Dispatches from District 48
Archive for September 2014
Three of the visitor areas we operate -- Manzanita Campground, West Fork / Call of the Canyon Day Use Area, and the Grasshopper Point Day Use Area -- are finally being allowed to reopen October 1, 2014. If you are in the area, please come visit and enjoy the fall foliage and the beautiful weather.
In the 1970's, Hollywood produced a number of movies that drew from a frustration that the criminal justice system was broken. Specifically, a surprisingly large number of people felt that due process protections of accused criminals had gone too far, and were causing police and prosecutors to lose the war on crime. In the Dirty Harry movies, Clint Eastwood is constantly fighting against what are portrayed as soft-hearted Liberal protections of criminals. In the Death Wish movies, Charles Bronson's character goes further, acting as a private vigilante meeting out well-deserved justice on criminals the system can't seem to catch.
There are always folks who do not understand and accept the design of our criminal justice system. Every system that makes judgments has type I and type II errors. In the justice system, type I errors are those that decide an innocent person is guilty and type II errors are those that decide a guilty person is not guilty. While there are reforms that reduce both types of errors, at the margin improvements that reduce type I errors tend to increase type II errors and vice versa.
Given this tradeoff, a system designer has to choose which type of error he or she is willing to live with. And in criminal justice the rule has always been to reduce type I errors (conviction of the innocent) even if this increases type II errors (letting the guilty go free).
And this leads to the historic friction -- people see the type II errors, the guilty going free, and want to do something about it. But they forget, or perhaps don't care, that for each change that puts more of the guilty in jail, more innocent people will go to jail too. Movies cheat on this, by showing you the criminal committing the crimes, so you know without a doubt they are guilty. But in the real world, no one has this certainty. Even with supposed witnesses. A lot of men, most of them black, in the south have been put to death with witness testimony and then later exonerated when it was too late.
This 1970's style desire for private justice to substitute for a justice system that was seen as too soft on crime was mainly a feature of the Right. Today, however, calls for private justice seem to most often come from the Left.
It is amazing how much women's groups and the Left today remind me of the Dirty Harry Right of the 1970's. They fear an epidemic of crime against women, egged on by a few prominent folks who exaggerate crime statistics to instill fear for political purposes. In this environment of fear, they see the criminal justice system as failing women, doing little to bring rapist men to justice or change their behavior (though today the supposed reason for this injustice is Right-wing patriarchy rather than Left-wing bleeding heartism).
Observe the controversies around prosecution of campus sexual assaults and the bruhaha around the video of Ray Rice hitting a woman in an elevator. In both cases, these crimes are typically the purview of the criminal justice system. However, it is clear that the Left has given up on the criminal justice system with all its "protections" of the accused. Look at the Ray Rice case -- when outrage flared for not having a strong enough punishment, it was all aimed at the NFL. There was a New Jersey state prosecutor that had allowed Rice into a pre-trial diversion program based on his lack of a criminal record, but no one on the Left even bothered with him. They knew the prosecutor had to follow the law. When it comes to campus sexual assault, no one on the Left seems to be calling for more police action. They are demanding that college administrators with no background in criminal investigation or law create shadow judiciary systems instead.
The goal is to get out of the legally constrained criminal justice system and into a more lawless private environment. This allows:
Postscript: For those who are younger and may not have experienced these movies, here is the IMDB summary of Death Wish
Open-minded architect Paul Kersey returns to New York City from vacationing with his wife, feeling on top of the world. At the office, his cynical coworker gives him the welcome-back with a warning on the rising crime rate. But Paul, a bleeding-heart liberal, thinks of crime as being caused by poverty. However his coworker's ranting proves to be more than true when Paul's wife is killed and his daughter is raped in his own apartment. The police have no reliable leads and his overly sensitive son-in-law only exacerbates Paul's feeling of hopelessness. He is now facing the reality that the police can't be everywhere at once. Out of sympathy his boss gives him an assignment in sunny Arizona where Paul gets a taste of the Old West ideals. He returns to New York with a compromised view on muggers...
I guess I was premature in portraying these movies as mainly a product of the 1970s, since this movie just came out.
Inevitably necessary note on private property rights: The NFL and private colleges have every right to hire and fire and eject students for any reasons they want as long as those rules and conditions were clear when players and students joined those organizations. Of course, they are subject to mockery if we think the rules or their execution deserve it. Public colleges are a different matter, and mandates by Federal and State governments even more so. Government institutions are supposed to follow the Constitution and the law, offering equal protection and due process.
How do I know that average people do not believe the one in five women raped on campus meme? Because parents still are sending their daughters to college, that's why. In increasing numbers that threaten to overwhelm males on campus. What is more, I sat recently through new parent orientations at a famous college and parents asked zillions of stupid, trivial questions and not one of them inquired into the safety of their daughters on campus or the protections afforded them. Everyone knows that some women are raped and badly taken advantage of on campus, but everyone also knows the one in five number is overblown BS.
Imagine that there is a country with a one in 20 chance of an American woman visiting getting raped. How many parents would yank their daughters from any school trip headed for that country -- a lot of them, I would imagine. If there were a one in five chance? No one would allow their little girls to go. I promise. I am a dad, I know.
