Dispatches from District 48
Archive for November 2011
I do not think that word "anarchist" means what they think it means.
This has from the beginning been the almost charming oddity of the OWS movement - we are anarchists that want more government. We oppose "the man" but want him to pay our college tuition. We hate capitalism but can't go anywhere without our iPods.
Well, it appears that Solyndra has not scared solar companies off from feeding at the state trough
More subsidies for the solar industry in Arizona are crucial to avoid being left behind by other states and China, a Phoenix business leader said today at a solar-power conference.
Tax incentives and loan guarantees "make a lot of sense" right now in Arizona, which is already a leader in the industry, said Barry Broome, president and CEO of theGreater Phoenix Economic Council at the Solarpraxisconvention.
Despite the high-profile financial failure of the Solyndrasolar plant this year in California, Broome told a packed conference room that solar power is destined to be a major force in Arizona and elsewhere. The only question, as he sees it, is whether sunny-skied Arizona will take full advantage....
Behind Broome on an overhead screen, a chart showed that Texas, Oregon, Nevada and other states provide more "aggressive economic development tools," (a.k.a. public money), for solar power than Arizona, and the state can't compete without doing the same thing.
What is this, a football game? This strikes me as turn-of-the-century small town boosterism updated to the 21st century, with a dollop of tribal rivalry thrown in. He's talking mainly about manufacturing of solar components. I am left with a couple of questions
Its just too easy to snipe at about everything in this article, but this caught my eye in particular
To help move the industry's message, Broome said, solar advocates must stop infighting over their competing technologies and present a unified and positive position.
Normally, I think an economist would argue that in an immature (both market-wise and technologically) product, competition and creative destruction between various competitors is critical to ultimate success. So in fact this advice is totally senseless, unless you see the industry as a taxpayer-money-magnet rather than a real business, and then it makes perfect sense. Politics, after all, demands simple sound bytes and a unified front.
Update: In the first week of Harvard Business School, I learned a lesson from strategy class, in a series of two cases, that still may be the most important thing I learned there. The cases were a hot, sexy electronics company, and a boring, dull as dirt water meter company. To cut to the chase, the electronics company sucked as an investment, and the water meter company was a gold mine. The moral, among several takeaways, is don't get fooled into thinking the hot, sexy business of the moment is necessarily a good investment. Our development agencies in AZ are making this mistake in spades. In fact, the entire history of government economic development efforts in Phoenix has been to chase sexy businesses at the top of the market, spend taxpayer money to get some plant relocations, and then see the businesses struggle. We certainly did this with semiconductor fabs a couple of decades ago.
There are cases in which I support jury nullification. I cannot imagine sitting on a jury and voting to convict someone of violating a law I thought to be grossly unethical, no matter what the jury instructions were.
For explanation, see here, but the key quote
In response to Julian Heicklen’s motion to dismiss his indictment [for distributing pamphlets on jury nullification] on First Amendment grounds, federal attorneys have filed a response with the court. Here is the federal government’s position: “[T]he defendant’s advocacy of jury nullification, directed as it is to jurors, would be both criminal and without Constitutional protections no matter where it occurred” [emphasis added]. This is really astonishing. A talk radio host is subject to arrest for saying something like, “Let me tell you all what I think. Jurors should vote their conscience!” Newspaper columnists and bloggers subject to arrest too?
Next up -- it will be illegal to speak out against the President's ability to detain or assassinate Americans who he believes to be terrorists.
For a while, there has been a contrarian school of thought in historical study of WWII that FDR, wishing to have the US enter the way against a strong isolationist streak in the general population, purposefully ignored evidence of an impending Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in order to create a casus belli. A few historians have used some intelligence warmings combined with the insane un-preparedness of Pearl Harbor as their evidence. Instapundit links to a new declassified memo that warns of Japanese interest in Hawaii just three days before the attack.
