Coyote Blog

I am going to show you this chart from the New York Times and you tell me the lede:

If your first reaction was something like "wow, the gender gap in favor of girls in English simply dwarfs any gender gap that exists in favor of boys in math," you had the same reaction as I did.  All I could think was that all this discussion of getting more girls in STEM is a fine aspiration, but my God, boys in English are a dumpster fire.

I saw the chart standalone like this before I flipped to the source New York Times article and read more.  And, incredibly, this is the title of the article: "Where Boys Outperform Girls in Math:  Rich, White and Suburban Districts."  That's right, the authors look at this chart and all they want to talk about is the small area in the lower right quadrant of the chart, the only place where boys out-perform girls (and even there the maximum boy advantage perhaps a third of the girl advantage across the board in English).  This is bizarre beyond belief.

I wrote the other day in a sort of toss-off conclusion that is looking more accurate today:

Look, I have no doubt that one could easily put together a book about all the ways the public education system fails girls because I think the public education system in many parts of this country fails EVERYONE.  But we seem to keep obsessively questioning whether we are doing enough for girls in education when the problem seems to be boys....

I am not an expert on why this is.   Shifting success norms from competition to cooperation, elimination of historic outlets for non-academic males like vocational programs, and huge amounts of money and counseling resources all dedicated to girls probably play a part.  But the frustrating thing is you almost never see a discussion of this topic.  Anyone who does try to address it is immediately pigeon-holed as some alt-right male rights extremist and defenestrated from the Overton Window.

Update:  Had "boys" and "girls" swapped in the third paragraph.  Thanks for those who pointed it out.  As one reader noted, I need to find a female to help me edit I guess.

Based on a Tyler Cowen pointer (who else), I thought this Twitter thread on how the Internet was changing sex work was really interesting.  This in particular caught my eye:

And now let's get to a third point: the internet has changed the economics of porn by gutting the industry through piracy, which means 3) there's increasing amounts of overlap between porn performers and escorts.

She makes this observation as part of a larger point that the Internet is breaking down some of the opposition to sex work (in addition to making it safer).  This would be a welcome change.  Sex work should be legal, and it has always been a weird thing to me that one of the stronger opponents of legalization has been parts of the keep-your-laws-off-my-body feminist community.

Anyway, what I found interesting was how parallel this is to the modern music business.  Piracy and streaming enabled by the Internet have killed the profits of the vast majority of the music recording business, meaning that top artists make a lot of their money in other ways, particularly from live performances.  In this business model, the published music is merely an advertisement and brand-building to encourage people to pay for the live performance.  If you consider pornography to be parallel to recorded music, and the escort business as the live performance, then the business models look surprisingly similar.

Over the last several years, there have been several proposals to split California into more than one state (I know what you are thinking:  Good God, more Californias?)  There was a proposal last year to split it into 6 states.  This election, there is a proposal on the ballot to split it into 3 states.  I am not sure what the entire process would be, but as a minimum either proposal would have to be approved by Congress.  For that latter to happen, the 3 state plan is probably more likely to get approved than the 6 state plan because it is an odd number.  Seriously.

For the rest of us, the main effect of a California split is that its current citizens would get more US Senators.  Each state gets 2 Senators so California would go from 2 to 6 Senators in a three-state proposal and 2 to 12 Senators in a 6-state proposal.  This also means that California would get some extra Electoral College votes, since a state's votes is the sum of its Representatives and Senators.

To some extent, this debate will be a flashback to the mid-19th Century when statehood decisions were made based on the north-south balance in the Senate.   This time around, it will be about shifting, or perhaps more accurately not shifting, the Republican-Democrat balance.  Right now CA is perceived by all to be +2 Senate seats for the Democrats for most of the foreseeable future.  The problem with even-number splits such as 2 or 4 or 6 states from CA is that they are almost guaranteed to shift the CA contribution away from +2D.  Take the two state solution.  If they were split north and south, you would likely get two blue states and the +2D from CA in the Senate would become +4D.  Republicans would barf.  If you split the state east-west, you might be able to create a red state and a blue state such that CA would shift from +2D to neutral, an effective gain for R's.  Democrats would hate this.  Neither party in Congress is going to agree on a solution here.  There is no way to gerrymander the thing without some party making a gain.  This is generally true for all even number state solutions.

Odd number state solutions could also be problematic, but they could also work depending on how the lines are drawn (making this probably the most watched gerrymander in US history).  A three state solution that creates two blue states and a red state would keep CA's total effect on the Senate as +2D.  I am not sure any split would clear Congress but this is probably the only possibility that might do so.   Two coastal states and one inland state would probably achieve this result, but I believe the current proposal is for three states split north to south, so a large heavily blue coastal city or two is in each state, which could push the thing into being +6D which the Senate would never buy short of a Democratic majority and elimination of the filibuster (which for a generation of +4 votes in the Senate they might consider).

All of this glosses over huge local problems in CA itself, like

• How do you split up state debts, such as Calpers obligations and assets
• Will current state officeholders (e.g. the governor and AG) who are incredibly powerful and have historically used these positions as springboards for national office (e.g. Kamala Harris, Jerry Brown, Ronald Reagan) accept a huge reduction in their power and budget
• If there is a red state created, how will blue urban areas put into this red state react?  (the opposite issue already exists with red rural areas already used to living in a blue state).

I was randomly browsing my blog history when I encountered a post from over 11 years ago when it was necessary to spend 1800+ words explaining why steel could still fail in the Twin Towers even when it did not actually melt.

Of late, Rosie [O'Donnell] has joined the "truthers," using her show to flog the notion that the WTC was brought down in a government-planned controlled demolition....

Rosie, as others have, made a point of observing that jet fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel, and therefore the fire in the main towers could not have caused the structure to yield and collapse.  This is absurd.  It is a kindergartener's level of science.  It is ignorant of a reality that anyone who has had even one course in structural engineering or metallurgy will understand.  The argument made that "other buildings have burned and not collapsed" is only marginally more sophisticated, sort of equivalent to saying that seeing an iceberg melts proves global warming.  ...

Here is the reality that most 19-year-old engineering students understand:  Steel loses its strength rapidly with temperature, losing nearly all of its structural strength by 1000 degrees F, well below its melting point but also well below the temperature of burning jet fuel.

