Coyote Blog

Laws that require the goodwill and ethical functioning of its participants, without oversight, always worry me.  The companion argument to this is when someone says (and this is popular among Democrats nowadays) all this infrastructure in the government that does not work will be fine when we get our own smart people running it.

It never, never works.  Here is yet another example:  All that extra post-9/11 investigatory power?  Trust us, we only use it on the bad guys.

The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as
terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state
and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police
chief acknowledged yesterday.

Police Superintendent Terrence B.
Sheridan revealed at a legislative hearing that the surveillance
operation, which targeted opponents of the death penalty and the Iraq
war, was far more extensive than was known when its existence was
disclosed in July....

Said the unrepentant leader of this efort:

"I don't believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government," he said.

Reading my history, disrupting the government was not the last thing they were trying to protect, it was the first thing. 

At first, I thought this was an interesting article in the battle of urban planners against suburban "sprawl."  Here is the voice of the often silent majority, who like suburbs and don't want a bunch of high-density mini-Manhattans :

Jones and his neighbors moved to Laveen's low-scale subdivisions in
hopes of finding a suburban life near the heart of the Valley, where
they could enjoy large, affordable homes a few miles southwest of
downtown Phoenix.

"We had the opportunity to buy a brand-new home we could afford, and
we had a view of downtown," Pacey says. "The potential to make this as
wonderful as other areas of Phoenix is huge."

The story has the typical highly-connected former politician turned developer (is there another kind?) using his unique access to his old zoning cronies to manipulate regulation for personal profit:

Then Paul Johnson, a former Phoenix mayor, proposed taking a mostly
vacant 27-acre parcel a few blocks east of Jones' home and building 517
apartments and townhouses on it.

The property was zoned for one house to the acre. It abuts a
two-lane road where the speed limit, when two nearby schools are in
session, is 15 mph. And the nearby intersection of 27th and Southern
avenues, which provides access to downtown Phoenix, is still controlled
by stop signs.

Schools in the neighborhood already were overcrowded, and residents
were concerned about the police's ability to keep up with calls for
service. Where were all these new people going to go?

"They've done so much building in Laveen that the infrastructure has
not kept up," says Jones, an auditor who had no previous involvement in
civic affairs.

Despite a resident outcry and opposition from Michael Nowakowski,
the councilman who had just been elected to represent the district, the
council approved the rezoning 7-1 on Dec. 19.

Johnson gets extra bonus points as the urban-chic villain, expressing the superiority of sitting in cafes to, say, having a back yard.

As a former mayor, Paul Johnson is familiar with residents' arguments against high-density developments.

"They feel that any time you have additional density, that it means
a lower quality," he says one morning over coffee at Biltmore Fashion
Park. "The counter to that is this."

Johnson gestures across Camelback Road to the high-rise apartments and townhomes near 24th Street.

"I look out across the street, and there's a lot of density there,"
he says. "But I'm also sitting in a pretty nice cafe. I have a nice
place to sit. And there's a lot of other people here who think it's a
nice place."

But it turns out that there are no good guys in this story, as is often the case for your poor libertarian correspondent.  Because, the opponents of such development are turning to the ballot box, converting property decisions from individual ones made by the property owner to group decisions made on election day.  What can be built on this particular property may well be decided at the ballot box, just as I discussed another parcel of land whose fate will be decided not by its owner, but at town elections in November.

Sometimes, the reaction to government control is a bid for de-regulation.  But more often, it merely results in a scrap for power, as parties ignore the question of whether the government power should exist at all, and instead fight over who gets to wield it.

For the most part, it has been up to city councils to decide how
much density one neighborhood can tolerate. If Jones is successful,
they could lose some of that power.

"It speaks to the age-old dilemma of representative democracy versus
direct democracy," said Paul Lewis, an assistant professor of political
science at ASU. "There's always an issue with land use because what
might be in the overall interest of the city might still be seen as a
detriment to its immediate neighborhood."

This is all very depressing.  No mention of any age-old question between individual rights and government power.  For these guys, the "city" and the "neighborhood" are somehow real entities with more rights than actual people. 

