Coyote Blog

Years ago I had an argument with my mother-in-law, who is a classic Massachusetts liberal  (by the way, we get along fine -- I have no tolerance for the notion that one can't be friends with someone who has a different set of politics).  The argument was very clarifying for me and centered around the notion of coercion.

I can't entirely remember what the argument was about, but I think it was over government-mandated retirement programs.  Should the government be forcing one to save, and if so, should the government do the investment of those savings (ie as they do in Social Security) even if this means substantially lower returns on investment?

The interesting part was we both used the word "arrogant."  I said it was arrogant for a few people in government to assume they could make better decisions for individuals.  She said it was arrogant for me to assume that all those individuals out there had the same training and capability that I had to be able to make good decisions for themselves.

And at the end of the day, that is essentially the two sides of the argument over government paternalism boiled down to its core.  I thought coercion was immoral, she thought letting unprepared people make sub-optimal decisions for themselves when other people know better is immoral.  As with most of my one on one arguments I have with people, I left it at that.  When I argue face to face with real people, I have long ago given up trying to change their minds and generally settle for being clear where our premises diverge.

I am reminded of all this reading Bruce McQuain's take on Sarah Conly's most recent attempt to justify coercive paternalism (the latter is not an unfair title I have saddled her with -- it's from her last book).  Reading this I had a couple of other specific thoughts

1. I am amazed how much Conly and folks like her can write this stuff without addressing the fundamental contradiction at its core -- if we are so bad making decisions for ourselves, why do we think the same human beings suddenly become good at it when they join government?  She would argue, I guess, that there are a subset of super-humans who are able to do what most of us can't, but how in a democracy do we thinking-impaired people know to vote for one of the supermen?  Or if you throw our democracy, what system has ever existed that selected for leaders who make good decisions for the peasants vs., say, selected for people who were good generals. 
2. Is there any difference between Conly's coercive paternalism and Kipling's white man's burden?  Other than the fact that the supermen and the mass of sub-optimizing schlubs are not differentiated by race?  It's fascinating to see Progressives who are traditionally energized by hatred of colonialism rejuvinating one of imperialism's core philosophical justifications.

Well, as promised, I wanted to post our race day picture from the half marathon.  This was done for my daughter's benefit, who set the goal to run a half marathon about 6 months ago and figured the promise of a Disney trip would be incentive to stay on top of her training.

She schlepped that tutu and that tiara for the whole 13.1, walking only at a couple of the last water stops.  This event was 95% women, and attracts a LOT of folks who really don't run the whole thing, so it was a great place for her to begin.  It's also pretty laid back, as there are actually character photo ops every mile, though we skipped those.  I have not seen our time, but we probably did about 2:45.  That's 20 minutes worse than my time five years ago -- it would be nice to say I was holding back to stay with my daughter but in fact she pulled me through the last mile.  Muscles and cardio were fine but the knees and ankles really can't take it any more.  But I proudly wore this bad boy all day.

If you are interested in this sort of thing, it was a great event, going through two of their parks.  The only problem is that it has to take place before the parks are open, so we had to set the wake-up call for 3:15 AM.  Uggh.  The butt-crack of dawn, as my sister calls it.

And yes, I did help make the tutu, with the aid of this video.  It is videos like that that remind me there are whole worlds of which I am virtually unaware.   Note the number of views - 1.4 million, on making a tutu.

I have been watching the old PBS documentary series (in that Ken Burns style but I don't think by Ken Burns) and found this an interesting story of government policy fail that I had never heard much about.  Much like segregated train and bus service, racial redlining that is commonly blamed on private enterprise in fact began as government policy

Government policies began in the 1930s with the New Deal's Federal Mortgage and Loans Program. The government, along with banks and insurance programs, undertook a policy to lower the value of urban housing in order to create a market for the single-family residences they built outside the city.

The Home Owners' Loan Corporation, a federal government initiative established during the early years of the New Deal went into Brooklyn and mapped the population of all 66 neighborhoods in the Borough, block by block, noting on their maps the location of the residence of every black, Latino, Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Polish family they could find. Then they assigned ratings to each neighborhood based on its ethnic makeup. They distributed the demographic maps to banks and held the banks to a certain standard when loaning money for homes and rental. If the ratings went down, the value of housing property went down.

From the perspective of a white city dweller, nothing that you had done personally had altered the value of your home, and your neighborhood had not changed either. The decline in your property's value came simply because, unless the people who wanted to move to your neighborhood were black, the banks would no longer lend people the money needed to move there. And, because of this government initiative, the more black people moved into your neighborhood, the more the value of your property fell.

The Home Owners' Loan Corporation finished their work in the 1940s. In the 1930s when it started, black Brooklynites were the least physically segregated group in the borough. By 1950 they were the most segregated group; all were concentrated in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, which became the largest black ghetto in the United States. After the Home Owners Loan Corp began working with local banks in Brooklyn, it worked with them in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens.