And on and on from there.  Seriously,  I know its hard to believe this was even necessary, but it was a serious charge by some of our intellectual betters in the entertainment industry.  Actually, it brings me a certain comfort in encountering this again -- maybe our public discourse is not really getting substantially stupider.  Maybe it has always been that way.

Look, I am not mocking you if you don't know the material properties of steel and how they change with temperature.   Odds are, in your jobs, you do not need to know anything about it.  What bothers me are the people who know nothing about these topics who speak with such certainty.  In some ways it seems to go past Dunning-Krueger,   People making these absolute pronouncements not only don't know anything about the topic, but many have actively avoided ever finding themselves in a classroom where the topic (or more accurately the mathematical and scientific foundations of the topic) might have been discussed.

It's not like I am totally immune to this.   Here are a few topics that I may have blogged about a few times years and years ago but now I won't touch because I know I don't understand them:

• Central banking and monetary policy
• Almost anything having to do with chemistry, including ocean acidification (or more accurately, reduced ocean alkalinity).  I even had an A in Organic Chemistry but it did not stick at all.
• Literary criticism, except to say what I liked and I didn't like
• Anything about certain performance-based crafts, like singing and acting, except to say which performances I did and did not enjoy
• Ice hockey, horse racing, and soccer (which doesn't mean I don't enjoy watching them)
• 80% of what Tyler Cowen writes about
• Anything about music post-1985
• Anything on cooking or food
• Absolutely anything on wine

To the last point, I got invited to a wine tasting the other day.  Everyone was saying they tasted chicory or boysenberry or a hint of diatomaceous earth or whatever and I tasted .. wine.  Honestly I felt like a blind person sitting in on a discussion of the color wheel.  But I resist the temptation to scream that it is all just the emperor's new clothes -- I am sure the people around me can honestly taste differences that I can't.  I know I can taste differences in bourbon they cannot taste.  Good vodkas on the other hand, are a different matter.  Some day I am going to do a blind vodka tasting for my vodka-snob friends and see if they really can taste the difference.

Postscript:  I used to love the show Connections by James Burke.  He would start with something like the Defenestration of Prague and show a series of connections between it and, say, the invention of the telephone.  Perhaps you can see why I found it entertaining since I began a post about the structural strength of steel at different temperatures and ended it with whether good vodkas really taste different.

There are a lot of James Burke TV episodes on Youtube and I recommend them all.  Connections is recommended of course but I actually think his best series was season 1 of the Day the Universe Changed.  I believe this is episode 1.

The other day the indispensable Mark Perry wrote:

....women have earned a majority of bachelor’s degrees for the last 36 years starting in 1982. Not shown here, but women previously earned a majority of associate’s degrees starting in 1978 and a majority of master’s degrees starting in 1981. By 2006, women earned a majority of doctoral degrees and the “takeover” of higher education by women was complete for degrees at all levels! But instead of declaring “victory” and moving on, many women are still claiming “victim status” in higher education with the need for special gender preferences in the form of funding, scholarships, centers, commissions, fellowships, awards, programs, and initiatives that are only available for women, or are primarily for women.

I have annotated his chart (shown below) to amplify his last sentence.

One of the seminal books on the topic of girls in education was "Failing at Fairness" by Myra P Sadker and published in 1994.  The Google Books summary of the book is as follows:

Failing at Fairness, the result of two decades of research, shows how gender bias makes it impossible for girls to receive an education equal to that given to boys.

• Girls' learning problems are not identified as often as boys' are
• Boys receive more of their teachers' attention
• Girls start school testing higher in every academic subject, yet graduate from high school scoring 50 points lower than boys on the SAT

The book was very influential.  I know it sat on my feminist wife's night table for quite a while.  But note the publication date on Mark Perry's chart above.  For kids in high school when that book was published, a fair median date for their college graduation would be 6 years later, or around the year 2000.  It's fair to estimate that girls in high school at the time Sadker was writing were going to be 33% more likely to get a college degree than the boys in the same classes.   Anyone who had read that book alone and nothing else on the topic would have called you a liar for predicting that.

Look, I have no doubt that one could easily put together a book about all the ways the public education system fails girls because I think the public education system in many parts of this country fails EVERYONE.  But we seem to keep obsessively questioning whether we are doing enough for girls in education when the problem seems to be boys.

The New York Times actually talked about boys falling behind in education a few years ago, and had this telling chart about ways in which boys lagged in education.  The article forced on poor boys, but note that boys of all socioeconomic classes lagged.

And this is before we even get to the most disturbing metrics about boys and girls, such as youth crime.  While girls have closed the gender gap in crime somewhat, boys are still 10 times more likely than girls to be arrested for a homicide, and boys are more than twice as likely to be arrested for any sort of crime than girls (source).  Remember that last mass shooter who was female?  Neither do I.

I am not an expert on why this is.   Shifting success norms from competition to cooperation, elimination of historic outlets for non-academic males like vocational programs, and huge amounts of money and counseling resources all dedicated to girls probably play a part.  But the frustrating thing is you almost never see a discussion of this topic.  Anyone who does try to address it is immediately pigeon-holed as some alt-right male rights extremist and defenestrated from the Overton Window.

I do not know how to fix public discourse in this country.  In particular, I have no idea how to repair our growing tribalism.  But I do have one small suggestion for better Internet discourse, which is:  If you are going to comment on an article, or email about it to the author, could you actually read it first, and not just react to a 240-character tweet about it that was crafted by the author's intellectual opponent?

Thank you.

It has been a while since I blogged on my model railroad but unfortunately real life intervened and cruelly prevented me from working on my hobby for a while.  I have been making progress recently and thought I would post what I have been working on.  Believe it or not, there are one or two readers who actually write me for updates.

One thing I can do even when I am busy is make progress hand building turnouts.  These are some small #5 turnouts built with code 40 rail (perfect for eyesight destruction).  No way I could to this without the fabulous Fast Tracks construction jigs.

I built the main line out of code 55 flex track and am hand-building all the sidings and branch lines with code 40.  This lets me get the main line up and running fast while still being able to hand build some track, often the track closest to the front of the layout.  Below is the code 55 flex track main line after some test painting.  The one thing I do not like about flex track is that it always looks so uniform.  Even on good mainline track the rail and ties vary a lot in color, so I spray paint a base coat and use brushes to hand paint individual tiles and rail sections different colors to get some variation.