For centuries we have had a perfectly serviceable approach for determining who gets to decide what gets built on a piece of land:  ownership.  If one wanted to control a property, she/he bought it.  But the desire to control property without really owning it is a strong one, and a driving force for much of government regulation.

One of the things I have always found frustrating and confusing is the number of folks who call themselves "civil libertarians" who simultaneously have not problem with economic and nanny-state hyper-regulation.  In fact, ACLU types are often at the leading edge of calls for more regulation on safety or prices or property or whatever.

I have never been able to understand how the two are not inextricably linked.  How can bright-line protections of freedoms of choice and action be essential in one sphere of our lives but unimportant in others?  Here is just one example of how they work together, from none other than our egregious Sheriff, Joe Arpaio:

Arrest records from crime sweeps conducted by the Maricopa County
Sheriff's Office add substantial weight to claims that deputies used
racial profiling to pull Latino motorists over to search for illegal
immigrants....

even when the patrols were held in mostly White areas such as
Fountain Hills and Cave Creek, deputies arrested more Latinos than
non-Latinos, the records show. In fact, deputies arrested among the
highest percentage of Latinos when patrols were conducted in mostly
White areas.

On the arrest records, deputies frequently cited minor traffic
violations such as cracked windshields and non-working taillights as
the reason to stop drivers.

"These are penny-ante offenses that (police) almost always ignore. This
is telling you this is being used to get at something else, and I think
that something else is immigration enforcement against Hispanic
people," Harris said....

Brian Withrow, an associate professor of criminal justice at Wichita
State University, said racial profiling is very difficult to prove.

States have thousands of traffic laws on the books, so police can
almost always find a reason to stop someone. The U.S. Supreme Court has
ruled that police can legally use minor traffic violations as a
"pretext" to stop someone they suspect of other crimes. Withrow said
the only way to prove racial profiling is by looking at large numbers
of traffic stops to see if "patterns and practices" of selective
enforcement exist. Otherwise, it's difficult to tell whether police are
stopping motorists for legitimate reasons or merely based on race or
ethnicity.

Withrow agreed that the arrest records alone are inconclusive. But
he found it troubling that they show that Latinos were arrested more
frequently than non-Latinos even when the patrols took place in mostly
White areas such as Fountain Hills.

"That tells me that that is who is being targeted," Withrow said.

Reason has been on top of the LA crackdown on bacon-dog sales from mobile carts for some time.  Recently, the police stormed in and confiscated a number of vendors' inventory and push carts.  OK, its bad enough that bacon product sales have been deemed a threat to the Republic.  But what freaked me out is that the police did not impound the carts but rather junked them (pictures here).  So where is the due process?  If the police are found to have acted precipitously in arresting these folks, if they are found to be not guilty for whatever reason, their property is still gone forever.  This is roughly equivilant to having your car crushed in a mobile hydraulic press within minutes of being given a speeding ticket.  I wonder how many of these carts, which likely represent a huge investment relative to the investment capital these small business people possess, are collateral for loans?

I thought this was a pretty good video -- why even the innocent should not talk to the police.  Learn to love your fifth amendment rights.  He demonstrates that even the innocent can make statements that can be used to wrongly convict them.

From the AZ Republic:

A 27-year-old Avondale man has been arrested on suspicion of causing
a massive power outage last summer in Goodyear's Estrella community.

The outage knocked out power to nearly 4,000 homes for 19 hours June 18, 2007, when Goodyear's high reached 115 degrees....

According to police, officers arrested the suspect on a tip from the
public. He reportedly told investigators he cut down the pole because
he enjoyed the sparks it made.

The government claims that it is important to crack down on gambling because people who gamble might do themselves financial harm.  Of course, just like the teenager who is thrown in jail because it is better for him than smoking marijuana, so goes the case of Salvatore Culosi:

"¦ Salvatore Culosi "¦ was a 37-year old optometrist in the
Washington, D.C. suburb of Fairfax, Virginia. According to friends,
Culosi was a wealthy, self-made man. He was easygoing and friendly, a
guy who enjoyed his success.