Even if the average person can't articulate their source of skepticism, most people understand in their gut that we live in a post-modern world when it comes to media "data". Political discourse, and much of the media, is ruled by the "fake but accurate" fact. That is, the number everyone knows has no valid source or basis in fact or that everyone knows fails every smell test, but they use anyway because it is in a good cause. They will say, "well one in five is probably high but it's an important issue anyway".
The first time I ever encountered this effect was on an NPR radio show years ago. The hosts were discussing a well-accepted media statistic at the time that there were a million homeless people (these homeless people only seem to exist, at least in the media, during Republican presidencies so I suppose this dates all the way back to the Reagan or Bush years). Someone actually tracked down this million person stat and traced it back to a leading homeless advocate, who admitted he just made it up for an interview, and was kind of amazed everyone just accepted it. But the interesting part was a discussion with several people in the media who still used the statistic even after they knew it to be outsourced BS, made up out of thin air. Their logic: homelessness was a critical issue and the stat may be wrong, but it was OK to essentially lie (they did not use the word "lie") about the facts in a good cause. The statistic was fake, but accurately reflected a real problem. Later, the actual phrase "fake but accurate" would be coined in association with the George W. Bush faked air force national guard papers. Opponents of Bush argued after the forgery became clear to everyone but Dan Rather that the letters may have been fake but they accurately reflected character flaws in the President.
And for those on the Left who want to get bent out of shape that this is just aimed at them, militarists love these post-modern non-facts to stir up fear in the war on terror, the war on crime, the war on drugs, and the war on just about everyone in the middle east.
PS- Neil deGrasse Tyson has been criticized of late for the same failing, the use of fake quotes that supposedly accurately reflect the mind of the quoted person. It is one thing for politicians to play this game. It is worse for scientists. It is the absolute worst for a scientist to play this anti-science game in the name of defending science.
Had some sort of attack running all weekend against one of my more minor web sites. Hostgator found the attack and changed our security rules, and for now we should be fine. Sort of violating the security through obscurity rule of thumb since this was a very obscure site they were attacking.
Virtually every product and service we purchase has its supply and demand match by prices. Higher prices tell buyers they should conserve, and tell suppliers to expend extra effort finding more.
Except for water.
Every water shortage you ever read about is the result of refusing to let prices float to dynamically match supply and demand. And more specifically, are the result of a populist political desire to keep water prices below what would be a market clearing price (or perhaps more accurately, a price that maintains reservoir levels both above and below ground at target levels).
So, some groups in Arizona are offering a$100,000 prize to help solve the water shortage. And what is it they are looking for? A better price system? Nah:
A $100,000 prize awaits the group that comes up with the most innovative campaign to push water scarcity into the forefront of public conversation...
The competition wants to create a public-service campaign that raises awareness about the challenges facing Arizona's long-term water supply so residents will feel an urgency to start working on them now.
If Arizonans don't change how they consume water and start brainstorming new solutions for dwindling supplies, shortages won't be a choice, they will be an unavoidable reality. Planning for the future of water now will help ensure there is enough water for future generations, Brownell said.
The message isn't new; it has been taught with puppets, posters, television spots, brochures and landscape-design classes for years.
But experts, researchers and industry workers agree that as long as taps gush clear,drinkable water, it's hard to keep water scarcity part of public conversation.
"One challenge is getting people to take ownership of their decisions and how they contribute to the demand side of the equation," said Dave White, co-director of Arizona State University's Decision Center for a Desert City, which studies water use and sustainability....
Possible solutions to meeting Arizona's future water needs include:
• Desalination of sea water, which requires large financial investment and collaboration between government agencies and possibly Mexico.
• Rebates for water-efficient systems. Tucson offers up to $1,000 for households that install gray-water recycling systems to reuse water from sinks, showers and washing machinesfor irrigation.
• Increasing the use of recycled or reclaimed water. Arizona already uses this water to irrigate landscaping and recharge aquifers, but not as drinking water.
• Cloud seeding. The Central Arizona Project has spent nearly $800,000 to blast silver iodide into clouds to try to increase snowfall in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, where the snowpack feeds the Colorado River.
I will say that it is nice to see supply side solutions suggested rather than the usual demand side command and control and guilt-tripping. But how can we possibly evaluate new water supply solutions like desalinization if we don't know the real price of water? Accurate prices are critical for evaluating large investments.
If I find the time, I am going to tilt at a windmill here and submit an entry. They want graphics of your communications and advertising materials -- I'll just show a copy of a water bill with a higher price on it. It costs zero (since bills are already going out) and unlike advertising, it reaches everyone and has direct impact on behavior. If you want to steal my idea and submit, you are welcome to because 1. The more the merrier and 2. Intelligent market-based solutions are never ever going to win because the judges are the people who benefit from the current authoritarian system.
PS- the site has lots of useful data for those of you who want to play authoritarian planner -- let some users have all the water they want, while deciding that other uses are frivolous! Much better you decide than let users decide for themselves using accurate prices.
Yesterday, when writing about the US Forest Service (USFS) restrictions on commercial photography in wilderness areas, I discussed the contradictions that make their policy problematic
The USFS has undermined their own argument by making exceptions based on the purpose of the filming. Apparently only commercial filming hurts ecosystems, not amateur photography. And apparently commercial filming that has positive messages about the USFS are OK too. Its just commercial filming that goes into a beer company ad that hurts ecosystems. You see the problem. If it's the use itself that is the problem, then the USFS should be banning the use altogether. By banning some photography but not all based on the content and use of that photography, that strikes me as a first amendment issue.
