Coyote Blog

My new column is up this week, and is a response to the July 2012 issue of Popular Science which includes a long, unbalanced attack on skeptics, without once addressing their scientific arguments.

I thought I knew what “science” was about:  the crafting of hypotheses that could be tested and refined through observation via studies that were challenged and replicated by the broader community until the hypothesis is generally accepted or rejected by the broader community.

But apparently “popular science” works differently, if the July 2012 article by Tom Clynes in the periodical of that name is any guide [I will link the article when it is online].  In an article called “the Battle,” Clynes serves up an amazing skewering of skeptics that the most extreme environmental group might have blushed at publishing.  After reading this article, it seems that “popular science” consists mainly of initiating a sufficient number of ad hominem attacks against those with whom one disagrees such that one is no longer required to even answer their scientific criticisms.

The article is a sort of hall-of-fame of every ad hominem attack made on skeptics – tobacco lawyers, Holocaust Deniers, the Flat Earth Society, oil company funding, and the Koch Brothers all make an appearance.

Thousands of words about critical issues like Heartland Institute's funding, but less than two dozen dedicated to dismissing skeptic's scientific concerns.  And that is before we get to outright journalistic fraud, as the author attempts, for example, to lay blame for Obama Administration financial audits of climate scientists on, you guessed it, skeptics. Read it all

I will admit, I can get angry, especially when I believe someone has done me wrong.  But over time, I have learned to distrust this anger.  About twenty of twenty of the actions that I have most regretted in life or that have backfired on me have been undertaken during such periods of anger -- from yelling at innocent airline employees to writing scathing business letters that only make a situation worse.  I have learned to impose on myself a sort of count-to-ten rule, where if I am really ticked off about something, I force myself to wait 24 hours before I respond.  It works for me.

Attorney Charles Carreon needs to figure out a parallel strategy, or else he needs a business partner or family member who can perform an intervention for him.  Because last week, he totally lost it.

As you might remember from our last episode, Carreon was representing a web site called Funnyjunk where people post content strip-mined from other sites.  One of those sites, the Oatmeal, got mad about their cartoons ending up on this site without compensation, and called them out online.  No lawsuit, nothing unnatural, just good old American criticism.

I don't know enough about copyright law to know if Funnyjunk was in the right or wrong.  The Oatmeal could have tied it up anyway in copyright suits, but chose not to.  So of course Funnyjunk responded in asymmetric fashi0n by hiring Carreon to threaten the Oatmeal with a $20,000 lawsuit.  Apparently they were really sad and hurt by the Oatmeal's criticism, and argued that the Oatmeal abused their copyrighted name by using it online in the criticism (a hilarious charge given how the whole thing started).  By the way, in case anyone is confused about this, though this approach is tried constantly, courts have routinely held that there is no such copyright that bars someone from criticism or comment using one's name.

At this point, this all constituted irritating but fairly normal (unfortunately) behavior of people and lawyers online who don't really understand the First Amendment.

Then Charles Carreon drove over the cliff.

On Friday, he apparently sued not only the Oatmeal  (for criticizing him online, causing other people to hate him, and for violating his copyright in his own name) but also, get ready for this, the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.  Why?  Because when the Oatmeal first got Carreon's demand letter, its proprietor said he would raise $20,000 for charity instead, and send Funnyjunk a picture of the money.  To date, nearly $200,000 has been raised for the two charities by Oatmeal fans who wanted to show their support.

Apparently, according to Carreon's suit  (I still can't believe he actually filed this), the money that was raised for these charities was tainted because it was raised in the name of making him look like a doofus.  Which, by the way, is exactly right.  I am not a huge fan of either charity (they use too much money in both cases for political activism rather than solving problems), but I gave $100 just to help hammer home the point that Charles Carreon is an idiot.

Perhaps this guy has no friends.  But if he does, one of them needs to be grabbing his collar and shoving him up against the wall and explaining in one syllable words how suing two prominent charities is NOT a path to success in the war to reclaim his reputation.  The guy basically kneecapped himself with his opening shot.   He will soon learn that while it may be increasingly against the law on college campuses to hurt someone's feelings with your speech, it is not illegal in the rest of America.  And he will also soon learn all about California's tough anti-SLAPP law, as he finds himself headed to Bank of America to take out a second mortgage on his home so he can pay the legal bills of those he has sued with the intent to suppress their speech.