The switch in the foreground below is the first code 40 hand built track I have put on the layout.  It is a bit of a pain to join code 55 to code 40, so I wanted to experiment some.  Eventually I inserted a code 55 rail joiner in the mainline track, and the crushed the other end flat and soldered the code 40 rail to the top.  With some trial and error, this got both the rail tops at the same height.  I really love the look of real wood ties and the color variation you get naturally, which I accentuate some.

The biggest recent progress was I painted the back drop.  Since this is Phoenix I wanted some low haze but no clouds, so I used the tried and true method of blue at the top of the background and white and the bottom and blending them in between.  Came out pretty well, though this picture does not really do it justice because the lighting is not quite right yet.  I need to try it with a better camera.   The biggest problem I had was a classic Phoenix problem where the paint was drying too fast.  One of the hardest problems is that the Phoenix sky on certain days is so deep, deep blue that it looks unrealistic, even in real life, so I did not use the actual color for the top of sky that I see from my front yard, I backed it down a bit.

Oh, you can also see that I have put in the lighting.  As an experiment I used led light strings.  This avoids the directional shadow problem but I am not totally convinced I am happy with it yet.  I also have fluorescent lights installed for night effects, though I still struggle with the OBA / fluorescent paper problem here.  Anyone who has a source for matte (not gloss) OBA-free photo paper that is not too think (I often have to bend and shape the paper for projects) can certainly email me.   Paper models like these are more popular in the UK than in the US, but I have come to really like them in certain applications.  They just don't look good in night scenes when brick walls glow under black light.

In the plan I have locations vaguely blocked out for industries but I had not yet tested the sites against actual buildings I have in inventory or would like to put in.  Below I have a half-built grain elevator I was testing locations for.

That's it for now.  I am starting my big building project which is a scale refinery.  We actually don't have a refinery in Phoenix (closest is Yuma I think) but I worked in one years ago and love the look of them, especially lighted at night, so dammit I am going to have one.

The Union Pacific Railroad is attempting to restore and run a 4-8-8-4 Big Boy locomotive next year.  Seeing live steam locomotives run is a rare but fabulous spectacle, but most of what is still running is WAY smaller than this locomotive they are restoring.  I am not sure most people have a sense of scale for these beasts.  I chose the picture below because it has people in them for scale.

This business in San Diego was probably just minding its own business, smug in the confidence that Internet companies like Amazon were not going to threaten a local rental business when, bam:

Bikes and scooters suddenly show up literally just sitting there on every corner, ready to be rented via smartphone app for prices starting at a dollar an hour.  Interestingly, even in sunny healthy California, I saw more than 100 people riding rental scooters and about 1 riding a rental bike.  This was not just tourists -- though it was certainly popular with visitors -- but I saw many young locals riding the scooters downtown to work.  In the morning they piled up in front of office buildings (from which they would presumably disperse at the end of day to apartment buildings).

Below is another business that could be in trouble, charging $7 (rather than $1 on the street bikes) an hour for a rental and requiring the bike be returned to a defined location, rather than dropped anywhere (I see these in many cities -- I wonder how much investment the government has in these or if it is a concession where all the investment was private).

Of course, in the long run this may work out better from an operational standpoint because it seems to take a lot less labor.  Re-positioning scooters and picking them up and dropping them off for recharge struck me as labor intensive and costly (particularly in California).  I am not sure how it is sustainable at the rates that are charged.  Fortunately, that is not my problem and I tried both the bikes and the scooters and enjoyed both.  Despite my doubts about their profitability, I hope they are making a fortune because it seems to be a fun a popular service and I would like to see it last.

The International House of Pancakes announced the other day that they are changing their name to International House of Burgers, or IHOb.   I am 99% certain that this is just a marketing gimmick, a way to get social media buzz, after which they will "as a result of public pressure" go back to the old name.  A sort of intentional version of what Coke did years ago by accident with New Coke.

So far, I would judge it to be successful.  They were talked about on several national radio shows that I listen to (on sports talk radio, no less) and got a day's worth of media coverage (and presumably another day's worth when they change back).  This is a LOT of free advertising for a brand I have heard absolutely nothing about for years (except from my 21-year-old daughter who still makes me take her there from time to time for funny face pancakes.)

Brand strategy has really evolved a lot from when I was in B-school.  In the 1990's my wife was a brand manager at Frito-Lay and brand management at the time seemed incredibly conservative.  There were very defined, tightly-spaced rails that circumscribed what you could do with a brand.  But that is so boring it gets nowhere on social media.  "Fritos! They are... uh... everything they always have been."  This IHOP gimmick (and Budweiser's temporarily changing its name to America) demonstrate a lot less risk-aversion with core brands in a social media era where one has to be outrageous to get attention.

Postscript:  I was in Santa Monica the other day and saw something where they had a really lame, forgettable tag line for the city.  I wanted to help them with some catchier phrases.  Like, "Santa Monica:  World's Nicest Homeless Shelter" or "Santa Monica:  Watch Out For That Scooter!" or "Santa Monica:  You Want HOW MUCH for Rent??"

My agent has always signed me up for a persona umbrella policy, pretty much without even discussing it much.  The costs have always been nominal compared to my other insurance and I got it to handle liability issues that might exceed the limits of other policies, like a really bad car crash or a slip and fall suit around my house.

It turned out that I got a lot of value out of the policy, but not in the way I had planned.  I was once sued, pretty hard and seriously, by a company over a negative review I wrote.  I won't talk about the details but if you are really interested Mr. Google will help you find it pretty quickly.   But here is an example of a similar case in the news:

A Manhattan woman has found herself in a world of legal troubles after posting a bad review of a local doctor online.

Michelle Levine tells CBS2 she’s already spent close to $20,000 fighting the million-dollar suit which accuses her of defamation, libel, and causing emotional distress.

The plaintiff is Dr. Joon Song, a gynecologist Levine says she visited once in August for an annual exam.

“After I got a bill for an ultrasound and a new patient visit, whatever that means, and it was not billed as an annual I wrote a review about it,” she told CBS2’s Lisa Rozner.

