Coyote Blog

I was sitting here today, and was trying to discern why the government-run health care issue made me more nervous than other government welfare programs.  I get ticked off, for example, about the horrendous rates of return (think negative interest rates) paid out by Social Security on what are nominally our retirement account premiums.  But I don't get nervous.  Why?

I think because unlike other welfare proposals that [just] cost us a ridiculous amount of money, the current plans for providing universal health care imply that my personal health care and health care options will get much worse.  When government provided housing, my housing did not get worse.  When government provided a ripoff retirement plan, my personal non-government retirement savings did not take a hit.  In all these cases, we paid out tons of money to provide some terrible base-level services for the poor and the true-government-believers in the middle class, but my options did not get worse.

However, in the case of health care, most proposals on the table will very likely result not only in much higher taxes, but also in my personal health care options getting worse.  The government will not want to provide multiple levels of service, and can't afford anything beyond "crappy", so as a result we will all end up with crappy service (Insert Rush song "trees" here).  A lot of crap is written about how great all these other socialized medicine services are, but thousands of people travel from other countries to have medical procedures in the states, and about zero travel the other way.  More on the topic of closing coverage gaps at the price of making your own personal care worse here.  More on why these gaps are not as large as advertised here.

Update:  Quick proof -- My chosen health plan is now illegal in Massachussetts

Here is all you need to know to understand the two political parties as they are in 2007:  Both parties want to return to the 1950's.  The Republican Party wants to return to Leave-it-to-Beaver type social/sexual options and media offerings.  The Democratic Party wants to return to the large company / heavily union work models and economy of the 1950's. 

Which makes the titles "Conservative" and "Liberal" worse than meaningless, since each vision is inherently small-c conservative.  Both fear change, diversity, and risk, though in different sectors of our lives.  In some sense this is the real culture war, between dynamism and fear of change.

New SEC rules being drafted by the Bush administration are set to declare that Paris Hilton is a fully "accredited investor" with full freedom to invest in any way she likes.  I, who graduated near the top of my class at Harvard Business School, shall likewise be declared not capable of investing and the government will limit my options "for my own good"

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has just proposed
that the amount of liquid net worth an individual must have before
investing in hedge funds and other so-called risky investments be
raised to as much as $2.5 million.

The largest program the government has for protecting us from our own investing incompetence is called Social Security, which takes retirement savings from us by force and has the government invest it for us.   As I showed in previous posts, Social Security is returning -0.8% a year on our savings.  Thank god the government is investing this money for us - no way I could have beaten a -0.8% a year return during the greatest 20-year bull market of all time.

Tinfoil Hat Observation:  I use Google search to find old posts on my site.  Usually it is flawless.  For some reason, though, my post titled Social Security Ripoff is not indexed by Google.  A follow-up post on the same day is indexed, as you can see from this search, but not the original.  I have never failed to pull up a post before, even with inexact search words, and have never failed with the exact title in the search.  Weird.   Maybe something in the comments, I will have to check.

It is an interesting experience negotiating as a buyer when you know two things:

• Seller has marginal cost approaching zero
• Seller has lots of competitors who, for my purposes, provide equivalent service

In this case, I was calling Network Solutions to transfer my domain name registrations to GoDaddy, because GoDaddy is substantially cheaper.  Network Solutions sent me a renewal letter to renew at $34.99 a domain.  Yuk!  I began the process of transferring these domains to GoDaddy, who charges in the $8 range.  (By the way, I have been very happy with GoDaddy for my registrations and hosting of simple sites).

Unfortunately, I had a problem with the transfer -- I needed an authorization code for each domain from NetSol and was not sure how to get it, so I had to call their customer service.  Like a good rep, the person asked me why I was leaving, and I said it was because NetSol was too expensive. 

This is where it got interesting.  First, he said that I could stay at Network Solutions and pay just $16 a domain.  I told him forget it, it was still too high.  After some back and forth, and his getting the information I had called for, he finally offered $8 a domain.  That is nearly an 80% discount from the rate they first offered me, and is lower even than the 100 year renewal (LOL) they offer for $9.99 a year.  I turned it down, because it was too late and I was already consolidating my accounts at GoDaddy.