Update:  Mr. Carreon, welcome to the Streisand effect.  Last Thursday, none of his first page Google results mentioned this incident.  Today, there are five.

Update #2:  Mr. Carreon claims his web site has been hacked.  Maybe.  But I will observe that for the web NOOB, "buying the cheapest Godaddy hosting account that is fine for my normal 12 visitors but crashes when I get 50,000 hits in an hour from Reddit" and "hacking" often look the same.

Update #3 and irony alert:  If you want to see something odd, check out the web site he and his wife run.  The site is full of very raw critiques that would easily land a desk full of lawsuits in the Carreon mailbox if the legal system routinely accepted the type of censorious lawsuits he himself is attempting to initiate.  If he takes the linked site down, the screenshot is here.  As an aside, I am constantly amazed at how liberals, including those who claim to be feminists, seem so obsessed with the sexuality of Conservative women and couch so much of their criticism in terms up to and including rape images (particularly oral sex).

The general utility of shareholder lawsuits has confused me for quite some time.  Way back in the blogging stone age of 2006 I wrote a guest post at Overlawyered that said in part:

But from a philosophical standpoint, shareholder suits have never made much sense to me. While I can understand the shareholders of the company suing a minority shareholder who might be enriching themselves disproportionately (e.g. Rigas family at Adelphia), suits by shareholders against the company they own seem… crazy.

Any successful verdict for shareholders against the company would effectively come out of the pockets of the company’s owners who are.. the shareholders. So in effect, shareholders are suing themselves, and, win or lose, they as a group end up with less than if the suit had never been started, since a good chunk of the payout goes to the lawyers. The only way these suits make financial sense (except to the lawyers, like Bill Lerach) is if only a small subset of the shareholders participate, and then these are just vehicles for transferring money from half the shareholders to the other half, or in other words from one wronged party that does not engage in litigation to another wronged party who is aggressively litigious. Is there really justice here?

OK, you could argue that many of these shareholders are not suing themselves, because they are past shareholders that dumped their stock at a loss. But given these facts, these suits are even less fair. If these suits are made by past shareholders who held stock (ie, were the owners) at the time certain wrongs were committed, they are in fact paid by current and future shareholders who may well have not even owned the company at the time of the abuses, and who may in fact be participating in cleaning the company up. So these litigants are in effect making the argument that because the company was run unethically when they owned it, they are going to sue the people who bought it from them and cleaned it up? Shouldn’t the payment be the other way around, with past owners paying current owners for the mess they left?

So I found this decision in a case at Sears refreshing:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday put the kibosh on a shareholder antitrust suit against the board members of Sears Holding Corp, finding that the suit only served to enrich the plaintiffs' lawyers.

The ruling from the Chicago-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit marks the latest victory for Ted Frank, of the Center for Class Action Fairness, who argued that the suit was an abuse of the legal system and conferred no benefit on Sears shareholders at large. The 7th Circuit agreed.

"The only goal of this suit appears to be fees for the plaintiffs' lawyers," Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel.

Several law firms, including Vianale & Vianale, filed the proposed class action on behalf of two named investors in 2009. The derivative suit accused two Sears directors of holding positions on the boards of several competing companies, in violation of federal antitrust law.

Given the high cost of litigating an antitrust suit, Sears reached a settlement with the investor plaintiffs, agreeing to get rid of one of the directors and pay $925,000 to the investors' attorneys.

Frank, who specializes in challenging class action settlements, argued that the resolution was a raw deal for Sears shareholders, costing them legal fees and a director they had recently re-elected. The deal also would not prevent someone else from filing a copycat suit, given that one of the two targeted directors would remain on the Sears board. What's more, the problem of interlocking boards is usually resolved when the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission asks a company to fix the violation.

Frank, himself a Sears shareholder, asked to intervene in the case to block the settlement, but the Illinois district court refused, finding that the plaintiff investors adequately represented the interests of Frank and the other shareholders.

On appeal, the 7th Circuit panel reached the opposite conclusion, finding the interests to be "entirely incompatible." The panel sent the case back to the district court, with instructions to allow Frank to intervene and to rule in favor of the Sears defendants.

"The suit serves no goal other than to move money from the corporate treasury to the attorneys' coffers, while depriving Sears of directors whom its investors freely elected," Easterbrook wrote.

