Dispatches from District 48
Archive for March 2014
Good news, Diamondbacks fans: Chase Field is still home to the cheapest beer in baseball.
Fourteen ounces of beer at a Diamondbacks game is still $4, making this at least the fifth season in a row the D-backs have had the cheapest beer in baseball.
Fed's reverse repo activity in Treasuries with major banks. When I was on the corporate staff of a large conglomerate, we eventually busted one of our divisions for pushing inventory out the door on the last day of the quarter, only to have most of it returned a few days later, all as a way to boost quarterly revenues. This appears to be the bankers' equivalent of such channel-stuffing.
Are the Feds really fooled by artificial quarter-end liquidity that is provided by the Feds themselves? The stress-tests remind me of the story about FDR declaring a bank holiday, and claiming to have allowed only the strong banks to reopen the next day. How did they know which were strong and weak? They didn't, really. The whole exercise was a PR ploy to boost consumer confidence in the banking industry.
Update: Yep, there it all goes back where it came from
Greg Mankiw wonders how much the growth of pass-through corporations like sub-chapter S corps are skewing income trends, particularly for the highest earners. With a C-corp, an owner only recognizes corporate income when it is passed through as dividends or when they sell the company. With an S-Corp or LLC, there are no corporate taxes and corporate income is declared in that year, in full, on one's individual 1040. I asked about this as far back as 2006 and 2007.
Matt Ridley has another very good editorial in the WSJ that again does a great job of outlining what I think of as the core skeptic position. Read the whole thing, but a few excerpts:
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will shortly publish the second part of its latest report, on the likely impact of climate change. Government representatives are meeting with scientists in Japan to sex up—sorry, rewrite—a summary of the scientists' accounts of storms, droughts and diseases to come. But the actual report, known as AR5-WGII, is less frightening than its predecessor seven years ago.
The 2007 report was riddled with errors about Himalayan glaciers, the Amazon rain forest, African agriculture, water shortages and other matters, all of which erred in the direction of alarm. This led to a critical appraisal of the report-writing process from a council of national science academies, some of whose recommendations were simply ignored.
Others, however, hit home. According to leaks, this time the full report is much more cautious and vague about worsening cyclones, changes in rainfall, climate-change refugees, and the overall cost of global warming.
It puts the overall cost at less than 2% of GDP for a 2.5 degrees Centigrade (or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature increase during this century. This is vastly less than the much heralded prediction of Lord Stern, who said climate change would cost 5%-20% of world GDP in his influential 2006 report for the British government.
It is certainly a strange branch of science where major reports omit a conclusion because that conclusion is not what they wanted to see
The IPCC's September 2013 report abandoned any attempt to estimate the most likely "sensitivity" of the climate to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The explanation, buried in a technical summary not published until January, is that "estimates derived from observed climate change tend to best fit the observed surface and ocean warming for [sensitivity] values in the lower part of the likely range." Translation: The data suggest we probably face less warming than the models indicate, but we would rather not say so.
Readers of this site will recognize this statement
None of this contradicts basic physics. Doubling carbon dioxide cannot on its own generate more than about 1.1C (2F) of warming, however long it takes. All the putative warming above that level would come from amplifying factors, chiefly related to water vapor and clouds. The net effect of these factors is the subject of contentious debate.
I have reluctantly accepted the lukewarmer title, though I think it is a bit lame.
In climate science, the real debate has never been between "deniers" and the rest, but between "lukewarmers," who think man-made climate change is real but fairly harmless, and those who think the future is alarming. Scientists like Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Richard Lindzen of MIT have moved steadily toward lukewarm views in recent years.