He was also a small-time gambler. Culosi and his friends
regularly met at bars in the area to watch sports, and frequently
wagered on the outcomes of games. The wagers weren't insignificant "”
$50, $100, sometimes more on a given afternoon. But the small circle of
friends also had the means to back up their wagers. No one was betting
the mortgage, here"¦

Fairfax police detective David J. Baucom met Culosi in a bar
one evening last October, befriended him, and was soon making wagers
himself"¦ Baucom began upping the ante, encouraging Culosi to wager
larger sums than what the friends were used to"¦

Baucom eventually encouraged Culosi to wager at least $2,000
in a single day, the lower threshold under which Culosi could be
charged under state law with "conducting an illegal gambling
operation." On January 24 of this year, Detective Baucom assembled the
Fairfax County SWAT team, and marched off to Culosi's home to arrest
him.

According to press accounts, police affidavits, and the
resulting investigation by the Fairfax prosecutor's office, Baucom
called Culosi that evening, and told him he'd be by to collect his
winnings. With the SWAT team at the ready just behind him, Baucom
waited outside Culosi's home in an SUV. As Culosi emerged from the
doorway, clad only in a t-shirt and jeans, SWAT officer Deval Bullock's
finger apparently slipped to the trigger of his Heckler & Koch MP5
semiautomatic weapon, already aimed at the unarmed Culosi.

The gun fired, releasing a bullet that entered Culosi's side,
then ripped through his chest and struck his heart, killing him
instantly.

I got a lot of email this weekend telling me why I was short-sighted in supporting the Supreme Court's decision on habeas corpus rights for detainees.   First, I will observe that I have great readers, because all of the email was respectful.  Second, I will say that I am open to being convinced that I am wrong here, but I have not been so convinced yet. 

I got a lot of email about past precedents and settled law on this.  What I don't seem to be communicating well is that I understand and agree with past precedent in the context of other conflicts, but that the concept of "combatant" as currently used by the GWB administration is so different than in the past as to defy precedent.  The folks sitting in Gitmo are not uniformed Wermacht officers captured in the Falais Gap.  They are combatants generally not because they were caught firing on our troops but because the Administration says they are combatants.  New situations often require new law, and as I said before, when in doubt, I will always side for protection of individual rights against the government.

I'm not going to get into an anecdotal battle over the nature of individual Gitmo detainees.  I can easily start rattling off folks who were detained for extended periods for no good reason, and I am sure one can rattle off names of hard core bad guys who none of us would be happy to have walking the streets.  The place where reasonable people disagree is what to do with this mixed bag.  Gitmo supporters argue that it is better to lock up a few good guys to make sure the really bad guys are off the street.  I would argue in turn that this is exactly NOT how our legal system works.  For good reasons, our system has always been tilted such that the greater harm is locking up the innocent rather than releasing the guilty.

It may be a faulty analogy, but I considered the other day what would have happened had the US government taken the same position with active communist part members in the 1950's.  Would it really have been that hard to have applied the same logic that has a number of Gitmo detainees locked away for years to "communist sympathizers?"

I think this Administration, time and time again, has exhibited a strong streak of laziness when it comes to following process.  It doesn't like bothering to go through channels to get warrants, even when those warrants are usually forthcoming.  And it doesn't want to bother facing a judge over why detainees are in captivity, something that every local DA and police officer have to deal with every day.

Update: More, from Cato and George Will, here.  There are certain people who I find it to be a sort of intellectual confirmation or confidence builder to find them on the other side of an issue from me.  John McCain is quickly falling into to this camp for me, at least vis a vis individual rights questions.

Dibor Roberts was convicted, somehow, for being attacked by a police officer.

The jury in the Dibor Roberts case returned a verdict that I can only describe as contemptible, finding her guilty
of resisting arrest and felony flight from a law officer as a result of
a brutal attack upon her by Sgt. Jeff Newnum of the Yavapai County
Sheriff's Department.