A family member is selling this beautiful ranch in Wyoming.  I can't afford it, but if you know someone who can it is a gorgeous location in the mountains adjacent to the Medicine Bow National Forest.

Sorry for the shameless promotion but the owner has some health issues and I agreed to help out a bit, despite the fact that I have absolutely no experience trying to sell something like this.

I just opened a summer-seasonal camping business in Washington state.  Given that I mainly need relatively unskilled help landscaping and cleaning up from Memorial Day to Labor Day, one would think that this would be a natural place for high school kids to look for work.

Well, check out my new Washington business license.   This is not something unusual for me, it's the standard form issued to all businesses.  Check out the last line.

You can do anything you want, but for God sakes don't employ any high school kids over the summer.

Sorry teens.  I don't know what kind of special application is required to get the state's permission to employ you, and I don't have time to find out -- particularly since whatever additional license to hire teenagers that I need to obtain is likely to entail all kinds of onerous special rules and reporting requirements.

Update:  I get asked this a lot when I post such business licenses.  "Foreign Profit Corporation" does not mean that I am based in Sri Lanka, "foreign" in this context means that my original corporate registration is in another state.

I will give kudos to WA state on one dimension -- most states will issue me separate numbers for my withholding account, my sales tax account, my workers comp account, my unemployment account, my secretary of state registration, etc.  WA issues a single number for everything.

New taxes are frequently sold as protecting police, fire, and education, though these together represent barely 25% of all US government spending.  Where does the rest go?  It's a giant bait and switch, made worse by the fact that even within these categories, new headcount is more likely to be added in administrative and overhead roles rather than in promised functions such as "teachers".  This is the subject of my Forbes column this week:

There is a way to reconcile this:   While increases in education spending are sold to the public as a way to improve results in the classroom, in reality most of the new money and headcount are going to anything but increasing the number of teachers.

Let’s start with an example from the city of Phoenix, New York.  Why this town?  Am I cherry-picking?  In fact, I was looking for data on my home town of Phoenix, Arizona.  But I have come to discover that while school districts are really good at getting tomorrow’s cafeteria menu on the web, they are a little less diligent in giving equal transparency to their budget and staffing data.  But it turns out that Phoenix, New York, which I discovered when I was looking for my home town data, publishes a lovely summary of its budget data, so I will use it as an example that helps make my point.

The city’s budget summary for 2012-2013 is here.  Overall, they are proposing a 0.4% increase in spending for next year, which initially seems lean until one understands that they are projecting a 4% decline in enrollment, such that this still represents an increase in spending per pupil faster than inflation.  But the interesting part is the mix.

What are the two things politicians are always claiming they need extra money for?  Classroom instruction and infrastructure.  As you can see in this budget, only two categories of spending go down:  classroom instruction and facility maintenance and cleaning.  Administrative expenses increase 4% (effectively 8% per pupil) and employee benefits expenses increase just under 1% despite a total decline in staffing.  Though I am not very familiar with the program, one irony here is that the fastest growing category is the 8.7% growth (nearly 13% per pupil) in spending with BOCES, a New York initiative that was supposed to reduce administrative costs in public schools.  In other words, spending increases are going to everything except the areas which politicians promise.

I don’t think these trends are isolated to this one admittedly random example.  The Arizona auditor-general recently did a study on trends in education spending in the state.  They found exactly the same tendency to reduce classroom spending to pay for increases in administrative headcounts.

Read it all, as they say.

I had always assumed the cover for the Beatle's Sgt. Pepper album was just a photo mosaic, a cut and paste of photos that was then re-photographed into the final image.  But it appears to have been shot life-size all at once.  More here.  Apparently Hitler and Jesus just missed the cut.  Can you imagine anyone even bothering with this in the age of Photoshop?

I hate excerpting Ken at Popehat in times like this, because I simply love reading all his prose and hope you will do so as well rather than settling for the excerpt only.  I love Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon not because it is his best story (it's not) but because it has some of his best prose.  Six pages on eating Cap'n Crunch and ten or so on getting a wisdom tooth extraction, and I was left begging for more.  Ken is my blogging equivalent.  I could read a whole book just with Ken calling out censorious lawyers for threatening bloggers to try to shut them up.