When I make presentations, I like to start with the following (because it gets everyone's attention): "Yes, I am a denier. But to say 'denier', implies that one is denying some specific proposition. What is that proposition? It can't be 'global warming' because propositions need verbs, otherwise it is like saying one denies weather. I don't deny that the world has warmed over the last century. I don't deny that natural factors play a role in this (though many alarmists seem to). I don't even deny that man has contributed incrementally to this warming. What I deny is the catastrophe. Specifically, I deny that man's CO2 will warm the Earth enough to create a catastrophe. I define "catastrophe" as an outcome where the costs of immediately reducing CO2 output with the associated loss in economic growth would be substantially less than the cost of future adaption and abatement. "
Most folks who talk about oil production know very little about it. One reality of oil production, particularly for older fields like those around Los Angeles, is that oil wells have to be frequently reworked to maintain such production (fracking, by the way, is one of those rework techniques and has been used for over 50 years). By banning well rework and re-injection of water (most fluid flowing from older wells is water), the city council has effectively banned oil production.
The linked article is a good reminder of a technique used by many environmental activists. Despite portraying themselves as being driven by science, they actually often make progress by taking words and both obscuring their meaning and adding emotional baggage to them. Such is the case with "fracking"
Because with its pun-friendly name, the term fracking has become an effective nonspecific rallying point for extreme activist groups aiming to scare the public about environmental harms that have yet to be demonstrated. Amid the cheering after the vote, some of the national activists behind the effort acknowledged the true goal behind measure. The term fracking, it seems, is actually intended to be a catch-all phrase to describe all aspects of oil and gas production, conventional and unconventional alike, according to Washington-based Food and Water Watch, one of the activist groups behind the measure. In an interview with online publication Streetsblog Los Angeles after the vote, FWW organizer Brenna Norton boldly stated as much when she acknowledged, “It’s easier to engage and organize people around ‘fracking’ than a complicated list of practices.”
This week, the NLRB agreed to allow the players on the Northwestern University football team to unionize. This is one of those issues that is simple and straightforward in a free society and a total mess in our less-than-free society. Here are a few thoughts:
I am not sure where this is all going, but as a minimum I think the NCAA is going to be forced to allow athletes to earn outside income and accept outside benefits without losing their eligibility.
I can't think of a better illustration of the "bootlegger and Baptist" coalition supporting prohibition than the case of California state senator Leland Yee. By day, he was one of the most outspoken advocates of gun control. By night, he was apparently trafficking in illegal weapons.
Smuggling only earns high rents if the underlying goods are illegal. Who ever heard of cucumber smugglers, or dealers in the illegal cat 5 cable trade? Every time Leland Yee took another action to make guns harder to own in California, he not only got pats on the back from gun control "baptists" on the Left, but he also made his criminal friends more money.
NEITHER dead or alive, knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month, as a groundbreaking emergency technique is tested out for the first time....
The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. "If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can't bring them back to life. But if they're dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed," says surgeon Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique.
The benefits of cooling, or induced hypothermia, have been known for decades. At normal body temperature – around 37 °C – cells need a regular oxygen supply to produce energy. When the heart stops beating, blood no longer carries oxygen to cells. Without oxygen the brain can only survive for about 5 minutes before the damage is irreversible.
However, at lower temperatures, cells need less oxygen because all chemical reactions slow down. This explains why people who fall into icy lakes can sometimes be revived more than half an hour after they have stopped breathing.
Don Boudreax has a good editorial up on occupational licensing
The first hint that the real goal of occupational licensing isn't to protect consumers' health and welfare is that far too many of the professions that are licensed pose practically zero risks to ordinary people. Among the professions that are licensed in various U.S. states are florists, hair braiders and casket sellers. What are the chances that consumers will be wounded by poorly arranged bouquets of flowers or that corpses will be made more dead by defective caskets?
The real goal of occupational licensing is to protect not consumers, but incumbent suppliers. Most occupational-licensing schemes require entrants into a trade to pass exams — exams designed and graded by representatives of incumbent suppliers....
But what about more “significant” professions, such as doctors and lawyers?
The case for licensing these professions is no stronger than is the case for licensing florists and hair braiders. The reasons are many. Here are just two.
First, precisely because medical care and legal counsel are especially important services, it's especially important that competition to supply these services be as intense as possible. If the price of flowers is unnecessarily high or the quality poor, that's unfortunate but hardly tragic. Not so for the prices and quality of the services of doctors and lawyers.