This is a fun but generally foolish game. The same game was played after 9/11, pointing to a few scraps of intelligence that were "ignored." But the problem in intelligence isn't always lack of information, but too much information. In late 1941, the US government was getting warnings from everywhere about just about everything. It is easy as a historian to pick out four or five warnings and say they were stupidly (or purposely) ignored, but this fails to address the real point -- that those warnings were accompanied by a thousand false or misleading ones at the same time. The entire Pacific theater had already had a whole series of alerts in the months leading up to Dec 7, one false alarm after another. It is Monday morning quarterbacking that strips the intelligence problem of its context. To prove that something unusual happened, one would have to show that these warnings were processed or prioritized in a manner that was unusual for the time.
And sure, the readiness issue at Pearl Harbor is inexcusable. But while historians can always find a few people at the time who argued that Pearl Harbor was the most logical attack target, this ignores the thousands in and outside the military who thought the very idea of so audacious an attack that far from Japan was absurd. Historians are failing in their job when they strip these decisions of context (if you really, really want to get on someone about preparedness, how about McArthur, who allowed most of his air force to be shot up on the ground despite having prior notification of the Pearl Harbor attack hours before).
I feel the need to reproduce this email in its entirety. Here is Phil Jones actively hoping the world will warm (an outcome he has publicly stated would be catastrophic). The tribalism has gotten so intense that it is more important for his alarmist tribe to count coup on the skeptics than to hope for a good outcome for the Earth.
>From: Phil Jones [mailto:p.jones@uea.ac.uk] >Sent: 05 January 2009 16:18 >To: Johns, Tim; Folland, Chris >Cc: Smith, Doug; Johns, Tim >Subject: Re: FW: Temperatures in 2009 > > > Tim, Chris, > I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting > till about 2020. I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office > press release with Doug's paper that said something like - > half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on > record, 1998! > Still a way to go before 2014. > > I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying > where's the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal > scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away. > > Chris - I presume the Met Office > continually monitor the weather forecasts. > Maybe because I'm in my 50s, but the language used in the forecasts seems > a bit over the top re the cold. Where I've been for the last 20 > days (in Norfolk) > it doesn't seem to have been as cold as the forecasts. > > I've just submitted a paper on the UHI for London - it is 1.6 deg > C for the LWC. > It comes out to 2.6 deg C for night-time minimums. The BBC forecasts has > the countryside 5-6 deg C cooler than city centres on recent nights. > The paper > shows the UHI hasn't got any worse since 1901 (based on St James Park > and Rothamsted). > > Cheers > Phil
Is this better or worse than rooting for a bad economy to get your favorite politicians elected? Anthony Watt has more in this same tone, showing how climate scientists were working to shift messages and invent new science to protect the warming hypothesis.
The last part about the UHI (urban heat island) study is interesting. I don't remember this study. But it is interesting that he accepts a UHI of as high as 1.6C (my son and I found evening UHI in Phoenix around 4-6C, about in line with his London results). It looks like he is trying to say that UHI should not matter to temperature measurement, since it has not changed in London since 1900 (a bias in temperature measurement that does not change does not affect the temperature anomaly, which is what tends to be important). But the point is that many other temperature stations in the Hadley CRUT data base are in cities that are now large today but were much smaller than London in 1900 (Tucson is a great example). In these cases, there is a changing measurement bias that can affect the anomaly, so I am not sure what Jones was trying to get at.
Today, US markets are rallying strongly (Dow up 400 points or so at the moment) on news of coordinated central bank action that, that .... that what? It looks to me like the US and European banks are merely building up liquidity in preparation for potential bank runs. I would have considered this bad news, kind of like news we just went to DEFCON 2, but for some reason the market is rallying (though there was also an ADP report saying hiring was way up last month, which is certainly good news).
As I wrote yesterday, there only appear to be 3 solutions to the European debt crisis and this is not one of them. If I am right and patterns hold, the markets will wake up in a day or two and say, "wait, there is still trillions of Euros of deteriorating sovereign debt sitting on bank balance sheets with 40:1 leverage ratios" and fall back. I am thrilled that our economy shows signs of life and I know that corporate profits have been good, but I don't see any way a European debt crash won't have substantial negative effects on the US. If I am wrong, the market will continue up, up and away and you should stop ever listening to me because I clearly don't understand squat.
