Coyote Blog

... but I am increasingly convinced it is real.  Somehow I got on the mailing list of the "Environmental New Network" and got this press release:

Eco-Friendly Snow Thrower Is Alternative To Belching Snow Blowers

Sno Wovel Quietly Outperforms Snow Blowers Without Emissions, Noise, Strain

New Canaan, CT. November  9, 2009 -- Structured Solutions II LLC announced the launch of their newly-designed wheeled snow shovel this fall. The Sno Wovelâ„¢ is the only non-combustion alternative snow removal device performing equal to or better than a snow blower. The all new folding frame Sno Wovelâ„¢ debuts in a new category of hybrid tools, combining safety for the user, protection of the environment and high-performance. No fuel, fumes and deafening noise to harm the environment or the operator "“ no electric cords to tangle with. The Sno Wovel is 2-3 times faster than shoveling and comes with a folding frame design for easy and portable storage.

This seems like a fairly unsatisfying alternative to a big honkin' snow blower, but I live in Phoenix so what do I know?

I usually use Google search ads for my business, but I decided to try Yahoo! in parallel for a while.  After some admittedly brief and narrow experience, I think the various metrics of search engine market share are understating Google's lead (supposedly Google has about 50% and Yahoo 20%).  Here are the number of impressions I got for roughly the same 2 days and same set of search terms and maximum bids:

Yahoo:  175

Google:  3132  (search only)

Google:  74,000 (search + content network)

Neither account hit a budget limit on these days.  Of course this might change with the nature of the search given different demographics in the user bases.  An academic term would likely get more on Google than Yahoo, proportionately.

No point here, just interesting.  I really was kind of shocked how pathetic the Yahoo numbers are.

I was familiar with the dynamics of the all-pay auction (I always called it the Wargames auction -- the only winning move is not to play).  I had never thought of it as a good analog for lobbying expenditures, but it makes a lot of sense once David Zetland made the point.  Good video at the link.

Don Boudreaux has a nice summary of the problems with a lot of product safety problems.

You write as if "safe" is an objectively determinable and unique fact, such as whether or not your newspaper's paid circulation exceeds 500,000 or whether or not your sister is pregnant.  But "safe" is not objective in this way.  Because no product is 100 percent certain never to cause even the slightest harm (or 100 percent certain to cause harm), the question "Is this product safe?" has no correct single answer.  It has correct answers as varied as the number of that product's potential users.  No product is "safe" or "unsafe" in the abstract.

Perhaps your tolerance for risk is higher than mine.  Perhaps the pleasure I get from using a product is less than yours.  If so, should I be permitted to prevent you from using that product because, for me, the product is insufficiently safe?  My evaluation of the product's safety is correct only for me, not for you.  And matters don't change if I'm a government official.

Ken Lewis gets his payoff for knuckling under to Paulson and Bernanke on the Merrill Lynch acquisition

Kenneth Lewis, outgoing chief executive of Bank of America Corp., will get no salary or bonus for 2009, according to people familiar with the matter, the biggest Wall Street name thus far to come under the thumb of the government's pay czar.In fact, Mr. Lewis will have to repay the North Carolina-based bank more than $1 million in salary he has already earned.

The move was demanded by Kenneth Feinberg, the U.S. Treasury Department's special master for compensation, and was agreed to by Mr. Lewis and the bank.

After forcing Lewis to deal fraudulently with his shareholders, they cut his pay to zero. Nice. Lewis will do fine, he has a nice fat retirement, but it is still a pretty scary development for those of us who still care about contracts and individual liberty.  Just ask yourself - what objective standard did Feinberg apply?  Can't come up with one, can you?

This decision by the Supreme Court may be a surprise to anyone who reads the regular media, which long ago fricasseed Skilling.  But Houston attorney Tom Kirkendall has been covering the Enron-related cases for years, and has reported on any number of prosecutorial abuses.  As he writes:

On the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision earlier this year to hear Conrad Black's appeal of his criminal conviction on honest services wire-fraud charges under 18 U.S.C. § 1346 ("Section 1346), the Court yesterday granted former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling's appeal on similar grounds. A copy of the Skilling's cert petition and its appendix, which are bookmarked in Adobe Acrobat to facilitate ease of review, can be downloaded here.

My sense is that Skilling has a good chance of having the Supreme Court overturn his conviction. Here's why.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal's decision in Skilling's appeal... is looking by the minute similar to the Fifth Circuit's decision in the Arthur Andersen case that was overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court

This is the ironic gist of the appeal in layman's terms:

Honest services wire-fraud under Section 1346 was intended by Congress to penalize corporate executives and governmental officials for accepting bribes and kickbacks and for engaging in self-dealing at the expense of the employer-- i.e., the private gain requirement of the crime.