Too high a price for medical visits will cause too many people to resort to self-diagnosis and self-medication. Too high a price for legal services will cause too many people to write their own wills or negotiate their own divorce settlements. Getting matters wrong on these fronts can be quite serious.
Won't, though, the absence of licensing allow large numbers of unqualified doctors and lawyers to practice? No.
People are not generally stupid when spending their own money on themselves and their loved ones. Without government licensing, people will demand — and other people will supply — information on different physicians and attorneys. Websites and smartphone apps will be created that, for a small fee, collect and distribute unbiased information on doctors and lawyers. People in need of medical care or legal advice will be free to consult this information and to use it as they, rather than some distant bureaucrat, choose
One thing I think sometimes gets lost -- the critique of licensing often focuses on where licensing is too restrictive - e.g. hair braiding or taxis or simple medical procedures.
But it is just as likely to fail because it is insufficiently restrictive. People will always say to me that they certainly want their brain surgeon to be a licensed physician, implying that licensing is appropriate for certain extreme skills. But would you really choose a brain surgeon merely because he or she was licensed? I would do a ton of research in choosing a brain surgeon, research that would go well beyond their having managed to pass some tests 20 years ago.
The same applies for restaurants - my standards go way beyond whether they have a 3 basin cleanup sink and have sufficiently high temperatures in their dishwasher.
The criteria for licensing is never "just right". Either it is too restrictive and eliminates competition that would provide me value; or else it is insufficiently stringent such that I have to perform the same due diligence I would have in the absence of any licensing regime (though perhaps with less robust tools since licensing likely stunts development of such consumer tools). And even if it happened to be well-calibrated for me, it will not be well-calibrated for my neighbor who will have a different set of criteria and preferences.
A while back I wrote about my concerns about the total absence of any security at all in the Arizona corporate annual reporting system
I started the annual reporting process by just typing in the name of my company and getting started. There was no password protection, no identity check. They had no way of knowing I had anything to do with this corporation and yet I was answering questions like "have you been convicted for fraud." The potential for mischief is enormous. One would have to get the timing right (an annual report must be due before one can get in) but one could easily open the site on January 1 and start entering false information in the registrations for such corporations as Exxon and Wal-Mart.
See for yourself. .
I showed how one could open and file the report for a company like Wal-Mart, changing all their officers names, and confessing to all sorts of imagined corporate crimes
Again, note what I am saying. This is not the result of hacking. This is not lax security I figured out how to evade. This is the result of no security whatsoever. I simply went to the link above, clicked on the Wal-Mart Associates link, and then clicked on the annual report link. I know from doing my own registration that there is a signature page at the end, but all you do is type in the name of an officer and a title -- data that is right there on the site. It's like asking you for a password after the site just listed all the valid passwords.
The head of the Arizona Corporation Commission wrote me back. Here is here email in its entirety:
Dear Mr. Meyer:
Thank you for your email regarding the Corporations Division. The Arizona Corporation Commission is the repository for all business formation documents for corporations and limited liability corporations. We are in full compliance with state statutes.
Submitting false documents to alter another’s corporate structure or status is a crime and carries a Class 4 or Class 5 penalty. The Commission or the aggrieved business entity may refer the false filing to the Attorney General’s office for prosecution. Additionally, the individual business entity may pursue a civil cause of action. The Commission only accepts on-line charges for a few services such as name reservation or to order a certificate of good standing, and the online payment process is completely secure.
Even though the Commission’s existing security measures comply with the state law and are similar to most other states and other Arizona governmental entities like the County Treasurer’s Office, the Commission is looking at implementing new technology to allow for the online submission of additional services – such as the filing of original Articles of Organization and Articles of Incorporation. We do intend to provide password protected security features when that new technology is offered to the public.