The state also got involved in redlining. (Initially, redlining literally meant the physical process of drawing on maps red lines through neighborhoods that were to be refused loans and insurance policies based on income or race. Redlining has come to mean, more generally, refusing to serve a particular neighborhood because of income or race.) State officials created their own map of Brooklyn. They too mapped out the city block by block. But this time they looked for only black and Latino individuals.

The academics interviewed in the series argued that nearly every black ghetto in the country was created in the 1930's by this program.

The government just sent me a letter informing me that it is time, in the name of creating a race-blind society, to categorize all my employees by race, count them up, and report everyone's color to the government.

As an aside, I found this bit of privacy reassurance to employees to be pretty funny.  This is suggested language for an employer to use when asking, "um, by the way, can you tell me what race you are?"**

"The employer is subject to certain governmental recordkeeping and reporting requirements for the administration of civil rights laws and regulations. In order to comply with these laws, the employer invites employees to voluntarily self-identify their race or ethnicity. Submission of this information is voluntary and refusal to provide it will not subject you to any adverse treatment. The information obtained will be kept confidential and may only be used in accordance with the provisions of applicable laws, executive orders, and regulations, including those that require the information to be summarized and reported to the federal government for civil rights enforcement. When reported, data will not identify any specific individual."

So the private data you share will only be used if Congress writes a law, the President issues an executive order, or a bureaucrat writes a rule saying they can use it.  And this is comforting?  Our President claims the right to assassinate Americans by executive order, for God sakes, and this paragraph makes people feel better about categorizing themselves with the government in ways that, in the past, have been used by numerous governments in a variety of pogroms.

** I do not allow my supervisors to even ask.  We just do our best from our knowledge of all the employees.  My vision of the relationship I have with my employees does not include inquiring about their race (or religion, or sexual orientation) in an official capacity.  It also, does not encompass testing their bodily fluids, which is why I refuse to bid on management contracts that require drug testing of our employees.

This article from the Chicago Tribune on fire retardants has everything, from regulations that benefit a small industry group to tort lawyers effectively forcing the propagation of a bad standard to playing the race card and the "for the children" card in policy debates.   Here is a bit of history I did not know:

These chemicals are ubiquitous not because federal rules demand it. In fact, scientists at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission have determined that the flame retardants in household furniture aren't effective, and some pose unnecessary health risks.

The chemicals are widely used because of an obscure rule adopted by California regulators in 1975. Back then, a state chemist devised an easy-to-replicate burn test that didn't require manufacturers to set furniture on fire, an expensive proposition.

The test calls for exposing raw foam to a candle-like flame for 12 seconds. The cheapest way to pass the test is to add flame retardants to the foam inside cushions.

But couches aren't made of foam alone. In a real fire, the upholstery fabric, typically not treated with flame retardants, burns first, and the flames grow big enough that they overwhelm even fire-retardant foam, scientists at two federal agencies have found.

Nevertheless, in the decades since that rule went into effect, lawyers have regularly argued that their burn-victim clients would have been spared if only their sofas had been made with California foam. Faced with the specter of these lawsuits — and the logistical challenge of producing separate products just for California — many manufacturers began using flame retardant foam across their product lines.

The "if only the manufacturer had used technology X, little Sarah would not be dead" argument should be very familiar to readers of Walter Olson's blog.  Part II of the story argues that the Tobacco industry helped reinforce this story to shift the blame for fires started by cigarettes to the furniture (can't any of this be, you know, the person's fault who dropped burning items onto flammable items?)

It also, by the way, has plenty of elements of environmental panic in it.  For example:

"When we're eating organic, we're avoiding very small amounts of pesticides," said Arlene Blum, a California chemist who has fought to limit flame retardants in household products. "Then we sit on our couch that can contain a pound of chemicals that's from the same family as banned pesticides like DDT."

I am open to believing that flame retardant chemicals pose some harm to humans, though one must posit some way for them to get out of the foam and into people for it to be harmful (just existing nearby is not enough).  Further, being from the "same family" as another chemical is meaningless, particularly as compared to DDT which was banned for suspected thinning of bird eggs and not for demonstrated harm to humans.

I finally read through all four parts  of the story, and its interesting to compare the approaches to science.  The authors make a really good case that the science of flame retardants effectiveness is deeply flawed and that lobbying pressure and actions in tort cases have led to their expanded use rather than any particular benefit.

But the authors' scientific standards change wildly when it comes to their own side's science (I write it this way because the authors clearly have  a horse in the race here, they want these chemicals banned). I kept waiting for their bombshell study that these chemicals posed a danger, but we never get it.  All we get is the typical journalistic scare quotes about trace quantities of these chemicals being found in house dust and in certain animals.

OK, but with improving detection technology, we are constantly finding traces of chemicals at tiny levels we did not know were there before.   How much risk do they pose?  We never find out.  It would be nice to know.  I'm convinced I would rather not have this crap in my couch, but there has to be a better standard for legislation than this.  Ironically, the whole point of their story is to highlight regulation pushed by small groups based on bad science, and their response is to ... mobilize a group to push different legislation based on bad science.    There is a heck of a lot of "OK for me but not for thee" here.