The Task Force faced a big problem with prosecuting Skilling at all because he never stole a dime from Enron (that is, no private gain). In fact, the Task Force conceded at trial that, not only did Skilling not embezzle any money from Enron, the case against him was not about "greed," that Skilling always sought to pursue Enron's "best interests," and that every act for which he was being prosecuted was undertaken for the purpose of protecting Enron and promoting its share price.

Despite the foregoing, the Task Force persuaded U.S. District Judge Sim Lake to allow the prosecution to proceed against Skilling on a much broader honest services theory -- that is, that Skilling simply took on too much risk for the long-term good of Enron and improperly touted the company to the markets.

However, all corporate executives take business risks and promote their companies, so a rule that criminalizes any business decision that seems imprudent to prosecutors or lay jurors operating with hindsight bias -- even if if the executive was pursuing the interest of the company -- would force corporate executives to proceed at peril of criminal liability in making day-to-day business judgments. Indeed, in a civil case, Skilling would have had the protection of the "business judgment rule" for his business decisions,  but the Enron Task Force's theory of honest services in Skilling's case provided for no such defense. Instead, the Task Force lawyers urged the jury to send Skilling to prison effectively for life simply because he breached his duty to do his job and do it appropriately.

Meanwhile, Skilling may also get a new trial from the 5th Appeals court based on charges of prosecutorial abuse:

In that regard, the Fifth Circuit decision invited Skilling to file a motion for new trial based on issues of prosecutorial misconduct that Skilling raised in the appeal after discovering the evidence post-trial. Specifically, the Fifth Circuit was particularly concerned about the failure of the Enron Task Force to comply with federal rules requiring the disclosure of exculpatory evidence to the defense from the Task Force's pre-trial interviews with main Skilling accuser, former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow.

I must say that I do find it interesting that a few heated verbal exchanges and one guy carrying a gun peacefully somewhere near where the President was speaking is considered a looming threat from the right to civil society while lefties physically clashing with police and destroying property (again near the President) is treated as ho-hum, more leftish rioting.  The same bored reaction tends to result from union violence as well.  Is it bias, or have we just had years to get used to violence on the left?  With memories of Seattle, all subsequent violence I guess seems tame and not worthy of comment.

Kevin Drum links this:

The city of Palmdale is running out of water, and as a result prices are going up.  Way up:

"My bill went from $12.80 to $185," [Tracey] Summerford, a Neighborhood Watch captain, told the water board.

"My water bill went from $139 to $468," Sanchez said at that meeting. Since then Sanchez received another monthly bill, one for $324. Together that meant she owed the water district $792, plus a prior balance that brought her total to $924. "That's my two car payments," said Sanchez, who moved into her home in November....I feel discouraged. I feel like we should have stayed in Santa Clarita and lived in our apartment."

I wrote in the comments:

From Joe Biden, in the debates:

"No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama's plan will see one single penny of their tax raised, whether it's their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax."

Oops:

Under the plan, people who earn between 100% and 300% of the poverty level (or between about $22,000 a year and $66,000 a year for a family of four) would face fees ranging from $750 to $1,500 a year.

For taxpayers with incomes above 300% of poverty, the penalty starts at $950 a year and reaches as high as $3,800 for families. Nearly 12 million people fit in this category, according to the National Institute for Health Care Management.

The idea behind the penalty is that those who can afford insurance but don't buy it are imposing costs on the entire health system. Under the proposal, nearly 12 million people who currently have no insurance could be subject to such fines, according to figures compiled by the National Institute for Health Care Management.

People focus too much on the penalty itself being a new tax.  But the new tax is actually the requirement that individuals buy a product (in this case a health insurance policy) that they feel has no value (or else they would purchase it of their own free will today).  The government stopped pretending long ago that these younger middle class families will get much value from such a policy.  In fact, if they did get value commensurate with the premiums they will be paying, the mandate would not be achieving its purpose.  The whole point is that healthy people pay more into the insurnace system than they get back to support sick people.  If that payment is mandatory, then it is a tax, even if it is called an "insurance mandate" instead.

In fact, this is made all the more clear when politicians also suggest that cheaper high deductible health insurance plans be banned, as they were in Massachusetts.  Again, the whole point is to get young healthy people to overpay for insurance, and allowing them to buy sensible, cheaper, high deductible insurance defeats the whole purpose.