That said, he has been writing of late about a site called Funnyjunk sending a lawyer-cum- Tony-Soprano after the Oatmeal.  Today he really rips into said lawyer, named Charles Carreon:

See, a legal threat like the one Charles Carreon sent — "shut up, delete your criticism of my client, give me $20,000, or I'll file a federal lawsuit against you" — is unquestionably a form of bullying. It's a form that's endorsed by our broken legal system. Charles Carreon doesn't have to speak the subtext, any more than the local lout has to tell the corner bodega-owner that "protection money" means "pay of we'll trash your shop." The message is plain to anyone who is at all familiar with the system, whether by experience or by cultural messages. What Charles Carreon's letter conveyed was this: "It doesn't matter if you're in the right. It doesn't matter if I'm in the wrong. It doesn't matter that my client makes money off of traffic generated from its troglodytic users scraping content, and looks the other way with a smirk. It just doesn't matter. Right often doesn't prevail in our legal system. When it does, it is often ruinously expensive and unpleasant to secure. And on the way I will humiliate you, delve into private irrelevancies, harass your business associates and family, disrupt your sleep, stomp on your peace of mind, and consume huge precious swaths of your life. And, because the system is so bad at redressing frivolous lawsuits, I'll get away with it even if I lose — which I won't for years. Yield — stand and deliver — or suffer."

Our system privileges Charles Carreon to issue that threat, rather than jailing or flogging him for it. And so Carreon supports bullying like that. He's got a license to do it. He knows that his licensed threats — coming, as they do, on the [slightly odd] letterhead of a lawyer — inspire far more fear and stress than the complaints of a mere citizen, and by God he plays it to the hilt.

By contrast, Charles Carreon doesn't like shows of force that you or I can muster. "I'm completely unfamiliar really with this style of responding to a legal threat," he sniffs. There's a whiff of Paul Christoforo of Ocean Marketing in there — the sentiment "how was I to know that I was picking on someone stronger than I am? Is that fair?" But what he means is "if the people I threaten don't have to dig into their pockets to go hire a lawyer, and spend unpleasant hours with that lawyer, and lay awake at night worrying, and rely on a lawyer who is part of my privileged culture, but can stand up for themselves . . . how can I intimidate them so easily?" Perhaps some rude Oatmeal followers did actually send true threats or abuse to Charles Carreon's office — which I condemn. That's morally wrong and not helpful to the cause of free speech; it's harmful. But I fail to see why Charles Carreon sending that threat letter is more legitimate, admirable, or proper than ten thousand Oatmeal fans sending back the message that Charles Carreon is a petulant, amoral, censorious douchebag. It doesn't take lawyers, it doesn't take law school, it doesn't take any special privilege conferred by the state — it only takes a robust right of free expression — sending it back by blogging it, tweeting it, posting it on Facebook, and posting it in comments on forums. Charles Carreon has power derived from an inadequate legal system and letters of marque from the State Bar; The Oatmeal has the power of goodwill and community respect earned by talent. There's no reason to exalt Carreon's power and condemn The Oatmeal's.

Read it all.  The Oatmeal's response is also classic.

Just in case you believed all the BS around the passage of Dodd-Frank that in the future there would be no such thing as too big to fail, just look at yesterday's JP Morgan hearings in Congress.  

U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday interrogated J.P. Morgan Chase Chief Executive James Dimon in a much-anticipated and sometimes-heated exchange after the bank registered more than $2 billion in derivatives losses

No one grills Exxon-Mobil executives when the company loses a couple of billion to a nationalization somewhere or grills Sears executives as the blunder their way towards bankruptcy.  These are private business losses.  The only reason to grill JP Morgan is if Congress still considers the American taxpayer to be ultimately on the hook for trading losses (above and beyond deposit insurance requirements, which the Bear Sterns and AIG bailouts certainly were).

According to the RIAA prosecutors owned by the RIAA, it is all Kim Dotcom's fault:

Meanwhile, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is free on bail, living in his rented home near Auckland and awaiting extradition proceedings to begin in August. Dotcom along with Finn Batato, Julius Bencko, Sven Echternach, Mathias Ortmann, Andrus Nomm and Bram Van Der Kolk are charged with criminal copyright infringement and money laundering.

The men -- along with two companies -- are accused of collecting advertising and subscription fees from users for faster download speeds of material stored on Megaupload. Prosecutors allege the website and its operators collected US$175 million in criminal proceeds, costing copyright holders more than $500 billion in damages to copyright holders.