Greg Nix of Larson newspapers has an interesting insight,
suggesting that the trial could have come down to the prosecution
painting a picture for the jury of "'angry black woman' v. 'respectable
white officer.'" He adds, "I grew up in the South so running the 'angry
black woman' strategy is nothing new and generally works for getting
convictions."

Perhaps he's right, and the decision was
essentially racist. Or maybe the prosecution succeeded in picking
jurors who bow down and bang their heads on the floor every time they
see a uniformed government employee. Or the result could have resulted
from a little bit of both factors.

Yavapai County Sheriff Steve Waugh tells motorists that may be concerned with the authenticity of a police officer asking them to pull over at night in a deserted area that they should continue on to a more public, well lighted place.  Sgt. Jeff Newnum of the same police department says that he would give his wife the same advice.   There have been several well-publicized incidences in Arizona of people being attacked by criminals impersonating an officer making a traffic stop.

But when Dibor Roberts attempted to follow this advice, officer Newnum ran her car off the road, broke the window of her car with his nightstick, and grabbed the cell phone she was using to call 911.  Now, it is, incredibly, Ms. Roberts who is on trial for her actions.   All because she was driving 15 miles an hour over the limit on a deserted rural road.  The post title comes from the Sgt Newnum's explanation in court of his aggressive tactics.

Kevin Drum is discussing a book by Larry Bartels that argues the bottom third of the US population (as measured by income) are disenfranchised, as their preferences seem to have no discernible effect on legislative votes.  I have not read the book, but I find this an astounding assertion on its face, particularly given that the US government is nearly entirely paid for by the other 2/3.  We exploiters don't seem to be doing a very good job of taking advantage of our oligarchy.  (By the way, if "oppressed" is defined as having one's preferences have no impact on Congressmen, then add us libertarians into the oppressed).

On the other hand, I would say that if an affluent neighborhood had 50,000 of its citizens per month randomly stopped and frisked in the street, we might see a little more pressure for police and prosecutorial reform.  I just finished Cop in the Hood, in which Peter Moskos spends a good portion of the book discussing these same issues of probable cause and street searches.

Part number whatever in a series.  Today's danger to consumers and the Republic is:  people offering to drive others around without a license.

A man who said he thought he was just helping a woman in need is accused of running an illegal taxi service.  Miami-Dade
County's Consumer Services Department has slapped Rosco O'Neil with
$2,000 worth of fines, but O'Neil claims he is falsely accused.....

The 78-year-old said he was walking into a Winn-Dixie to get some
groceries when he was approached by a woman who said she needed a ride.

"She asked me, 'Do I do a service?'" O'Neil said.

"I told her no. She said, 'I need help getting home.'

"O'Neil told the woman if she was still there when he finished his shopping, he would give her a ride. She was, so he did.

As
it turned out, the woman was an undercover employee with the consumer
services department targeting people providing illegal taxi services.

"She
said the reason she targeted him (is because) she saw him sitting in
his car for a few minutes," said Ellen Novodeletsky, O'Neil's attorney.

After
O'Neil dropped off the woman, police surrounded him, issued him two
citations and impounded his minivan. On top of the fees, it cost O'Neil
an additional $400 to retrieve his minivan from the impound lot.

There are no prior complaints that O'Neil was providing illegal transportation for a fee.

I don't care if he was running a business or being a good Samaritan -- I see no possible reason that this type of transaction should be illegal.

This post from TJIC, which is really about something entirely different, mentions that the price of cocaine has been dropping sharply over the last 10 years.  This is something I have heard police officials lament as well.

Does the profit motive rock or what?  The largest and most powerful government in the world stations armed men and ships around the country.  It has a legal system in place with huge penalties that has of late been nearly entirely dedicated to drug enforcement.  The US has even subverted 200 year old Constitutional restrictions on searches and property seizures (the Patriot Act is mostly used for drug, not terrorism, actions).  All to stop the importation of certain valuable substances.  And even so, the human mind is powerful enough to subvert all of these restrictions and bring in so much supply that the price continues to drop.