I was determined to fight my case in the name of all those (like Ms. Levine) who could not afford to fight these overt attempts to suppress and intimidate perfectly legal speech.  I was ready to take a substantially loss in legal fees to defend myself but it turned out I was covered for all my defense costs by my personal umbrella.  Note, I am not an insurance expert nor a lawyer, so before you buy such a product I would be sure you know what it does and does not cover.

Postscript, to all you businesses who keep suing over bad reviews:  GET OVER IT.  I get dozens of reviews every day on multiple platforms.  Most of our locations sit at an average rating just over 4.5 stars out of five so perhaps one in 20 are negative and maybe one in 100 are grossly, absurdly unfair.  Sure, all of us service business owners gripe about unfair reviews when we get together, but we all deal with it.  Every review platform has ways to respond to bad reviews, and most have a way to challenge reviews that violate their terms of service.   Often times if you actually do have a good business, the best defense is to encourage all your customers to review so all the good reviews drown the bad ones.  This is not 1996 when customers have never seen a review site.  Customers know EVERYONE gets bad reviews.   The Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok had some of the best service I have ever experienced, but it gets 1-star reviews.  The movie Casablanca has one-star reviews on Amazon.

Sometimes the bad reviews are perfectly understandable.  For example, at one beach we run there used to be a high place where kids would jump off into the water.  Despite having a lifeguard there, we had too many close calls and too many kids did not heed the lifeguard, so the jumping area was closed.  We got bad reviews for months about how awful it was the kids could not jump.  Each time we took the opportunity to explain that yes the jumping wall was closed and if that is the experience customers are looking for, they need to explore other options.  Eventually we got customer expectations to match the services we provided and things improved.  As much as businesses hate to have bad reviews, these were useful to us because they communicated changed services to the public and helped make sure that customer who come are coming for the right reasons.   Having people expecting the Ritz show up at Holiday Inn Express does not help the Holiday Inn Express at all.

Sometimes one does get totally unfair reviews and there is an art to writing responses to bad reviews.  You want to explain why many customers might consider the review unfair without seeming defensive or seeming to throw the customer under the bus, which will lose you a lot of sympathy in the community.  I am still learning.  Here is a tough one we had:

I will need go back to Juniper Spring it not the forest or the camping grounds but the workers are really not friendly at all I’m black and I hope people who’s from my race trust me it not a good place to take your family you can feel the eyes and I know please know racism is strong in Ocala and I’m sorry to bring a nasty review but I owe it to myself if I was to read this I would know what to expect if I choose to go. But the camp grounds are very clean tho and the bathroom have hot water but the works are very nasty ways I see so to all people other then whites Ijs check it out and be sorry like I did. The water looks great but it cold ass ever but when you get used to it you would be ok I guess.

Obviously that is horrible, it makes us out to be a bunch of racists.  This customer did get special attention, but more because we had to work hard -- and often -- to get compliance with a number of rules we are required by the government to enforce.  After a lot of thought, this is the response I finally went with:

We are really sorry you did not have a good visit. We have a racially diverse group of employees in our company and all of them are trained and motivated to provide quality service to everyone. However, given that this is a campground in the Forest Service and adjoining a Federal Wilderness Area, we are tasked by the Forest Service to enforce a number of rules which are different than those in private campgrounds and can sometimes be surprising to new visitors. In this case, I am really sorry we obviously did a poor job of trying to courteously explain the rules.

For other readers considering a visit, I will take the opportunity to highlight some of these rules:

• Firearms are not allowed in the Ocala National Forest (except in hunting season)
• Dogs are not allowed in the day use area or at the canoe run
• Alcoholic beverages are not allowed in the day use area or on the canoe run
• Food and food waste must be properly stored in campsites when not actively being consumed (in order to avoid attracting bears)

After hammering various members of the G7 with new tariffs and threats of even more tariffs, Trump proposed that everyone eliminate all their tariff's and subsidies:

Q Mr. President, you said that this was a positive meeting, but from the outside, it seemed quite contentious. Did you get any indication from your interlocutors that they were going to make any concessions to you? And I believe that you raised the idea of a tariff-free G7. Is that —

THE PRESIDENT: I did. Oh, I did. That’s the way it should be. No tariffs, no barriers. That’s the way it should be.

Q How did it go down?

THE PRESIDENT: And no subsidies. I even said no tariffs. In other words, let’s say Canada — where we have tremendous tariffs — the United States pays tremendous tariffs on dairy. As an example, 270 percent. Nobody knows that. We pay nothing. We don’t want to pay anything. Why should we pay?

We have to — ultimately, that’s what you want. You want a tariff-free, you want no barriers, and you want no subsidies, because you have some cases where countries are subsidizing industries, and that’s not fair. So you go tariff-free, you go barrier-free, you go subsidy-free.

Awesome, sign me up. But is this serious?  I want to get to that in a minute but first let me offer two practical observations

• Trump belabored the 270 percent Canadian dairy tariffs on US products, but at the same time the US tariff rate on Canadian dairy products is effectively infinite, because we simply don't let any in.  This is the kind of complexity he is glossing over.  Forget Canada, his proposal for no tariffs or subsidies would cause a major freakout among US dairy farmers, a business absolutely chock-full of crazy quilt of progressive state regulation on prices and subsidies and quotas.  (and by the way, congrats to Trump for getting progressives like Drum into the free trade, anti-price-control camp).
• Simple statements like "no subsidies" are easy to make, but is a lower corporate tax rate a subsidy?  How about lower minimum wages?  What about really long copyright lives?  What about when a governor or mayor gives out relocation incentives and tax abatements?  What about the whole Amazon HQ2 deal that is coming?   The list of complexities are endless.  That is why long and complicated negotiations are necessary to reduce tariffs and subsidies.  Fortunately we have actually done this, in deals like NAFTA and the TPP.  Unfortunately, Trump has given both of these the boot.  So is he really serious?

I have a love for history and like to make comparisons of modern events to history, and in this case I believe there is a very parallel case we can learn from.   Here is the problem:  It involves Hitler's Germany.  Hitler is obviously the third rail of Internet discourse, but the example is so parallel I am still going to go ahead, with the following proviso:  I am not saying Trump is Hitler, or making any such analogy or statement.  I am merely attempting to learn from a very similar international negotiation that occurred in the 1930's.