J. Jerich
Executive Director
Arizona Corporation Commission
I had no doubt that submitting a false annual report for Wal-Mart would be illegal. Duh. However, it is just incredibly naive that this is the sole extent of the Commission's security, to prosecute people once the damage is done. Can you imagine if Amazon had the same security policy - "we are getting rid of passwords because it would be illegal for you to buy something from someone else's account." I wonder if the commissioners leave their doors unlocked at night, trusting in the threat of future prosecution to deter burglary and mayhem in their homes?
This is good news - the Oklahoma Attorney General is challenging sue and settle endangered species listings as a violation of the required rules-making process.
Environmentalists are trying to list such ubiquitous species as prairie chickens in order to halt oil and gas development in most of the west. Presumably, wind farms would be given a special exemption.
Hans Bader submitted a FOIA on October 9 about US Forest Service and Dept. of Agriculture decision-making leading up to the unprecedented shutdown of private operations on US Forest Service land. I have seen the FOIA results and -- almost laughably -- virtually all of the documents relate to the end of the shutdown, and all of the documents are dated after the date of his FOIA. In other words, the US Forest Service essentially ignored the documents requested by the FOIA request and submitted a stacks of unrelated documents.
I can think of two groups with whom I have some sympathy -- the Tea Party and climate skeptics -- who share one problem in common: the media does not come to them to ask them what their positions are. The media instead goes to their opposition to ask what their positions are. In other words, the media asks global warming strong believers what the skeptic position is, without ever even talking to skeptics. It should be no surprise then that these groups get painted with straw men positions that frequently bear no resemblance to their actual beliefs.
Paul Krugman provides an excellent example. He writes: (shame on the blog author for not linking Krugman's article, here is the link)
Or we’re told that conservatives, the Tea Party in particular, oppose handouts because they believe in personal responsibility, in a society in which people must bear the consequences of their actions. Yet it’s hard to find angry Tea Party denunciations of huge Wall Street bailouts, of huge bonuses paid to executives who were saved from disaster by government backing and guarantees.
This is really outrageous. I am not a Tea Partier because they hold a number of positions (e.g. on immigration and gay marriage) opposite of mine. But to say they somehow have ignored cronyism and bailouts is just absurd. TARP was one of the instigations, if not the key instigation, for the Tea Party. As I have written any number of times, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street actually shared a number of common complaints about bank bailouts and cronyism.
By the way, it is Hilarious to see Krugman trying to claim the moral high ground on Cronyism, as he has been such a vociferous proponent of the Fed balance sheet expansion, which will likely go down in history as one of the greatest crony giveaways to the rich in history.
The $10.10 minimum wage discussion has gotten a lot of attention. But in 2011 only 3.8 million workers made at or below the minimum wage, and of these, at least half earn substantially more in reality through tips.
Obama's announcement yesterday that he wanted to substantially change the way salaried workers will likely have far more negative impacts on employment than his minimum wage proposals.
President Barack Obama is expected to order a rule change this week that would require employers to pay overtime to a larger number of salaried workers, two people familiar with the matter said.
Currently, many businesses aren't required to pay overtime to certain salaried workers if they earn more than $455 a week, a level that was set in 2004 and comes to roughly $24,000 a year. The White House is expected to direct the Labor Department to raise that salary threshold, though it is unclear by how much.
Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, and Jared Bernstein, a former White House economist, recently proposed the limit be increased to $984 a week, or roughly $50,000 a year.
"That would mean between five- and 10-million people could be affected, but they might choose a lower number," Mr. Eisenbrey said about the White House plans.
5-10 million is potentially 3x or more the people affected by a minimum wage change. But in some sense, this still underestimates the impact. Here is one example. Last year the average starting salary of college graduates is about $45,000. The median is likely lower. This means that over half of all college graduates going into the work force will be taking hourly jobs that used to be salaried. Teachers will be hourly. Budget analysts will be hourly. Etc.