$500 billion is about 3.5% of US GDP.

If it's June, it must be time for me to mock Arizona budget games.  To save re-writing the old post over and over, here is what I wrote several years ago.

In May of this year I got a form from the Arizona Department of Revenue that said my company was now large enough to make estimated sales tax pre-payments.  Some states do this when you are large enough - they don't like you holding their sales tax money a whole month until the reporting deadline, they want their cash in hand.  Its a pain, so I sighed, but we did it.  We prepaid estimated full-month June sales tax in mid-June as required, rather than in mid-July when the payment would normally be due.  Note that we still have to fill out all the sales tax reports in July, so paperwork is doubled, not to mention the extra work to reconcile between the estimate and actual results.

So this month, I was looking for the July pre-payment form.  I figured the July pre-payment must be due soon, so I called the Department of Revenue and asked where my form was.  They said there was no form for July.  The pre-payment is only one time.  I said, "its only for June?" and they said yes.  You can see the blank form online is hard-coded for June.

Then it dawned on me:  Arizona is on a June 30 fiscal year.  The entire point of this exercise is to pull July revenues into June to artificially inflate the prior fiscal year financials.  Wow - all those pious government workers artificially manipulating results just like an evil old corporation.  Because there is absolutely no other reason to do this for just one month.  The time value of money gained is dwarfed by the costs of changing your payment processing approach for just one month, and is certainly dwarfed if you consider the extra taxpayer effort required (which of course the government never does).

But it's even worse!  Because, in effect, this only worked one time -- the first time.  The first time they did this, they helped the fiscal year.  But now, pulling forward July this year just offsets losing the July revenues from last year.  So politicians have saddled us with a tax process that costs the government more money and the taxpayer more time and has no benefit beyond generating a slightly more positive press release about the budget for some politician several years ago (whatever year this was first implemented).

NY Times has a great interactive graphic of Miami and OKC shooting by location on the court (roll over the face pictures to get the actual graphics).

It provides some insight as to why the NBA game seems to be all threes or points in the paint -- the mid-range jump shot just does not have the same return on investment (ie points per shot).  Which begs the question, I suppose, as to why anyone shoots the mid-range jump shot at all  (look at Battier's and Hardin's maps - they are almost all threes and layups/dunks).  I suppose the answer likely takes the form of "you have to shoot mid-range to open up the other two zones", a sort of run to set up the pass in football strategy.  Don't know enough about basketball to say if this is true.

Update:  Also, the shot clock probably has a lot to do with it.  Given infinite time, teams would be able to get the shot they want, but in 24 seconds sometimes you just have to loft one up  as time runs out from wherever you are.

Here are the stats:  Close range -- 1.19 points per shot, 3-point -- 1.08 pps, mid-range --  0.80 pps

I am glad to see that other sites with more influence than I are focusing attention on the electric vehicle mileage fraud.   The Green Explored site writes, via Q&O:

The EPA allows plug in vehicle makers to claim an equivalent miles per gallon (MPG) based on the electricity powering the cars motors being 100% efficient. This implies the electric power is generated at the power station with 100% efficiency, is transmitted and distributed through thousands of miles of lines without any loss, is converted from AC to DC without any loss, and the charge discharge efficiency of the batteries on the vehicle is also 100%. Of course the second law of thermodynamics tells us all of these claims are poppycock and that losses of real energy will occur in each step of the supply chain of getting power to the wheels of a vehicle powered with an electric motor.

Finally!  For months I have been writing about this and have started to believe I was crazy.   I have written two Forbes pieces on it (here and here) and numerous blog posts, but have failed to get much traction on it, despite what appears to be near-fraudulent science.  I wrote

the government wants an equivilent MPG standard for electric cars that goes back to the power plant to estimate that amount of fossil fuels must be burned to create the electricity that fills the batteries of an electric car.  The EPA’s methodology is flawed because it assumes perfect conversion of the potential energy in fossil fuels to electricity, an assumption that violates the second law of thermodynamics.   The Department of Energy has a better methodology that computes electric vehicle equivalent mileage based on real world power plant efficiencies and fuel mixes, while also taking into account energy used for refining gasoline for traditional cars.  Using this better DOE methodology, we get MPGe’s for electric cars that are barely 1/3 of the EPA figures.