However, if there are those of you out there who are with Network Solutions and want to stay, but want a discount, call their customer service (not tech support) number, click the options for "transfer domains away from Network Solutions".  When you get a guy, tell him you need the authorization number on the domain to transfer it to GoDaddy (this is true).  When he asks you why you are transferring, tell him NetSol is way more expensive than GoDaddy.  And then let him run.  I didn't even ask for a discount.  He just kept throwing them out at lower and lower price levels after I turned each one down.

There is no doubt that electricity markets are a mess.  Electric utilities have been regulated for so long and in so many ways, and new capacity is so hard to add, the deregulation experiments tend to fail over short time periods for any number of reasons.  In California, what was called "deregulation" never really was such, since pricing signals were never passed on to consumers and therefore never really influenced demand.  In Texas, the areas where my company operates still struggle with deregulation, and we have seen few price or customer service benefits. 

This is not that surprising when you consider other major industries that have been so thoroughly regulated.   Railroads come to mind, for example.  Deregulation occurred thirty years ago and we are only recently starting to see a renaissance in that industry.  Pre-deregulation airline incumbents (e.g. Delta, United, American) are still struggling with open markets.

Mike Gibberson links a pair of court decisions that may set back any progress made in deregulating at least the wholesale electricity markets.  In a series of suits, the State of California is seeking a mulligan, asking the court to rule that wholesale electricity contracts it entered into in 2000-2001 should be voided because the price was too high and FERC did not have the authority to allow blanket market-based rather than cost-based electricity pricing.  And the judges seem to agree:

The panel held that prices set in those bilateral transactions pursuant
to FERC's market-based program enjoyed no presumption of legality.

I don't think there is anything more depressing to a good anarcho-capitalist like myself than seeing the government rule that a price negotiated at arms length by the free will of consenting, and in this case well-informed adults enjoys "no presumption of legality."  If not, then what does?  Is that where we are heading, to a world where no voluntary actions enjoy a presumption of legality?

By the way, one has to remember that this is not a case of an impoverished high school drop-out in East St. Louis signing a high interest rate loan he didn't understand.  This is the case of highly paid electricity executives and government electricity officials signing electricity contracts.  It is as ridiculous to argue that they were somehow duped in buying the one and only item they ever buy for resale as to argue that Frito-Lay somehow shouldn't be held responsible for the price it negotiates for potatoes.  These electricity companies knew they had obligations to supply power at retail at certain rates and failed to lock up enough supply in advance.  Whether Jeff Skilling gamed the short-term spot market is irrelevant - the utility executives were at fault for finding themselves beholden to the spot market for so great a volume of electricity, and doubly at fault for taking this power at insane rates when other lower cost options were available to them (such as cutting off customers on interruptible contracts).

Tonight, I decided to switch to Feedburner to manage the feeds from my site.  I did this for two reasons:  1) I would like better traffic information on the readership for my feeds and 2) I like some of the configuration options they have.

Both Feedburner and Typepad swear that they have everything set up so that all my existing feed subscribers will now get the feeds via Feedburner without changing their subscriptions (some sort of redirect, I guess).  We'll see.  Please comment if you are having problems.

If you are getting some duplication of posts or some read posts showing up as unread, I am pretty sure that this is a one-time effect of the changeover.  However, if the problem persists, let me know.

A reader emailed me this article about the Endangered Species Act at work:

The sharp chirps of the endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers and the
whine of chain saws sound discordantly in this coastal community of old
pine forests....

The woodpecker's status as an endangered species requires special
measures to try to prevent its extinction and restore its population,
wildlife officials say. That's the law. Wildlife officials gave the
town maps pinpointing woodpecker nests. No building or tree cutting is
allowed within 200 feet of a nest tree without a federal permit. Some
restrictions on development also apply to 75-acre circles around each
nest site to provide foraging area for the birds....

Since word got around this spring that owners could
face problems selling land or building houses where the birds lived,
people have been rushing to clear undeveloped lots of pine trees and
yanking the woodpecker welcome mat.

