Coyote Blog

Why so few posts?  Because the current political environment is exhausting.  On many issues the major players are half right and half wrong, but no one wants to hear that.  The crowds are either all-in on Trump or all-in on the opposition and trying to point out nuance is both unwelcome and more time-consuming than the news cycle allows.  A few examples:

• On immigration, I think the sane majority would like to see bad actors and gang-bangers sent back to their home countries, but have little stomach for uprooting the 10-year resident construction laborer and his family in the middle of the night and sending them away.  Trump wants to send them all away, even the peaceful and productive.  Sanctuary cities like LA want to protect everyone, even the violent gang-bangers.
• With universities like Harvard, it is long past time to enforce some discipline on spending and stop knuckling under the the "its all science, go away peons" elitism.  But institutions like Harvard still contribute a lot to this country and Trump's actions often smack of vendetta rather than thoughtful policy.
• Everyone with a uniform opinion that court injunctions of the Trump administration are universally correct or universally wrong are all misguided.  It is a total mixed bag.  Trump, as with tariffs, has grossly overstepped his statutory authority and IMO it was correct to stop him.  In other areas, like laying off administration employees, it is astounding to me that the judiciary can be of the opinion he can't fire anyone.

A few other thoughts before I likely join the ostrich party and stick my head in the sand and ignore this all:

• I have written for years that I do not understand why well-meaning folks on the Left do not devote more time to government efficiency and spending issues.  For a couple of reasons.  First, every bit of waste is money that could have been spent towards policy goals.  Second, waste undermines public support for the type of programs (eg SNAP) that they support. For years the grandfather of DOGE was William Proxmire, a Democrat from the Wisconsin progressive tradition.  But there seems to be zero interest on the Left in spending accountability, as demonstrated by the huge opposition to DOGE.
• Both parties are violating coyote's law, establishing precedents the WILL NOT LIKE when the other party uses them.  R's played the find-a-judge game a bit in the Biden administration but you can be sure they will be all-in on the game next D administration.  And of course Trump is establishing Presidential power precedents that the next D president will LOVE to use.
• National injunctions are generally ridiculous and need to be reformed.  I say this having benefitted from several in my business life.  I am out of my business but for years under Obama and Biden the Administrations kept imposing minimum wages on recreation concessionaires that ended up being enjoined for years and years, only to be allowed when they finally had their day in court (and overturned a few months later by a Trump EO).
• In my mind there is no nuance -- Trump is all wrong on tariffs.  They are bad even if other countries have high tariffs on us.

Kudos to Harvard, for bravely standing up against the defenders of human rights when no one else is willing too.  From the Harvard Islamic chaplain, who further expresses the great wisdom he sees in executing apostates from Islam.  Good to see that Harvard hasn't gotten any saner since I left.

Postscript:  This is the faculty that claimed moral superiority over Lawrence Summers?  I can see what's coming next -- its wrong to question why women are under-represented in science, because we should just stone them all instead.

via maggies farm

Tim Harford Via TJIC:

Superficially, it seems that many people seek sunny climes,
especially now that air conditioning is available. For example,
long-run population growth in the "Sunbelt" "” the US South - is often
attributed to a demand for, well, sun.

Harvard economists Ed Glaeser and Kristina Tobio think
otherwise. They argue that before 1980, the boom in the South was
thanks to the region's growing productivity. After 1980, population
continued to grow, but house prices lagged behind those elsewhere in
the US, suggesting that the driving force was not high demand but
permissive planning rules. Certainly balmy California, with its tighter
restrictions on building, did not enjoy the same population growth.

All of this tends to suggest that people don't value sunshine quite as much as is supposed.

I have pretty convincing anecdotal evidence that the first part, at least, is true.  I worked for a large manufacturing corporation called Emerson Electric (no relation to the electronics company).  They are one of the few Fortune 50 companies not at all coy to admit that they move factories around the world chasing lower wages.  They had an epiphany decades ago, when in their planning, they assumed the move overseas was always a trade-off of wages for productivity... until they visited at motor plant in Brazil that had first world automation and productivity combined with third world wages.  That got their attention.  To their credit, they have pushed this further and further, such that not only are their factory workers in Mexico, but their plant superintendents and skilled workers and even their engineers are now Mexican too.

Anyway, if you listen to the company tell this story, phase 1 of the story was not a move to Mexico or Asia but to the south.  They must have moved probably 50 manufacturing plants over a decade from the northeast to the south during the sixties and seventies. 

This constant movement seems to be a natural life-cycle of locations as they grow wealthy.  Poorer regions eagerly welcome newcomers who may bring jobs and prosperity.  But, once the prosperity is there, the prosperous in town begin using government and other institutions to try to lock in their gains.  Corporations use government to fight new competitors.  Wealthy homeowners pass zoning to keep home prices high and rising.  Unions tend to increase and lock in gains for current workers at the expense of new workers.  A kind of culture of hostility emerges to any new job that makes less than $54,000 a year, any house that costs less than $400,000, and any immigrant who doesn't have a pale face.

Harvard physicist LuboÅ¡ Motl throws some cold water on recent claims to have broken the speed of light.  He argues:

Two years ago or so, Robert Helling
explained what these experiments are all about. As far as I can say,
there is nothing new about Nimtz's findings or observations and not
much interesting about them either. He's been doing the very same
things for decades.

He builds a setup in which the maximum
of a wave moves faster than light (although you need amplifiers to find
where the maximum is at the end). That's of course possible. In fact,
it's very easy. You can make such things with normal classical
electromagnetic waves as long as you have a layer of material where
they exponentially drop. In analogy with Schrödinger's equation, you
may realize that tunneling can be very fast.

However,
microscopically, no signal or information is moving superluminally and
nothing is violated about special relativity whatsoever because all
these waves perfectly satisfy Maxwell's equations where the speed of
light is safely bounded. Nimtz must know that, I think, so his behavior
seems dishonest to me.

As a way to celebrate the holidays and perhaps compensate for a more relaxed pace of blogging for a while, I am beginning a serialization of my new novel BMOC.  If there is interest, I will keep it going for a while.  So, lets get started.  Enjoy!  (You didn't really feel like doing any real work today, did you?).   By the way, for you prospective business school students, though it may seem un-serious, embodies my best advice for you.  Chapters 3 and 4 continue here.

chapter one

Robert
Gladstone, multi-millionaire CEO of the M Group, looked around the
room at his fellow conspirators and longed for the piranha
button. 

Continue reading ‘BMOC, Chapters 1 and 2’ »