Coyote Blog

Who says that professional sports have nothing to teach businesses?  Pro sports team owners have perfected the art of promising the world to local citizens to get taxpayers to pay for their billion dollar stadiums (which in the case of NFL teams are used approximately 30 hours a year).  The Miami Marlins in particular have perfected the art of building a good team, leveraging its success to get a new stadium deal, and then immediately dismantling the team and buying cheap replacement players.

In the business world many corporations have taken the Miami Marlins strategy.  Tesla took $3/4 of a billion dollars form NY taxpayers to build a factory in Western New York, only to employ a tiny fraction of the promised employees.  In fact, one academic studied all the relocation subsidies NY has made in the recent past and found none of the gifted companies fulfilled their employment promises.  In Mesa, AZ there is a factory that I call the graveyard of cronyism where not one but two sexy high-profile companies have gotten subsidies to move in (FirstSolar and Apple) only to both bail on their promises after banking the money.

So it should come as zero surprise that the Trump-facilitated crony Foxconn deal in Wisconsin is following the same path.

Foxconn Technology Group, a major supplier to Apple Inc., is backing down on plans to build a liquid-crystal display factory in Wisconsin, a major change to a deal that the state promised billions to secure.

Louis Woo, special assistant to Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou, said high costs in the U.S. would make it difficult for Foxconn to compete with rivals if it manufactured LCD displays in Wisconsin. In the future, around three-quarters of Foxconn’s Wisconsin jobs would be in research, development and design, he said.

They added this:

The company remains committed to its plan to create 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin, the company said in a statement.

Yeah, sure.  Anyone want to establish a prop bet on this one?  I will take the under.

I think it is important to publicize these names far and wide:

• Jagadish Shukla, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
• Edward Maibach, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
• Paul Dirmeyer, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
• Barry Klinger, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
• Paul Schopf, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
• David Straus, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
• Edward Sarachik, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
• Michael Wallace, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
• Alan Robock, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
• Eugenia Kalnay, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
• William Lau, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
• Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO
• T.N. Krishnamurti, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
• Vasu Misra, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
• Ben Kirtman, University of Miami, Miami, FL
• Robert Dickinson, University of Texas, Austin, TX
• Michela Biasutti, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY
• Mark Cane, Columbia University, New York, NY
• Lisa Goddard, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY
• Alan Betts, Atmospheric Research, Pittsford, VT

These 20 people, who nominally call themselves "scientists", have written a letter to President Obama urging him to use the RICO statute to prosecute people who disagree with them on climate science, essentially putting scientific disagreement in the same status as organized crime.  If they can't win the scientific debate with persuasion, they will win it with guns.  From the letter:

One additional tool – recently proposed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse – is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change.

Of course "deceive the American people" is defined by these folks in practice as "disagreeing with us".

The Federal Reserve Bank of NY has a study on the effect of increasing student loan availability on tuition.  The key sentence is in bold:

When students fund their education through loans, changes in student borrowing and tuition are interlinked. Higher tuition costs raise loan demand, but loan supply also affects equilibrium tuition costs—for example, by relaxing students’ funding constraints. To resolve this simultaneity problem, we exploit detailed student-level financial data and changes in federal student aid programs to identify the impact of increased student loan funding on tuition. We find that institutions more exposed to changes in the subsidized federal loan program increased their tuition disproportionately around these policy changes, with a sizable pass-through effect on tuition of about 65 percent. We also find that Pell Grant aid and the unsubsidized federal loan program have pass-through effects on tuition, although these are economically and statistically not as strong. The subsidized loan effect on tuition is most pronounced for expensive, private institutions that are somewhat, but not among the most, selective.

If I understand this correctly, they are saying that policy change that result in $3 of additional subsidized borrowing capability by students leads to $2 in tuition increases.   Talk about running in place!

Hat tip to Neal McCluskey of Cato, who has links to many more studies with similar results.

I generally have refused to even participate in the debate over Indiana's RFRA because most of the discourse is so incredibly ill-informed that it is impossible to have a serious discussion.  But I would like to make one observation:

Here is Ruth Marcus with as good a proxy for the anti-RFRA position as I can find:

Hold whatever religious views you want: about whether women should drive, or the morality of having children out of wedlock, or whatever. Your church gets to choose (and enforce its rules). You can practice whatever your church may preach. But if you operate a business, you shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against people based on who they are, or whom they love.