If  you can put aside all the emotional baggage of Hitler being either the worst mass murderer in history or at least in the top 3, he was (at least for a while until it all blew up on him) very successful in getting wins in diplomatic face-offs of the type Trump seems to want (by this I mean gains for his own country in zero-sum or even negative-sum games made by repudiating past international settlements).  Hitler's brashness essentially won out with the reoccupation of the Rhineland, Germany's remilitarization, the annexation of Austria, and even led to the western powers basically handing the Sudetenland over to him.

But the example I have in mind is with the disarmament conferences of the the early 1930's.  Major western powers were looking for some sort of agreement to head off an expensive and destabilizing arms race of the type that occurred in the run-up to WWI (and which by the way was way too expensive for countries bogged down in the Great Depression).  As the powers discussed incremental limits or reductions, one world leader jumped into the fray and proposed that all the powers agree to total disarmament  -- no more militaries at all.  Can you guess who made this radical proposal that would be the envy of any 1960's hippie?**

Hitler had [President Roosevelt's] message before him when he prepared the final draft of his speech to the Reichstag. Contrary to expectation, his speech, when delivered, made no threat of immediate rearmament. Germany was ready at any time, Hitler said, to renounce the aggressive weapons forbidden to her by the Treaty of Versailles “if the whole world also bans them.” Without further ado, Germany would dissolve her whole military establishment “if neighboring nations unreservedly did the same.” For President Roosevelt's proposal the German government was “indebted with warm thanks.” Germany was ready to join in “any solemn non-aggression pact because she thinks not of attack but of her security.”

In making this speech, Hitler said that he above everyone else wanted peace.  He was a soldier, he had been in the trenches, and no soldier wanted war.

Given his past actions, we suspect Hitler was not a total peacenik, so what was going on here?  The Treaty of Versailles had essentially disarmed Germany, reduced its army to 100,000 men and banned it from having an air force and submarines, among other things.  Germany chaffed at these limits, considering them grossly unfair, and wanted limits at parity with those on, say, France.

Hitler always liked to turn other nations' values against them in his international statements.  Later, when he justified potential annexations in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, he would say that he was just interested in "self-determination of peoples" and that other powers were inconsistent and unfair when they refused to allow this principle they themselves had established to be applied to ethnic Germans in these countries.  Hitler clearly didn't care one bit about free self-determination of peoples, but he was happy to throw US and British and French rhetoric back in their faces.

So in this case Hitler grabbed at the other major powers' pious pronouncements about their commitment to disarmament and again threw it back in their faces.  You want disarmament?  OK, let's do it -- total disarmament.  Hitler knew that they would never do it -- France in particular did not trust Germany at all.  Hitler waited until it was clear the other countries were not going to go for this proposal and said something like, "see, those other countries were never serious, they never wanted peace.  All they want to do is keep Germany down."  He proceeded to resign from the conference,  renounce the military limits of the Versailles treaty, and started building Germany's army and air force.   Which was what he had intended to do all along.

I know from the comments that there are folks reading my blog who honestly don't seem to understand trade and the trade deficit, and I am at my limit in explaining any more clearly.  I know there are also folks who honestly think Trump is following a brinksmanship path to get to a net better set of trade rules in the future.  I wrote the other day that I doubted this, but folks have emailed me the quotes about Trump proposing full free trade as proof of his intentions.  Sorry, while I would love to believe this is true, and will happily admit my error later if needed, I don't believe it for a minute.  It just looks too much like Germany's actions at the disarmament conference.  People who truly want and understand free trade do not say things like "there are too many German cars in the United States."***

** This link is squirrelly and sometimes is gated and sometimes not.  The full citation is Boeckel, R. M. (1933). The Disarmament Conference, 1933. Editorial research reports 1933 (Vol. II). Washington, DC: CQ Press. Retrieved from http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre1933100900

*** Anyone older than about 45 can tell you how badly US cars sucked before foreign competition, and how much better they are today only because we allowed this competition.  Even if you don't own a German car (and I do), your American car is better and less expensive than it would be without German and Japanese and Korean competition.

It has never rained in Phoenix, at least in the last 120+ years when records have been kept.

From Market Watch, but you see the same article everywhere:

This year, like last year, Social Security’s trustees said the program’s two trust funds would be depleted in 2034.

For the first time since 1982, Social Security has to dip into the trust fund to pay for the program this year.

This is like sticking a knitting needle in my eye every time I read it.  Repeat after me:  There is no trust fund.  If it ever existed, it is gone.

OK, I will admit that it does technically exist -- there is a government account for it.  But the trust fund is full of just one asset:  government IOU's to itself.  When Social Security was collecting more money in taxes than it spent on benefits, the extra cash flowed into the trust fund.  Then Congress immediately took the cash out and spent it on... whatever, and left behind an IOU.   I suppose the government pays interest to itself on this debt, but this interest just goes back around in a circle to cover the interest that was just paid out.

Imagine you had a piggy bank where you collected money for a rainy day.  Then one day you wanted a new TV and you took $1000 out of the piggy bank to pay for it, leaving an IOU in the piggy bank for $1000.  I guess you could technically say to yourself that you still had $1000 in assets in the bank, but what good is an IOU to yourself?  I suppose you could even pay yourself interest.  You could take $20 out and then put it back in as interest.  Wouldn't that feel like progress!

This is what the government has done.  You can read numerous articles online that will say that in the case of the trust fund these IOU's are somehow different and really have value.  Here is the simplest way to think about it:  Imagine to cover benefits in a particular year the Social Security Administration needs $1 billion above and beyond Social Security taxes.  If the trust fund exists, the government takes a billion dollars of government bonds out and sells them to private buyers on the open market.  If the trust fund didn't exist, the government would .... issue a billion dollars in bonds and sell them to private buyers on the open market.  In either case, the government's indebtedness to the outside world goes up by a billion dollars.  I will confess there are some technical issues that might differ in the two cases -- perhaps there are different implications for the two approaches on the government debt limit.  But that is just a procedural issue -- in reality there is no economic difference between the two cases.  If there is no economic difference between the trust fund existing and not existing, then in my mind is effectively does not exist.