Here is what is really going to happen:  After years of being stampeded by tort lawyers into putting these chemicals into furniture as a defense against "you should have..." lawsuits based on bad science, these same furniture makers are now going to be sued by people claiming the chemicals make them sick based on bad science.   And yet another industry will find itself in a sued-if-you-do-sued-if-you-don't trap.

The one group never interviewed in all four parts were furniture makers.  It would have been fascinating to get an honest interview out of them.  I am sure they would say something like "legislatures just need to tell us what they freaking want, chemicals in or out, and then shield us in the courtroom when we follow the law."

Update:  The updates to the story are classic.  After describing how the race card was abused in what should have been a straight up fight over chemical effectiveness and safety, the authors then pen a story called "Higher Levels of Flame Retardants in Minority Children."  It's OK, I guess, to play the race card in a scientific debate if it is for your own side.

I have been reading of late some histories of Germany in the 1930's, with a particular emphasis on racial laws and policy.   Over time the expanding bans on Jewish participation in the economy and society as well as preferences given to non-Jews for government jobs led to some practical problems, including:

• What percentage of Jewish blood made one Jewish?  The Nazis messed around with this problem a long time, in part because of Hitler's absolute reluctance to get involved in such details.  Was it one grandparent?  Three grandparents?
• How does one test for such things?  In the thirties, there was an boom in geneology research in Germany, as everyone raced around trying to figure out what evidence was sufficient to establish someone's race

It would be nice to think we put this kind of thing to bed, but here we are in the 21st century running around trying to answer the exact same questions

• Does 1/32 Cherokee blood make Elizabeth Warren the member of a protected group?  Does 1/8 black blood mean George Zimmerman is not a racist?
• We are building infrastructures to make rulings on race.  I found this story amazing

This story reminded me of the 1980s case of the twin red-haired Boston firefighters who claimed to be black, based on a photo of a great-grandmother and alleged oral history. While I remembered that they had gotten fired for their alleged fraud, I didn’t remember this detail:

Under current rules, said [general counsel to the state personnel office] Ms. Dale, candidates who say they are members of minority groups are judged by appearance, documented personal history and identification with a minority community. Disputes over claims of minority status are resolved by the Department of Personnel Administration.

 And indeed, there eventually was a two-day administrative hearing, in which the hearing officer determined that the twins failed all three criteria, and thus were not black. A judge upheld the ruling, finding that the twins had claimed minority status in bad faith.I have to admit being under the impression until now that as a legal matter, minority status was an in issue of self-reporting. But at least in the Massachusetts Civil Service system, one can get fired for “racial fraud.”

• Every year, in the name of some sort of racial harmony, I have to sit down and report to the government on the race of each of my employees.  For 364 days a year I can ignore the race of my employees, but one day a year the government makes me wallow in it.  Here are part of the instructions:

Self-identification is the preferred method of identifying the race and ethnic information necessary for the EEO-1 report. Employers are required to attempt to allow employees to use self-identification to complete the EEO-1 report. If an employee declines to self-identify, employment records or observer identification may be used.

Where records are maintained, it is recommended that they be kept separately from the employees basic personnel file or other records available to those responsible for personnel decisions.

Race and ethnic designations as used by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission do not denote scientific definitions of anthropological origins.

I am told we are trying to create a society free of racism, but the results sure look a lot like racism to me.

From California State contract language I am reviewing:

During the performance of this Contract, Concessionaire and its employees shall not unlawfully discriminate, harass, or allow harassment against any employee, applicant for employment, or any member of the public because of sex, sexual orientation, race, color, religious creed, marital status, need for family and medical care leave, ancestry, national origin, medical condition (cancer/genetic characteristics), age (40 and above), disability (mental and physical) including HIV and AIDS, need for pregnancy disability leave, or need for reasonable accommodation.

I am seldom surprised at NBC's behavior -- after all, this is the network that ran the exploding pickup truck story, only to admit later that it put model rocket engines in the fuel tanks to ignite the cars during simulated crashes because the they weren't catching fire on their own.

But NBC's editing of the Zimmerman 911 tapes to make them more inflammatory really sets a new low.  The country was practically on the verge of race riots, with groups actually posting dead-or-alive bounties for Zimmerman, and NBC purposefully edited the tape from neutral to incendiary?

I could not resist commenting on the brouhaha around the stolen Heartland Institute documents in my column at Forbes.  The key one that is the "smoking gun" now appears to be fake.  I wrote in part:

One reason I am fairly certain the document is fake is this line from the supposed skeptic strategy document:

His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.

For those of us at least somewhat inside the tent of the skeptic community, particularly the science-based ones Heartland has supported in the past, the goal of "dissuading teachers from teaching science" is a total disconnect.  I have never had any skeptic in even the most private of conversations even hint at such a goal.  The skeptic view is that science education vis a vis climate and other environmental matters tends to be shallow, or one-sided, or politicized -- in other words broken in some way and needing repair.  In this way, most every prominent skeptic that works even a bit in the science/data end of things believes him or herself to be supporting, helping, and fixing science.  In fact, many skeptics believe that the continued positive reception of catastrophic global warming theory is a function of the general scientific illiteracy of Americans and points to a need for more and better science education (see here for an overview of the climate debate that does not once use the ad hominem words "myth", "scam" or "lie").