So all these folks are saying - Yeah! I get overtime! Wrong. They will be eligible for overtime. But companies will quickly restructure their work processes to make sure no one works overtime. And since their new hires are working just a straight 40 hours (with mandatory unpaid lunch break time in CA), they will likely pay less. If I am paying $40,000 a year for someone who will work extra hours for me, I am not going to pay that amount to someone just punching a time clock. And the whole psychological relationship is changed - a salaried person is someone on the management team. A person punching a timeclock may not be treated the same way.
Further, when someone gets switched from salary to hourly, they lose a minimum pay guarantee. When I get a $3,500 a month offer, I know that no matter how slow things are, until I am fired I get $3500 a month. There is a floor on my earnings. As an hourly worker, my hours can be adjusted up or down constantly. There is no floor at all.
Oh, and by the way, remember Obamacare? The PPACA penalizes companies who do not provide a health plan that meets certain (expensive) criteria. But that penalty is not applied for workers who are "part-time" or work less than 30 hours a week. Salaried workers are automatically full time. But once you convert all those people to hourly and make sure they are working no more than 40 hours a week, is it really so large a step to getting them under 30 hours a week?
PS- Well, for those who think schools assign too much homework, this could well be the end of homework. The most dangerous possible thing with hourly workers is to give them the ability to assign themselves unlimited overtime. Teachers could do this at home with grading papers. If I were a school, I would ban teachers from doing any grading or schoolwork prep at home -- after all, it's hourly and probably overtime and they could work unlimited hours at home and how would you get it under control? The only way to manage it would be to ban it entirely.
PPS- What about travel? Would you ever let workers paid hourly travel? You would have to pay all the travel time and maybe part of the hotel time and there would be huge potential for ending up with overtime bills so better to just ban travel all together. I know this seems knee-jerk to ban something that might impose a lot of extra labor costs seems extreme, but just look at California. In California, employees have the right to a half-hour lunch break without work. They can work through lunch if they choose, but courts have imposed enough onerous reporting standards around this that most companies (like mine) have just banned working through lunch. It is a firing offense in my company, and in many others in CA, to be caught working during lunch. We are going to see the same thing working from home. In fact, we already see this, as there are class actions right now against companies who provided employees with cell phones saying that giving them a cell phone put them "on call" and subject to overtime hours that had to paid at home. Companies are now making it a firing offense to take one's company cell phone home.
Sorry this post is so disorganized, but this initiative caught be by surprise and I have not been thinking about it for very long. I will try to work out a more rigorous article in the next few weeks.
Yesterday, I came home exhausted. I have been working late nearly every night for weeks, at a time of year when most of my business is not even open yet (the business is seasonal). I realized to my immense depression that I have been spending all my time on regulatory compliance. I have not been pitching new clients or bidding on new prospects or making investments or improving our customer service processes -- though I have ideas for all of these. I have been 100% dedicated through 14 hour days to just trying to keep up with and adapt to changing government rules.
Break rules, changing minimum wages, heat stress plans, mandatory sexual harassment training, OSHA reporting, EEO reporting, Census reporting, and most recently changing rules on salaried workers that Obama just waived his wand and imposed -- this is what has been consuming me. I have been trying to roll out a new safety program to the field and can't do it because I keep having to train for one of these new requirements (one learns there is only a limited number of things one can simultaneously roll out to front-line staff).
At some point regulation will accrete so fast that it will be impossible to keep up. I am going to call that the Regulation Singularity, and for businesses my size, we are fast approaching it.
Prominent libertarian think tanks often rank state business climate by their tax regimes. I am all for low, sensibly-structured taxes. But for most of my time, taxes are irrelevant. We are shutting down businesses left and right in California and it has zero to do with taxes.
Ken White at Popehat offers some useful insight to non-lawyers among us about compelled testimony (in the context of the Louis Lerner/IRS saga)
Some people have argued that Lois Lerner should be compelled to testify, either by court order or by grant of immunity. Lerner and her lawyers would love that, as it would make prosecuting her for any suspected wrongdoing incredibly difficult.