OK, that is clear enough -- if you have a business that serves the public, you must accommodate all the public equally.  You can't decide not to do business with some group of people.  But this leaves me with a question -- many of the opponents of Indiana's RFRA, from Apple Computer to the NY Times editorial page to the governor of Connecticut (which has its own RFRA, lol) called for businesses to boycott the citizens of Indiana.  Why isn't such a boycott, essentially a refusal to do business with anyone from the state of Indiana irrespective of his or her position on the RFRA, illegal/immoral under exactly Marcus's logic?  Most folks see boycotts as an important first amendment right, a way to express displeasure with a group using the power of markets, without government coersion.  But it seems to be proscribed by Marcus's definition.   Am I missing something here?

I suppose supporters of the boycott would argue that it is OK to refuse business based on political opinions but not on race or gender or sexual orientation.  But supporting the legality of gay marriage is a political opinion.  Now what?

Try as I might, I can only think of two internally consistent positions on this issue:  1.  Businesses have the freedom to accommodate whomever they want; or 2.  All businesses, perhaps as a part of the state business license requirements, must accommodate all comers no matter what.  Number one leads to some ugly, but probably rare, incidents.  Number two causes a lot of friction with other first amendment rights such as speech and religion.

Any other position must take the form of "it is legal to refuse accommodation based on some things but illegal to refuse accommodation based on other things."  There is no way to derive a dividing line between the two based on first principles, so the line becomes a political football, with no viewpoint neutrality.   Basically, accommodation law is whatever the politician of the moment says it is.  Unfortunately, this seems to be what most folks are advocating.

Post-modernism is many things and its exact meaning is subject to argument, but I think most would agree that it explicitly rejects things like formalism and realism in favor of socially constructed narratives.  In that sense, what I mean by "post-modern science" is not necessarily a rejection of scientific evidence, but a prioritization where support for the favored narrative is more important than the details of scientific evidence.  We have seen this for quite a while in climate science, where alarmists, when they talk among themselves, discuss how it is more important for them to support the narrative (catastrophic global warming and, tied with this, an increasing strain of anti-capitalism ala Naomi Klein) than to be true to the facts all the time.  As a result, many climate scientists would argue (and have) that accurately expressing the uncertainties in their analysis or documenting counter-veiling evidence is wrong, because it dilutes the narrative.

I think this is the context in which Naomi Oreskes' recent NY Times article should be read.  It is telling she uses the issue of secondhand tobacco smoke as an example, because that is one of the best examples I can think of when we let the narrative and our preferred social policy (e.g. banning smoking) to trump the actual scientific evidence.  The work used to justify second hand smoke bans is some of the worst science I can think of, and this is what she is holding up as the example she wants to emulate in climate.  I have had arguments on second hand smoke where I point out the weakness and in some cases the absurdity of the evidence.  When cornered, defenders of bans will say, "well, its something we should do anyway."  That is post-modern science -- narrative over rigid adherence to facts.

I have written before on post-modern science here and here.

If you want post-modern science in a nutshell, think of the term "fake but accurate".  It is one of the most post-modern phrases I can imagine.  It means that certain data, or an analysis, or experiment was somehow wrong or corrupted or failed typical standards of scientific rigor, but was none-the-less "accurate".  How can that be?  Because accuracy is not defined as logical conformance to observations.  It has been redefined as "consistent with the narrative."  She actually argues that our standard of evidence should be reduced for things we already "know".  But know do we "know" it if we have not checked the evidence?  Because for Oreskes, and probably for an unfortunately large portion of modern academia, we "know" things because they are part of the narrative constructed by these self-same academic elites.

Postscript:  And I am making this kid my new head of HR

Got this from some Republican group (the "virtue" of being a libertarian is that I get bipartisan spam).

Tim Bishop = ObamaCare 

Bishop Has Been a Co-Conspirator in the Disaster That is ObamaCare; It’s Time for Him to Apologize For This Colossal and Expensive Mistake 

WASHINGTON – Today, in a rambling press conference, President Obama admitted he “fumbled” the ObamaCare rollout. And the president even warned of more problems to come.