Update: Yesterday I posited that real solutions were going to be a combination of 1) default/haircut 2) Make someone else pay back the debt and 3) print money. I have heard it argued this morning that today's announcement may be evidence of #2 (ie, US taxpayers will bail them out) or more likely #3 (since the ECB can't print money, but the Fed seems to be doing a lot of it, lets get the Fed to print more money for the Europeans .... I don't understand the mechanics well enough to pinpoint who would bear the inflationary consequences of this, but betting on the US to be the world's patsy is never a bad bet).
Instapundit reminded me -- this Snap Circuits toy is fantastic. Easily the best electronics lab for kids out there.
From the famous Onion 9/11 issue, this seems amazingly precient considering Senator McCain's proposed law to allow the President to indefinitely detain just about anyone he thinks might be a terrorist
U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), one of Congress' decorated war veterans, tried to steel the nation for the possibility of a long and confusing conflict.
"America faces a long road ahead," McCain said. "We do not yet know the nature of 21st-century warfare. We do not yet know how to fight this sort of fight. And I'll be damned if one of us has an inkling who we will be fighting against. With any luck, they've got uniforms of some sort."
"Christ," McCain continued, "what if the terrorists' base of operation turns out to be Detroit? Would we declare war on the state of Michigan? I suppose we'd have to."
Michigan was an interesting choice -- I wonder if they knew at the time the prominence of Muslims in Michigan or if it was just a random choice? Certainly, though, they had McCain nailed.
I mentioned earlier that maybe somewhat different rules of due process were required when the enemy is not wearing, you know, uniforms. Again, the Onion was first, from the same article
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the war against terrorism will be different from any previous model of modern warfare.
"We were lucky enough at Pearl Harbor to be the victim of a craven sneak attack from an aggressor with the decency to attack military targets, use their own damn planes, and clearly mark those planes with their national insignia so that we knew who they were," Rumsfeld said. "Since the 21st-century breed of coward is not affording us any such luxury, we are forced to fritter away time searching hither and yon for him in the manner of a global easter-egg hunt."
I normally object to the ways in which global warming alarmists portray skeptics. But I will accept this from Phil Jones
They [skeptics] mostly look at observation papers and ignore modelling ones, as they believe by default models are wrong!
Models are nothing more than scientific hypotheses programmed into computer code. As such, I must admit to finding papers that merely model various hypotheses (generally in a very nontransparent and non-replicable sort of way) to be the least interesting of all possible papers. It is far more interesting to see someone lay out their hypotheses and attempt to justify them with observational data. In climate, the prevalence of modelling tends actually obscure this discussion, as we don't always see all the relevant hypotheses that form the foundation of a model, and even when we do, we usually don't see the details of its implementation (which can be as important to the results as, say, the exact wording of a poll question).
So, yes, if Dr. Jones wishes to defines the sides in this debate as skeptics whose science is driven by observational data and alarmists whose science is driven by computer models no one has seen or replicated, I will accept those definitions.
This is simply an awful law. If you had asked me ten years ago if we would see the President (a Democrat yet) claiming the right to assasinate Americans and the Congress threatening to pass a bill requiring the indefinite detention, without trial, of people within our borders, I would never have believed it. At first I was excited to see that Obama was threatening a veto, but then I read that he was not upset about indefinite detention, but only that Congress was threatening to tie his hands and proscribe certain options. Obama wants to have the choice of whether to offer certain individuals due process or indefinite decision.
For more, see Rand Paul v. John McCain
Postscript: As usual, I am left flat by the debate over whether certain injustices, like indefinite detention, apply to all humanity or just foreigners. I have yet to parse anything in our founder's national rights arguments behind the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that justify why folks born outside our borders have fewer rights than those born inside them.
Update: More here, including a lot from the ACLU. We are supposed to feel better because John McCain says that this only applied to Al Qaeda. But how in the hell do we know with any confidence that the folks the President locks up are Al Qaeda? Its bad enough to declare a whole new crime, that of being a member of a certain organization. The US, through its history, has been much better than most nations in avoiding banning certain parties and organizations. But even if we accept this law, doesn't there need to be some due process?