Al Gore believes that alternative energy efforts in the US are being subverted by the oil companies:

Apparently, according to Gore, the oil companies drive up prices
reducing supply and then depress them in a telling pattern. As soon as
the political will swells to a light boil, the companies reduce
prices/increase supply.

Really?  Independent drug traders are able to subvert a million government officials with guns to keep cocaine prices low, but Exxon, with a 5% market share (at most) in oil, is able to hold the line on oil supply?

Sure.  In 1972 and 1978 there were a series of oil price shocks (to real levels about where they are today) that convinced everyone that oil prices would keep going up and up and that oil would run out within a few decades.  Of course, in about 1984 oil prices crashed, and stayed down for almost 20 years.  Depending on how you date it, it took oil supply development between 6 and 12 years after the price signal to flood the world with oil, and that was in an environment with price controls and windfall profit taxes that reduced development incentives. 

Right now, we are about 5 years in to the current oil price spike.  Go long at your own risk.

More on supply and demand vs. price manipulation in oil here.  More on Al Gore, including a fisking of his solar plan, here.

Update: Of course, the Democrats in Congress are doing everything possible to keep oil prices up.  If I wanted to ensure high oil prices, I would 1.  Kill incentives to increase supply, perhaps with a "windfall" profits tax and 2.  Put the most promising potential new exploration areas off-limits to new development.  Congressional scorecard:  #2 is in place, and both Obama and Hillary and Pelosi are proposing #1.

Update #2:   Another thought on Gore's statement:  The boom-bust
patterns in oil are characteristic of nearly every other commodity out
there, which therefore presupposes that if oil prices are the result of
manipulation, then every other commodity must be as well since their
prices demonstrate the same patterns.  We see these patterns in
commodities that politicians have never even heard of and in which they
have never thought to exercise their "political will."  (political will
in this context defined as use of government force against a segment of
the populace).

A reasonable person might
suppose that the surge in prices followed by a drop a number of years
later is better explained by the time delay in increasing oil
production after oil prices spike. In many ways, Al's theory is simply
delusional.  If your friend started trying to tell you, in all
seriousness, that every action Microsoft takes is actually aimed at
thwarting him personally, you would think him insane.  But this is
effectively Gore's argument, showing the immensity of the politician's
ego.  Oil prices move not because of supply and demand, but because of
us politicians.  Every tick up and down is carefully managed to thwart
us brave Congressmen!

When a politician describes price signals as mainly influencing political actions, rather than the actions of free producers and consumers, they are probably a socialist.

Apparently, the State of Texas is still trying to figure out what to do with those 400+ kids rounded up at the YFZ Ranch.  I don't really know enough about the case to comment on whether these kids were victims or not, though from reading this the evidence looks thin.

Here is my concern.  About 15 years ago I sat on a jury in Dallas.  The particular case was a child abuse case, with the state alleging a dad had sexually assaulted his daughter.  The whole case took about 3 days to present and it took the jury about 2 hours to find the guy innocent, and it took that long only because of one holdout.

The reason we found him innocent so quickly is because it became clear that the state had employed Janet Reno tactics (the Miami method, I think it was called) to put pressure on the child over a period of 6 months to break her out of her position that her dad had done nothing.  (By the way, is anyone else flabbergasted that Janet Reno, of all people, is on the board of the Innocence Project?).

Anyway, the dad was first arrested when the teenage babysitter told police that the daughter was behaving oddly and it seemed just like a story she had seen on Oprah.   Note, the babysitter did not witness any abuse nor did the girl mention any abuse to her.  She just was acting up one night.  At trial, the babysitter said her dream was to have this case propel her to an Oprah appearance of her own (I kid you not).

On that evidence alone, the state threw the dad in jail and starting a 6 month brainwashing and programming process aimed at getting the girl to say her dad abused her.  They used a series of negative reinforcements whenever the girl said dad was innocent and offered positive reinforcements if she would say dad had said X or Y.  Eventually, the little girl broke and told the state what they wanted to hear, but quickly recanted and held to the original story of her dad's innocent, all the way through the trial.