This is a tax on middle America, and Obama knew he was going to propose it way back in the campaign.  This is not something he just thought up or was a victim of changing circumstance.  This is an out and out lie on his part.

Kevin Drum says:

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act makes it illegal to sell toys that haven't been tested for lead content.  In general, I think that's a perfectly fine idea.

He can't understand, though, why its effects seem so perverse and Draconian when its core is such a "perfectly fine idea."  It is amazing to me that the law of unintended consequences is so hard even for seasoned political observers to grasp.

A sensible restriction might be that a child cannot by any reasonable use of the product ingest more than X concentration of lead.  But of course that is not what the government does.  The government requires that every toy undergo expensive testing and batch tracking (almost like that of an aircraft part).  This is not by any means the same as simply requiring products to limit lead exposure.  It is a one-size-fits-all regulation of process, rather than true safety.  It imposes huge testing and tracking expenses on products that can't possibly have any lead in them.

And, like many laws of this kind, it imposes a huge penalty on small competitors and new entrants and rewards larger toy makers who both have the scale to pay for the testing and the political clout to shape the law in their favor.  In fact, the big winner from the legislation has actually been Matel, the company whose recalls actually led to the law in the first place.

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) requires third-party testing of nearly every object intended for a child's use, and was passed in response to several toy recalls in 2007 for lead and other chemicals. Six of those recalls were on toys made by Mattel, or its subsidiary Fisher Price.

Small toymakers were blindsided by the expensive requirement, which made no exception for small domestic companies working with materials that posed no threat.

"¦

So while most small toymakers had no idea this law was coming down the pike until it was too late, Mattel spent $1 million lobbying for a little provision to be included in the CPSIA permitting companies to test their own toys in "firewalled" labs that have won Consumer Product Safety Commission approval.

The million bucks was well spent, as Mattel gained approval late last week to test its own toys in the sites listed above"”just as the window for delayed enforcement closed.

Instead of winding up hurting, Mattel now has a cost advantage on mandatory testing, and a handy new government-sponsored barrier to entry for its competitors.

Update: Brad Warbiany has similar thoughts.

Joe Romm of Climate Progress is a leading climate alarmist, telling the world that burning fossil fuels will increase CO2 concentrations by 0.04% of the atmosphere over the next century and thus destroy mankind.  As such, he is a supporter of the current cap-and-trade bill in Congress, whose purpose is to raise the price of fossil fuels (either directly as a tax or by restricting their supply) so that less will be used.

On a different but related topic, Joe Romm is also apparently a peak oil alarmist.  As I have written, I suspect real oil prices will rise steadily over the coming decades, but we aren't going to fall off some cliff and see a sudden hyperinflation of oil prices (temporary spikes are a different story).  He writes

The IEA's work makes clear that for oil to stay significantly below $200 a barrel (and U.S. gasoline to be significantly below $5 a gallon) by 2020 would take a miracle

I tend to doubt it, in part because I have seen so many very similar predictions ever since the mid-1970s, but I suppose some day someone will be right with one of these.   I wonder if there is some kind of psychological profile that causes people to see positive feedback-driven accelerating curves everywhere.

But here is my confusion -- he is absolutely convinced that oil is going up by $140 a barrel or more.  Let's look at this in the context of Co2.  The CBO estimates the clearing price for a ton of Co2 emissions under the current bill will be between $20-$30 a ton.  Since a barrel of oil creates about a third of a ton of CO2 emissions, this implies the cap and trade bill might increase the price of oil by $7-$10 per barrel.  But if Romm think oil is going up by natural market forces by $140+, why even bother?  Why not just put a tax on coal and be done with it?

I congratulate Mr. Romm, however.  If he is so sure of 2020 oil prices, there are all kinds of fabulous ways to become ridiculously wealthy with this knowledge.

Postscript:  There are two reasons why people have been making this same forecast for 30 years and have been wrong most of the time.

First, there is a very human tendency to assume current conditions and trends will go on forever.  Everyone is subject to this bias, even the smartest analysts.  Romm might argue that these are savvy, detail-oriented commodities analyst, but I only have to point to the recent behavior of savvy detail-oriented debt security analysts.

Second, analysts tend to apply current understandings of what technologies and substitutes are economic at $60 oil to a world where oil is priced at $160.  It just doesn't work that way.   The market for petroleum and its substitutes is enormously multi-variate and complex.  A $100 bump in prices will do things that are sometimes hard to predict in detail to the markets for exploration, new technologies, substitutes, conservation, etc.  But in all this complexity, the one thing we do know is that time and again, such changes have occurred quickly and decisively in response to rising oil prices, and have acted to mitigate and reverse price increases.