I suppose I understand that if I captured a guy in an SS uniform in WWII who 10 seconds ago was shooting at me, locking him up as a POW might not require a ton of due process. Last I checked, the AQ folks didn't have a uniform or anything. And most of them are not routinely shooting at us.
We didn't even pass this kind of horrible law at the height of Cold War anti-communist hysteria. Can you see Johnson or Nixon (or Hoover) being able to indefinitely detain anyone they thought was a member of the Communist Party?
In the Climategate 2.0 emails, Michael Mann confirms what we already knew - there is absolutely no tolerance for dissent, even the scientifically thoughtful sort, among climate alarmists. Writing about their mother-site, RealClimate, Mann says
I suspect you've both seen the latest attack against [Keith Briffa's] Yamal work by McIntyre. Gavin and I (having consulted also w/ Malcolm) are wondering what to make of this, and what sort of response---if any---is necessary and appropriate. So far, we've simply deleted all of the attempts by McIntyre and his minions to draw attention to this at RealClimate.
Note that the knee-jerk, default action is to purge, hide, and delete criticism, even before it is understood. They make absolutely no attempt to understand the argument, reading it just enough to know that it is critical and therefore must be deleted. The second action is to find someone to refute it, again even before the critique is understood. It is critical of us so it must be wrong. QED.
Here is one of the original McIntyre posts where he outlines the problem he found in Briff's work. He argues that the findings in Briffa are not very robust, as substitution of a larger sample of trees (this is a tree-ring temperature reconstruction study, like the hockey stick) from the same area for Briffa's apparently small, hand-picked sample have an astoundingly large effect on the study's findings (the red study line below, McIntyre's reconstruction in black).
Perhaps McIntyre was missing something (though over the 2 years since no one involved has suggested what that might be). But the tone of the article is certainly scientific and thoughtful. It has no resemblance to the unscientific polemic that alarmists often use as an excuse to excise skeptical comments from their web sites.
Via Hit and Run, this can't be said too many times
according to the CBO’s top official, the figures in this report and previous mandatory stimulus don’t actually tell us whether or not the stimulus created jobs. That’s because, as I’venotedsomanytimesbefore, the reports rerun slightly updated versions of the same models of that were used to estimate that the stimulus would create jobs prior to the law’s passage. And lo and behold, if you create a model that predicts the law will create jobs, and then you rerun a mild variation of that model a few years later using updated figures about what money was actually spent, it still reports that the stimulus created jobs. But there’s no counting here, no real-world attempt to assess the reality of the stimulus—just a model that assumes that stimulus spending will create jobs and therefore reports that stimulus spending has in fact created jobs. As CBO director Douglas Elmendorf confirmed on the record last year in response to a question, “if the stimulus bill did not do what it was originally forecast to do, then that would not have been detected by the subsequent analysis.”
Further, the fact that we can count individual jobs in stimulus programs (of which there are all too few, which is why the Administration doesn't do this), we still have to take into account an offset effect. The trillion dollars came from somewhere, and in effect were diverted from private to public hands. To justify the stimulus, one needs to be able to argue that the public use of these funds created more jobs than the private use of these funds. Good luck with that.
I am working on a summary post of the new batch of climategate emails, but this is perhaps my favorite. It is written to Andy Revkin, nominally a reporter for the NY Times but revealed by the new emails to be pretty much the unpaid PR agent of Michael Mann and company. Over and over, emails from Mann and his cohorts get Revkin to write the articles they want, drop quotes from skeptics from articles, and in general coordinate communications policy.
Anyway, one climate scientist writes Revkin this note
I think the notion of telling the public to prepare for both global warming and an ice age at the same [time] creates a real public relations problem for us.
Amazing that this actually had to be said.
Update: Revkin is currently an opinion blogger but at the time of the emails he was supposed to be a news reporter at the NYT.