Despite working with the USFS on lands management every day, this policy was new to me. I hypothesized
[There is a] large group in the USFS that is at best skeptical and at worst hostile to commercial activity. They would explain these rules, at least in private, by saying that anything commercial is by definition antithetical to the very concept of wilderness that they hold in their heads, and that thus all commercial activity needs to be banned in the wilderness because it is inherently corrupting.
Reading Overlawyered, I saw this US Forest Service quote from the Oregonian to explain their position on commercial photography:
Liz Close, the Forest Service's acting wilderness director, says the restrictions have been in place on a temporary basis for four years and are meant to preserve the untamed character of the country's wilderness.
Close didn't cite any real-life examples of why the policy is needed or what problems it's addressing. She didn't know whether any media outlets had applied for permits in the last four years.
She said the agency was implementing the Wilderness Act of 1964, which aims to protect wilderness areas from being exploited for commercial gain.
"It's not a problem, it's a responsibility," she said. "We have to follow the statutory requirements."
So it appears that the purpose of the Wilderness Act is interpreted by the USFS as "protect wilderness areas from being exploited for commercial gain."
But the Wilderness Act makes just a brief mention of commercial activity (It was written back in the day when laws did not have to be 2000 pages long, so you can read the who thing here). Its main purpose is to keep the lands wild and the ecology as free as possible from man's intervention
In order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition, it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness. For this purpose there is hereby established a National Wilderness Preservation System to be composed of federally owned areas designated by the Congress as "wilderness areas," and these shall be administered for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness, and so as to provide for the protection of these areas, the preservation of their wilderness character, and for the gathering and dissemination of information regarding their use and enjoyment as wilderness...
A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.
There is nothing in this that in any way shape or form should be affected by photography (unless the photography has some sort of heavy footprint, like making a Hollywood movie with hundreds of people and equipment and catering trucks, etc.).
The Wilderness Act is not primarily about protecting the Wilderness from commercial gain. It is about protecting the natural operation of ecosystems from intervention of any sort by man. Commercial activity is barely mentioned, and only as a minor aside deep into the legislation. But many US Forest Service employees have an antipathy to commercial activity and have sort of reinterpreted it in their mind as being an anti-commercialism act. Here are the only mentions of commercial activity in the law:
Except as specifically provided for in this Act, and subject to existing private rights, there shall be no commercial enterprise and no permanent road within any wilderness area designated by this Act and except as necessary to meet minimum requirements for the administration of the area for the purpose of this Act (including measures required in emergencies involving the health and safety of persons within the area), there shall be no temporary road, no use of motor vehicles, motorized equipment or motorboats, no landing of aircraft, no other form of mechanical transport, and no structure or installation within any such area. ...
Commercial services may be performed within the wilderness areas designated by this Act to the extent necessary for activities which are proper for realizing the recreational or other wilderness purposes of the areas.
In this usage (I am not an attorney so there is likely a long history of how the term "commercial enterprise" is understood in the law) my sense is this means that people are not to be conducting commerce -- trading goods and services for money- within the boundaries of the wilderness area. Essentially, they don't want a gift shop or McDonald's there. Grouped with the bit about roads, this is a paragraph about facilities and equipment and having a footprint.
So is a lone person taking pictures a commercial enterprise within the area? I doubt it. The actual commerce is conducted outside the park and there is nothing about photography that impairs the wilderness nature of the park. My interpretation is that taking pictures is OK but setting up a photography store is forbidden. But by the US Forest Service's definition, I suppose they should also ban people from collecting material for a book. If I walk through the wilderness area taking notes for a book I want to write, and then leave the area and write it and sell it, I am not sure how this is any different from commercial photography. And does this mean that I can't wear any clothes or bring any equipment into the wilderness area that I purchased commercially?
PS- Beyond a skepticism about capitalism, there is an other reason public lands people might want to shortcut the Federal Wilderness Act as "preventing commercial activity" -- it lets them off the hook. The Wilderness Act was about preventing meddling in the ecosystem (an impossible goal, but we will leave that for another day) and this applied to all groups -- commercial, government, educational. By shortcutting the Act as being about commerce, it helps folks forget that the same strictures should apply to agency personnel as well. I was up in Yellowstone listening to discussions of reintroduction of the wolf and the ongoing killing of thousands of non-native fish in Yellowstone Lake and various streams. The goal of these interventions is to reverse past interventions, but even so they strike me as violations of the Federal Wilderness Act.
With every item or service we buy, supply and demand are matched via prices. Except water. Because, for a variety of populist and politically scheming motives, no one wants to suggest "raising prices to consumers" as the obvious solution to reducing California water use in a drought, despite the fact that it would reduce demand in -- by definition -- the lowest value uses as well as provide incentives new sources and alternatives. So instead we get authoritarian stuff like this (press release from CA Senator Fran Pavely):
SACRAMENTO – Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1281 by Senator Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills) on Thursday to require greater disclosure of water use in oil production.
Oil well operators use large amounts of water in processes such as water flooding, steam flooding and steam injection, which are designed to increase the flow of thicker oil from the ground. In 2013, these enhanced oil recovery operations used more than 80 billion gallons of water in California, the equivalent amount used by about 500,000 households and more than 800 times the amount used for hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”).