Compelled testimony is radioactive. If a witness is compelled to testify, in any subsequent proceeding against them the government has a heavy burden to prove that no part of the prosecution is derived from the compelled testimony, which is treated as immunized. This is called theKastigar doctrine:
"Once a defendant demonstrates that he has testified, under a state grant of immunity, to matters related to the federal prosecution, the federal authorities have the burden of showing that their evidence is not tainted by establishing that they had an independent, legitimate source for the disputed evidence." 378 U.S. at 378 U. S. 79 n. 18. This burden of proof, which we reaffirm as appropriate, is not limited to a negation of taint; rather, it imposes on the prosecution the affirmative duty to prove that the evidence it proposes to use is derived from a legitimate source wholly independent of the compelled testimony.
If I read this right, if the House were to compel her to testify, they might as well grant her immunity and be done with it.
Further on in the post, Ken points out an issue that I have been wondering about myself -- Those who want Lerner to testify are concerned with government arbitrary abuse of power for political purposes. Given that, how can these same folks have any doubt as to why Lerner might plead the Fifth in front of a hostile and partisan House committee
I've been seeing a lot of comments to the effect of "why should Lois Lerner take the Fifth if she has nothing to hide?" Ironically these comments often come from people who profess to oppose expansive government power, and from people who accept the proposition that Lerner was part of wrongdoing in the first place — in other words, that there was a government conspiracy to target people with the machinery of the IRS for holding unpopular political views. Such people do not seem to grasp how their predicate assumptions answer their own question.
You take the Fifth because the government can't be trusted. You take the Fifth because what the truth is, and what the government thinks the truth is, are two very different things. You take the Fifth because even if you didn't do anything wrong your statements can be used as building blocks indishonest, or malicious, or politically motivated prosecutions against you. You take the Fifth because if you answer questions truthfully the government may still decide you are lying and prosecute you for lying.
Pardon me: if you accept the proposition that the government targets organizations for IRS scrutiny because of their political views, and you still say things like "why take the Fifth if you have nothing to hide", then you're either an idiot or a dishonest partisan hack.
If you want to get bent out of shape about something, you are welcome to wonder why Lerner is being investigated, apparently, by the hyper-partisan civil rights division of Justice rather than the public integrity section. That, combined with President Obama's pre-judging of the DOJ's conclusions, is more of a red flag than Lerner's taking the Fifth.
Remember, Martha Stewart did not go to jail for securities fraud of any sort. She went to jail for statements she made during the government investigation.
Many on the Left often deride the notion that government regulation really affects business behavior and reduces business activity. But it turns out that even the Feds themselves throw up their hands and give up in the face of trying to deal with their own regulations
Government estimates suggest there may be 77,000 empty or underutilized buildings across the country. Taxpayers own them, and even vacant, they’re expensive. The Office of Management and Budget believes these buildings could be costing taxpayers $1.7 billion a year.
…But doing something with these buildings is a complicated job. It turns out that the federal government does not know what it owns.
…even when an agency knows it has a building it would like to sell, bureaucratic hurdles limit it from doing so. No federal agency can sell anything unless it’s uncontaminated, asbestos-free and environmentally safe. Those are expensive fixes.
Then the agency has to make sure another one doesn’t want it. Then state and local governments get a crack at it, then nonprofits — and finally, a 25-year-old law requires the government to see if it could be used as a homeless shelter.
Many agencies just lock the doors and say forget it.
When Mathew Vassar built the original main building at Vassar college, he made the hallways of this college for women extra wide. While there is an apocryphal story that he did this so he could later convert the college to a brewery if the whole educating women thing did not work out, the actual explanation is a window on Victorian-era thinking about women.
People of the time were convinced that women were subject to hysteria, and that one way to potentially defuse such hysteria was through exercise. The extra-wide hallways were so women in their hoop skirts could walk back and forth in bad weather. (Interestingly, Vassar and other women's colleges also played a role in the early history of baseball, fielding teams for a number of years until men decided that the unseemlyness of women playing sports trumped the fight against hysteria).
Whenever this story is told, we laugh today at Victorians' condescending, even misogynist views of women as subject to hysteria or fainting or the vapors when encountering the slightest bit of stress.