I thought this was an interesting, pre-radar technology that has a lot of visual appeal. These are Japanese devices for detecting aircraft approach by listening for their motor
My new column is up at Forbes, and discusses solutions to the European debt crisis. The problem is that there are really only three, and all are bad, so most solutions being proposed either attempt to disguise that they are bad or to disguise that they are not really doing anything. An excerpt:
The default option will almost certainly wipe out a lot of powerful banking and financial interests as well as make it very hard for governments to keep spending money at their historic pace. This will certainly have a bad effect on the larger economy, but we should be careful accepting forecasts of economic catastrophe as most of these come from these same powerful bankers and politicians. Every group, down to the local dog catchers, argue that the world will suffer a calamity if their particular profession is harmed. What we do know is that large banks and financial companies are even more intertwined with the political elite in Europe than they are in the US. We can be pretty certain that, push come to shove, a solution that saves the banks and allows politicians to keep spending will be preferred.
That is why the Europeans will likely end up printing money to pay off the debt. They almost certainly would be doing so already,were it not for Germany’s strong memories of its Weimar inflation years, when exactly this kind of money printing to pay down government debt led to hyperinflation and political instability. But the appeal to politicians of shifting the costs from themselves and banks to the average consumer is simply too great to pass up. If Germany can be convinced, then the European Central Bank will print Euros. If Germany cannot be convinced, then countries will leave the Euro and print Lira and Drachma.
I will leave aside the issue of the recently revealed massive loans from the Fed to various banks. It can be argued that being the provider of last resort for short-term liquidity in the banking system is a legal, even legitimate, role for the Fed.
But scan this list. Here are some of the "banks" that got close near-interest-free money from the Fed
I presume these loans were nominally for their financing arms, but what is the systematic-risk argument for backstopping manufacturer's credit operations?
When I was at McKinsey & Co, part of their relocation package was a $10,000 interest-free one year loan. I had any number of new recruits say they did not need the loan. I told them it was a business IQ test. If you turned down the loan, we revoked your job offer (just kidding, of course). I took the loan and dropped it into T-bills.
I wonder how many of these recipients really needed the money to survive or just got smart enough to claim dire need and took the money and just dropped it into something interest-bearing.
Done with a large bid (pictured below, 42 notebooks!). Now I can stop pursuing trivial tasks like putting food on the table and get back to blogging.
The California High Speed Rail Authority has reason to be thankful this week as the U.S. Department of Transportation gave it another $900 million, keeping hopes alive for the state’s rail program. That means the feds have given the state a total of about $4.5 billion which, when matched with state bonds (which can only be sold when matched by other money) brings the authority’s total funds to $9 billion.
I have written any number of times that this project is simply doomed. Either it will fail to complete, after spending billions, or worse, will spend well over $100 billion to create an enormous white elephant whose potential ridership is being grossly exaggerated (by exactly those folks whose salaries are paid by these federal grants)
We lost track of a caribou herd, so since we can't find it, we will just tell the press it was destroyed by climate change. (Happily the herd has been found, right where it always was, so we won't have to see caribou heads on our diet coke bottles).
I joke about this but it is really a serious statement about the quality of science and science journalism that there was really a big climate-related panic over the disappearing caribou a couple of years ago. This is climate science in a nutshell - make a measurement error, assume the faulty data is real, and then without evidence blame the changing data on climate change.
(Update: Yes, I actually spelled caribou herd "heard" in the original. I am a big believer there is no such thing as a single metric for intelligence, but that there are multiple intelligences of various sorts. We can argue about the other kinds, but I clearly did not get much of the spelling and proof-reading sort.
You decide (origins and data for chart here)
I am generally opposed to tax increases because they never seem be matched to spending cuts -- the tax increases are passed but Congress finds ways to gut the spending cuts. But I would accept this proposal in a heartbeat: Return to both Clinton era tax and spending levels. There, that's my super committee proposal. Taxes and spending both targeted at 19% of GDP. Problem solved.
I found this 2009 graph and comment by Paul Krugman (dredged up by Megan McArdle) to be a hilarious call to arms for all his fellow lemmings to follow him over the cliff
[from November 2009]: Why, people ask, would I want to compare us to Belgium and Italy? Both countries are a mess!
Um, guys, that's the point. Belgium is politically weak because of the linguistic divide; Italy is politically weak because it's Italy. If these countries can run up debts of more than 100 percent of GDP without being destroyed by bond vigilantes, so can we.
