Coyote Blog

Via Jim Kingsdale:

Since PHEV's [plugin hybrid electric vehicles] can have so much impact on both the energy investment outlook and national security, I follow with some interest the news about their likely availability.  Recently a picture is starting to emerge.  It is not positive for American car companies, of which G.M.'s Volt is the poster child.  This is not totally surprising given G.M.'s proven history of incompetence.

We know that the Volt's battery is so expensive that G.M. proposes to sell the car for $40,000 - a price that would eliminate most buyers.  And even with such a high price G.M. promises they would lose money on every vehicle.  So, as I've previously written, the Volt may well be more of a political strategy for G.M. than a likely transportation solution.   Now a new study by Carnegie Mellon University says the design of the Volt's propulsion system is inherently sub-optimal and uneconomical - "not cost effective in any scenario" in the words of the study.

The reason is quite obvious once you think about it.  G.M. designed the Volt battery to go 40 miles on a charge because, they "reasoned", some 90% of all drivers go no more than 40 miles in a day.  What Carnegie Mellon points out is that the average driver goes less than 20 miles in a day.  Therefore the Volt's battery is twice as large as necessary for some 50% of drivers .  Since battery weight and cost are the prime determinants of a PHEV's cost-effectiveness, the Volt battery is about twice as large as is economically practical for most drivers.

Here's how the report put it: "The Carnegie Mellon study, conducted by engineers from three different departments, constructed computer simulation models to determine the impact of additional batteries on fuel consumption and cost and greenhouse gas emissions over a range of charging frequencies.  It found that small-capacity plug-ins that get less than 20 miles per charge are more efficient than conventional hybrids. And it said that large capacity hybrids like the Volt that go 40 miles or further on a charge are never cost-effective, because the batteries cost and weigh too much.  A car with the Volt's range, according to the study, would also be extremely uneconomical traveling fewer miles as it hauls around battery capacity it doesn't need."

So much for the Volt.  Ciao - and lets hope the U.S. govt. is smart enough not to fall for the Volt's fools-gold as an excuse to keep G.M., a chronically mismanaged company, from enjoying the cleansing benefits of bankruptcy.  Among which benefits might be new management.

A few days ago I posted on the security hole I discovered in Paypal where payments to my email were flowing to someone else's account.  After denying the problem for quite a while, Paypal finally admitted it.

In the last two days, I have had two other problems with Paypal.  The first was that an account hold was slapped by Paypal on my account.  Apparently I accessed the account from an IP address (maybe a hotel on the road?) they had never seen me at before and so they froze my account until this morning when I had to spend an hour convincing them in various ways I really did control the account.

The second issue was when Paypal put a hold on a payment I received.  At first, I was ticked off at the buyer, thinking that person had received the item and then was trying to keep his money.  But it turned out the buyer had nothing to do with it.  Again, the Paypal computers saw the buyer account had been relatively inactive and held the payment until the buyer called in and convinced them the payment was legitimate.

Now, at some level, one can say that Paypal is trying to protect my money.  But if fraud is so prevelent in Paypal that these kind of onerous fraud checks and constant account and payment freezes are becoming the norm, then it may well be that their business model is in trouble.  Like strip searches at the airport, it may increase security but it may also kill the business.

If you had asked me five years ago, I would have said it likely that by 2009, we would have an online payments system that involved some type of digital certificates on individual computers tied to either a payment system or one's credit card number.  My corporate cash management account works this way, but the retail world does not.  Part of the problem is that there is only limited consumer incentive to demand such a system.  Currently, most fraud costs are pushed by card companies unto retailers rather than consumers (who can fairly easily void a fraudulent payment) reducing the percieved cost of low security.

Postscript:  It is always interesting to listen to the tone of customer service agents.  I talked to four different Paypal agents this morning, and the fairly clear undertone of their responses to my rants about these problems was "it's as bad around here as you think it is."