The linked articles provide much more detail on the calculations.  As a result, when the correct methodology is applied, even in all-electric mode the heavily subsidized Fisker Karma gets just 19 MPG-equivalent.

Do you want to know the biggest energy advantage of electric cars?  When you fill them with energy, you don't stand there at the pump watching the cost-meter spin, as you do in a gas station.   It's not that the energy cost is lower, it's just better hidden (which is why I suggested the Fisker Karma be renamed the Fisker Bastiat, after the French economist who wrote so eloquently about the seen and unseen in economic analysis).  It's why, to my knowledge, no electric car maker has ever put any sort of meter on its charging cables.

Turns out the guy who gasses up a school bus has a green job.

When Bureau of Labor Statistics Acting Commissioner John Galvin balked on what qualifies as a green job under the agency definition, Issa responded, “Just answer the question.”

“Does someone who sweeps the floor at a company that makes solar panels -- is that a green job?” Issa asked.

“Yes,” replied Galvin, who also acknowledged that a bike-repair shop clerk, a hybrid-bus driver, any school bus driver and “the guy who puts gas in a school bus” are all defined as green jobs.

He also acknowledged that an oil lobbyist, if his work is related to environmental issues, would also have a green job.

It gets better.  Apparently, when I worked at the Exxon refinery in Baytown, TX, I had a green job:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics states a green job is either: a business that produces goods or provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources, or a job in which a worker's duties involve making their establishment's production processes more environmentally friendly or use fewer natural resources

I have never encountered an industrial engineering job anywhere that was not concerned with having their processes use fewer natural resources.

I would argue the greenest of jobs are held by oil and other commodity speculators and traders.  They ensure that prices at all times accurately match our current understanding of the scarcity of each resource.  Without these accurate pricing signals, all efforts to properly invest to use more or fewer of these materials would be impossible.  Just look at the "success" of investments like Solyndra that were made irregardless of these market pricing signals.

While this may be familiar territory for readers of this blog, I have a post up at the Privatization blog on the history of private operation of public parks.  In this article I quoted one of my favorite over-wrought criticisms of private operation of parks, this time from the San Francisco Chronicle:

The question is, how will these agreements work over time? If parks remain open using donations, what is the incentive for legislators to put money for parks in the general fund budget? And who is going to stop a rich crook or pot dealer from taking a park off the closure list and using it for fiendish pursuits?

LOL.  "Fiendish pursuits?"

I also had an article there a while back about government accounting systems and how they make such privatization efforts difficult:

Back when I was in the corporate world, "Make-Buy" decisions -- decisions as to whether the company should do some task itself or outsource it to companies with particular expertise or low costs in that area -- were quite routine.  Even in the corporate world, though, where accounting systems are built to produce product line profitability statements and to do activity-based costing, this kind of analysis is easy to get wrong (in particular, practitioners frequently confuse average versus marginal costs).

But if these analyses are tricky in the private world, they are almost impossible to do well in the public sphere.  Grady Gammage, a senior and highly respected research fellow at Arizona State University's Morrison Institute, has as much experience with public policy analysis as anyone in the state.  Several years ago, he spent months digging into the financial numbers of Arizona State Parks, with the full cooperation of that agency.  A critical question of the study was how much it actually cost to operate a park, vs. do all the other resource and grant management tasks the agency is asked to perform.  Despite a lot of effort by Gammage and his staff, he told me once that the best he could do was make an educated guess --plus or minus several million dollars -- as to how much of the Agency's budget is spent actually operating parks vs. performing other tasks.

The reasons that this is so hard is that the parks agency's budgeting process was not set up to determine true net operating gains and losses at parks.  It was set up, like most public accounting systems, to enforce accountability to different pools of money that have been allocated by the legislature for certain tasks.  This tends to lead to three classes of problems that cause public make-buy decisions, as well as ex post facto third-party analyses, so difficult.  Since I am most familiar with the parks world, I will discuss these three issues in the context of parks:

Don't say I have not been warning you.  For years.  Philip Klein via Peter Suderman:

...Bloomberg highlighted a comment from a supporter of the [soda] ban, who wrote, "Anyone who pays taxes and thus bears the health care costs of obesity should support this."