I am reposting this from several years ago, but I am doing it on June 7 because last time when I posted it on June 6 people called me disrespectful.  I am not really sure I understand why, but this characterization is so wrong (I already have a trip lined up to be in Normandy next year around the 75th anniversary) that it is easier just to hold off for a day.

Over time, my understanding of the importance of the D-Day invasions has shifted.  Growing up, I considered these events to be the single key event in defeating the Nazis.  Listening to the radio this morning, this still seems to be the common understanding.

Over time, I have had to face the fact that the US (or at least the US Army) was not primarily responsible for defeating Germany -- the Russians defeated Germany, and what's more, would have defeated them whether the Allies had landed in France or not.  Check out the casualties by front, from Wikipedia:

The Russians defeated Germany.  Period.   And I don't think the western allies would ever have had the stomach to inflict the kind of casualties on Germany that were ultimately necessary to defeat her without Russian help.  To me, this is the great irony of WWII, that it was not ultimately a victory for democracy.  Only totalitarian Russia could defeat totalitarian Germany.  This thought often bothers me a lot.  It doesn't fit with how we want to view the war.

However, D-Day did have an important effect -- it kept Western Europe out of Soviet hands.  We did not know it at the time, but I would argue in retrospect that from mid-1944 on we were competing with Russia to see how Europe would get divided up after the war.  D-Day allowed the western allies to overrun most of Western Europe and keep it out of Soviet hands, perhaps an even more important outcome than just speeding the defeat of the Germans.  Sure, FDR gets grief for giving the farm away to Russia at Yalta, but what could he do?  The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe at that point was a fait accompli.  What would have been FDR & Churchill's negotiation position at Yalta if their armies were not even on the continent (excepting Italy, where we might still be fighting in 2014 and getting nowhere)?

Postscript:  There is no doubt that some German troops were pinned down in the West by the invasion, but many of these troops were already pinned down by the mere threat of invasion.   Only the experienced soldiers and new equipment gathered by Hitler for the Wacht am Rhein, what we now refer to as the Battle of the Bulge, were a major diversion from the East due to the invasion, and even that was a relatively small amount of reserves compared to the immensity of the Eastern Front.  Had we overrun the industrial Ruhr earlier, that would have made a real difference but we only really achieved this a few months before Berlin was taken.

There are a lots of what-ifs about the war in the West and about how the war might have been shortened.  What if Montgomery really could have taken Cannes on D+1?  That if the Allies had taken the larger solution to trap more Germans at Falais?  What if the Allies had given limited supplies to Patton rather than Montgomery and Operation Market-Garden?  What if Eisenhower had been less timid about trapping the Germans in the Bulge?

But I think the most interesting missed opportunity was a small one with huge impact -- what if the Allies had been more aggressive in taking the Scheldt Estuary?  The Allies were desperately short of supplies in Northern France in the Fall of 1944.  They simply could not get enough supplies over the beaches at Normandy and across France to support all the armies they had in play.  They needed a real high-capacity port in the North and they actually captured one in Antwerp almost intact around September 3.  Antwerp, though, is not right on the ocean -- boats had to come down an estuary which the Germans still controlled.  Quick action in early September could have easily cleared the estuary and made the port almost immediately use-able.   The Allies took only half measures and basically dithered for a while, failing to see the opportunity, as the Germans continued to fortify their position.  In the end, it was not until nearly December before Antwerp could act as a port, long after the opportunity for a coup de grace of the Germans in the West had passed.  If you are interested, here is the Wikipedia article on the Battle of the Scheldt.

Update:  by the way, there were lots of good comments on the original post and you can see them here.

Over at Powerline Paul Mirengoff writes:

Last week, the Department of Justice released an updated study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) showing that 83 percent of prisoners released by states are re-arrested within nine years of their release. 44 percent of released state prisoners were arrested during the first year after release, 68 percent were arrested within three years, and 79 percent within six years.

The study encompassed 30 states and accounted for 77 percent of all persons released from state prisons nationwide during the period under study. Daniel Horowitz discusses the studyhere. Kent Scheidegger does so here.

The results of the study should deter the Senate from embracing the FIRST STEP legislationpassed by the House just before the BJS figures were published. Indeed, the BJS numbers undermine FIRST STEP in multiple ways....

As I argued here, the FIRST STEP bill is just that — a first step to the release of thousands of additional prisoners. It’s also a first step to shorter mandatory minimum sentences. Thus, FIRST STEP is the first step to a crime wave....

But even if there is no second step, the BJS numbers show that FIRST STEP means more crime sooner. That’s what any Senator who supports FIRST STEP is voting for.

Second, the BJS study tells us that the crimes that federal drug felons will commit aren’t confined to drug crimes. According to the study, more than three-quarters (77 percent) of released drug offenders were arrested for a non-drug crime within nine years, and more than a third (34 percent) were arrested for a violent crime.

So much for the argument we hear over and over again from Team Leniency that those incarcerated for drug crimes are “non-violent offenders.” As Daniel Horowitz puts it, “when you let out drug offenders early from prison in this era, they will not only go back to selling even deadlier drugs, killing thousands, they will also commit other crimes” including overtly violent ones.

I understand this is right in the Conservative "civilization vs. barbarism" wheelhouse, so the article is unsurprising.  But I think it includes, at a minimum, one dangerous principle and one deeply flawed assumption.

Dangerous Principle:  By justifying longer prison terms based on potential future recidivism, we are in fact proposing to punish people for future crimes they not only haven't been convicted of, but which they have not even committed.   If I were to walk into a busy street today, shoot 20 people, then lay down my gun and get arrested, you know what I am at that moment under the law?  I am innocent until I am proven guilty.  If I am legally innocent in that situation, I am certainly innocent of some hypothetical crime 10 years in the future.  Assuming that I should be punished for this pre-crime violates every rule of due process -- which Mr. Mirengoff has called a "right" in other contexts.  Taken to its logical extreme, this idea of recidivism as a justification for longer sentences would imply that we incarcerate everyone for every crime for life -- then recidivism rates would drop to zero!