The only people who believe skeptics are anti-science per se, and therefore might believe skeptics would scheme to dissuade teachers from teaching science, are the more political alarmists (a good example was posted today right here at Forbes, which you might want to contrast withthis).  For years, I presume partially in an effort to avoid debate, certain alarmists have taken the ad hominem position that skeptics are anti-science.  And many probably well-meaning alarmists believe this about skeptics (since they may have not actually met any skeptics to know differently).  The person who wrote this fake memo almost had to be an alarmist, and probably was of the middling, more junior sort, the type of person who does not craft the talking points but is a recipient of them and true believer.

At the end I make a sort of bet

 If the strategy memo turns out to be fake as I believe it to be, I am starting the countdown now for the Dan-Rather-esque "fake but accurate" defense of the memo -- ie, "Well, sure, the actual document was faked but we all know it represents what these deniers are really thinking."  This has become a mainstay of post-modern debate, where facts matter less than having the politically correct position.

But in the first update I note the winner may already be delcared

Is Revkin himself seeking to win my fake-but-accurate race?   When presented with the fact that he may have published a fake memo, Revkin wrote:

looking back, it could well be something that was created as a way to assemble the core points in the batch of related docs.

It sounds like he is saying that while the memo is faked, it may have been someones attempt to summarize real Heartland documents.  Fake but accurate!  By the way, I don't think he has any basis for this supposition, as no other documents have come to light with stuff like "we need to stop teachers from teaching science."

Via the Weekly Standard (with video):

Gene Sperling, director of the White House's national economic council, said today at an official meeting that "we need a global minimum tax":

Pegging our tax rates to France is almost as good an idea as pegging our exchange rates to Greece.

Also, this statement is a hilarious mass of contradictions

“He supports corporate tax reform that would reduce expenditures and loopholes, lower rates for people investing and creating jobs in the U.S., due so further for manufacturing, and that we need to, as we have the Buffett Rule and the individual tax reform, we need a global minimum tax so that people have the assurance that nobody is escaping doing their fair share as part of a race to the bottom or having our tax code actually subsidized and facilitate people moving their funds to tax havens," Sperling said.

He wants to lower rates for people investing, but he wants to institute the Buffett Rule, which effectively raises taxes on people whose income is substantially dividends and capital gains, ie people who invest.  He wants special rates for creating jobs and extra special rates in manufacturing, but he wants to get rid of loopholes, most of which were created at least with the nominal intent of spurring investment in certain sectors, particularly manufacturing.

Just six months ago, governments were criticizing ratings agencies for letting threats by debt security issuers cow them into keeping ratings for bad debt higher than they should be (emphasis added)

Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, Wall Street’s two largest credit rating agencies, were roundly criticized in the Levin-Coburn Senate reportfor betraying investors’ trust and triggering the massive mortgage-backed securities sell-offs that caused the 2008 financial crisis.

Credit rating agencies are supposed to provide independent, third-party credit assessments to help investors understand the risks in buying particular securities, debts and other investment offerings. For example, securities that have earned the highest ‘AAA’ rating from Standard & Poor’s (S&P) should have an “extremely strong capacity to meet financial commitments” or have “a less than 1% probability of incurring defaults.” Investors would use the ratings to help evaluate the securities they’re seeking to buy.

However, the standard practice on Wall Street is fraught with conflicts of interest. In reality, the credit rating agencies have long relied on fees paid by the Wall Street firms seeking ratings for their mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), or other investment offerings. The Levin-Coburn report found the credit agencies “were vulnerable to threats that the firms would take their business elsewhere if they did not get the ratings they wanted. The ratings agencies weakened their standards as each competed to provide the most favorable rating to win business and greater market share. The result was a race to the bottom.” Between 2004 and 2007, the “issuer pay” business model fostered conflicts of interest that have proven disastrous for investors.

I have no problem with this analysis.  But it's ironic in contrast to the very same governments' reactions to their own downgrades over the last 6 months.  In fact, the general government reaction from Washington to Paris has to be to ... wait for it ... threaten the agencies in order to keep their ratings up.  And these threats go farther than just loss of business - when the government issues threats, they are existential.  It's hard to see how the US or French government's behavior vis a vis downgrades has been any different than that of banks or bond issuers that have faced downgrades.

In general, the tone of government officials has been "what gives them the right to do this to us?"  The answer to that question is ... the government.  These self-same governments were generally responsible for mandating that certain investors could only buy certain securities if they are rated.  And not just rated by anyone, but rated by a handful of companies that have been given a quasi-monopoly by the government on this rating business.

This is a pretty interesting interview with Eric Schmidt of Google.  I am running out the door and don't have time to excerpt it, but in short, Schmidt is quite critical of the ability of government to intelligently regulate technology.