Tim Bishop has been a vocal ObamaCare supporter from the beginning—voting for the bill in 2010 and giving the president a blank check on ObamaCare time and time again. Now that the law is becoming more of a disaster every day, Bishop needs to answer for the higher premiums and canceled plans facing families in his district.

Didn't even know who this dude was until I checked (US Representative from NY, apparently).  I expect to see a lot of this.  At least for now.  Things can change quickly.  After all, just 30 days ago the Republicans were supposedly on the ropes from self-inflicted wounds vis a vis the shutdown.  Now, no one even remembers it.

There won't be any direct order found telling the IRS to go hassle Conservative groups.  That's not the way it works.  Obama's style is to "other" groups he does not like, to impugn their motives, and to cast them as pariahs beyond the bounds of civil society.  Such and such group, he will say, opposes me not because they have reasonable differences of opinion but because they have nefarious motives.  Once a group is labelled and accepted (at least by your political followers) as such, you don't have to order people to harass them. They just do it, because they see it as the right thing to do to harass evil people.  When Joe Nocera writes this in support of Obama in no less a platform as the NY Times, orders are superfluous

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took...

He concludes by saying

For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement.

There are probably some deeply confused people in the IRS right now -- after all they were denying tax exempt status to terrorists, to enemies of America.  They should be treated like heroes, and now they are getting all this criticism.  So unfair.

Postscript:  And they are racists.  Racist terrorists.

But Obama, in his most candid moments, acknowledged that race was still a problem. In May 2010, he told guests at a private White House dinner that race was probably a key component in the rising opposition to his presidency from conservatives, especially right-wing activists in the anti-incumbent "Tea Party" movement that was then surging across the country.

This is totally the Obama way of fighting a political battle.  He is saying, "forget their stated reasons for opposing me, such as opposition to the health care law, to Wall Street bailouts, and to rising government debt.  They really oppose me because they are racists and I am black."  Obama's opposition are absolutely never, ever people of good will who simply disagree.

PS#2:  It's pretty hilarious the NY Times published Nocera's "Tea Partiers are Terrorists" editorial just 6 months after they editorialized against incivility in the context of the Giffords shooting, which by the way had as much to do with civility in public discourse as the Benghazi attacks had to do with a YouTube video.  In fact, it sure seems like this administration has a history of falsely blaming tragedies on their political opposition's speech.

Anthony Watt has a nice catalog of past predictions of doom (e.g. running out of oil, food, climate issues, etc).  It really would be funny if not such a serious and structural issue with the media.   I would love to see someone like the NY Times have a sort of equivalent of their reader advocate whose job was to go through past predictions published in the paper and see how they matched up to reality.  If I had more time, it is the blog I would like to start.

Update:  One of his readers Dennis Wingo took the resource depletion table from Ehrlich's Limits to Growth and annotated it -- the numbers in red show the resources Ehrlich predicted we should already run out of.

However, rather than ever, ever going back and visiting these forecasting failures and trying to understand the structural problem with them, the media still runs back to Ehrlich as an "expert".

NY Times has a great interactive graphic of Miami and OKC shooting by location on the court (roll over the face pictures to get the actual graphics).

It provides some insight as to why the NBA game seems to be all threes or points in the paint -- the mid-range jump shot just does not have the same return on investment (ie points per shot).  Which begs the question, I suppose, as to why anyone shoots the mid-range jump shot at all  (look at Battier's and Hardin's maps - they are almost all threes and layups/dunks).  I suppose the answer likely takes the form of "you have to shoot mid-range to open up the other two zones", a sort of run to set up the pass in football strategy.  Don't know enough about basketball to say if this is true.

Update:  Also, the shot clock probably has a lot to do with it.  Given infinite time, teams would be able to get the shot they want, but in 24 seconds sometimes you just have to loft one up  as time runs out from wherever you are.

Here are the stats:  Close range -- 1.19 points per shot, 3-point -- 1.08 pps, mid-range --  0.80 pps

Walter Olson has been writing a lot about Wal-Mart and FCPA.  I don't have a lot to add except my own experience working for a large corporation in third world countries.

I worked for a manufacturer of industrial equipment for years.  In most countries in Europe and North America, part of our strategy was a dedicated in-house sales force that could provide a high level of technical support.  But we went away from that strategy when we went into third world countries, just the place where we needed more rather than less technical support for our customers.