I got another boiler room broker call today, so I guess the recent downturn has not flushed out all the cockroaches.  A while back I discussed the frequent calls I get from boiler room stock promoters.  The approach they use with me is this:

So the other day, I accidentally let one of them go further than I usually allow.  He said he was from Olympia Asset Management.  (There is an Olympia Asset Management web page, but I don't know if it is the same company and the web page has not been updated for several years.)  I let him run for a bit because a friend of mine runs a very well-respected financial planning firm with a different name but also with Olympia in the title, and for a moment I thought it might have been one of his folks.

Anyway, he proceeds to try to convince me that we have talked before and discussed a certain security.  "Remember me, we talked six months ago about ____".  Of course, I had never heard of the guy.  At this point I usually hang up, because I have heard this crap before -- it is a common pitch.

Its pretty clear to me now that this is what he is doing:

1. Trying to imply that we have some kind of relationship we actually don't have.  Or worse...
2. Trying to convince me that he touted stock A six months ago, so now he can tell me stock A has gone up in price.  Many reputable brokers built their reputation by cold calling people and saying:  Watch these 3 stocks and see how they do and I will call you back in 6 months.  That way, you can evaluate their stock picking without risk.  The modern sleazy approach is to pick a stock that has gone up a lot in the last 6 months, and then call some harried business person and pretend you called them with that pick 6 months ago, hoping that they will give you the benefit of the doubt.

The call just went downhill from there.  I hung up after his discussion of throwing Molotov cocktails into the cars of people he doesn't like.  That was right after I asked him if Tony Soprano was standing beside him listening in on the call.

Anyway, beware.  The guy today called me and asked me if I remembered him calling 6 months ago predicting the downturn in the mortgage market and the crash of the financial stocks.  You are not crazy - no matter how certain the guy seems, you really did not talk to him 6 months ago.

By the way, I am not the only one getting this pitch.  Ed Moed got the same pitch from the same script from the same company.  Many of his commenters share similar experiences.

Update: Wow, they sure do like Mitt Romney over at Olympia Asset Management.  I'm sure there was no arm-twisting here, when every single employee of the company seems to have given the max donation to the same candidate, with no breaking of ranks.

Update #2: Mike Murphy, CEO of Olympia Asset Management, was "a member of the [Hoffstra's] elite football team."  Wow.  Remember that time Hoffstra ripped through all those SEC teams?  Yeah, neither do I.  Anyway, this achievement does not hold a candle to the fact that I was once captain of Princeton Tower Club's elite intramural coed field hockey team.

As mentioned in the updates to this earlier post, the Obama transition web site has, at least temporarily, purged out all the real content they had up about specific programs and legislative goals.  So, as a public service, I will help fill this information gap by re-posting an article I wrote about 9 months ago on the "Patriot Employer Act" sponsored by Barack Obama and likely a kernel for early 2009 legislative action:

Posted 2/13/2008:

It turns out, according to Barack Obama, (who hales from the party that doesn't believe in questioning anyone's patriotism) that I am not a "Patriot Employer." This is from the text of Senate Bill S. 1945 of which he is a co-sponsor (My snark is interspersed in italics): Patriot Employers are to be given tax breaks over unpatriotic employers (I presume this means that their tax rates will be raised less in an Obama presidency than those of other folks) with "patriot employers" defined as such:

(b) Patriot Employer- For purposes of subsection (a), the term`Patriot employer' means, with respect to any taxable year, any taxpayer which-

`(1) maintains its headquarters in the United States if the taxpayer has ever been headquartered in the United States,

OK, I guess I can comply with this. Though I am not sure the best way to begin an Obama "kindler gentler foreign policy" is to tell the nations of the world that we will be taxing their company's income in the US at a higher rate than our own companies.