Which is why I never would have believed that it would be 21st century feminists dredging up these old attitudes with fears of "triggering." Women are once again being treated as if they will get the vapors if difficult topics are discussed in class. I suppose we are now supposed to leave these to men in the smoking room after dinner?
In the future, historians will draw a line somewhere in the last decade to mark the point where feminism switched from empowering women to treating them like children.
Disclosure: My wife attended Vassar College and is still convinced the brewery explanation is the correct one.
Jan Brewer, Arizona governor by grace of Janet Napalitano going to Washington, said she would not run for a third term. This is actually hilarious, because by our state Constitution she may not serve a third term. This announcement would be roughly equivalent to Obama announcing next year he was not seeking a third term as President. It is simply absurd, and an indicator of the low quality of politicians we get in this state, that she actively entertained the extra-Constitutional notion of a third term for so long.
Today I gave notice that I was exiting another park operations contract in California. This location has always been marginal, but we kept holding out hope of improving it. But with rising CA minimum wage, the PPACA, and onerous CA labor and liability laws, operating in CA is so hard that I have to make good money or get out.
I had to pick a termination date at the end of the summer. I was going to choose Labor Day but looking at the calendar, it gave me a smile to slip the date to September 2, a date that should be familiar to anyone who is a real Atlas Shrugged geek. It is an inside joke guaranteed not to be recognized by any of the government agency managers we work with there.
The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) argues that a 0.7 percent increase in annual transit ridership in 2013 is proof that Americans want more “investments” in transit–by which the group means more federal funding. However, a close look at the actual data reveals something entirely different.
It turns out that all of the increase in transit ridership took place in New York City. New York City subway and bus ridership grew by 120 million trips in 2013; nationally, transit ridership grew by just 115 million trips. Add in New York commuter trains (Long Island Railroad and Metro North) and New York City transit ridership grew by 123 million trips, which means transit in the rest of the nation declined by 8 million trips. As the New York Timesobserves, the growth in New York City transit ridership resulted from “falling unemployment,” not major capital improvements.
Meanwhile, light-rail and bus ridership both declined in Portland, which is often considered the model for new transit investments. Light-rail ridership grew in Dallas by about 300,000 trips, but bus ridership declined by 1.7 million trips. Charlotte light rail gained 27,000 new rides in 2013, but Charlotte buses lost 476,000 rides. Declines in bus ridership offset part or all of the gains in rail ridership in Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, and other cities. Rail ridership declined in Albuquerque, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Sacramento, and on the San Francisco BART system, among other places.
It looks like Chris Christie was doing his part to increase transit ridership in New York.
By the way, the phenomenon of small increases in light rail use offset by large drops in bus ridership is extremely common, almost ubiquitous. Cities build flashy prestige rail projects that cost orders of magnitude more to build and operate than bus service, and are much less flexible when the economy and commuting patterns change. Over time, bus service has to be cut to pay the bills for light rail. But since a given amount of money spent on buses tends to carry more than 10x the passenger miles than the same amount spent on light rail, total ridership drops even while spending rises. That is what is going on here.
Light rail is all about politician prestige, civic pride, and crony favoritism for a few developers with land along the route. It is not about transit sanity.
An excellent editorial from Tim Carney
Democrats occupied the Senate floor all night Monday, talking aboutclimate change. They didn't try to advance any legislation, and they didn't even try very hard to get media attention.
“The members know that serious climate change legislation stands no chance of passage in this divided Congress,” wrote the New York Times' climate-change reporter, Coral Davenport. Beyond that, Democrats know that action on climate legislation would help Republicans take the Senate in 2014.
So why occupy the Senate floor talking about the issue? In short: Faith, identity and cash.
The liberal climate cause is easier to understand if you think of it as a religion. Monday’s talkathon sounded at times like a religious revival. Senators spoke about the faithful who “believe in wind” and “believe in renewable” energy. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said climate for him is “a faith issue.”