Why?  A big reason was the FCPA.  There are many countries where it is simply impossible to do business without paying bribes.  Bribes are absolutely wired into the regulatory process.  In Nigeria, public officials are paid less with the expectation they will make it up on bribes, similar to the way we pay waiters who get tips.  The only way to legally work in these countries is to work through third party resellers and distributors and other such partners, and then tightly close your eyes to how they get things done.

What always ticks me off about these cases is the fake attitude of naivite in the press that seems to be constantly amazed that corporations might have to pay bribes to do basic things we take for granted here, like get the water turned on or have your goods put on a ship.  But in fact reporters can't be this naive, as they almost certainly have to deal with many of the same things in their business.  I would love to see an accounting of the grease payments the NY Times pays in a year in foreign countries.

I think most people when they hear these foreign bribery cases assume corporations were paying to get a special advantage or to escape some sort of fundamental regulation.  And this is possibly the case with Wal-Mart, but more likely they were simply paying because that is what you have to do just to function at all.

This is just amazing -- Bloomberg has become too nutty even to caricature.  From CBS NY via Overlawyered

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s food police have struck again!

Outlawed are food donations to homeless shelters because the city can’t assess their salt, fat and fiber content, reports CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer.

Glenn Richter arrived at a West Side synagogue on Monday to collect surplus bagels — fresh nutritious bagels — to donate to the poor. However, under a new edict fromBloomberg’s food police he can no longer donate the food to city homeless shelters.

It’s the “no bagels for you” edict.

“I can’t give you something that’s a supplement to the food you already have? Sorry that’s wrong,” Richter said.

Richter has been collecting food from places like the Ohav Zedek synagogue and bringing it to homeless shelters for more than 20 years, but recently his donation, including a “cholent” or carrot stew, was turned away because the Bloomberg administration wants to monitor the salt, fat and fiber eaten by the homeless.

Scathing report on how NY police gamed the process to improve their reported crime numbers.  Nothing in this should be the least surprising to anyone who watched a few seasons of The Wire.

These are not just accounting shenanigans.  There were actions the directly affected the public and individual liberty.  People were rounded up on the street on BS charges to pad arrest stats while real, substantial crimes went ignored in a bid to keep them out of the reported stats.

There is one part in here that is a good illustration of public vs. private power.  People who fear corporations seem to have infinite trust for state institutions.  But the worst a corporation was ever able to do to a whistle blower was fire him.  This is what the state does:

For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraftsecretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the "stats" that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports.

Arresting bystanders made it look like the department was efficient, while artificially reducing the amount of serious crime made the commander look good.

In October 2009, Schoolcraft met with NYPD investigators for three hours and detailed more than a dozen cases of crime reports being manipulated in the district. Three weeks after that meeting—which was supposed to have been kept secret from Schoolcraft's superiors—his precinct commander and a deputy chief ordered Schoolcraft to be dragged from his apartment and forced into the Jamaica Hospital psychiatric ward for six days.

Say what you want about the NY Times, but they are the lords of interactive info-graphics.  Note you can play with the date as well as, on the left, which component of benefits you want to view.

If Medicare is really an insurance program, than as I wrote last week, the premiums are absurdly low.  And this isn't even a rich-poor transfer issue - the premiums are too low for everyone.  See the bar chart about halfway down on this page at the NY Times.  Here is a screenshot:

Take Social Security first.  Taxes come fairly close to covering benefits, with some rich-poor redistribution.  These numbers look sensible (leaving aside implied annual returns on investment and whether the government should be running a forced retirement program at all) -- the main reason social security is bankrupts is that in the years when premiums exceeded benefits, Congress raided and spent the funds on unrelated things.

Medicare, though, is a huge problem.  Even for high income folks, premiums cover only 43% of the expected benefits (I am not sure how they treat present values and such, but again lets leave that aside, I don't think it affects the underlying point).  Assuming we end up with some rich-poor transfer, it looks to me that premiums are low by a factor of three.

Everyone seems to think Medicare is a great deal.  Of course it feels that way -- premiums are only covering a third of the costs.  There is no way we can have intelligent debate on these programs when the price signals are corrupted.  Its time to triple Medicare premiums.

