Coyote Blog

Apparently Obama is claiming:

“[Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.’”

The irony is that if you grade the equivalent mpg of electric cars by the methodology outlined by Chu's own energy department, the number would be about a third of that.  Only by the EPA's flawed methodology do we get equivalent MPG's for electric cars anywhere near 130.

I wrote about this whole sordid mess of inflated MPG numbers for electric cars here.

From the Hill, the ghost of Hawley-Smoot returns

 The Senate voted Monday to advance legislation pressuring the Chinese government to stop undervaluing its currency, a practice most economists agree is giving the country an unfair trade advantage and is costing the U.S. jobs.

The Senate voted 79-19 to end debate on a motion to proceed to the bill, the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act of 2011. While the vote does not mean the bill has passed, the strong show of support suggests it could well be approved in the upper chamber by the week’s end. Passage through the House is less clear, however, and GOP leaders have given no indication they will move forward with it.

Senate Democratic leadership, responsible for bringing the legislation to the Senate floor, heralded it as a way to create jobs and right a long-standing trade imbalance with China.

“China is by far the biggest exploiter of predatory currency practices,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Monday. “[T]hese currency policies artificially raise the price of U.S. exports and suppress the price of imports into the United States, undermining the economic health of American manufacturers and their ability to compete at home and around the globe.”

This is a great example of how a group, in this case the Democratic Party, can say they are against corporate welfare, but in fact be 100% behind it simply by changing the terms used.

Look at the sentence in bold.  Another way to write this would be "we want a law to help a few visible and influential manufacturers who most compete with China, but hurts consumers (ie every single American) and every business that uses imported raw materials.

Protectionism like this is corporate welfare for a few large manufacturers.  I find it amazing the reporter can say that "most economists agree" an undervalued Chinese currency is costing us jobs.  My sense is that most economists don't agree with this statement.  All this law will do is unilaterally increase consumer prices and raw material costs, and I know few economists who think this is stimulative.

A cheap yuan is a direct subsidy of American consumers by the Chinese, and I am not sure why we shouldn't let it continue as long as they are dumb enough to keep doing it.

I have been warning you, its coming.  When government pays the health care bills, they can then use that as an excuse to micro-regulate our every behavior.  Because its no longer an individual choice, it affects public costs.

“Denmark finds every sort of way to increase our taxes,” said Alisa Clausen, a South Jutland resident. “Why should the government decide how much fat we eat? They also want to increase the tobacco price very significantly. In theory this is good — it makes unhealthy items expensive so that we do not consume as much or any and that way the health system doesn’t use a lot of money on patients who become sick from overuse of fat and tobacco.  However, these taxes take on a big brother feeling.  We should not be punished by taxes on items the government decides we should not use.”

As an aside, given that Scandinavians tend to have among the world's highest tolerances for taxes, when they get fed up, it must be getting bad.

That is the sound of the printing presses running 24/7.  Because that appears to be how we are funding all of Obama's spending right now (source)

When folks say they are not worried about the deficit, because folks still seem eager to buy our debt (as evidenced by the low interest rates) note that the general public has been a net seller of US debt the first 2 quarters of 2011.  In fact, the only buyer has been Uncle Sam himself, buying up the debt with newly minted cash (or electrons, really).

One other interesting issue, the Fed seems to have been soaking up the money supply in the early days of the recession, before the high-profile business and financial failures really got things moving downward.

I simply cannot believe that the President of the US just ordered an American citizen killed, without trial or due process, and the country just yawns.  And in some cases, cheered.  Are we really going to make the Fifth Amendment, along with the Fourth, the Ninth, and the Tenth, another "just kidding" passage?  Its amazing that the same kids that marched  against Nixon's abuse of power have decided this is perfectly OK.

I suppose I expect Republicans to pile on for this kind of security-state garbage, but an awful lot of Democrats are sitting on their hands as well, just because it was their guy in the Oval office pulling the trigger.  Kudos to a few souls on the left like Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum who, however subdued in comparison to their reaction had it been Bush, called out their party's leader for this bit of horror.  Greenwald makes the point to fellow Lefties - how would you feel if Rick Perry or Michelle Bachman had this power?

This latter is a good test I ask folks all the time.  Those who advocate for statist powers generally imagine folks like themselves wielding these powers.  But how realistic is that in a Democracy where power shifts every 8-10 years or so?  I ask folks all the time to picture their worst political enemy, and then imagine that person with the power they advocate.

Well, I finished Reamde this weekend.   It was only OK.  It is a straight up modern adventure book, like perhaps a Vince Flynn novel, chasing terrorists around the globe.  I enjoy Stephenson for his big, sometimes outrageous ideas, his witty prose, and his love affair with the geek culture.  Except for the latter, none of this is in evidence in this book.  It is certainly a more popularly accessible book, but that is certainly not what I want from Stephenson.

Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash are among my favorite novels.  One of the reason I liked them were for the prose he brought to bear on even (or especially) trivial topics.  His long passages on eating Cap'n Crunch or getting wisdom teeth removed in Cryptonomicon are classics.   I got very little of this kind of thrill in Reamde, made worse by the fact that there were just too many main characters, none of whom were very well developed for me.

At some points, this book held my attention, and at some points it dragged.  The book in some ways is almost the same structure as a comedic farce -- a whole bunch of characters who are dragged along by events into increasingly unlikely circumstances.   There is no looming event or goal that drives the narrative in a, say, Clancy novel.  Its just a lot of falling into one mess after another.   Its also a bit unseriousness - it feels like the teens in Scooby Doo chasing terrorists.  (One problem is that Stephenson's bad guys are too likable - they are always smart and ironic gentlemanly - so its hard to get as worked up about heading them off as one might in a classic thriller).

Some playwright or critic once wrote (sorry, can't remember the name) that if you put a gun out on the stage in Act 1, someone better use it in Act 3.  (OK, it was Chekov, though why he said "gun" rather than "phaser" is beyond me).  In this book, Stephenson leaves guns unused all over the stage.  In particular, Stephenson comes up with one of his patented interesting-crazy ideas of using an MMRPG to crowd-source security analysis.  I felt sure that in the manhunts that followed, that particular gun would be picked up and used to help drive to the climax, but we never hear of it again.  In fact, we learn a lot of interesting things about this game in the book, which seems to be absolutely central to the plot, but in the end turns out to be entirely peripheral, an early macguffin to kick start the plot.

Another example is the HUGE amounts of the book go to talking about an interesting social realignment happening in the game, to absolutely no end.  OK, so characters have abandoned the good and evil alignments put in by the game masters for a new emergent faction division.  I thought sure we would see some kind of real-world parallel to this happening in the book, or some insight drawn from this that helps solve the real world problem.  Nothing.

Overall, a disappointing book I would not have finished had it not been by Stephenson.

Postscript:  If you become interested in the dynamics of the MMRPG in the book, where there are no character levels (only a skill system) and money and money making is central to the the game, the closest analog I have ever seen is not a fantasy game but EVE Online, a space-based game (also, to a lesser extent, Star Wars Galaxies as well, but that is now defunct).  EVE Online probably has the most interesting economy of any MMRPG I have played and I know they employ an economist who sometimes writes articles about his work.