`(2) pays at least 60 percent of each employee's health care premiums,

So the #1 determinant of patriotism is not commitment to individual rights but paying 60% of employee health care costs. I guess I am so unpatriotic

And, just from a practical standpoint, 90% of my employees are seasonal, hired for about 4 months of the year. To be patriotic, I have to pay their health care costs all year long? Also, since most of my employees are retired, they are on Medicare or an employee retirement medical plan. If they pay $0 in premiums and I pay $0 of that, do I get credit for 60%? Maybe the government can mandate a solution for zero divided by zero, like they did for the value of pi years ago

`(3) has in effect, and operates in accordance with, a policy requiring neutrality in employee organizing drives,

I presume neutrality means that in a hypothetical union drive, I do not express my opinion (and likely opposition) to said unionization drive? I am told that this also entails allowing card checks rather than hidden ballot voting. In other words, patriotism is being defined here as 1) giving up your free speech rights and 2) opposing hidden ballot voting. Uh, right. Besides, if a union organized our company, as unlikely as that would be, I would probably have to do a Francisco d'Anconia on the place.

`(4) if such taxpayer employs at least 50 employees on average during the taxable year-

`(A) maintains or increases the number of full-time workers in the United States relative to the number of full-time workers outside of the United States,

In other words, we don't want American companies growing overseas. This could also be called the "give up international market share act." This implies that it is unpatriotic for US-based Exxon to explore for oil in Asia and that it is more patriotic to let the Chinese national oil company do it. This implies that it is more patriotic for Coke to lose market share in Germany than to gain it. This means that it is more patriotic for Mattel to buy its toys in China from Chinese companies rather than run the factories themselves (and thereby be accountable themselves for product quality and working conditions).

This is beyond stupid. We LIKE to see US companies doing well overseas. If we have to import our raw materials, we feel more comfortable if it is US companies doing the extraction. Don't we? In the name of patriotism, do we really want to root for our domestic companies to fail in international markets?

`(B) compensates each employee of the taxpayer at an hourly rate (or equivalent thereof) not less than an amount equal to the Federal poverty level for a family of three for the calendar year in which the taxable year begins divided by 2,080,

90% of my workers are retired. They work for me to supplement their income, to live our in nature, and to stay busy. They need me to pay them based on the poverty line for a family of three, why? I will tell you right now that if I had to raise wages this much, most of my employees would quit. Many of them force me to give them fewer hours so they can stay under the social security limits for income. I discussed what rising minimum wages often force me to do here, but just as an illustration, a $1 an hour across the board wage increase would easily wipe out all the money I make in a year and put me into a loss position. In which case the lowered tax rate would not do me much good anyway.

`(C) provides either-

`(i) a defined contribution plan which for any plan year-

`(I) requires the employer to make nonelective contributions of at least 5 percent of compensation for each employee who is not a highly compensated employee, or

`(II) requires the employer to make matching contributions of 100 percent of the elective contributions of each employee who is not a highly compensated employee to the extent such contributions do not exceed the percentage specified by the plan (not less than 5 percent) of the employee's compensation, or

`(ii) a defined benefit plan which for any plan year requires the employer to make contributions on behalf of each employee who is not a highly compensated employee in an amount which will provide an accrued benefit under the plan for the plan year which is not less than 5 percent of the employee's compensation, and

Uh, I am not sure why it is unpatriotic for an employee to save for themselves, but I think 401k plans are a nice benefit. I would certainly offer one except for one tiny fact - ALL MY EMPLOYEES ARE ALREADY RETIRED!! They are over 65. They are drawing down on their retirement, not contributing to it.

This is at the heart of the problem with all US labor law. Folks up in Illinois write laws with a picture of a steel mill in mind, and forget that employment and employees have infinite variations in circumstances and goals.

So I am unpatriotic, huh. But if forcing companies to contribute to emplee retirement plans is patriotic, why is hiring folks once they are retired to give them extra income in retirement unpatriotic? In fact, maybe I could argue that 100% of the wages I pay go to retirement spending

`(D) provides full differential salary and insurance benefits for all National Guard and Reserve employees who are called for active duty, and

In other words, we of the government are not going to pay our employees (ie reservists on active duty) what they are worth and are not going to give them benefits, so to be patriotic you need to do it for us. We in Congress are not really very patriotic and don't support the troops, so you need to do it for us.

All kidding aside, I would do this in my company if it was applicable, but I really resent being piously told to do so by several Senators who don't really model this behavior themselves.