One of the classic mistakes in graphics is the height / volume fail.  This is how it works:  the length of an object is used to portray some sort of relative metric.  But in the quest to make the graphic prettier, the object is turned into a 2D, or worse, 3D object.  This means that for a linear dimension where one object is 2x as long as another, its area is actually 4x the other and its volume is 8x.  The eye tends to notice the area or volume, so that the difference is exaggerated.

This NY Times graph is a great example of this fail (via here)

The Tebow character is, by the data, supposed to be about 1.7x the Brady character.  And this may be true of the heights, but visually it looks something like 4x larger because the eye is processing something in between area and volume, distorting one's impression of the data.   The problem is made worse by the fact that the characters are arrayed over a 3D plane.   Is there perspective at work?  Is Rodgers smaller than Peyton Manning because his figure is at the back, or because of the data?  The Vick figure, by the data, should be smaller than the Rodgers figure but due to tricks of perspective, it looks larger to me.

This and much more is explained in this Edward Tufte book, the Visual Display of Quantitative Information.  You will find this book on a surprising number of geek shelves (next to a tattered copy of Goedel-Escher-Bach) but it is virtually unknown in the general populace.  Every USA Today graphics maker should be forced to read it.

I am working on a summary post of the new batch of climategate emails, but this is perhaps my favorite.  It is written to Andy Revkin, nominally a reporter for the NY Times but revealed by the new emails to be pretty much the unpaid PR agent of Michael Mann and company.  Over and over, emails from Mann and his cohorts get Revkin to write the articles they want, drop quotes from skeptics from articles, and in general coordinate communications policy.

Anyway, one climate scientist writes Revkin this note

I think the notion of telling the public to prepare for both global warming and an ice age at the same [time] creates a real public relations problem for us.

Amazing that this actually had to be said.

Update:  Revkin is currently an opinion blogger but at the time of the emails he was supposed to be a news reporter at the NYT.

Folks in the OWS neighborhood in NYC are fed up and want the city to kick out the protesters.  While they grow old waiting for that, I would suggest taking some individual action right out of the army psi-ops manual (actually, its also from a Sopranos episode).

1. Find some big-ass speakers
2. Find the biggest amp you can
3. Place speakers in window, point out at park.
4. Find the single most annoying recording you can, and play it at volume 11 .. over and over and over and over, day in and day out.  I might try "I'm turning Japanese" or maybe "I want a hippopotamus for Christmas."  Possibly the song they used to play over and over in FAO Schwartz stores, or "It's a small world."   Or maybe something like a Joel Osteen sermon.  It almost doesn't matter once its been repeated 12 times an hour for 3 days.

OK, so the Eastern narrative on Arizona is that it is full of a bunch of wacked-out xenophobic conservatives.  And sure, we have our share.  But the NY Times delves into an issue that, living here, I had never even heard of

The massive dust storms that swept through central Arizona this month have stirred up not just clouds of sand but a debate over what to call them.

The blinding waves of brown particles, the most recent of which hit Phoenix on Monday, are caused by thunderstorms that emit gusts of wind, roiling the desert landscape. Use of the term “haboob,” which is what such storms have long been called in the Middle East, has rubbed some Arizona residents the wrong way.

“I am insulted that local TV news crews are now calling this kind of storm a haboob,” Don Yonts, a resident of Gilbert, Ariz., wrote to The Arizona Republic after a particularly fierce, mile-high dust storm swept through the state on July 5. “How do they think our soldiers feel coming back to Arizona and hearing some Middle Eastern term?”

Presumably Yonts also uses some numeric system other than arabic numerals for his math as well.  Seriously, I could mine any community and find some wacko with some crazy idea.  Good journalists are supposed to have some kind of filter on these things to determine if they really are some pressing regional issue.  I live here and I have not heard one word about any such controversy.  But it fits the NY Times caricature of AZ, so they ran with it.

In fact, I think "haboob" has caught on pretty fast because it is a fun sounding name and it is something that is unique to AZ vs. other states.    After living on the Gulf Coast and in tornado alley and on the west coast, it is kind of nice to live in a place where the worst natural disaster you get is a dust tsunami that makes you have to go out and wash your car.