More than anywhere else in
North Carolina, Boiling Spring Lakes is a place where the coastal
development boom and the federal Endangered Species Act have collided.

"People
are just afraid a bird might fly in and make a nest and their property
is worth nothing," said Joan Kinney, mayor of Boiling Spring Lakes in
Brunswick County. "It is causing a tremendous amount of clear-cutting."...

Bonner Stiller, a state lawmaker from Brunswick County, has owned a
pair of lots as an investment here for more than 20 years. He cleared
them recently. Stiller said he was sorry to lose the trees but wanted
to protect his investment.

"You had to get in line to get
somebody with a chain saw," Stiller said. "I have not a single pine
tree left. Folks around here are terrified of the prospect of losing
their property. That causes people to get out there and find out what
they can do to protect themselves."

In the past, I have divided environmental law into two categories:  emissions law, which is not only consistent with but a must for the maintenance of a strong property rights regime; and land use law, which tends to be an affront to property rights.  You can read more on this distinction here.  This situation is a great example of why land use environmental law is such a problem.

Take a step back.  Consider that some (but by no means all) people in this country value the continued existence of the red-cockaded woodpecker.  There are several ways they might pursue this goal, which I will put in order of decreasing attractiveness:

• They can get together, voluntarily pool their money, and seek to purchase land that might be habitat for the woodpecker and voluntarily set aside what is now their land from development.  This is the best solution, and the only one that operates without resorting to the use of force against individuals.  Oranizations like the Nature Conservancy and other land trusts work this way.
• They can get the government to tax everybody in the country a few extra cents, flow these cents together into big dollars, and have the government buy the land (or seize it via eminent domain) and set it aside as open space or parkland.  This takes money by government force from people who don't value the woodpecker's survival, but at least it spreads the cost wide and thin.
• They can get the government to declare that the twenty-five or thirty people who have these birds on their land can no longer do anything, from development to tree-cutting, on their land.  This option is the worst, because it lands the entire cost of the woodpecker's survival on just a few individuals, and it costs these individuals inordinately high amounts of money in the form of reduced property values  (if you can't do anything to a piece of raw land, the resale value effectively drops to zero).  I personally hold a piece of raw land for future development of a vacation or retirement home.  A substantial portion of my net worth is in this land.  If it were to be suddenly made worthless, much of my life's savings would be gone.

As an interesting note, I have ranked these options in descending order with an eye to fairness and individual rights.  However, if we instead rank these options from the perspective of the average Congressman and his/her political calculations, we actually get the reverse order!  The first option of private action is the worst from your average Congressman's point of view, because then there is nothing they can take credit for in their next election campaign.  The second option is better, but would involve a tax or deficit increase he might conceivably be dinged for.  The third is the best for our average politically-calculating Congress critter, since it results in an outcome he can take credit for with important interest groups, and the costs are almost totally hidden, and born by just a few people who don't have many votes and may not even be in his district.  Not surprisingly, this is the approach Congress has taken, via the Endangered Species Act.

There is some hope that this problem may eventually get worked out the right way, at least in Boiling Springs Lake:

The Nature Conservancy hopes to help. Since 1999, it has acquired about
6,500 acres that form a horseshoe around the center of town. The land,
much of which is wetlands, has two groups of woodpeckers. Woodpeckers
typically nest in clusters of 3 or more birds with one breeding pair
and helpers. In time, the land could support six or eight clusters as
the conservancy adds more land for a nature preserve.

Blogging has been light, as I have been working on the publication of my new novel called "BMOC".  We're a number of weeks from getting it through Ingram and onto Amazon, etc. but it is available today at my Lulu storefront.  If you order the printed version from Lulu, be careful!  The Lulu UPS shipping options are really overpriced.  Only the regular US mail delivery is a very good deal.  For those of you who have the version with the old purple cover, this is an updated version.

Once it gets some broader distribution, I'll be running a special event on this site.  Details later.

Update: Web site for BMOC book by Warren Meyer

I am kind of a video snob so you can take this rant with that in mind. 

