass cancer for 40 years. He still predicts that `the world is coming to a turning point'.

Ah, that phrase again. I call it turning-point-itis. It's rarely far from the lips of the prophets of doom. They are convinced that they stand on the hinge of history, the inflexion point where the roller coaster starts to go downhill. But then I began looking back to see what pessimists said in the past and found the phrase, or an equivalent, being used by in every generation. The cause of their pessimism varied - it was often tinged with eugenics in the early twentieth century, for example - but the certainty that their own generation stood upon the fulcrum of the human story was the same.

I got back to 1830 and still the sentiment was being used. In fact, the poet and historian Thomas Macaulay was already sick of it then: `We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason.' He continued: `On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us.'

Check out the article for more.  I am currently reading his book -- good stuff so far.  He quotes both my college roommate Brink Lindsey as well as yours truly in the book.  How can you go wrong?

I was watching the Elizabeth Hurley remake of Bedazzled (mainly to see, you know, Elizabeth Hurley) and thought the guy in the video below should be in the Obama cabinet.  Y'all may know the story - guy gets 7 wishes from the devil, and each wish goes wrong in some way.  In this wish, he wants to be really sensitive to get this girl he is after, but he is unable to take any meaningful action because he is just too caught up in expressing the depth of his caring.

From the Thin Green Line:

So much for criticism that California's environmental leadership "” notably AB 32 "” kills jobs: The state has the most green-collar jobs of any in the nation, and San Francisco leads the Golden State with 42,000 positions. For a city with a population of 809,000, that's pretty impressive.

I think of my father-in-law when I read something like this.  He was a lifelong environmentalist as well as a PHD physicist and a researcher at MIT's Lincoln Labs.  While we often disagreed on various issues, he always tried to bring both science and the scientific method to environmental issues.  I wonder what he would think about this bozo.

Not that this quote really deserves further attention, but here are a couple of random thoughts:

• While AB32 has been law for a number of years, the CARB has made only limited progress actually setting up the enabling regulations and carbon trading schemes.  In effect, AB32 is largely un-implemented at this point, making its lack of effect on job growth fairly unsurprising
• Wow, what a surprise -- the state with the largest number of workers has the largest number of workers in a particular employment category.  My guess is they have the most car mechanics in the country too, and the most SUV owners.  So what?
• The whole definition of a "Green collar job" is total BS.  Basically it means you work in a job that has been deemed to be in a politically correct energy related field.  But why are solar executives green jobs but hydro plant workers not?
• The implication in the post is that this is some kind of public policy victory, but of course there is no evidence at all of why these jobs exist or are located in California
• Even if these jobs are the result of some kind of California public policy initiative, how much did they cost?  How many jobs were lost when the government shifted resources around by fiat?  In Spain, its been calculated that more than 2 jobs were lost for every green job created.

There used to be a joke in Texas during the 80's oil bust -- "How do you make a million dollars in oil?  Start with $10 million."  The same likely applies here -- "How do you create 42,000 green jobs?  Start with 100,000."

Remember when the stimulus bill was all about "infrastructure" and "green energy?"  Way back in January of 2009 (sorry I am in I-told-you-so mode) I observed how less than 6% of the first two years spending appeared to be related to infrastructure.  It turns out that this is exactly how it played out

According to Recovery.gov, the government has now paid out $415 billion of the stimulus funds. Tax rebates account for $163 billion. Of the $252 of direct spending, the Department of Transportation has paid out $14 billion. That's 5.5%.

I kind of proud I came that close to the actual number.  Note then that the stimulus was sold to Americans based on 5.5% of the program.  No mention by Obama in selling it where the other 94.5% was going.  It would have been interesting to see public reaction at the time if Obama had said "we want to spend $230 billion making sure government employees continue to get 8% pay raises, even through the recession.  We are going to stimulate the economy by giving your money to a bunch of assistant principals who do little work but call themselves 'educators' so that they can pretend to be teachers when government budget cuts come along."

A while back I wrote how the simplest reality checks demonstrated that the ridership forecasts for California high speed rail were absurd.  A new study from Berkeley comes to the same conclusion, that the ridership figures are bogus, though they spent a lot more time and money coming to the conclusion than I did.

When we gave government money targeted at single women with kids we got, incredibly, more single women with kids.  And when we give people money only when they are unemployed, we are going to get more unemployed.  The economics of this are pretty bullet-proof.  We may choose to do so because we have a humanitarian desire to cushion hardship, but we should accept that when we reduce the hardship of being unemployed, and actually give people money for not working, we are going to get more people unemployed for longer periods.

Apparently, Nancy Pelosi lives in a different world (no surprise there) there supply and demand curves slope the opposite direction.

Talking to reporters, the House speaker was defending a jobless benefits extension against those who say it gives recipients little incentive to work. By her reasoning, those checks are helping give somebody a job. "It injects demand into the economy," Pelosi said, arguing that when families have money to spend it keeps the economy churning. "It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name."

Pelosi said the aid has the "double benefit" of helping those who lost their jobs and acting as a "job creator" on the side.

I am rapidly approaching the point where I am ready to throw out the whole of macroeconomics as unprovable and unproductive, serving the purpose of allowing statists to do whatever they hell they want to do with some fig leaf from some goofball macro-economics theory  (and if the necessary theory is not  on the books, Paul Krugman, formerly a real economist, will be more than happy to whomp one up for his buddies on the Left.)

When I grew up in Houston, we told Aggie jokes, like others might tell blond jokes or fill-in-disfavored-ethnic-group jokes.  Anyway, way back in the 70's a joke went around something like this:

Did you hear about the Aggie who was caught in the New York blackout?  He was stranded on an escalator for three hours.

I remember this only after seeing this story via overlawyered:

Kim Kreis, et al. v. American Multi-Cinema Inc.; AMC Entertainment Inc., No. CGC-10-501102 (San Francisco Super. Ct. filed June 25, 2010).

Trip and fall lawsuit. The plaintiffs injured themselves on a stationary escalator at the defendants' movie theatre, as there was no sign posted warning them that it was not moving.

Is there any unwelcome outcome nowadays, however trivial, that can't spawn a lawsuit?

My Forbes column this week is up, and it is a sort of open letter to Conservatives, trying to demonstrate that their stance against immigration is inconsistent with many of their other principles.  A quick exceprt:

Just to be clear, it is perfectly reasonable that the government might set restrictive or difficult eligibility requirements for participation in government activities we normally associate with citizenship, such as voting, holding office and receiving welfare benefits. But selling one's labor or participation in commerce are natural rights to which happenstance of birth location should be irrelevant. It should mean no more to these rights that someone is born today north or south of the Rio Grande river than it meant to our founding fathers that someone was born with or without a hereditary title.