Last week I showed the Obama-proposed cuts as an almost invisible, except under extreme magnification, portion of the total budget.  Unfortunately, proposed Republican cuts (which according to the NY Times and other voices of big government will lead to the end of the world as we know it) are not much better

via Tad DeHaven

Via the NY Times, no flaws found with Toyota accelerators

The Obama administration's investigation intoToyota safety problems found no electronic flaws to account for reports of sudden, unintentional acceleration and other safety problems. Government investigators said Tuesday the only known cause of the problems are mechanical defects that were fixed in previous recalls.

The Transportation Department, assisted by engineers withNASA, said its 10-month study of Toyota vehicles concluded there was no electronic cause of unintended high-speed acceleration in Toyotas. The study, which was launched at the request of Congress, responded to consumer complaints that flawed electronics could be the culprit behind Toyota's spate of recalls.

"We feel that Toyota vehicles are safe to drive," said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Officials with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said they reviewed consumer complaints and warranty data in detail and found that many of the complaints involved cases in which the vehicle accelerated after it was stationary or at very low speeds.

NHTSA Deputy Administrator Ron Medford said that in many cases when a driver complained that the brakes were ineffective, the most likely cause was "pedal misapplication," in which the driver stepped on the accelerator instead of the brakes.

As Walter Olson writes of the original overblown brouhaha

Did it make a difference that the federal government has taken a proprietor's interest in major Toyota competitors GM and Chrysler, or that a former trial lawyer lobbyist heads the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration?

I had more back in July (and here, where I observe that scientific data on breast implant safety did nothing to stop the torts, and is unlikely to do so in this case).  I questioned the US Government's conflict of interest in this matter way back in January of 2010.

By the way, anyone want to reopen the case on that guy in LA with the runaway Prius -- I thought it was concocted at the time (I called him balloon boy in a Prius) and am doubly sure now.  How is what he did, in retrospect, and different from leading the police on a high-speed chase?

This chart in the NY Times is pretty interesting, though I could quibble about the color coding.  You have to stare at it a minute to get it - each cell represents a combination of stock purchase and sales dates, with the color representing the average market inflation-adjusted return for that buy and hold period (click to enlarge, or click through to the source link where it is explained in more depth).

Whenever one uses red and green for coloring a chart, the reader is going to assume red is bad and green is good.  In this case, the light red represents returns from 0 to 3% above inflation.  Is that bad?  Maybe.  I would say inflation plus 3% is probably lower than people's expectation of stock market returns, but I think a lot of folks would equate red with capital erosion, which is not the case if returns are out-pacing inflation.

This is sort of a good-news-bad-news story.  The good news is that there is no 25-year period where returns fall below inflation.  The bad news is that the median return of inflation plus 4% is probably less than most folks are planning for -- including a lot of state pension funds that are still counting on returns like 8% for their entire portfolio (something like inflation + 5-6%), which is a blend of stocks and bonds, implying they are hoping for an equity return north of that.

HT:  Flowing Data

Two great examples:

1.  Barney Frank is supposedly going to remake housing finance after having helped destroy it by his actions over the last 20 years.  In particular, after his polititization of Fannie Mae's business goals over the last 20 years, and constant fight to prevent any kind of oversight of Fannie and Freddie, which has led to over a hundred billion dollars and perhaps as high as $400 billion in taxpayer losses, Barney is going to do more of the same with Frannie and Freddie now that the government has full control of these entities.

2.  A NY state child protective services study shows that all their resources provide little real benefit to endangered children.  The solution -- do even more of the same.

And don't forget the classic example, the 10x increase in public school funding to no apparent benefit:

I hate blog posts that begin this way, but I will do it anyway:  Imagine that Wal-mart, Target and a hundred other major retailers all got together and agreed to an industry plan to hold down workers's wages.  Anyone involved with even rudimentary economics training would know that there would be enormous incentives for individual retailers to "cheat", ie offer wages above the agreed to levels to try to get a particular advantage hiring the best employees.  So imagine that the cartel actually forms an enforcement body, that goes around the country levying fines and punishments against any individual participant who breaks ranks and tries to share some of the largess with their workers.

Now imagine the NY Times rooting the enforcement body on, cheering it when it adopts a new get-tough stance on organizations that pay its workers too much.  Hard to imagine, but that is exactly the case in this article, where the Times writes about the NCAA's new efforts to get tough on what it calls "recruiting violations" but in any other industry would be called "trying to pay the workers more than the cartel allows."