The impact of this use on domestic and agricultural water supplies is not known because oil companies are not required to disclose details about their water use
“At a time when families, business and farmers are suffering the effects of severe drought, all Californians need to do their part to use valuable water resources more wisely,” Senator Pavley said. “The public has the right to know about the oil industry’s use of limited fresh water supplies.”
Oil well operators have an available source of recycled water known as “produced water,” which is trapped deep underground and often comes to the surface during oil production. More than 130 billion gallons of produced water surfaced during oil production in California last year.
Many oil companies already recycle some of their produced water, but the amount is not known because of the lack of disclosure. Senate Bill 1281 requires oil well operators to report the amount and source of their water, including information on their use of recycled water.
The ONLY reason for such disclosure is because they want to impose some sort of autocratic command and control rules on oil industry water use -- not water quality mind you, but the amount of water they use. Add this to all the other creepy Cuba-style water actions, like having neighbors spy on each other to monitor water use, and you will understand why folks like Milton Friedman argued that free markets were essential to free societies.
In honor of the California water situation, I have created the second in my series of Venn diagram on economic beliefs.
A follow-up to this article is here.
The news has been zooming around the Internet that the US Forest Service (USFS) is going to require permits to take pictures on public lands. It was the first I had heard of this, which is odd in one sense because I actually operate tens of thousands of acres of US Forest Service lands, and in fact operate the ones with the most visitation (on the other hand, we are often the last to hear anything from the USFS).
So, knowing that the Internet can be a huge game of "telephone" where messages quickly get garbled, I went to the regulation itself. As usual, that did not help much, because it is so freaking hard to parse. Reading between the lines, here is what I think is going on:
The Federal Wilderness Act gives the government a lot of power to limit uses in a designated wilderness area. Motorized vehicles and tools are banned, as were bicycles more recently. My company operates in only one wilderness area, a canoe run at the Juniper Springs recreation area in Florida. If a tree falls across the stream, we have to float down in canoes and take it out with hand axes. We have to open and inspect coolers of those going down the run to make sure no banned items are in them. In other words, wilderness areas definitely have a higher level of restrictions than the average public land.
As to the First Amendment issues, well folks like Ken White at Popehat have taught me that it is very very dangerous for the uniformed (ie me) to pontificate on complex First Amendment issues. I am sure the USFS would say that they are not interfering with free expression, just banning a use that could be dangerous in the wilderness. There are a few problems with this:
A few years ago, the USFS tried to reverse an expensive mistake it had made. The US government issues lifetime senior passes that allow free entry and half off camping for seniors. This is an expensive giveaway, paid for by taxpayers. But the USFS had gone further, requiring that concessionaires like our company also accept the pass and give half off to seniors. While giving half off to seniors at government-run campgrounds had to be funded by taxpayers, concessionaires only have use fees to fund operations. So to give half off to seniors, prices have to be raised to everyone else. The senior discount requirement was raising prices (and still does) $4-$5 a night for every other camper.
Well, long story short (too late!) the US Forest Service folded under the organized pressure of senior groups. And my guess is that they will do so again here. Unlike with the National Park Service which has a clear mandate and strong public support, few people get misty-eyed about the USFS, which means they are always sensitive to bad news that might hurt them in the next budget fight.
PS -- Is someone going to go back and bill Ansel Adams' estate? Isn't he exactly the sort of commercial nature photographer that this rule is aimed at?
Update: I have talked to a number of people in the know on this. Apparently what began as a desire merely to stop high impact filming in the wilderness -- full Hollywood movie sets with catering trucks, etc. -- has gotten taken over by a large group in the USFS that is at best skeptical and at worst hostile to commercial activity. They would explain these rules, at least in private, by saying that anything commercial is by definition antithetical to the very concept of wilderness that they hold in their heads, and that thus all commercial activity needs to be banned in the wilderness because it is inherently corrupting.
Matt Ridley gave the keynote today and said something like, "as someone once said, Greenpeace offices should have John D Rockefeller's picture on the wall because he did more than anyone else to save the whales." Hmmmm. Wonder who has been saying that?
We have a TV on the wall of our patio. We don't use it that often, but in fall evenings it is sometimes fun to sit outside and watch the baseball playoffs. Also, that is the only TV we ever allowed a game system so we could always see our kids playing. The TV is under a covered area but close enough to the outside that rain will sometimes blow in and get it wet. It gets really hot a lot, over 115F in the summer. It is constantly subject to dust storms in the monsoon seasons.
For a while we considered an special all-weather TV like this one. If the TV had been completely out in the open, we probably would have bought one. But instead we bought a regular LCD TV -- just something from Samsung I think -- on sale at Amazon. The regular TV was 1/3 the price, and we figured that even if it died, we would still be ahead having bought two instead of one of the more expensive TVs.
The TV has now been out there for over 5 years and is doing fine. If you want a TV outside, unless it is directly in the elements, I have found that regular TV's are pretty durable.
Well it has been a busy 10 days for travel. Last weekend my wife and I were at Harvard for our 25th anniversary of graduating from the business school there. The way the b-school taught at the time, they basically locked 90 people together (a "section") in the same room for a year and threw teachers and course material at them. I may have spent more time in a room with those 90 people than I spent in the same room with my dad growing up. So you get to know them pretty well. It was fun seeing everybody, though intimidating given all the folks my age running Fortune 50 companies or cashing out billion dollar startups.