In a free society, individuals are able to take risks and make decisions detrimental to their own well-being -- be it smoking, drinking, excessive eating or anything else -- because they'll bear the ultimate costs of their decisions. But when government assumes a greater role in the health care system, suddenly there's a societal cost to individual risks. This provides an opening for those who believe in a paternalistic role for government to make their regulations seem pragmatic. Bloomberg used the "health care costs to taxpayers" argument during his previous drives to ban smoking in bars and restaurants and to outlaw the use of trans fats.

Via the Onion (via Master Resource)

A coalition of geologists are challenging the way we look at global stone reserves, claiming that, unless smarter methods of preservation are developed, mankind will eventually run out of rocks.

"If we do not stop using them up at our current rate, rocks as we know them will be a thing of the past," renowned geologist Henry Kaiser said at a press conference Tuesday. "Igneous, metamorphic, even sedimentary: all of them could be gone in as little as 500,000 years."

"Think about it," Kaiser added. "When was the last time you even saw a boulder?"

The scientists warned that, although people have long considered the world's rock supply to be inexhaustible, it has not created a significant number of new rocks since the planet cooled some 3.5 billion years ago. Moreover, the earth's rocks have been very slowly depleting in the last century due to growing demand for fireplace mantels, rock gardens, gravel, and paperweights.

Kaiser claims that humanity has "wreaked havoc" on the earth's stones by picking them up, carrying them around, and displacing them from their natural habitat.

"A rock can take millions of years to form, but it only takes a second for someone to skip a smooth pebble into a lake, and then it is gone." Dr. Kaiser said. "Perhaps these thoughtless rock-skippers don't care if they leave our planet completely devoid of rocks, but what about our children? Don't they deserve the chance to hold a rock and toss it up and down a few times?"

I have been trying to play with Linux/Ubuntu, mainly because Linux seems a much better approach than Windows for dedicated video streaming boxes (e.g. those based on XBMC software).  I also just got a Raspberry Pi, which is a sort of Anduino-like Linux-based small computer project board.

In playing with them, I have been dual-booting, which is somewhat </understatement> of a hassle.  So I appreciate readers who encouraged me to try VirtualBox.  Installed last night and seems to be just what the doctor ordered.

This guy in Road Warrior and this guy in Commando are the same actor.  Never would have suspected until I saw the actor signing autographs at local Comic Con.  Certainly a formidable acting portfolio.

Commando is one of my favorite of its genre.  All the elements are there - classic Arnold walk-away lines, bad acting, infinitely large ammo magazines, worse-than-stormtrooper bad-guy shooting, more bad acting, and unrepentant machismo.

Update:  Apparently Rae Dawn Chong is still making movies.  Who knew?  But I am a bigger fan of the woman in Road Warrior

The trade group that represents companies like mine that privately operate public parks is looking for a college student to work part-time for us, either this summer or into the fall.  The ideal committment is 20 hours a week for 6-10 weeks but we could accommodate fewer hours for a longer span of time.  We are willing to pay in the ballpark of $13 an hour plus expenses (phone and Internet bills, etc).  We anticipate the candidate would work from his or her own home (or dorm) and already has access to a computer and Internet connection as well as a word processing software of some sort.

Job responsibilities would include:

• Working with our members to accumulate and organize our intellectual property vis a vis this business.  This includes marketing material, regulatory and statutory information, how-to guides, etc.
• Working with our partner agencies, like the US Forest Service, to get statistics on our members' scope  (e.g. we don't even know how many US Forest Service parks are run privately) and to synthesize these into marketing materials

The candidate need not have any specific knowledge of our business, and we have experts in the organization that can supply contacts and information.  Being an all-volunteer organization, we need someone with the time and the focus to gather and organize the information we have.  The candidate will have direct contact with the CEO's of most of the key players in this industry as well as with senior staff officers of a number of public recreation and lands agencies.    We want someone who is bright and unafraid to approach, even pester, strangers for information.  Quantitative skills and/or economics or business-related studies are a plus but are not required.  Experience with web tools such as content management systems like WordPress also a plus.

If someone is interested, have them email me at warren -at- camprrm *dot* com or hit the email link above.

Kevin Drum is back on his "because Republicans won't agree to more massive deficit spending, they must be purposefully trying to destroy the economy."   Literally.  He translates Republican opposition to Obama's proposed stimulus packages as being explained by this strategy:

Basically, the Republican strategy for the past three years has been this:

1. Do everything humanly possible to prevent the economy from recovering.
2. Wait for 2012.
3. Run a campaign focused on the fact that the economy is lousy.