I am getting tired of looking at five thousand dollar flatscreens with the picture distorted.  As most of you will know, the new generation of TV sets are wider than the old sets, with a ratio of length to width of 16:9 rather than the old 4:3.  Unfortunately, most current broadcasting and all legacy TV shows are filmed in 4:3.  To watch these programs without distortion on a new flatscreen HDTV, you will either have black bars on the sides or you will have to zoom it such that you lose the top and bottom of the picture. 

Instead of these two options, most people have their widescreen TV's set to stretch the picture horizontally to fit the wider screen.  What this results in is a picture that is distorted and stretched by 33% in width, giving you lots of fat faces.  Yuk!  Why would someone buy a $5000 (or more) TV set with state of the art high-definition picture and then set it up so most of the programming looks like it was viewed in a fun-house mirror?  Especially when you only have to press one button usually to cycle the setup between regular and widescreen programming. 

Anyway, the teli is always on here in the breakfast room of the hotel (one of the realities of modern travel is that you can't seem to escape the blaring TV in either hotels or airports) but I have no idea what the BBC announcers look like.  The way the TV is set up, it looks like they all are fat with cheek fulls of acorns.

Congratulations to Gene Wright, who won the first annual Coyote Blog NCAA bracket contest.  Gene only had one of the final four picked (UCLA) but did so well in the opening rounds he had the contest locked up even before last weekend.  Second place was Michael Gunter and third was Bob Houk.  Interestingly, no one out of 34 contestants had Florida in the finals or winning it all.  By the way, yours truly limped in at 24th, though my son helped uphold the family honor at 10th.  If you were not in the pool, you can still click here and enter email "coyote -at- coyoteblog -dot- com" and password "coyote" to see all the results.

By the way, I highly recommend the www.pickhoops.com site for your brackets.  It costs $9 to set up, but it has no ads, the registration is MUCH less intrusive for your players than free sites like Yahoo, they have great analysis options, and they are much faster at posting results.

One of the advantages of not being a partisan of either the Democrats or Republicans is that I have more flexibility to actually say what I believe, without worrying that something I am saying might actually give aid and comfort to my political enemies.  I have always felt that it is really, really difficult and rare to become actively political without sacrificing consistency in your deeply held beliefs, particularly since both parties represent such an inconsistent hodge-podge of positions.  The irony of this has been, at least until the advent of blogging, that I could be smug about maintaining my philosophic virginity but I left myself no avenue to make any impact with my strongly held beliefs.

Given this, I was therefore struck by this, from Cathy Young at Reason, writing about Yale's future Taliban student:

One striking aspect of this controversy is the reaction from Yale's liberal
community. Della Sentilles, a Yale senior, recently
wrote a
piece
for the Yale Herald denouncing such manifestations of rampant
misogyny at Yale as the shortage of tenured female professors and poor
childcare options. On her blog, a reader asked Sentilles about the presence
at Yale of a former spokesman for one of the world's most misogynistic
regimes.
Her reply:
"As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements
or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one
culture is more sexist and repressive than another. American feminism is
often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own
imperialist ends."

It appears Ms. Sentilles, beyond having a lot of multi-cultural baggage, is terrified that if she actually criticizes Afghanistan in any way, she is somehow giving aid and comfort to the Bush administration, which feminists have declared enemy #1.  The politics of US presidential elections, in this case, trump criticizing a regime that treated women worse (by far) than the US has at any time in its history.  Which of course is one of the reasons* that women's groups in this country are sliding into irrelevance, putting their support of a broad range of leftish causes above speaking out on what is essentially apartheid-for-women in the Middle East  (I say essentially, because women are actually far worse off in much of the Middle East than blacks ever were in South Africa).  Whereas a decade ago the left was marching in the street to better the lot of blacks in South Africa, they are strangely mum on women in the Middle East. 

As a result, I can lament the condition of women in the Middle East, acknowledge that Saddam was a blight on humanity, but still oppose the war in Iraq as not worth the cost (when "cost" is defined broadly enough to include not must money and men but also opportunity cost).  I can adopt this position because I am not required to put on the Republican happy face or Democratic America-always-sucks face.