His solution is telling.  There is nothing here about reducing the power and scope of government, despite his clear and concise description of its consistent structural failures.  His solution:  more power for my guys.  That way, when Washington plays its game of sacrificing the less connected in favor of the well connected, we will do OK.

I am working on this concept for my next Forbes column vis a vis the Occupy Wall Street movement.  The OWS folks seem incoherent to us, because, in short, they complain about people having unfair power over them and then their solution is ... to give other people more power.   I have reconciled this in my mind with a cold war analogy.  Everyone accepts the arms race as a fact, and so the only way to survive is to have more nukes than the other guy.  The only way to deal with power, is to get more power for my side.

Frankly, its time for disarmament.  As a retailer, I get irritated with credit card processors, but I understood when Congress was considering regulation of interchange fees that giving the Feds the power to set credit card terms, rather than the banks, was not going to make things any easier, just shift the costs from more to less favored constituencies (and consumers are always the least favored constituency).

More later as I sort this out in my head.

So here is an interesting local story giving us a window into race relations.    First, a black comedian named Katt Williams (I never heard of him either) called a Mexican man a "nigga" and told him to go back to Mexico.   Then a Hispanic woman created a profanity-laced 6-minute video calling Katt Williams "a white supremacist."

Outstanding.  Actually, I think that this has little to do with race relations and more to do with a post-modernist view of language.  I am still working on writing about this phenomenon, wherein certain political phrases have become all-encompassing insults or descriptors of the opposition, wholly stripped of their original meaning.  Thus "Soros-funded" or "Koch-funded" become synonyms for being extreme left or libertarian, rather than actually being supported by any evidence of such funding.  My interest in this topic began with a comment on Kevin Drum's site, where one sympathetic reader smacked Tea Partiers as merely mouthing Republican talking points, and the proceeded to repeat in now-standard terminology every Democratic talking point about the Tea Party.  The juxtaposition was so obvious I thought it might be performance art rather than a real comment.

Today in Forbes, I have an article bringing the layman up to speed on Henrik Svensmark and this theory of cosmic ray cloud seeding.  Since his theory helped explain some 20th century warming via natural effects rather than anthropogenic ones, he and fellow researchers have face an uphill climb even getting funding to test his hypothesis.  But today, CERN in Geneva has released study results confirming most of Svensmark's hypothesis, though crucially, it is impossible to infer from this work how much of 20th century temperature changes can be traced to the effect (this is the same problem global warming alarmists face -- CO2 greenhouse warming can be demonstrated in a lab, but its hard to figure out its actual effect in a complex climate system).

From the article:

Much of the debate revolves around the  role of the sun, and though holding opposing positions, both skeptics and alarmists have had good points in the debate.  Skeptics have argued that it is absurd to downplay the role of the sun, as it is the energy source driving the entire climate system.  Michael Mann notwithstanding, there is good evidence that unusually cold periods have been recorded in times of reduced solar activity, and that the warming of the second half of the 20th century has coincided with a series of unusually strong solar cycles.

Global warming advocates have responded, in turn, that while the sun has indeed been more active in the last half of the century, the actual percentage change in solar irradiance is tiny, and hardly seems large enough to explain measured increases in temperatures and ocean heat content.

And thus the debate stood, until a Danish scientist named Henrik Svensmark suggested something outrageous -- that cosmic rays might seed cloud formation.  The implications, if true, had potentially enormous implications for the debate about natural causes of warming.

When the sun is very active, it can be thought of as pushing away cosmic rays from the Earth, reducing their incidence.  When the sun is less active, we see more cosmic rays.  This is fairly well understood.  But if Svensmark was correct, it would mean that periods of high solar output should coincide with reduced cloud formation (due to reduced cosmic race incidence), which in turn would have a warming effect on the Earth, since less sunlight would be reflected back into space before hitting the Earth.

Here was a theory, then, that would increase the theoretical impact on climate of an active sun, and better explain why solar irradiance changes might be underestimating the effect of solar output changes on climate and temperatures.

I go on to discuss the recent CERN CLOUD study and what it has apparently found.

For some reason I do not fully understand, there are two worlds of gaming - the Wal-Mart/Target/Toys R Us world of Monopoly and Risk, and the geeky world of strategic gaming.

It used to be that the strategic gaming world was just too complicated and arcane for prime time.  I once spent a whole summer playing through a game called "War in Europe" from SPI.  It had a 42-square foot map of Europe, thousands and thousands of counters, hundreds of pages of instructions, and simulated WWII in weekly turns.

However, there is now a whole slew of games in the strategic arena, mostly from Europe, that are very accessible.   A number are not much harder to learn than Risk but are more fun and play a lot faster.  Unfortunately, few of these have migrated to mainstream stores, so you may be missing them.  Here are a few my family plays that are excellent places to start.  I have put them in approximate order of complexity, from low to high.