After that, I went to Bozeman early this week and discussed free-market options for reforming the National Park Service at an event hosted by PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center. On Tuesday we went into Yellowstone and met with the Superintendent there, who had also run the whole agency for about a year. A lot of the discussion was about sustainability - financially. The NPS raises less than 10% of its revenue from visitors, and so must constantly fight with Congress for cash. One problem is that Yellowstone (perhaps their premier park) charges just $25 per vehicle for a one week admission. This is insane. We have tiny state parks in Arizona with one millionth of the appeal that fill the park despite a $20 a day entrance fee. And the NPS (or really Congress) takes every opportunity to discount this already absurdly low rate even further. You can get into all the parks for the rest of your life for a single $10 payment with the Senior pass. This essentially gives free entry to their largest visitor demographic.
Today I am in Houston for a sort of climate skeptics' conference. If you are in the area and the agenda looks interesting, they are still selling admissions (I think) for $75 for the two day event at the Hyatt downtown. Rick Perry is speaking tonight, and that is supposed to be a draw I guess but I am actually skipping that and focusing on the scientists they have through the day. Hopefully it is interesting, but I am also a conference skeptic so we will see.
I didn't get that big Internet payout from my year or so at Mercata, but those of us involved have this to fall back on:
Founder and CEO Steve El-Hage acknowledged that “super-smart people had tried to get the ball rolling in the past” on group buying — one of them was Mercata, which shut down back in 2001. (More recently, I’ve written about a group-buying startup called Higgle.)
It's amazing how group buying is an idea that keeps coming back. Even pre-social media, we found it to be a better tool for driving viral marketing than for achieving any economies of scale.
There is nothing in the new Apple OS update that is particularly pressing, and even if there were, don't update on the first day. Wait. I gave this advice to my family for iOS7 and saved everyone a world of grief. One would think that Apple would have a way easier time with releases than, say, Android or Windows. Apple OS runs only on Apple devices, whereas Google and Microsoft have to deal with all sorts of hardware compatibility issues. Nevertheless, Apple has had many issues with its round-number OS releases such that there is no reason to rush. I suggest you wait 2 weeks, then Google "iOS8 issues" and "iOS problems" and see what you find. If nothing scares you, then update.
Here is the problem with Apple - whether it be OSX or iOS or even iTunes - it is almost impossible to roll back. I hated Windows Vista and Windows 8 (Windows is sort of like original-series Star Trek movies where every other release sucks more than average) but I was able to roll back in both cases. Short of rooting your iPhone, I am not sure iOS rollbacks are even possible.
The other day you may have seen some test posts here on trying to cross-post between blogs. It turns out there are surprisingly few wordpress apps for this, and those that exist are not being maintained. I have a ManageWP account where I can simultaneously post to multiple accounts with the same post, but that was not exactly what I was looking for. So I thought of my IFTTT account, which I had not played around with for a while.
I am not really an expert on this space, but I have used a site / program called "If This Then That" (IFTTT.com) for several years. What it does is set up simple rules to fire off certain actions based on triggers. For example, I cannot stand iphoto and the absolute mess of duplicates that icloud and iphoto make, so I now have an IFTTT rule that every time my iphone takes a picture, it automatically puts it in a folder on my Google Drive account. I have IFTTT rules based on everything from my Nest thermostat at home to highlighting items in my feed reader.
IFTTT is really easy to use, but part of that is that there are limited options. One limitation is that for each object - eg Twitter account or WordPress Account - you can only have one version. In other words, if I have 3 WordPress accounts, IFTTT can only recognize one so, obviously, IFTTT is not going to be able to trigger based on a post at one blog and then do something on another blog. Which is exactly what I wanted to do. Whenever I make a climate post at Coyote Blog, I wanted to cross-post it at Climate Skeptic.
So I tried a similar site called Zapier. Zapier allows me to do exactly what I wanted with WordPress accounts, and for each trigger and action it seems to give me, from my limited poking around, a lot more choices than IFTTT. For example, a lot more different WordPress events can act as a trigger. So I am now using it to cross-post, and we will see how it works.
Overall, IFTTT is a bit more mature, it has more choices of integrations, and probably most important has both iphone and android apps that give it a lot of integration options with your phone. The limitation to one instance of each sort of trigger or action is a limitation they have been promising to fix for years, but still have not addressed. Zapier is more complicated to use, but for the triggers and actions it has, gives a lot more options. Unfortunately, it does not have much, if any, iphone or android integration which I think is a huge limitation for this type of functionality.
Both are worth checking out. They are free (up to a point) and you can create a rule without programming in less than five minutes on either, so you can see if it is something you find useful.
Again, I am not an expert on this space and if there is a third, better choice, let me know in the comments.
The other day I wrote about non-monetary job benefits. Here is an example:
A small-time vintner's use of volunteer workers has put him out of business after the state squeezed him like a late-summer grape for $115,000 in fines -- and sent a chill through the wine industry.
The volunteers, some of them learning to make wine while helping out, were illegally unpaid laborers, and Westover Winery should have been paying them and paying worker taxes, the state Department of Industrial Relations said.
"I didn't know it was illegal to use volunteers at a winery; it's a common practice," said winery owner Bill Smyth.