Deeply Flawed Assumption:  The underlying assumption here seems to be that there is some sort of criminal gene at work, that these folks are chosen by birth or circumstances to be criminals in an almost Calvinist dynamic.  As such, in this model, minor crimes are merely markers to a tendency to commit larger crimes later.  Look, I understand that there are people who are just bad -- heck, my dad was on the Unibomber's target list so you don't have to explain the existence of evil to me.  But it is really misguided to assume that prison itself has nothing to do with future criminal activity, particularly in the case of first-time non-violent drug offenders.

We take these people who were selling some grass or their leftover pain pill prescription and we throw them into a camp for several years that is populated only with felons.  You sleep with felons and you shower with felons and the only people you have to talk to all day are felons.  Is it really so remarkable that after being thrown into a criminal frat house for a few years, some people might have more criminal tendencies when they leave than when they enter?  And then after they leave, they are met at every turn with the brand of being an ex-felon, making it hard to get a job or do things we take for granted.  So we put someone away in a training camp for criminals for a few years, and then make it really, really hard for them to find good paying ways to support themselves afterward, and we are surprised they go back to crime?

I have a guy, who I won't name for privacy reasons, who works for me in Arizona.  Over 10 years ago, barely over 18, he was convicted of some non-violent drug crimes and locked away.  Had I done the same things in my youth, my rich dad likely would have kept me out of jail but as a poor Hispanic in the world of Sheriff Joe's Phoenix, he went to jail.  Over ten plus years later, he had a stable marriage and had his civil rights restored, but was still mostly doing minimum wage labor.   He has been a good, reliable maintenance person at one of our campgrounds, in a job where he could work with his wife.  One day a customer got in some sort of dispute with this man's wife, looked him up online, and found he had a prison record.   This customer then started sending me messages that I must fire this person immediately or else this customer would file suit against us for creating a dangerous environment for her.  When I refused, she then started posting yard signs around town that we hired felons and telling people on social media that they needed to shun our maintenance guy in any number of ways and accusing him of running a narcotics ring out of the campground.

This is the kind of crap that non-violent drug offenders face their entire lives.  And you wonder why some of them, after finding no work and being shunned by civil society, might turn to crime?  Were they really destined to be criminals, or did we make them that way?  And what about this gets any better if we leave them in federal crime school for a few more years?

I can't resist publishing this email.  This is the full text, I have not edited it:

57 YEARS ASIA FAKE MONOPLY MONEY THEFT/TRADE THEFT/DEFENSE THEFT/WELFARE THEFT & BUILT US OVER THERE & CHARGING “””””””YEN,YUAN’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’MONEY MANIPULATION

SO POTUS TRUMP STOPS THEFT & YOU MF ARE MAD

SO WHY ARE YOU NOT LIVING IN ASIA US=================INSTEAD OF THE ONE YOU DESTROYED-US!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When I get a recorded phone call that begins, "This is an important call, do not hang up..."   I get these all the time.  No idea what they are for because I immediately hang up.

Every time one points out a historic failure of communism (most recently, for example, in Venezuela), Marxists will argue "well, that is not true communism."  Somehow they think that communism without heavy-handed exercise of state power is possible.  It is not.

Here is the latest example, from our own peoples' republic in California.  For reasons that are simply beyond me, no one in California wants to use market mechanisms and the power of prices to match supply and demand for water.  We use these market tools successfully in pretty much every other market, but not in water.  The result is that increasingly heavy-handed exercise of government power is necessary to match supply and demand.

Senate Bill 606 establishes a “governing body” to oversee all water suppliers, both private and public and will require extensive paperwork from those utility companies.

Assembly Bill 1668 is where it gets personal.  This establishes limits on indoor water usage for every person in California and the amount allowed will decrease even further over the next 12 years.

The bill, until January 1, 2025, would establish 55 gallons per capita daily as the standard for indoor residential water use, beginning January 1, 2025, would establish the greater of 52.5 gallons per capita daily or a standard recommended by the department and the board as the standard for indoor residential water use, and beginning January 1, 2030, would establish the greater of 50 gallons per capita daily or a standard recommended by the department and the board as the standard for indoor residential water use. The bill would impose civil liability for a violation of an order or regulation issued pursuant to these provisions, as specified.

If you’re wondering how the government would know how much water your family is using, the utility providers will be obligated to rat you out of face massive fines. And they’re encouraged to spy in all sorts of creative ways. They “shall use satellite imagery, site visits, or other best available technology to develop an accurate estimate of landscaped areas.”...

If you don’t plan to comply it’s going to be way cheaper to move. Here are the fines Californians will be looking at – and it’s not a typo – these fines are PER DAY.

(1) If the violation occurs in a critically dry year immediately preceded by two or more consecutive below normal, dry, or critically dry years or during a period for which the Governor has issued a proclamation of a state of emergency under the California Emergency Services Act (Chapter 7 (commencing with Section 8550) of Division 1 of Title 2 of the Government Code) based on drought conditions, ten thousand dollars ($10,000) for each day in which the violation occurs.

(2) For all violations other than those described in paragraph (1), one thousand dollars ($1,000) for each day in which the violation occurs.

All of this could easily be replaced with the simple expedient of allowing the price of water to rise until supply and demand matched, a solution that works for everything else and would provide the added benefit of giving financial incentives to seek out new sources of water.  If they are worried about prices for the poor, then they can have a subsidized rate for the first X gallons and then a market rate above that.  There are at least two reasons I think politicians don't do this, beyond just their socialist assumptions and distrust in markets

1. The people who would most be hurt by market pricing for water -- farmers, golf course/resort owners, etc -- have a lot of political pull in the state and would prefer a regime where high-value uses are curtailed to save water for their potentially lower-value uses.  Just look at the carve-outs in the law for swimming pools, water features, and golf courses.
2. Politicians like rationing, or more accurately they like being the rationers.  You can't generate political contributions from market pricing of water. But if you are the person doing rationing, then everyone is going to come to you and try to curry favor.

The simplest way to explain why Marxism fails is "incentives and information" -- planned economies shift economic decision-making from individuals who have the information and incentives to make the proper tradeoffs for their own set of circumstances and preferences and on to politicians whose main incentive is to see who is willing to do the most to curry favor with them.

Yes, we have dust storms that put megatons of dirt in the air and force me to power-wash the walls of my white house every so often.  But the dust in the air also makes for the most amazing sunsets of any place I have lived.  This is a panorama I took on a walk this evening of about 270 degrees, so both west and east.  The sky was amazing in every direction, not just towards the setting sun.