One ironic way of looking at it, since this is Joe Romm, is to say that there are negative feedbacks that cut in to slow and even reverse sharp rises in oil prices.  Romm seems to reject these negative feedbacks, in favor of a price model that rapidly accelerates.  This is all ironic, since this issue of negative vs. positive feedback is what separates climate alarmists like Romm from many climate skeptics like myself.

Two large drivers of high health insurance costs in certain states is 1) bans on interstate competition for health insurance and 2) state-by-state mandates for minimum coverage.  These two government actions lead to some states having remarkably higher health insurance prices than others.  Via Carpe Diem:

The average health insurance ranges from a low of $1,254 in Wisconsin to a high of $8,537 in Massachusetts, and the national average is $2,613. That kind of variation couldn't exist in a competitive market for health insurance. Interstate competition for health insurance would go a long way towards bringing health insurance costs down.

That Massachusetts model sure is doing wonders, huh?  If reimportation of drugs from Canada makes sense, why not of policies across state lines? See where your state ranks here.

It used to be said that it was the young who distrusted police and authority, while as people aged they became more conservative and comfortable with authority and the police, ostensibly because they had more wealth and position to protect.  Al Franken had a sketch on SNL where he explicitly poked fun at this, saying something like "when I was young, I opposed the draft, but now that I am over draft age, I support the draft to protect me, Al Franken... etc. etc."

Oddly enough, I have had exactly the opposite progression.  In high school I was a police-loving, authority trusting, border-closing little conservative, cheering on Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson in 1970's movies where loan heroes fight against the degradation of police departments by civil libertarian pinko bleeding hearts.

The older I get, and the more experience I gain, the less I trust any authority and in particular the less I trust police officers who are given the power to use force and the authority to cover up its misuse.  Yet another good example.  So Dirty Harry and Death Wish have been replaced in my favorites list by the Wire.

Usually an article like this would blame the US:

Global carbon dioxide emissions in 2008 rose 1.94 percent year-on-year to 31.5 billion tonnes, German renewable energy industry institute IWR said on Monday, based on official information and its own research.

Several other leftish / alarmist sites picked up the story, but still didn't hammer the US, saying only that the US is the largest contributor to total emissions but not whether it contributed significantly to last year's rise.  It turns out there is a reason for this.  US emissions were actually way down, falling far faster than the drop in economic growth:  (from the EIA)

The story tries to put a positive spin on Europe  (again, the preferred story line is always Europe-good-America-bad):

Carbon dioxide emissions from heavy industry participating in the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme fell 3.1 percent last year compared with 2007, the EU's executive Commission said in mid-May

This is a carefully worded cherry-picking on one sector of the economy.  I would be willing to bet almost any amount of money that the rest of Europe's economy saw less of a drop or even an increase.  Even so, the cherry-picked sector, the one subject to cap-and-trade, still underperformed the US.  Overall, US emissions have fallen since 2000 without any real regulatory program and just the normal incentives of economic efficiency at work.

The US is NOT the problem when it comes to future emissions growth.

From CNN via NRO:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) "” What are people trading their clunkers in for? It depends on who you ask.

The government's results showed small cars as the top choice for shoppers looking for Cash for Clunker deals. But an independent analysis by Edmunds.com disputed those results, and showed that two full-size trucks and a small crossover SUV were actually among the top-ten buys.

The discrepancy is a result of the methods used. Edmunds.com uses traditional sales measurements, tallying sales by make and model. The government uses a more arcane measurement method that subdivides models according to engine and transmission types, counting them as separate models.

For example, the Ford Escape is available in six different versions including two- and four-wheel drive and hybrid versions. The government counts each version as a different vehicle using guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency. Only the front wheel drive, non-hybrid version made the government's top ten list.

The Ford Escape crossover SUV, instead of being the seventh-most popular vehicle under the program, as the government ranked it, was actually the best seller, according to Edmunds.com. The government pegged the Ford Focus as the top seller.

Trucks tend to be available in more variations than cars. That's because truck buyers have a wider variety of needs than car buyers, General Motors spokesman Brian Goebel said.

"There's just so many different uses for the truck, both retail and commercial, than with car purchasers," he said.

The Edmunds rankings, shown in the NRO link above, actually solve one problem for the Obama administration but create another.  The Edmunds list has far fewer foreign cars, overcoming the criticism the program has gotten (not from me!) for promoting sales of non-American nameplates.  But it creates another problem, in that most of the cars on the Edmunds list are relatively low MPG, obviating the whole point of the program.