So, as quickly as we could, we set the dad free  (the last jury holdout, interestingly, was a big Oprah fan).  No one ever compensated for states abuse of the dad, and perhaps even worse, the states psychological abuse of his daughter.  I know nothing of what became of them, but I hope they are all OK.  I guess its lucky he did not get convicted, because while the Innocence project has freed a lot of people in Dallas, it sure is not going to work on this type of case with Janet Reno on its board.

Coming back to the YFZ case, I am worried that the state seems to be wanting to hold the kids for as long as possible, presumably to apply these methods to start getting kids to adopt the stories of abuse prosecutors want to hear.  In some ways, the YFZ case is even more dangerous from a prosecutorial abuse standpoint.  That is because there are a large number of people who think that strong religious beliefs of any type are, well, weird, and therefore are quicker to believe that other weird behavior may also be present.

I am working on a longer post on Sheriff Joe Arpaio's sweeps through Hispanic neighborhoods to round up the usual suspects (Mayor Phil Gordon has asked the feds to investigate these practices, which I hope they will do).

But this one is just weird.  Apparently Phoenix tax money is being used by Arpaio to train Honduran police, in a program that makes sense (from a Phoenix point of view) to no one.  Sheriff Joe watchers will enjoy his numerous nonsensical explanations, though the last one probably is the correct one.  For those outside of Phoenix, sit back and enjoy the weirdness -- its the only consolation we here in Arizona get for having the worst and most abusive sheriff in the country.

Explanation One:  Arpaio looks to small Latin American countries as models for his police force

Sheriff's officials told the county Board of Supervisors that the
Honduran National Police possess the "intelligence data, knowledge and
cultural experiences to benefit the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office."

Explanation Two:  We can't tell you, because it would endanger Sheriffs' lives (this is an Arpaio oldie but goodie):

discussing efforts in Honduras could endanger the lives of law-enforcement officers in both countries....revealing details could put lives at risk

Explanation Three:  Honduras supplied millions of photos for Arpaio's facial recognition software (yeah, I know non-Phoenicians, this is weird)

The sheriff's facial-recognition software program is supposed to be among the biggest beneficiaries of the Honduras engagement....When Arpaio was first confronted about the department's trips to
Honduras, he said the agency had received "millions" of photos from
Honduran officials.

Explanation Four:  Its a RICO thing, so we can't tell you (at least, it uses RICO funds)

The agency has spent more than $120,000 on Sheriff's Office employee
salaries in Honduras, and an additional $30,000 in RICO funds seized
from criminals. And some of the trips occurred during a time period
where the Sheriff's Office overspent its overtime budget by nearly $1
million.

Explanation Five:  We can't talk about it, because that would open up public officials to scrutiny for their actions:

The Sheriff's Office will not grant interviews to explain how and why
the program was started and what the benefits are to Maricopa County,
because officials say discussing the program fuels criticism

I observed a while back that "Eliot Spitzer has been brought down for a crime most libertarians don't
think should be a crime, by federal prosecutors who should not be
involved even if it were a crime, and using techniques, such as
enlisting banks as government watchdogs of private behavior, that
stretch the Fourth Amendment almost out of recognizable shape."

Megan McArdle makes a pretty good point about the last part:

I'm not distressed to hear that the Feds were spying on Eliot Spitzer.
No, not because I don't like the man, but because I think maybe we should
spy on our politicians, all the time. No probable cause, you say? I
fling back at you Mark Twain's observation that America only has one
distinct criminal class: Congress. . . . I think it's entirely
appropriate that the anti-corruption police watch politicians like
hawks. They've chosen public office; that conveys a lot of
responsibility to the public, including assuring them that your votes
aren't being bought outright. I also think that politicians, when
caught in a crime, should automatically get the maximum penalty; if
they think the law is such a good idea, they ought to suffer heartily
when they disregard it.

When you convert the police from crime solvers to revenue generators, this is a pretty logical outcome.  Hat tip to a reader.  A man has his cars stolen, the police ticket them and tow them but refuse to return them to him.