One doctrine in the Church of Climate is sola fide. In the words of Reformation theology: Justification comes through faith alone. “Good works” are irrelevant....
Beyond exercises in faith and identity politics, the Democratic all-nighter should be understood as a very odd fundraiser. Most fundraisers feature one or two politicians speaking to dozens of donors. Monday night featured a dozen politicians speaking to one donor: Energy billionaire Tom Steyer.
Steyer, having made his riches partly in green energy and fossil fuels, has decided to spend his billions electing Democrats who will pass climate legislation. He says he’s divested from his energy holdings, signifying his intentions are sincere.
Steyer spent $8 million to help elect Terry McAuliffe governor of Virginia last fall. “Steyer will inject millions into assorted races” in 2014, reports Joe Hagan in Men's Journal. Steyer has made it very clear what a politician needs to do to get his money: Make a big deal about climate change.
By the way, kudos to Carney for getting this correct. It seems like an easy nuance to get accurately, but no one in the media ever does
Democrats called Republicans “deniers” 28 times during the talkathon. Majority Leader Harry Reidframed his speech this way: “Despite overwhelming scientific evidence and overwhelming public opinion, climate change deniers still exist.”
There’s an ounce of truth to this attack: Some Republicans wrongly deny that carbon dioxide and similar gasses exert a net upward pressure on atmospheric temperature, and that this has affected the climate.
But liberals hurl the term “climate denier” at anyone who doubts the hyperbolic catastrophic predictions of Al Gore, posits that non-manmade factors (like the sun) may also drive climate change, or opposes Democrats policies — the same policies Democrats aren’t actually trying to pass.
I have actually learned to embrace the "denier" label. When it is applied to me, I agree that I am, but that one has to be careful what exact proposition I am denying. I don't deny that the world has warmed over the last 100 years or that man-made CO2 has contributed incrementally to that warming, both now and in the future. What I deny is the catastrophe.
...government access. Clearly Warren Buffet saw the writing on the wall in 2009, that the way to make money in the US was no longer to build products and factories but to invest in lobbying to get crony advantages and giveaways.
This Administration and Senate makes all kinds of progressive noises, but all the while they are running perhaps the greatest expansion of cronyism in US history. And the smart money knows it.
Today I had to do my annual renewal of my corporate registration in Arizona. As in most states, this involves a bit of information foreplay followed by the purpose of the exercise -- sending in a check to the corporation commission.
But here is the extraordinarily scary part -- I started the annual reporting process by just typing in the name of my company and getting started. There was no password protection, no identity check. They had no way of knowing I had anything to do with this corporation and yet I was answering questions like "have you been convicted for fraud." The potential for mischief is enormous. One would have to get the timing right (an annual report must be due before one can get in) but one could easily open the site on January 1 and start entering false information in the registrations for such corporations as Exxon and Wal-Mart.
See for yourself. . Below is a screen shot of the site letting me in to edit one of Wal-Mart's corporate registrations in Arizona:
Again, note what I am saying. This is not the result of hacking. This is not lax security I figured out how to evade. This is the result of no security whatsoever. I simply went to the link above, clicked on the Wal-Mart Associates link, and then clicked on the annual report link. I know from doing my own registration that there is a signature page at the end, but all you do is type in the name of an officer and a title -- data that is right there on the site. It's like asking you for a password after the site just listed all the valid passwords.
If I disliked Wal-Mart, I could put all kinds of crazy garbage in here. I did not go further, because I would have had to answer these questions to proceed and I had no desire to mess with another company's critical data, but if I had gone further I could have changed their mailing address, the names of their officers, etc. -- all I had to do was just pay the $60-ish registration fee for them and they would have a big mess on their hands to sort out. If I had access to a fake or stolen credit card and a public computer, I could have done it all without any hope of being traced.
By the way, from my experience, this is not unique to Arizona. This criminally lax behavior seems to be the norm in most states.
I have submitted this all as a complaint to the state, so far with no response. If anyone in AZ knows how I can get someone's attention with this, let me know.