* Another reason is that it may be time for women to declare victory.

Daniel Weintraub has a nice take on our health care system in a post recently in the Sacramento Bee.

Imagine for a moment that your employer was required by law to buy a
plan to manage your nutrition needs - rather than simply paying you a
wage, out of which you buy the food you want to eat.

Or suppose the government required your employer to pay for a housing
plan, rather than paying you and letting you decide where and how to
live.

Finally, consider what it would be like if the company you work for was
mandated to design and finance a transportation plan for you, with a
list of options for how you could get to work and back home each day.

Each of these scenarios brings a few things to mind.

First, you'd probably get paid a lot less than you do today, because
your employer would be diverting much of your current wages to pay for
these plans instead.

Second, you would have less choice than you do now, because your
employer would have to standardize these food, housing and
transportation plans to fit the needs of many workers.

Third, the service you would get from your local grocery store,
landlord or automobile dealer would probably be worse, since your
relationship with each of them would now be muddled through the entry
of a third party, your employer. Your local grocer would have a greater
incentive to try to satisfy his real customer - your boss, or worse,
the food management company your boss chose - than to serve your needs.

Fourth, the costs of each of these goods would tend to rise over time -
especially if you and your fellow employees were able to eat as much as
you liked, or live in any size house or drive as far as you wanted
within the choices provided. While large employers might be able to use
their superior bargaining power to drive down costs a bit, their power
in the marketplace would be outweighed by the increased cost of
providing food, housing and transportation in quantities unlimited by
the discipline that comes when a consumer pays for something
out-of-pocket.

Finally, as the costs did start to rise, you would feel less secure
about where your next meal was coming from, or whether you'd have a
place to live tomorrow or a car to drive to work. With the management
of these essential items in the hands of a third party, you'd feel
vulnerable, worried about whether they might cut back on your choices
or on the quality of the offerings in order to save money.

Beyond these arguments, there is the threat of using publicly funded health care as a Trojan Horse for complete government micromanagement of our lives.

Below in my first post on the old 1968 edition of The Population Bomb, I said one of the key mistakes of these doomsayers was static analysis, which I described as:

blind projection of trendlines without any allowance for individuals
actually doing something to alter those trends, particularly in
response to pricing signals.  This leads not only to predictions of
disaster, but to the consistent conclusion that only governments
coercing individuals on a massive scale can avert dire consequences for
humanity

A great example of the static analysis fallacy in action today in in the debate on school choice.  School choice opponents often bring out some or all of these arguments:

• Private schools are often more expensive than public schools, so even with vouchers set at the state per pupil spending, many won't be able to afford private schools
• Private schools have admissions requirements and testing, such that many students will not be able to meet the cut
• Private schools are disproportionately religious, leaving few options for secular parents
• There are no where near enough private schools for the potential demand

Do you see the consistent fallacy?  All the arguments assume that private schools, in terms of pricing, mission, supply, etc., will remain static and unchanged after a voucher program is instituted.  I hate to waste electrons stating the obvious, but the private schools that exist today did not evolve in a vacuum.  They evolved in a world of monopoly public schools, and their nature is based on that reality.  Change that backdrop, and the schools will change.

For example, take the cost issue.  Sure, many private schools are expensive.  The main reason is that private schools have been created in an environment where their customers must have the ability to pay for their kid's education twice.  My kids go to private school, and every month I pay their bill to go to a public school they don't attend (via my property taxes) and then I pay a second bill to the private school they do attend.  As a result, many private schools have high prices, because their customer base can pay.  If the government instituted a special tax so that everyone received a government-funded Yugo, don't you think that the number of inexpensive cars sold by private companies might dry up some?

But private schooling does not have to be expensive.  My kids go to a fantastic school here in Phoenix.  We have moved around a lot, and we have been lucky enough to be able to send our kids to some very good and sometimes very expensive private schools, and I can say with confidence that their school here is both the best and the cheapest!  In fact, the tuition I pay for an education far, far superior to the local public schools is less than what the state of Arizona spends as an average per pupil in the public schools.