State law prohibits for-profit businesses from using volunteers.
Before the fine, volunteer labor was common at wineries in the nearby Livermore Valley, said Fenestra Winery owner Lanny Replogle.
...
About half the people the state considered Westover employees were taking a free class at the Palomares Canyon Road winery. Students learned about growing vines, harvesting and blending grapes and marketing the finished product.
"This was an incredible opportunity for me," said Peter Goodwin, a home winemaker from Walnut Creek who said he dreams of opening a winery with some friends. "I got to learn from someone who knows the business."
The winery sometimes asked Goodwin if he wanted to assist in different tasks.
"That's what I wanted, to be as involved as much as possible -- it was all about learning," he said. "I don't understand the state's action. It was my time, and I volunteered."
I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, this demonstrates the appalling violation of individual freedom that minimum wage laws create -- not just for the employer, but for the employee as well. Minimum wage laws mean that you are not allowed to perform labor for less than that minimum, even if you choose to and get non-monetary benefits that you feel fully compensate you for the time.
On the other hand, you have to be particularly clueless, especially in California, to claim ignorance on this. I work in an industry that 10 years ago routinely accepted volunteer labor (illegally) and I was never lulled by the "everyone else is doing it in the industry" excuse. I will say that it is irritating to try to run a business in compliance with the law and to find yourself undercut by folks who are avoiding the more expensive parts of the law. Years ago there used to be a couple of non-profits who competed against me running campgrounds. They were really for profit - they just paid their president a large salary rather than dividends - but used the non-profit status** as a dodge to try to accept volunteer labor. Eventually, they were stopped by several courts from doing so.
Yes, I know this is kind of odd. You might ask yourself, why are there so many people willing to take their volunteer position when you are offering paid jobs? It turns out here are a lot of non-monetary benefits to this job such that people will do it for free. In fact, that huge fountain of hypocrisy that is the Federal Government exempts itself from paying minimum wage and accepts volunteers to run its campgrounds where I must pay them.
** the non-profit status helped them in one other way. We take over operation of recreation areas under concession contract from the government. Many government employees hate this sort of outsourcing partnership, and really find it - for the lack of a better word - dirty to sully themselves interacting with a profit-making entity. The non-profit status helped my competitors seem friendlier -- ie less capitalistic -- than I. California recently passed a law allowing lower cost third party operation of certain parks functions but only if this was performed by a non-profit. I had a US Forest Service District Ranger in Kentucky tell me once that he was offended that I made money on public lands, providing services in the National Forest. I answered, "Oh, and you work for free?" I said that I did not know how much he made but I guessed $80-100 thousand a year. I said that would be over double what my company made in profit in the same forest operating and paying for hundreds of camp sites. Why was I dirty for making money in the Forest but he thought he as "clean"?
I couldn't get IFTTT.com to automatically cross-post (it can only recognize one WordPress account at a time) so now I am trying Zapier.com. I need to use it for a while but despite being a long-time IFTTT fan, Zapier seems to have a going for it.
I hear Conservatives lamenting all the time that their kids can't get a good college education because academia is dominated by Liberals and liberal assumptions. I think just the opposite is true. Leftist parents should be asking for their money back.
I have spoken on campus a few times about topics such as climate and regulation. One thing I have found is that students have often not heard the libertarian point of view from a libertarian. I have done any number of campus radio station interviews as a climate skeptic, and I have similarly found is that the students I talk to have a very muddled understanding of what skeptics believe. In most cases, I was the first skeptic they had ever talked to or read - everything they knew previously about skeptics had come from our opposition (e.g. what Bill McKibbon says skeptics believe). This is roughly equivalent to someone only "knowing" why liberals believe what they do from Rush Limbaugh. My son encountered a college woman last week who despised the Koch brothers, but actually knew almost nothing about them and had never actually seen their work or read their views. Harry Reid and others she considered authorities said the Kochs sucked so suck they do.
This is just incredibly unhealthy. Living in an echo chamber and only encountering opposing or uncomfortable positions as straw men versions propped up to be knocked down. What a crappy education, but that is what most liberal kids get.
Not so my son the libertarian. He is forced to encounter and argue against authoritarian ideas with which he disagrees in every class and in every social interaction. Not just in economics and domestic policy -- there is still a lot of interventionism and authoritarianism taught in foreign policy and even in history. Name one US president from academic lists of great presidents who did not get us in a war?
Yesterday, Yale did not cave to pressure from certain parts of the student body and Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke on campus. As with many controversial speakers, mostly consisting of folks not on the political Left, a number of campus groups tried to force Yale to cancel her speech because they expressed themselves offended by her. Among politically correct colleges, there has been a growing trend towards enforcing a right not to be offended, though this enforcement tends to be asymmetric -- Muslims apparently have a right not to be offended, but Christians do not. Women have it but men do not. Greenpeace has it but Exxon does not.
People of prominence who offend us or with whom we violently disagree should not be the least but the most welcome speakers on campus. I will demonstrate this by using the most extreme of all possible examples: An imaginary speaking tour by Adolph Hitler, say in December of 1938. Could there be a more distasteful person, the leader of Nazi Germany just weeks after the Reichskristallnacht? But I think he would have been the most valuable speaker I could possibly imagine.