Wow, this officer is a total loser.  Absolutely out of control.  Hand-held video recorders may well be the greatest defense yet against the over-bearing state.  No wonder many police organizations want to ban videotaping of police officers.  Sometimes I watch "The Wire" and wonder, even as a libertarian, if the government and police suckage portrayed there is exaggerated.  And then I see this ... in Baltimore now less!

Update:  The guy in the video likely supports this site.

From Disloyal Opposition:

L.A. councilman Dennis Zine is urging a proposal in the wake of the
pop star's latest psychiatric emergency that would implement a 20-yard
"personal safety zone" around celebrities after Spears' ambulance had
to be surrounded by police cars and helicopters late last month to
prevent the paparazzi from snapping photos of the singer en route to
the hospital. ...

The tentatively termed "Britney Law" would
have the right to confiscate all profits from any photograph taken
without signed consent within the bubble of safety around any celebrity.

I really like the HBO series "the Wire" about the Baltimore police force and the pursuit of various drug gangs, which I have been catching up on via DVD.  While season 2 and 3 were not quite as good as 1, they still are quite good.

In many respects, this is a very libertarian series in outlook.  A central part of the show is that government officials nearly universally do wrong and wasteful things.  However, only a few of them are overtly corrupt.  The vast majority are regular folks responding rationally to the types of incentives government employees are given and which result in really bad outcomes.

In fact, I may just be screwed up from too many years in a past life working on corporate performance metrics, but at some level the show is all about incentives.  Even within the drug gangs, there is an interesting interplay between Avon and Stringer due mainly to the fact that though they face roughly the same circumstances and inputs, one has a goal of making money while the other has a goal of reputation and street cred.  I can see now why the Freakonomics blog discusses the show so often.

Oh, and the season 3 experiment with effective drug legalization is also interesting.

Highly recommended.

Unfortunately, Arizona Sheriffs, including out own egregious Joe Arpaio here in Phoenix, still have a wild west mentality:

On the night of July 29, 2007, Dibor Roberts,
a Senegalese-born American citizen living in Cottonwood, Arizona, was
driving home from her job as a nurse's aide at an assisted living
center located in the Village of Oak Creek, an unincorporated community
near Sedona. Along Beaverhead Flat Road, an unlit, unpopulated route
through the desert, she suddenly saw flashing lights in her rearview
mirror. Fearful of stopping on a deserted stretch of pavement,
especially in light of reports she'd heard of criminals impersonating police,
she decided to proceed to a populated area before stopping the car, the
nearest such area being Cornville, an unincorporated settlement along
the road to Cottonwood. She slowed her car to acknowledge the flashing
lights and continued to drive. Her decision wasn't especially unusual
-- in fact, it's recommended by some police departments....

On Cornville Road, well before the populated area, Sheriff's
Sergeant Jeff Neunum apparently tired of waiting for Roberts to reach a
settled area. While he was, in fact, a police officer, he now proceeded
to justify every fear an American may have about rogue cops. He raced
his cruiser in front of Roberts's car, forcing her off the road. He
then smashed her driver's-side window with his baton and grabbed a
cellphone she was using to check his identity. Accounts vary at this
point. While police deny it, the press has reported that Neunum dragged
Roberts from her vehicle, threw her to the ground, and handcuffed her
while driving his knee into her back.

All of this because she was going 15 miles over the speed limit on a deserted rural road.

TJIC has a disgusting story of the state legislature passing a law just to bail out one guy who could not do well on his civil service tests but had friends in high places, vaulting him from 623 to 1 on the waiting list  (if only I could get the same law for me and security lines at airports).

Now, it is always possible to find anecdotes of government patronage, but I thought this quote from the Boston Globe about the extent of such help-one-person laws was incredible:

A Globe review found that 40 of the 218 state laws passed in 2007
provide benefits to specific individuals by name. Thirty allowed
employees of certain state agencies to donate sick days to particular
colleagues, and three granted retirement benefits to certain public
employees. Six exempted particular police and firefighter applicants
from maximum age requirements, allowing them to take civil service
tests and apply for municipal jobs at an older age.