`(5) if such taxpayer employs less than 50 employees on average during the taxable year, either-...

blah, blah. Basically the same stuff repeated, though slightly less onerous.

Since when did patriotism equate to "rolling over to the latest AFL-CIO wish list?"

Yeah, I think the title is worded awkwardly, but I am trying to curb my enthusiasm for ending sentences with prepositions  (I will continue to boldly split infinitives that no man has split before).

Anyway, in the spirit of this post and this one, I try from time to time to reinforce my support for free speech as an absolute right by publicly supporting the speech rights of those with whom I disagree.  Today's case is the public University of Nebraska-Lincoln deciding to un-invite former terrorist William Ayers to speak on campus.  The reason given was the current weak-ass excuse often used to reverse the invitation of controversial speakers, "we can't gaurantee security." 

Though I would never have hired the guy, Ayers is a professor at a real public university, and what he has to say is particularly relevant given his ties to Barack Obama.  I find the behavior of Nebraska's conservative politicians to be especially absurd here -- after months of calling for more discussion and disclusore of Ayers and his ties to Obama, they want to prevent Ayers from speaking publicly?

Update:  In an odd coincidence, at about the same time I was writing this post, the NY Times blog was posting on split infinitives.

Anyone who flies regularly and has not thought of at least five ways they could easily beat airport security isn't really trying.  Jeffrey Goldberg actually tries a few:

Suspicious that the measures put in place after the attacks of September 11 to prevent further such attacks are almost entirely for show"”security theater is the term of art"”I have for some time now been testing, in modest ways, their effectiveness. Because the TSA's security regimen seems to be mainly thing-based"”most of its 44,500 airport officers are assigned to truffle through carry-on bags for things like guns, bombs, three-ounce tubes of anthrax, Crest toothpaste, nail clippers, Snapple, and so on"”I focused my efforts on bringing bad things through security in many different airports, primarily my home airport, Washington's Reagan National, the one situated approximately 17 feet from the Pentagon, but also in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago, and at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport...

Schnei­er and I walked to the security checkpoint. "Counter­terrorism in the airport is a show designed to make people feel better," he said. "Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers." This assumes, of course, that al-Qaeda will target airplanes for hijacking, or target aviation at all. "We defend against what the terrorists did last week," Schnei­er said. He believes that the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11
levels. "Spend the rest of your money on intelligence, investigations, and emergency response."

Though I have to give props to the TSA for supporting first Amendment rights, I am not sure their concern over free speech and privacy was driving this encounter:

On another occasion, at LaGuardia, in New York, the
transportation-security officer in charge of my secondary screening
emptied my carry-on bag of nearly everything it contained, including a
yellow, three-foot-by-four-foot Hezbollah flag, purchased at a
Hezbollah gift shop in south Lebanon. The flag features, as its
charming main image, an upraised fist clutching an AK-47 automatic
rifle. Atop the rifle is a line of Arabic writing that reads Then surely the party of God are they who will be triumphant.
The officer took the flag and spread it out on the inspection table.
She finished her inspection, gave me back my flag, and told me I could
go. I said, "That's a Hezbollah flag." She said, "Uh-huh." Not "Uh-huh,
I've been trained to recognize the symbols of anti-American terror
groups, but after careful inspection of your physical person, your
behavior, and your last name, I've come to the conclusion that you are
not a Bekaa Valley"“trained threat to the United States commercial
aviation system," but "Uh-huh, I'm going on break, why are you talking
to me?"

It turns out, incredibly, that most airport employees are not screened.  Because, you know, it would be grossly unfair to subject airport staff to the same sort of time-wasting indignities to which we all must acquiesce.  Also, many commercial flights have a belly-full of US mail which I am pretty sure is not inspected in any way.

Eric Posner writes:

Many legal academics claimed that courts should serve as fire walls
against the conflagration of fear. When the government locks someone
up, the courts should realize that in many cases either government
officials have panicked or are violating someone's civil liberties
merely to assure frightened citizens that something is being done. For
that reason, courts should treat the government's justifications with
skepticism, and never ever trust the executive branch.