If he were honest, which Hitler likely couldn't have stopped himself from being, what valuable insights we could have gained. The West made numerous mistakes in the late thirties and even into the forties because it just could not believe the full extent of Hitler's objectives and hatreds**. Perhaps we would have understood sooner and better exactly what we were dealing with.
Even if he were dishonest, and tried to "convert" the office without discussing specific plans, that would still be fascinating. What arguments did he use? Could we get insights into why he struck a chord among the German people? Would his rhetoric be compelling to American audiences? I despise the guy and almost everything he stood for but I would have loved to have him on campus as a speaker.
I will tell one of my favorite stories about the rise of Hitler. You have heard the story of Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics. Supposedly this was a slap in the face to Hitler, to have a black man winning medals. But one of the last events of the games was a four man relay race. The US was certainly going to win. But one of the US runners was Jewish and the US pulled the runner from the race and substituted Owens. The US didn't want to embarrass Hitler by making him hand a medal to a Jew. This sounds odd to put it this way, but one of the problems we had in really taking the worst of the Holocaust seriously as it was happening is that we were not able to see that Hitler's anti-semitism was so much more dangerous than the ubiquitous and run-of-the-mill anti-semitism that obtained all over Britain and America. We should always have a policy of letting even the most extreme people talk as much as they like. We might learn that they have a point and adjust our thinking on something, or we might learn that they are even batshit crazier than we thought. Either outcome is useful.
I suppose one could argue that there is some change in reporting rates, since rape is well-know to be an under-reported crime. However, I would struggle to argue that under-reporting rates are going up (which is what it would take to be the prime driver of the trend above). If anything, my guess is that reporting rates are rising such that the chart above actually understates the improvement.
PS- Folks commenting on this post saying that by reporting a declining trend I demonstrate that I don't care about rape or don't treat it seriously are idiots. I have lived through dozens of data-free media scares and witch hunts -- global cooling, global warming, the great pre-school sexual abuse witch hunt, about 20 different narcotics related scares (vodka tampons, anyone?). Data is useful. In this case, knowing there is improvement means we can look for what is driving the improvement and do more of it (though Kevin Drum would likely attribute it to unleaded gasoline).
"Trend that is not a trend" is an occasional feature on this blog. I could probably write three stories a day on this topic if I wished. The media is filled with stories of supposed trends based on single data points or anecdotes rather than, you know, actual trend data. More stories of this type are here. It is not unusual to find that the trend data often support a trend in the opposite direction as claimed by media articles. I have a related category I have started of trends extrapolated from single data points.
One of the mistakes people make in economic analysis, IMO, is that they sometimes miss non-monetary benefits. A great example is how labor law and the minimum wage is structured -- there are many benefits of a having job to a young, unskilled, unemployed person. That job may teach valuable industry-related skills and will almost certainly help teach some basic life skills (like how to show up on time every day and how to work with others in an organization toward shared goals). For my kids when they were 15 or 16, these non-monetary benefits dominated, and I would have been happy if they worked for free in exchange for such skills. That used to be the whole point of unpaid internships, until the government started essentially banning them. Unfortunately, the government considers only money in computing the minimum wage, and ignores all these non-monetary benefits.
Mark Perry had what I think is another good example a while back, quoting from the Priceonomics blog:
If you want to dine at State Bird Provisions, you’ll have to get in line. The small restaurant, winner of the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant (2013) and a Michelin Star, only accepts a few reservations that are snapped up as soon as they are released — at midnight, sixty days in advance. So nearly every day, people line up on Fillmore Street in San Francisco an hour or more before State Bird’s 5:30pm opening time to score a table.
It may seem silly to line up for State Bird Provisions in a city full of renowned restaurants and good food. But as anyone who has eaten brunch in the city knows, San Franciscans view long restaurant lines as social proof more than as a deterrent. Besides, State Bird offers determined diners a relative bargain. While its offerings are not cheap — even without indulging on wine, bills can reach $50 per person — State Bird’s prices are more modest than almost any other local Michelin Star restaurant.
This makes State Bird something of an economic mystery.If economists owned popular restaurants like State Bird, they would take one look at the long lines and raise prices.After all, the overwhelming demand is pretty clear. Or at the very least, given how reservations disappear like Coachella tickets, they would start charging for them. In fact, since restaurants do not do this, a number of startups in San Francisco and New York City have started to sell reservations to users, often by reserving tables and scalping them.
In contrast to the executives who run large restaurant chains, the restaurateurs behind celebrated restaurants and local favorites are often chefs first rather than professional managers. This raises the question: Are restaurants like State Bird Provisions, which seems to resist simple economic analysis, the exception or the norm? And if they are the norm, is that because it is somehow self-defeating to raise prices even at booming restaurants? Or are chef proprietors a unique breed in the business world, immune to supply and demand and content to leave money on the table?
I believe that many of these high-end chefs are not driven entirely by money. Their personal reward system also depends a lot on prestige and recognition. Making a good profit in a restaurant gets you no recognition in the the circles where chef's crave it. Name the three most profitable restaurants in town -- you have no idea, do you? What get's these chef's recognition is being the hot place to dine that is so in demand it is impossible to get a table. So one makes the restaurant a little too small and keeps the prices a little too low and one trades a bit of money for something that is more valuable: prestige.