[By the way, don't have a family or friends?  Your in luck!  At least 3 of the games below have very high quality iPad game apps with good to very good AI competitors]

1. Ticket to Ride. Very easy to learn.  Even visiting kids get the idea immediately.  This is a railroad line building game.  Start with the original North American version, it is the least complicated.  Also, if you have an iPad, there is a very good game app port of this game.
2. Small World. This is an absolute freaking classic. Totally fun, pretty easy to learn, fast to play.  Sort of a wargame ala Risk but it doesn't feel like Risk.  Very repayable because the army or race (e.g. dwarves, elves, giants, etc) you play changes each game as special powers are mixed and matched.  As important to taking territories will be recognizing when your race has become senescent and when it is time to start a new race.  If you have an iPad, there is an awesome Small World game app I heartily recommend.
3. 7 Wonders. A new game that has quickly become a favorite.    This game is typical of many modern strategy games -- there are many ways to score and you only have a limited number of actions, so the trick is figuring out your priorities.  The play rules of this game are dead simple.  The complicated part is deciding what action to take among many alternatives, since the scoring is complicated.  Here is my advice on this game and for many of these games that follow.  Just play the game once.   This is what my kids and I did with 7 Wonders.  They yelled at me at scoring time that they hadn't understood that such and such scored so well or poorly, but they understood it better with one play-through than by any number of times parsing the rules.  This is our current favorite.  Interesting dynamic here as after each card play, everyone passes his or her whole hand to their neighbor.
4. Dominion.  Similar to 7 Wonders in that it is a card game building to victory points.  There is a constant tradeoff of getting victory points now or building up "infrastructure" that will allow more scoring later.  It is more complex than 7 wonders as it has even more options and paths.  I play it with my family but both this and the next game fall out of what are typically called "family" games.
5. Race for the Galaxy.  Again, similar to 7 Wonders and Dominion, just more complicated.  A planet development game.

Here are some other family accessible games I can't recommend as much

1. Settlers of Catan. This is a popular strategy classic, and is simple to learn.  My kids think its kind of meh.  It has a diplomacy negotiating element that does not seem to work well in my family for games
2. Cargo Noir. I have only played this once, so I can't say how it wears.  My kids liked it better than I did.  It is easy to learn, but I thought the strategic options were a bit thin.
3. Carcasonne.  There are very few games I don't care for, but I have tried this game several times and it just does not click for me.  But it is wildly popular, so what do I know?  A game where you add tiles of roads and cities to try to score based one where you have put your mini people (meeple in euro-game speak).   There is a high quality port of this game on iPad.

Here are some games I really love but are not appropriate for the entry level family

1. Twilight Struggle - replay the cold war.  My son and I played this and it was awesome, but it took some time to learn and was pretty wonky.
2. Agricola - one of the reigning kings of hard-core Euro-style strategy games, this game is fairly complicated to learn (not helped by instructions that really need a re-write) and very complicated to master.   The concept -- trying to keep a medieval family alive - bored the hell out of my kids but it is similar to many of the games above in that there are far more ways to score than one can pursue in a turn, and it has a very strong element of balancing immediate returns against investments in the future.   I have never played Puerto Rico but my sense it is in a similar genre.

The Boardgame Geek website is a great place to learn about these games (I have just listed a few of the most popular of literally thousands of games).  Their ranking of top family games is here.  To give you an idea, Monopoly is rates #781 in family games and #7148 overall by their readers (though there is some geek snob factor in this, it really is not a very good game), so you probably have some good games to discover.

PS- Most all of these are on Amazon.

This is awesome, and the only real argument is which one is the bigger piece of crap.  The drag race was particularly funny. Part 2 here

Update: Fixed the second link.  Forgot to give credit to reader Leith Kronenberg for the link, who, by the way, needs his own blog.

My column this week in Forbes is about the declining rate of entrepreneurship and startups in the US.

A recent study by the Beauru of Labor Statistics confirmed a potentially disturbing trend — that the number of new startup businesses in the United States has declined since 2006, and the number of jobs created by those startups has been in decline for over a decade.

This is not just a result of the recent recession.  These declines pre-date the current recession, and besides, startup activity has always held up well in past recessions as unemployed workers try entrepreneurship as a path back to prosperity.

There are likely a myriad of economic and demographic reasons for this decline, but certainly the growth of government power in the economy must be seen as a major contributor.  Government intervention in commerce nearly always favors large companies over small, even if that was not its specific intent, for a couple of reasons:

1. Increasingly complex and pervasive regulations on everything from labor practices to salt content tend to add a compliance cost burden that is more easily born by larger companies
2. Large, entrenched competitors are becoming more facile at manipulating government to create barriers to competition from upstart companies with different business models.

The role of government in throttling entrepreneurship has been evident for years, in the enormous differentials between US and European business startup rates.  Historically, the US has had entrepeneurship rates 3-4 times higher than in the large European industrial countries, due in large part to the barriers these latter countries place in the way of business creation.  But the US, with its current bi-partisan drive towards a corporate state, may soon be engaged in a race to the bottom with these other countries.

I go on to discuss each of these two points in more depth.