NCAA division I sports are made up of a 100+ mostly public institutions that make a fortune off of their athletic programs, particularly men's football and basketball.  Large institutions like the University of Texas or Ohio State reap tens of millions each year in ticket sales, TV deals, merchandising sales, and Bowl/tournament winnings.  One of the reasons this is so profitable is that they basically pay the key workers who generate this income close to zero.  Sure, they give them a scholarship, but what is the marginal cost to, say, the University of Texas for providing a few hundred free educations on top of their 40,000 paid customers?  This is roughly equivalent to McDonald's paying its employees nothing more than a couple of happy meals each day.

While many of these university's athletes will make nothing after college playing sports, the ones involved in these "violations" are typically athletes who are offered millions, even tens of millions of dollars the moment they leave college.  In effect, these colleges are getting tens of millions of dollars of labor virtually for free, and so the incentives to cheat on their cartel deal are huge, which is why the cartel enforcers have to be so aggressive in stopping under-the-table payments to the grossly underpaid workers.

It is an ugly process, and one wonders why so many folks support it when they would be appalled at such practices in any other industry.

... the other auto-makers are not going to be treated very fairly.

Senior officials at the U.S. Department of Transportation have at least temporarily blocked the release of findings by auto-safety regulators that could favor Toyota Motor Corp. in some crashes related to unintended acceleration, according to a recently retired agency official.George Person, who retired July 3 after 27 years at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said in an interview that the decision to not go public with the data for now was made over the objections of some officials at NHTSA.

"The information was compiled. The report was finished and submitted," Mr. Person said. "When I asked why it hadn't been published, I was told that the secretary's office didn't want to release it," he added, referring to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Welcome to the corporate state, Obama-style.   Not to mention some old-fashioned bureaucratic CYA:

Since March, the agency has examined 40 Toyota vehicles where unintended acceleration was cited as the cause of an accident, Mr. Person said. NHTSA determined 23 of the vehicles had accelerated suddenly, Mr. Person said.

In all 23, he added, the vehicles' electronic data recorders or black boxes showed the car's throttle was wide open and the brake was not depressed at the moment of impact, suggesting the drivers mistakenly stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake, Mr. Person said.

"The agency has for too long ignored what I believe is the root cause of these unintended acceleration cases," he said. "It's driver error. It's pedal misapplication and that's what this data shows."

Mr. Person said he believes Transportation Department officials are "sitting on" this data because it could revive criticism that NHTSA is too close to the auto maker and has not looked hard enough for electrical flaws in Toyota vehicles.

"It has become very political. There is a lot of anger towards Toyota," Mr. Person said. Transportation officials "are hoping against hope that they find something that points back to a flaw in Toyota vehicles."

The existence of this report is one reason, suggests Walter Olson, why the Democrats in Congress (abetted by the NY Times) seem in an enormous hurry to pass a new auto regulatory bill.  After all, automobiles have been sold in this country for only about 100 years, so every day counts in getting new regulatory infrastructure in place

The recall of millions of Toyota cars and trucks because of persistent problems of uncontrolled acceleration has exposed unacceptable weaknesses in the regulatory system. These weaknesses are allowing potentially fatal flaws to remain undetected. Democrats in Congress are pushing legislation to improve regulation and oversight of auto safety. It should be passed into law without delay.

As Olson points out, the NY Times has bent over backwards to ignore recent NHTSA findings in its reporting. This in particular is the enormously flawed logic of the regulator:

N.H.T.S.A. could fine Toyota only $16.4 million for delays in revealing problems with defective accelerator pedals that left the throttle open after being released. That's pocket change for a company of its size.

Pay no attention to that free market behind the curtain.  The billions of dollars this acceleration problem has cost Toyota in recalls, repairs, lost sales, and damage to reputation are irrelevant -- only fines imposed by the Administration (and torts by its allies in the litigation industry) matter.  And if the same problem beset government-owned GM, anyone want to bet what the penalty would be?  They would probably get a new bailout from Obama to pay for the recall costs.   In fact, even without the NHTSA findings, this Toyota problem is really no worse in terms of incidence rates or costs than any number of other recalls by US manufacturers.  The only difference is the media attention lavished on the problem.