The sunset behind palm trees is one of my favorite photograph subjects.  One example from a few days ago:

Update:  LOL, a reader says it looks just like the mural on the wall in the office in Scarface (warning: quite violent)

On Friday I was browsing the AM dial looking for a sports talk radio station discussing Game 1 of the NBA Finals when I ran into Rush Limbaugh.  Now, I am not one of those who will say that I never listen to X -- I will listen (at least for a while) to both the Limbaughs and Olbermans to understand what is going on in Tribe Blue and Tribe Red.  And I am glad I did on Friday because I heard something that really shocked me.

No, this is not faux public shock at some Conservative taking a position one would fully expect him to take, but just the opposite -- Limbaugh was at least partially defending Trump's tariffs despite the fact that I am absolutely positive he knows better.

In fact I am sure he knows better because he made a very good 60-second case for exactly why tariff's were bad.  Couldn't have done a better job in that short time myself.  But then he did what many Conservatives have been doing of late -- he tried to justify the tariffs as part of some hypothetical long game of Trump's to negotiate a better deal in the future.

Personally, I think it is absurd to assume that Trump's real intention is to get us to a new equilibrium with lower tariffs all around the world.  He does not understand the value of free trade and his closest adviser on this issue is an ardent protectionist.  Trump's negotiation experience is all in zero-sum games where he is trying to extract the most of a fixed pie for himself, not in trying to craft win-win solutions across multiple parties.

But here is the real reason this won't work:  The current relatively-free trade regime that exists today was built almost totally on America's moral leadership on the issue.  Let me take a quick aside to discuss a parallel case.  In 2012 the US compound in Benghazi was attacked.  The Obama Administration publicly blamed this attack on an obscure anti-Muslim video posted on YouTube, and continued to insist for weeks on the video being to blame despite the fact that new evidence shows the Administration knew from the beginning the video had nothing to do with the attack.  This was a terrible action for the Administration to take, because from China to Russia to Iran to Saudi Arabia to Britain to Berkeley, there is growing skepticism, even hostility, towards free speech.  If the US President is not staking out a moral position on the world stage in favor of free speech, then it is not at all clear who in the world is going to oppose what seems to be a natural authoritarian tide to shut inconvenient people up.  Obama did not have to defend the video itself (I have not seen it but I understand it to be confused and absurd and fairly indefensible) but he should have said something like "I don't like the video myself but in a free society we do not meet speech with violence, no matter how confused or misguided that speech is."

I have the same problem for many of the same reasons with Donald Trump's tariffs.  Pro-tariff folks pretend like there is some powerful free-trade globalist conspiracy they are fighting, but in fact the real headwinds all around the world are in favor of protectionism.  Few countries outside of the US have our historic dedication to free trade.  In addition, many of our partners have their own anti-trade populist parties on the rise (e.g. Britain, Italy).  And many of the most powerful political actors in our trading partners actually represent large corporations (some state owned and some just highly-aligned with the state) and powerful labor unions who would be perfectly happy to pursue additional crony protectionism of their industry even at the expense of the majority of their country's consumers and businesses.  All these forces for protectionism have always been kept at bay in large part by America's leadership on the issue.   How better to demonstrate to the Luddites that trade deficits are not bad than by accepting large trade deficits and having the strongest economy in the world?

Rush Limbaugh and other Trump Conservatives want to argue that these Trump tariffs are the opening move in an extended negotiation that will likely result in a better end state.  I have an alternate way of portraying them.  This is the United States walking into a group of barely-recovering alcoholics -- a group in which the US has historically been the powerful moral voice who has kept all these countries on the wagon -- and slamming a bottle of Jack Daniels on the table.  The results are not going to be pretty.

Virgin Galactic is testing their new rocket and it is pretty spectacular.  I have said before but I will repeat it, what could be cooler than living in an age where private billionaires are competing at space travel (Musk, Branson, Bezos, Allen, etc.)?  I have always thought that Virgin's approach of using fixed-wing aircraft to get as much height as possible followed by a rocket launch from that altitude made the most sense from an efficiency standpoint.  Unfortunately, I am not sure you can get really large payloads or escape Earth's gravity with this approach.  Anyway, enjoy:

This article about Anna, the millennial sociopath, has been linked all around but it is a good yarn and I recommend it as an interesting read if you have not seen it.  I have a couple of thoughts.

I told me wife that I was unlikely to be fooled by Anna, because I have known a lot of rich and successful people and almost to a one they don't engage in this sort of name-dropping behavior.  Where I grew up we called that "all hat and no cattle."  I have met people with some of the same sorts of shticks as Anna and they have always been full of sh*t.

My wife, who used to live in Manhattan, said that from her experience things were different in New York and even successful people felt compelled to make a public spectacle of their success.   As much as I would like to believe there is a difference so we flyover country folks can feel a warm sense of superiority, this may be more a function of her having lived there in the 1980's.  I know successful New Yorkers today and they don't act this way, the one in the White House notwithstanding.

I actually think this may be more of a function of people without business experience building up their understanding of business from watching fictional shows on TV and in movies.  I call this the Dynasty effect, where everyone thinks big business works just like on Dallas and Dynasty (sorry, dating myself here).  Actually, business life is EXACTLY like fictional accounts on the screen, but you have to watch Office Space and Silicon Valley rather than Dynasty.

I want to add that there is something oddly compelling about this story for folks like me who are introverts.  When one starts a role playing game, one has a character sheet with different qualities.  Typically increasing one characteristic means decreasing another.  I think I found Anna compelling because her character sheet was filled in so differently from mine.   And I don't mean that in a self-serving way like she is dishonest and I am honest.  Sure, at the end of the day Anna is an unlovable parasite, but its hard as an introvert not to secretly admire so much daring, a willingness to walk up to pretty much anyone anywhere and ask them for almost any favorNext time you are playing your fighter in that RPG, wonder a bit -- as he wades through an ocean of blood with his sword and constantly takes near-fatal damage that has to be healed while watching you mage stand in the rear and just nuke creatures from a distance with spells -- whether that fighter might wish that you had specc'd him with just a bit of magic.