The same type of rebuttal can be made to all the other arguments.  Private schools often have tough admissions requirements because the public schools have already staked out the niche for the lowest-common-denominator education, so private schools differentiate themselves by serving an intellectual elite.  But does anyone doubt that if millions of average kids suddenly had $6000 vouchers in their hands, someone would step up to serve the heart, rather than the tail, of the normal distribution?  And I addressed here the huge potential for private school to evolve to serve a diverse range of viewpoints.

Arizona Watch has a nice post on this same topic, including similar thoughts in response to criticisms of school choice:

The statist arguments against HB 2004 are more clearly spelled out in Mike
McClellan's blog
on AZCentral in which he calls HB 2004 "tuition tax fraud." Mike is (surprise
surprise) a public school teacher. Indicative of the quality of public school
education in Arizona, Mike's arguments against HB 2004 are weak, but I'll
briefly refute them here.

1. Private schools can choose who they take "“ many have entrance exams that
will block some students from entering the school.

Mike's correct: private schools can choose the students they accept. Some
students may not qualify for their first choice school. The real point he's
making here is that some students may not have access to private schools even
with the corporate funding "“ that the bill would create a class divide in
education. That's absolutely incorrect. If private schools become affordable to
a significant portion of the population, then more private schools will emerge.
These schools will assuredly serve different market segments. There will be prep
schools, technical schools, art schools, religious schools, atheist schools, and
schools that just provide a decent basic education. There will even be schools
that specifically serve challenged students "“ those students who Mike claims
won't have access to private schooling. The opposite is true. Schools will be
better able to serve a variety of students in a manner far more effecting than
the current one-size-fits-all public school system.

2. Even if they can attend the school, the tuition might not cover all the
costs the student will incur "“ books, uniforms, other fees. If the schools won't
waive those costs "“ and many can't afford to do that "“ the student's family
might not be able to make up the difference.

Certainly some private schools will be more expensive than the tuition grants
can cover. However, many more will design their tuition structure specifically
to stay within the limits covered by the tuition grants. It is absurd to think
that schools would deliberately price themselves out of the market. If the
demand exists, private schools are going to find a way to meet that demand and
earn those tuition dollars.

3. And here's the big one: Republicans apparently believe there are quality
private schools everywhere. They oughta take a more careful look. While Phoenix
and Tucson have plenty of private schools "“ some far too expensive for the
Republican plan, by the way "“ that is not the case in the rest of the
state.

Do you see a trend here? The answer to this last argument is the same as the
answers to the previous two. Tuition grants will create demand for private
schools. New private schools will emerge to meet that demand and collect that
grant money. This is basic economics.

The one concern I have is that statists and choice opponents have many ways to block private schools.  Even with vouchers, zoning and land use laws in many areas have provided a powerful tool to block private school expansion.

By the way, here is one way to test whether people who make these arguments against choice really mean them or are using them to hide the true reasons that they object to school choice:  If they are right, then what are they worrying about?  No new schools will open, no publicly educated kids will be able to afford or meet the admissions standards of those schools that do exist, so nothing will change.  But they seem really worried about school choice, which makes me think that they don't even believe their own arguments.

Up until the last month, I have been very happy with Amazon Prime, the service where you pay $80(?) for a year of free 2-day delivery.  I am sure I have ordered more stuff from Amazon because of it, and I know I order it faster because I don't wait weeks with things in the shopping cart to group shipments.   

However, in the last month, I have had not one but two orders show up in 7-8 days instead of two.  The first was a Batman Begins DVD, pre-ordered to ship on its release date (which it apparently did).  It was shipped USPS, so there was obviously no hope that it would arrive in 2 days.  The second was a new Nikon D50, which was back-ordered for about a week.

I never really got an explanation for the DVD shipment (maybe they don't apply Amazon Prime to pre-orders?), but I did get some explanation for the Nikon D50.  After writing Amazon, asking them why my item shipped UPS Ground with a 7-8 day delivery time instead of 2-day, which I had paid for with Amazon Prime and was listed as the shipment method on the order page, I got this response  (greetings, apologies, etc. omitted):

After your order leaves our fulfillment center, we may use any
appropriate ground or air shipping service necessary to ensure that
your order is delivered within one or two days, depending on the
delivery option you selected.  These delivery options do not
directly correspond to any carrier-branded shipping services.