Last week in the race around New England colleges I missed a milestone of sorts - Coyote Blog crossed over 5 million visits.  I say "of sorts" because with feed readers, many readers of the blog do not hit the visit counter.  In fact, with over 2,000 feed subscribers who check this feed each day, that equates to about 3/4 million visits a year that don't hit the counter.

Nevertheless, all these numbers, however flawed, are far higher than I ever thought I would reach here (way back on September 29, 2004).  Thanks for the support.

PS-  Here was that first scintillating post 6-1/2 years ago:

This blog will often touch on the insanity that is the current American tort system. I don’t think there is any greater threat to capitalism, due process, or democracy than the growing power of the litigation bar.

Via Overlawyered.com, which should be an essential part of your daily blog browsing, comes this story. Apparently, after being sued by Okaloosa County for making defective police cars, Ford refused to sell the county any more of this type car. The County sued again, this time to force Ford to sell it more cars of the type it is suing Ford for being defective:

One of Morris’ attorneys, Don Barrett, has said the sheriff firmly believes the Police Interceptors are defective but he wants to buy new ones to replace aging cars because seeking other vehicles would be more costly.

lol. Unfortunately, in the service business, it is legally more difficult to exclude customers from the premises. We have several well-known customers who come to our campgrounds (plus Wal-mart and any other private retail establishment) desperately hoping to slip and fall and sue. In a future post, I will tell the story of a Florida campground that is being sued by a visitor for sexual dysfunction after the visitor allegedly stepped on a nail in their facility.

So the Republicans in Wisconsin eliminated collective bargaining for public unions except on wages.  The Democratic Secretary of State, fully within the law, is delaying making the law official for 10 days.  This 10 days is giving us a great picture of the problem with public unions.

Why?  Because the 10 days was explicitly to allow cities and counties to cut new deals with unions, since all deals before the law is passed are grandfathered.  The fact that many city and county governments are rushing to take advantage of this window just proves that public collective bargaining is broken -- no one is looking after the taxpayers.  I have argued that public unions are basically on the same side of the table with governments in bargaining sessions.  What could be better proof?  If government officials really cared about the taxpayer or their fiduciary responsibility, why in the world would they be rushing to cut above-market deals with government employees when they won't have to do so in just 10 days?  Government officials are colluding with unions to race to transfer more wealth from taxpayers to workers before the window for such subsidies shuts.

For the last three weeks, I have been writing about the information, incentive, and rent-seeking issues that will doom Obamacare -- for example, how its impossible for a centralized board to set prices, and why a complete end to individual shopping will doom us to both rising prices and increasing frivolous demand.

I really didn't have to bother, though, because it is unnecessary to hypothesize -- we can just look at Massachusetts, which embarked on a proto-Obamacare several years ago.  John Calfee has a great column in the WSJ today.  Some excerpts

• On costs

Massachusetts reformers deferred cost control to the vague prospect of a "Round 2" of reform—much as congressional Democrats did a year ago when they passed ObamaCare. Meanwhile, economists John Cogan, Glenn Hubbard and Daniel Kessler reported in the Forum for Health Economics & Policy (2010) that insurance premiums for individuals (alone or in employer-sponsored group plans) increased 6% to 7% beyond what they would have without the reform. For small employers, the increases are about 14% beyond those in the rest of the nation. Four years after reform, Massachusetts still has the highest insurance premiums in the nation, and the gap is getting wider.

In 2010, insurance firms announced premium increases of 10% to 30% in the individual and small-group market. Gov. Patrick, on the verge of a tough re-election race, had the state insurance commissioner deny the higher rates.

• On frivolous demand

But the number of emergency room visits, which everyone expected to drop once people had to purchase insurance, is still going up. Surveys show roughly half the visits are unnecessary. Surveys also indicate that finding a primary care physician is becoming more difficult.

• On the end game of a centralized price-control regime

Last month Round 2 arrived. Gov. Patrick introduced a bill that will impose de facto price controls on everyone from solo primary care doctors to prestigious academic hospital systems. An 18-member board will decide how and how much providers should be paid, and the bill gives regulators the power to force private insurers to accept these fiats. Some 30 states experimented with such rate-setting in the 1970s and '80s. Except for Maryland, all of them—including Massachusetts—deregulated in the 1990s because costs rose even as quality and choice declined

• On politicization of decision-making

Insurance firms protested that they increased premiums because they had to deal with entrenched providers, especially hospitals, most notably the academic giants of Boston and Cambridge. Then the state prepared to introduce highly intrusive price controls over those providers—only to discover that this would provoke formidable political opposition while encountering myriad practical difficulties

To the last point, what happens to prices when providers know that a) consumers aren't shopping any more; b) consumers will take the service at any price, because they aren't paying; and c) insurance companies have to pay the bill, not matter how high, based on government rules.  Of course prices go up, because the entire price-discovery mechanism has been eliminated by government fiat.  Then the government has to step in with a doomed-to-failure price-setting plan.  In the end, those with political connections get the prices they want, and those who do not get throttled to make up the difference.

http://ktar.com/category/local-news-articles/20110215/Arpaio-leads-in-poll-for-Senate-race/

The early returns are in, and right now it would seem Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has the early edge in replacing Jon Kyl.