This is such a shabby bit of false logic it is amazing anyone even attempts this any more, or more accurately, it's amazing that folks continue to buy it.  Is it really so impossible to believe that there are actually people of goodwill who wish to see the economy improve but disagree with Drum and Obama as to the correct course to achieve that?  Apparently not  (I suppose the last stimulus was so wildly succesful that it is impossible to doubt the success of another trillion or so of deficit spending?)

The irony is that for some reason I simply cannot fathom, from a political tactics point of view, he points to this chart when talking about Truman and his "do-nothing" Congress:

He's is trying to make some political tactical point, but he is so blinded by his own assumptions that he misses the real point -- that the American economy grew at records rates through a "do-nothing" Congress.  Now, I suppose Drum might argue that this was an accident of timing, but in fact Truman inherited what should have been, by Drum's Keynesian thinking, the worst economic situation ever since an enormous amount of government spending was going away after the war and new workers were simultaneously flooding back into the job market.  If any time in recent history should have demanded Keynesian stimulus, this was it, and yet a do-nothing Congress led to a massive expansion.  Hmmmm.

Matt Curran has spot-on comments about the death penalty in a letter to the Tampa Bay Times

Robyn Blumner's column highlighting the wrongful executions of Carlos DeLuna and Cameron Todd Willingham was a very compelling argument against the death penalty. I am a Republican who rarely agrees with Blumner, but in this case she was spot on. While I believe that there are individuals who certainly deserve to lose their lives for the crimes they commit (John Couey comes to mind), I simply do not trust the government to administer such a process fairly or accurately. This is because the government is run by human beings, who like the rest of us are motivated by narrow self-interest and restrained by limited knowledge. Because those in government rarely face the consequences of their decisions, they often make the wrong ones, even if their intent is pure.

What I find puzzling is how Blumner can so effectively articulate these failings of government when it comes to civil liberties in one column, and in the next champion its abilities and competence in economic matters. A criminal trial is a grueling and exacting process that seeks to administer justice in a very narrow, specific instance. If government doesn't deserve our faith in doing that correctly, how can we trust it to control and coordinate the countless decisions that hundreds of millions of Americans make each day in our economic lives?

For more from Matt, his blog is here.

Here

Whether crimes were involved in the failures of Enron, Lehman, & Bear Stearns is still being debated.  All three essentially died in the same way (borrowing short and investing long, with a liquidity crisis emerging when questions about the quality of their long-term investments caused them not to be able to roll over their short term debt).  Just making bad business decisions isn't illegal (or shouldn't be), but there are questions at all three whether management lied to (essentially defrauded) investors by hiding emerging problems and risks.

All that being said, MF Global strikes me as an order of magnitude worse.  They had roughly the same problem - they were unable to make what can be thought of as margin calls on leveraged investments that were going bad.  However, before they went bankrupt, it is pretty clear that they stole over a billion dollars of their customers' money.  Now, in criticizing Wall Street, people are pretty sloppy in over-using the word "stole."  But in this case it applies.  Everyone agrees that customer brokerage accounts are sacrosanct.  No matter what other fraud was or was not committed in these other cases, nothing remotely similar occurred in these other bankruptcies.

A few folks are talking civil actions against MF Global, but why isn't anyone up for criminal charges?  Someone, probably Corzine, committed a crime far worse than anything Jeff Skilling or Ken Lay were even accused of, much less convicted.   This happens time and again in the financial system.  People whine that we don't have enough regulations, but the most fundamental laws we have in place already are not enforced.

Swiss government bonds are trading at rates that imply a negative interest rate.  The German government is issuing bonds with interest rates of zero that are actually trading above face value.

This is really bad news.  Investing in these securities is effectively the equivalent of putting money in one's mattress -- it means that investors don't perceive any money-making uses for their money better than paying paying financially strong governments to keep it safe for a while.   I am far from an expert on banking regulations, but my first guess on this is that this is at least in part a function of bank capital requirements that effectively require banks to put a lot of cash into government securities no matter how bad the return.

Germany and Switzerland certainly are providing some value in creating a safe haven for capital, but I wonder if in the long-run this is anything but destructive, shifting wealth and investment out of the private economy and into investments with no return.