I have researched the order in question, and it appears your package
will arrive on time.

We understand that customers who select Two-Day or One-Day delivery
want to receive their orders faster, and we will only use an
alternative shipping method when we know your order will arrive by
the estimated delivery date. 

This is obviously not very clear, but here is what I infer:  When the item was back-ordered, they gave me an updated delivery date range, something like "estimated delivery Nov 2-10".  What I infer from this email is that once they give you an estimated delivery date range, they feel like their obligation to ship 2-day is voided.  The only obligation they now feel they have is to hit that date range.  So, despite the fact that my camera shipped on Nov 2 and I paid for 2-day shipping, they feel they are meeting their obligations if it gets to me by Nov 10, the back end of their estimated range.

The conclusion is not to feel sorry for me that I have to wait to play with my new toy, but that this may be the first sign of a program that is being gutted under profit pressure.  When lawyers looking for loopholes take over the customer service and fulfillment department, things can go downhill pretty quickly.  Note that the "est. delivery date" dodge really gives them carte blanche to get out of the 2-day obligation any time they want, since they set the estimates. 

As a note, I tried to confirm my interpretation with Amazon and have been unsuccessful.  In the tradition of making itself one of the hardest companies in America to actually contact, one can't reply to their customer service email so I can't get an easy confirmation or clarification.  I actually got and called their customer service phone number, which you will never find on their site (write this down:  1-800-201-7575).  The person on the other end of the line was useless, not understanding that I wanted a clarification of the Amazon Prime rules rather than some resolution of a particular order.  She couldn't access the emails I had sent to customer service or had received from them, and didn't seem to understand Amazon Prime rules, so she was no help.  The only funny part was that as I kept trying to clarify what I wanted from her, she kept upping the gift certificate amount she offered me as compensation, despite the fact that I kept saying "I don't want money I want to know what the rules are".  I think I ended up with $20 without even wanting it.

Which makes me wonder why I can't reply to Amazon's customer service emails.  I don't have a problem getting customer support via email rather than the phone, but to make this work I really need to keep working through to resolution with the same person, and the Amazon process makes this impossible.

If you were to make a list of 10 people in the 20th Century who had the ability to rethink whole industries, you might come up with names like Sam Walton or Herb Kelleher.  One guy you might not think of, but who should make the list, is Bill James.  James has helped to single-handedly rethink the game of baseball, one of the great bastions of not-invented-here thinking.  Here is an interview of James that is pretty interesting.  Hat Tip to Cafe Hayek, who also has some thoughts on James the economist.

James sounds a lot like Hayek, and more recent authors like Virginia Postrel, when he says things like this:

If I were in politics and presented myself as a Republican, I would be
admired by Democrats by despised by my fellow Republicans. If I
presented myself as a Democrat, I would popular with Republicans but
jeered and hooted by the Democrats.
        I believe in a universe that is too complex for any of us to
really understand. Each of us has an organized way of thinking about
the world"”a paradigm, if you will"”and we need those, of course; you
can't get through the day unless you have some organized way of
thinking about the world. But the problem is that the real world is
vastly more complicated than the image of it that we carry around in
our heads. Many things are real and important that are not explained by
our theories"”no matter who we are, no matter how intelligent we are.
        As in politics we have left and right"”neither of which explains
the world or explains how to live successfully in the world"”in baseball
we have the analytical camp and the traditional camp, or the
sabermetricians against the scouts, however you want to characterize
it. I created a good part of the analytical paradigm that the
statistical analysts advocate, and certainly I believe in that paradigm
and I advocate it within the Red Sox front office. But at the same
time, the real world is too complicated to be explained by that
paradigm.