If each of these is a worthy goal, then change the law to allow everyone to do it, not just your pals.

My company, as I have written before, gets hosed on unemployment insurance in states like California where the government does nothing to police cheating.  Many of my seasonal employees take vacations during the winter, but draw unemployment from California because the state has absolutely no interest in really checking to see if they are looking for work (which is a legal requirement of drawing unemployment).

This week I received the  most amazing ruling from California on unemployment.  If you don't understand how it works, the state taxes me a percentage of my payroll in the state as unemployment insurance premiums.  The rate is set so that the premiums I pay are about equal to the payments my ex-employees receive.  This means that the rate can adjust up and down, and also means that any incremental payouts are eventually paid by my company.  The rules are that the employee must have been terminated, not voluntary quit, and can't have been terminated for cause (i.e. theft) though in the latter case states like California give employees a huge benefit of the doubt (so huge, that I have never been able to prove "cause" to their satisfaction, and end up paying the unemployment for people who stole from me).

So I got this notice this week:

The claimant quit your employment on his/her doctor's advice.   A leave of absence was not available or would not have resolved the problem.  Available information shows that the claimant had good cause for leaving work [the claimant admits in a second document to having had a motorcycle accident on his own time]

Great.  The state has agreed to exactly the facts as we submitted them.  Victory at last!  Or not:

Your reserve account will be subject to charges.

An employee of mine has a motorcycle accident on his own time, and my company has to pay his wages while he is hurt?  Why?  Because we were the nearest people at hand to grab the money from?  Who elected me this guy's parent?

Another milestone has been reached in DRM lameness:  Western Digital, which I considered, at least until today, to be the clear leader in the hard drive wars, has instituted DRM on its hard drives:

Western Digital's 1TB MyBook external hard drives won't share media files over network connections (UPDATE: Don't install the "required" client software! See workaround below). From the product page:

"Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the most common
audio and video file types cannot be shared with different users using
WD Anywhere Access."

It doesn't matter what
the files are: If you try to share these formats over a network,
Western Digital assumes not just that you're a criminal, but that it is
its job to police users. You see, MP3, DivX, AVI, WMV and Quicktime files are copy-protected formats.

Here is the list of 30 file extensions the hard drive won't let you share.  It does not matter if those mp3 files are just dictation files you created yourself using an MP3 recorder -- you still can't share them.  Really lame.  Why WD feels the need to get into the business of policing this stuff is beyond me.  Can you imagine the product meeting.  Gee, I think we should jump into the DRM fray, even though we don't receive a dime from the media companies and it will really piss all of our customers off.  Corry Doctorow also comments.

It's been a while since I posted any tort pr0n, so here are a couple of juicy onces:

From West Virginia:

Joe Meadows was drunk. Very drunk. 0.296 percent blood-alcohol content
drunk, 12 or 13 beers worth. Fortunately, he didn't drive in that
state. Unfortunately, he chose to sleep it off by resting under a
parked 18-wheel truck. More unfortunately, the driver, Doug Rader, who
didn't check to see whether there might be drunks lying under his truck
at 1:40 a.m., ran over Meadows. Rader had EMT training, and was able to
save Meadows's life, but Meadows lost a leg, and sued both the truck
company and the store that owned the parking lot. A Kanawha County jury
decided that Meadows was only a third responsible for his injury, which
means he "only" gets two thirds of the three million dollars they
awarded.

And from Florida:

"A police officer has sued the family of a 1-year-old boy who nearly
drowned because she slipped and injured a knee responding to their
9-1-1 rescue call." Andrea Eichhorn, a police sergeant in Casselberry,
Florida, responded to the pool accident, and now "claims the boy's
family left a puddle of water on the floor, causing her fall during the
rescue efforts. She broke her knee and missed two months of work." So
she's suing the Cosmillo family. "It's a situation where the Cosmillos
have caused these problems, brought them on themselves, then tried to
play the victim," says her attorney, David Heil. Joey Cosmillo, the
infant in question, suffered severe brain damage and lives in a nursing
home now.

West Virginia and Florida -- who'd have thought it?