Today I spent time arguing with a group of folks about global warming and the precautionary principle. The others all argued that a slim chance of a catastrophe justified immediate action. I argued, of course, that they were understating the cost of the intervention, but that is another story.
Its amazing to me that so many on the Left squawk about the precautionary principle in the case of climate, but are ready to continue running up government spending and deficits despite the fact that the disaster of this approach, given the experience in Europe, is no longer even debatable. Its simply math.
Our problem will play out differently than in Europe. Long before interest rates on US securities run up to the 6% or so tipping point, the Fed will be running the printing presses. Don't believe me, well, they already have been.
Savers beware, our path will be devaluation and inflation.
By the way, the speed with which hyperinflation can take hold is astounding. Here is the inflation rate in the Weimar Republic. As with the Fed today, the central bank of the Weimar Republic was buying up government debt with printed currency. Look how fast the inflation took hold:
(source) Imagine a quarterly meeting of the Fed in August of '22. They are probably looking at month-old data, and in July it looks like everything is under control. Boom, three months later, by the next schedule quarterly meeting, inflation is already out of control. Krugman would say not to worry about inflation, they will have plenty of time to act. Coincidently, this is exactly what Italy and France and Spain said about their sovereign debt, but in a flash, the crisis was upon them and so far out of control there is nothing they can do.
Thank God for the Left and their scientific approach to government decision making
EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration...
EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact.
Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month.
For three years a group of government employees actually got paid to come to the conclusion that drinking water does not prevent dehydration. Congrats.
If you want an explanation, my guess is that this is part of the Left's war on bottled water. For some bizarre reason, bottled water has been singled out as one of the evils of modern technology that will drive us into a carbon dioxide-induced climate disaster. So I don't think the EU would have approved any label claim for water. Since this is such an absurdly obvious claim that most consumers would just chuckle at (yes, consumers can be trusted to parse product claims), I almost wonder if some water company didn't just float this to make the point that no claim could be approved in the EU system.
I often raise the issue of "What is Normal" when discussing climate. The media frequently declares certain weather events as so "abnormal" that they must be due to man-made factors. A great example is the current Texas drought, which is somehow unprecedented and thus caused by CO2 despite the fact that the great dust bowl drought of the 1930's was many times larger in area and years in duration.
The EPA has a new slideshow purporting to aggregate these "abnormalities." While I could spend all year going through each slide, I want to focus on just one.
Now we all know that the EPA is just full of sciency goodness and so everything they say is based on science and not, say, some political agenda. And the statement and the pictures above are absolutely correct, as far as they go. But they are missing a teeny tiny bit of context. Here is a longer history of that same glacier (thanks to the Real Science blog for the pointer, this is a much better map than the one I have used in the past).
The 1948 position is way up at the top. You can see that the melting since 1966, which according to the EPA is an "acceleration," is trivial compared to the melting since 1760. Basically, this glacier has been retreating since at least the end of the little ice age.
Those who want to attribute the recent retreat to CO2 have to explain what drove the glacier to retreat all that way from 1760 to 1960, and why that factor stopped in 1960 at exactly the time Co2 supposedly took over.
By the way, this same exact story can be seen in glaciers around the world. Glaciers began retreating at the end of the little ice age, and if anything that pace of retreat has slowed somewhat over the last few decades.
If nothing else, the OWS movement is helping ordinary Americans see the abuse of power that is so endemic in many police departments. I am tired of the quasi-cult of police ass-kicking on average citizens, as fed by reality cop shows and folks like Joe Arpaio. As Radley Balko points out, the casual way that the officer hoses down citizens who are just sitting on a curb with pepper spray is just outrageous. From past experience, my guess is that these guys were ready to go limp and be dragged off - the pepper spray was just pure torture for the entertainment of the cops.
We would not do this to a terrorist in Gitmo, so why are we doing this to American citizens? I think I get particularly angry and intolerant of this kind of crap because I used to be the kind of law and order conservative that would excuse this kind of behavior, and that embarrasses me. The saying goes that a converted Catholic is often more fervent than a born one, so to I guess for this civil libertarian.