Or this, closer to the sports world:

Honestly, major league baseball"”and all sports"”would be far better off
if they would permit teams to do more to make one park distinctive from
another"”even so far as making the bases 85 feet apart in one park and
95 in another. Standardization is an evil idea. Let's pound everybody
flat, so that nobody has any unfair advantage. Diversity enriches us,
almost without exception. Who would want to live in a world in which
all women looked the same, or all restaurants were the same, or all TV
shows used the same format?
        People forget that into the 1960s, NBA basketball courts were
not all the same size--and the NBA would be a far better game today if
they had never standardized the courts. What has happened to the NBA
is, the players have gotten too large for the court. If they hadn't
standardized the courts, they would have eventually noticed that a
larger court makes a better game"”a more open, active game. And the same
in baseball. We would have a better game, ultimately, if the teams were
more free to experiment with different options.
        The only reason baseball didn't standardize its park
dimensions, honestly, is that at the time that standardization was a
dominant idea, they just couldn't. Because of Fenway and a few other
parks, baseball couldn't standardize its field dimensions in the
1960s"”and thus dodged a mistake that they would otherwise quite
certainly have made.
         Standardization destroys the ability to adapt. Take the high
mounds of the 1960s. We "standardized" that by enforcing the rules, and
I'm in favor of enforcing the rules, but suppose that the rules allowed
some reasonable variation in the height of the pitching mound? What
would have happened then would have been that, in the mid-1990s, when
the hitting numbers began to explode, teams would have begun to push
their pitching mounds up higher in order to offset the hitting
explosion. The game would have adapted naturally to prevent the home
run hitters from entirely having their own way. Standardization leads
to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.

I love it.  Maybe those guys who want to use baseball as a paradigm for life had something after all.

Five years ago, I probably would sooner have had my head held underwater in a toilet bowl than drive a Volvo.  This probably wasn't a fair bias, but they just looked so unappealing and seemed to embody "uncool" like no other car out there.

Anyway, things have changed, and Volvo is now offering several compelling vehicles.  A few months back I was looking for an SUV to replace my Lincoln Navigator and tote my kids around.  I had several complaints with my Navigator:

• It was too large and unwieldy around town
• The fit and finish was terrible.  It started rattling after about 8000 miles
• At $2 a gallon for gas, its terrible mileage started bankrupting me.
• Its cargo space was poorly engineered - the seats didn't fold down all the way and the space in the rear was not very usable.

I chose the XC90 for a number of reasons:

• It was the smallest, tightest SUV with a third seat in the back, allowing me to take up to five kids with me.  No other small SUV's had this third seat - you have to go to Suburbans or Navigators to find another car that has it
• The rear cargo area is superbly engineered.  Both the back seats fold down flat making a totally usable flat space all the way up to the front seats.
• The car maneuvers and parks really well, especially with the ultrasonic sensors when backing up.
• The fit and finish is really nice
• The car's exterior looks pretty good; its actually remarkably similar to the BMW SUV.
• The car handles pretty well, particularly with the AWD (all-wheel drive) and is a hell of lot better at cornering than the large SUV's. 
• Its very safe - it consistently ranks as safest car on the road - not just SUV but safest car period
• I got a good deal on it at the end of the last model year, though even then it certainly can't be called inexpensive

The car does have a couple of flaws.  The biggest one is the engine.  Both the 5 and the 6 cylinder options are fairly weak.  I ended up buying the smaller engine, because it was cheaper and the larger engine wasn't noticeably more powerful.  The pickup in the car is pretty mediocre, though I would not call it dangerous - there is enough power to get on the freeway without getting smushed.  However, it is disappointing that this small and under-powered engine is simultaneously weak on gas mileage.  I am getting about 16-17 mpg with the car, which is certainly better than my Navigator, but low given how much smaller the car is and how small the engine is.  I would have hoped it got at least 20.  This would probably be the perfect car if Honda or Toyota would make an engine for it (By the way, I heard on the radio the other day that Volvo is adding a V-8 option).

This is the third (and hopefully last) installment of a series of posts on how I went about buying my current business. You should also refer to part 1 and part 2. This installment will focus on options for financing the purchase of a small company and what kinds of legal documents you will need to complete the transaction.

Continue reading ‘Buying a Company, Part 3’ »