One can see this same effect among, say, US Senators. In our current corporate, crony state, US Senators can expect a huge spike in income once they leave Congress, getting paid by some large corporation lobbying firm. The economically rational decision, then, if one were only interested in money, would be to serve just one term, then leave and make some bank. But you never see that. Senators stay and stay, even when it is an enormous hassle to do so. They are essentially collecting and spending millions every election to keep their income low. Why? One big reason is prestige.
Going back to the restaurant example, let's consider a famous chef who pretty clearly does care about money: Wolfgang Puck. I have never seen this written, but here is what I observe to be Puck's approach. He creates a small restaurant and lavishes it with a lot of his personal attention. These restaurants do not have much seating and become the hot places to dine, leading to long lines and difficult reservations. The difficulty of getting a table generates an elite buzz around the restaurant. After some time, Puck will buy a huge new location nearby with many times more seating. He formula-izes his recipes so he no longer has to be involved, and then shifts the operation onto auto-pilot in the new large location. Perhaps he even franchises it. The new location cranks out a bunch of money, while he moves on to create a new elite concept. He also leverages the original buzz in his personal brand, which is applied to all kinds of other items. In a sense, he is banking prestige in the early venture and then monetizing it later.
Things like Obamacare cannot be discussed, it seems, in anything but a political context. So if you don't like Obamacare, everything that happens has to be bad. But I actually think this is good news, and goes against my fears in advance of Obamacare. I had been worried that Obamacare would just increase the trends of more and more health care spending being by third-party payers. And my guess is that this is happening, when you consider how many people have gone from paying cash to having a policy, either a regular policy or expanded Medicaid.
A report out today puts numbers behind what hit many workers when they signed up for health insurance during open enrollment last year: deductible shock.
Premiums for employer-paid insurance are up 3% this year, but deductibles are up nearly 50% since 2009, the report by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows.
The average deductible this year is $1,217, up from $826 five years ago, Nearly 20% of workers overall have to pay at least $2,000 before their insurance kicks in, while workers at firms with 199 or fewer employees are feeling the pain of out-of-pocket costs even more: A third of these employees at small companies pay at least $2,000 deductibles.
“Skin-in-the-game insurance” is becoming the norm,says Kaiser Family Foundation CEO Drew Altman, referring to the higher percentage of health care costs employees have to share.
Honestly, this is good news, sort of. I don't like the coercion and lack of choice, but the main problem with health care is that the person receiving the benefits is not the person paying the bills, which means there is no incentive to shop or make care tradeoffs. Higher deductibles mean more people are going to be actively shopping and caring what health services cost, and that is a good thing for prices and health care inflation.
I am with Kevin Drum. I got tired of using "his or her" or some other such kluge some time back. I am using "their" until someone defines a better third person possessive pronoun that is gender-neutral (ditto "them" for "him or her"). After all, unlike French, English is a bottom-up language defined by common use rather than unchanging top-down rules. So if enough of us use "their", it will become correct.
For those of you too young to remember, the invention of "Ms." as a generic women's prefix was one of the greatest improvements in the English language in my lifetime. If you despair sometimes in looking down a list of names and trying to guess if the person is a "Mr." or "Ms." (remember "Pat" on Saturday Night Live), you wouldn't believe what a pain in the rear it was to figure out if one should use "Miss" or "Mrs." for a given female.
I have just been flabbergasted at the feminist reaction against efforts to teach women to be more difficult targets for sexual predators (e.g. communicating the dangers of binge drinking, nail polish that detects date rape drugs, etc). Nobody thinks that encouraging people to buy burglar alarms or lock their doors is somehow shifting blame for robbery to the victim. But that is exactly the argument feminists are making vis a vis sexual assault on campus. They argue that any effort to teach victims to be a tougher target is an insult to women and must be avoided.
This is just stupid. So stupid that I wonder if there is an ulterior motive. There is no way you ever are going to get rid of bad people doing bad things. Our historic messaging on things like date rape may have been confused or insufficiently pointed, but we have always been clear on, say, murder and there is still plenty of that which goes on. I almost wonder if feminists want women to continue to be victims so they can continue to be relevant and have influence. It's a sick thought but what other explanation can there be for purposely disarming victims?
So I was jogging the other night through a university (Vanderbilt) and saw all those little blue light emergency phones that are so prevalent on campus. In most cases, the ubiquity of those emergency phones is a result of the growing female population on campus and are there primarily to make women (and perhaps more importantly, their parents who write the checks) be safer feel more comfortable. Women's groups were big supporters of these investments. But why? Isn't that inconsistent? Shouldn't we consider investment in such emergency devices as wrong-headed attempts to avoid fixing the root cause, which is some inherent flaw in males?
If you say no, that it would be dumb to rip out the emergency phones, then why is it dumb to teach Freshman women some basic safety skills that may prevent them from being victims? I have taken numerous campus tours with my kids and in almost every one they point out the blue light phones and in almost every case say, "I have never heard of these being used, but they are there." I guarantee 30 minutes helping women understand how to avoid particularly risky situations would have a higher return than the phones.
I say this with some experience. I was in a business for a while that required international travel and in which there was some history of executives getting attacked or kidnapped in foreign cities. The company gave us a one-day risk-identification as well as beginner escape and evasion course. It was some of the most useful training I have ever had. And not for a single second did I think anyone was trying to blame me for street crime in foreign cities.