According to Roll Call, Arpaio led a field of potential Republican candidates by 21 percent in a poll of likely GOP primary voters.

Though this makes us feel better, a little

Maricopa County's self-proclaimed "toughest sheriff in America," Joe Arpaio, says he's considering running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Senator Jon Kyl.

That said, New Times guaran-damn-tees he won't actually run.

"The issue is whether I want to leave this office and go to Washington and try to make a difference there, which I would do if I run and win," the 78-year-old Arpaio tells The Hill. "I think I could do that job."

Sorry, Joe, we've heard it all before.

As you may recall, Arpaio pulled a similar stunt last year when he claimed to be considering running for governor. And he did the same thing four years earlier, when he also claimed he was mulling over a run for the governorship.

In neither case did Arpaio actually run.

You see, Arpaio seems to get off on seeing his name in the headlines, and what better way to make that happen than to continually fuel speculation about potentially running for office -- and a poll showing he's the front-runner certainly doesn't help things.

Update: This was an interesting post about how TV has become far more accepting of police and proprietorial abuse in its heroes, comparing quasi-terrorist Steve McGarrett from the current incarnation of Hawaii 5-0 with the respectful and conscientious Jack Lord version.  Next up, the new show Arpaio 4-8?

Glenn Reynolds mentions an article on racial tests in Hawaii.  I blogged about a similar Hawaiian program several years ago, where $1 a year land leases are granted by the state to native Hawaiians

Qualifying for the program requires that the recipient pass a strict racial test, which the HHL web site says is "50% or greater native Hawaiian blood".  Setting eligibility for a government program based on racial tests is pretty outlandish in and of itself, but it gets worse.  People taking advantage of the program need to think carefully about the race of their mate before they decide how much to invest in their home.  A 75% Hawaiian who marries a full-blooded Hawaiian will be able to pass the improvements on to their children (since the children will be more than 50% Hawaiian), and thus can justify a large home investment.  The same person who marries a full-blooded Japanese or African or Anglo-Saxon will not be able to pass their home on to their kids, since their kids will fail the race test.  So, not only is there a race-test for a government program, but the government is providing strong financial incentives not to "dilute" a certain race.  Hawaii uber alles.

Just when I was climbing on top of any number of issues at work, and was ready to start blogging again in earnest, Civ 5 was released yesterday.  Yes, it has all the time destruction potential of its older versions.  Some quick thoughts from a few hours of play

• Beautiful interface.
• The things that were removed (ie religions) are not missed
• The only thing I don't like about the interface is that the new way of showing armies makes it harder to distinguish what type of troops they are.
• Love the new combat system and the elimination of absurd stacks.  The new city defense system is a nice add as well.
• More barbarians on the loose in the early game, but if they attack you no combat units (workers, settlers) they drag them back to their encampment and you can go and free the hostages
• Early game very different -- not a headlong race to settle open space.  Early game city states change the early dynamics, for the better I think.
• I like not having to build transports to send armies overseas.  This certainly will make oceans a less formidable barrier to conquest, which I think is good.
• Can't comment yet about balance or unbalanced strategies, not far enough along, but am very happy so far.

This is pretty interesting -- OK Cupid did a phrase-frequency count in its online dating ads and were able to sort them by race and gender, and then identify those phrases that the particular race-gender combination used most uniquely.  Its kind of amazing just how much the analysis might fit your stereotyped guesses.  Among many others, horseback riding, baths, and Jodi Picoult for white women, with Tom Clancy, Harleys and Soundgarden for white men.  Check it out here.  (hat tip Flowing Data)

Read this story, and then imagine if the facts had been reversed:

"A sports conference that always scheduled weekday basketball doubleheaders in which women's teams played the first game -- letting the men play in the later time slot -- has altered the practice, after an anonymous sex discrimination complaint charged that this made the women's games appear to be a "warm-up" act for the men's games.

Now, hoping to avoid possible gender equity suits, other athletic conferences are considering similar scheduling changes.  Last month, the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletics Conference announced that it would alternate from season to season the order in which men's and women's teams would play in doubleheaders. The men will play first this season, and the women will play first next season.

Dell Robinson, the conference commissioner, said the decision was made after the league received an inquiry in March from the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. An anonymous complaint filed with the agency argued that the negative connotation conveyed by always having women's teams play first in these doubleheaders was detrimental to women's athletics."

So let's imagine a alternate world where women's basketball games had always traditionally been played in the second game of the double-header, after men's games.  Does anyone believe that the civil rights folks wouldn't have filed a complaint saying

Having women's games always played after men's games makes them appear to be an after-thought to the main contest, positioning the game later in the prime social hours where potential student fans will be more likely to leave early and head to the bar instead of staying to watch.  The negative connotation conveyed by always having women't teams play last in these doubleheaders is detrimental to women's athletics.

See, its easy to be a race/gender advocate.