From a Chicago Tribune editorial on the city aldermen blocking Wal-Mart construction in the city, via Carpe Diem:

Organized labor doesn't like Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart doesn't have union jobs. It just has jobs (with an average hourly wage of $12.05 in Chicago). The aldermen, of course, already have jobs. They get paid $110,556 a year and they figure that as long as they keep the labor unions off their backs, they'll keep making $110,556 a year.

Who says the City Council doesn't generate jobs? If you're one of the 50 aldermen, your unemployment rate is 0 percent. But the unemployment rate for the rest of Chicago is above 10 percent. One in 10 Chicagoans is out of work.

You can actually read the health care bill.  Here.

Over the last few years, Republicans have tried to wrap themselves in the flag of the First Amendment, arguing that they were the true defenders of free speech against political correctness.  But while the left certainly has attacked speech on certain fronts, the right has been no less busy, particularly in areas related to sex, crime, and security.   One example, via Overlawyered:

Two Lee County, Florida men face possible prison sentences of five years because their MySpace pages show them making hand gestures that prosecutors say are associated with street gangs. "Their prosecutions are the first under a state law passed last year that criminalizes the use of electronic media to "˜promote' gangs." The bill's sponsor, state legislator Rep. William D. Snyder, R-Stuart, says in response to charges that the measure violates the First Amendment by criminalizing expression: "none of our freedoms are absolute, and the freedom of expression is not absolute"

At the beach for a while.

Mark Perry links a story on the "cash for clunkers" program, including a small taste of the 136-pages of rules, regulations, and procedures dealers must follow to qualify for the payment.

From the Anti-Planner:

Forty states have asked the federal government for a total of $102 billion for high-speed rail. This suggests that the Antiplanner's estimate of $90 billion for the cost of the Obama high-speed rail plan was low.

Secretary of Behavior Modification Ray LaHood says that this "shows that the country is ready for high-speed rail." Of course, all it really shows is that state bureaucrats are ready for free federal money.

Believe it or not, I am actually in Washington DC.  I am on the executive committee of our little industry's trade group, and as such it is expected that once a year we venture to DC to talk to Senate and House staffers about what legislation is pending that may affect our business.  I won't call this "lobbying" as that word implies we have any influence over outcomes.  It is more of a grim due dilligence to see what we are going to have to try to deal with next.

As this activity has roughly the same appeal for me as being dragged naked by a truck down the Interstate, I have avoided this task for years.  I finally relented to my duty, and here I am.

For those too young to remember, during the 1980's we endured a hysteria about child molestations, with a number of pretty obviously innocent men dragged to jail on the back of testimony coerced from kids by over-zealous prosecutors.  Janet Reno became particularly famous for the "Miami method" of hounding kids until they started pointing fingers at whomever the prosecutors had their eye on, and rode such fame to the US AG office (see here and here for the disturbing details).

As the kids grow up, a number of these prosecutions are finally falling apart, as in this story.  Of course, as i9s typical in such cases, despite all the witnesses coming forward and admitting they were coerced into making false accusations, the prosecutors are not giving up easily.  via Overlawyered

I really wanted to post by email in England but could not make it work. Trying again.

Update: So close, yet so far away. LOL. I will keep working on it.

The scare story, from November 2008:

Advocates for the nation's automakers are warning that the collapse of the Big Three - or even just General Motors - could set off a catastrophic chain reaction in the economy, eliminating up to 3 million jobs and depriving governments of more than $150 billion in tax revenue.

Industry supporters are offering such grim predictions as Congress weighs whether to bail out the nation's largest automakers, which are struggling to survive the steepest economic slide in decades.

Even if just GM collapsed, the failure could bring down the other two companies - and even the U.S. operations of foreign automakers - as parts suppliers run out of money and shut down"¦.

Automakers say bankruptcy protection is not an option because people would be reluctant to make long-term car and truck purchases from companies that might not last the life of their vehicles.

I called BS on this at the time.  Turns out it was yet another made-up scare story to justify government coercion and more unthinking expenditure of taxpayer dollars:

One of the biggest fears of a GM bankruptcy filing -- a collapse of revenue -- appears to not be as prominent an issue as originally thought.

Car buyers appear undaunted by GM's bankruptcy, assuaging one of the auto maker's biggest fears heading into Chapter 11. Early signs point to stable demand for GM cars and trucks since the company filed for Chapter 11.

Mr. Henderson said June retail sales are tracking higher than May. "June sales are moving along just fine," Mr. Henderson told reporters at a summit in Detroit. Sales to rental and other fleets are down from last month, he said. "We're very gratified for the support of dealers and customers that we've received through this."