These arguments have not yet surfaced in the current crisis. The
specter of fear is everywhere, not just on Wall Street. And the scale
of the government's reaction is no less than what it was after
9/11"”that is what probably scares ordinary people the most. Yet no one
who believes that the government exploited fears after 9/11 to
strengthen its security powers is now saying that the government is
exploiting financial crisis fears in order to justify taking control of
credit markets. No one who thinks that government would use fear to
curtail civil liberties seems to think that government would use fear
to curtail economic liberties. Why not?

No one, except me of course.  From my October 1 discourse with a Democratic friend:

I find it surprising that you take this administration
on faith in its declaration of emergency in the financial sector.
You've lamented for years about the "rush to war" and GWB's scare
tactics that pushed, you felt, the nation into a war it should not be
fighting, all over threats of WMD's that we could never find.  You
lamented Democrats like Hillary Clinton "falling for this" in Congress

But now the mantra is the same - rush, rush, hurry, hurry, fear,
fear, emergency, emergency. Another GWB declared crisis in which the
country needs to give the administration unlimited power without
accountability and, of course, stacks of taxpayer dollars to spend.  A
decision that has to be made fast, without time for deliberation.
Another $700 billion commitment.     And here the Democrats go again.
Jeez, these guys may have the majority in Congress but it is sure easy
for GWB to push their buttons when he wants to.  Heck, Pelosi is acting
practically as the Republican Whip to get GWB's party in line.

This is Iraq without the body bags, and without the personal honor
of brave soldiers in the trenches to give the crisis some kind of
dignity.

Saul Hansell at the NY Times has an interesting article about why risk assessment programs in investment banks were not sounding the alarm coming into the recent turmoil.  The article contains this gem:

Ms. Rahl said that it was now clear that the computers needed to
assume extra risk in owning a newfangled security that had never been
seen before.

"New products, by definition, carry more risk," she said. The models
should penalize investments that are complex, hard to understand and
infrequently traded, she said. They didn't.

I continue to see parallels between recent problems and the meltdown at Enron.  In fact, in many ways events in the natural gas trading market were a dry run for events in the mortgage market.   One filmmaker coined the phrase "Smartest Guys in the Room" to describe the hubris of the guys who ran Enron.  To some extent the phrase was absolutely true - I knew Jeff Skilling at McKinsey and he was indeed the smartest guy in the room.  But everyone can be wrong, and sometimes the smartest guys can be spectacularly wrong as they overestimate their ability to predict and control complex events.  I think this is a fair description of what went on in Wall Street over the past several years.

From Eric L Muller's "Hirabayashi:  The Biggest Lie of the Greatest Generation" which studies the Supreme Court decision upholding race-based civil rights restrictions (eg curfews) in WWII.

This Article presents new archival evidence of an enormous lie that Executive Branch officials presented to the Supreme Court in the Japanese American litigation of World War II, one that impugns Hirabayashi at least as much as it does Korematsu. The lie concerns what might be termed the "external" component of the national security threat in early 1942 "“ the danger that Japanese military forces posed to the West Coast of the United States.  The government's brief in Hirabayashi did not mince words about that external threat: The "principal danger" that military officials "apprehended" was "a Japanese invasion"  which "might have threatened the very integrity of our nation."  With the Japanese "at the crest of their military fortunes," the brief maintained, military officials found it "imperative" to "take adequate protective measures against a possible invasion of the West Coast."  The nighttime curfew on Japanese Americans was one such measure.

This depiction of the external Japanese threat found a sympathetic audience in the Supreme Court in Hirabayashi. Chief Justice Stone, writing for the unanimous Court, accepted that the men "charged with the responsibility of our national defense had ample ground for concluding that they must face the danger of invasion," a danger that concurring Justice Douglas insisted was "not fanciful but real." Singling out Japanese Americans for curfew was reasonable because of their "ethnic affiliations with an invading enemy."

Archival records now make clear that all of this talk of a threatened Japanese invasion was a massive distortion of the actual military situation in the eastern Pacific in early 1942. There was at that time no danger of a Japanese invasion of the West Coast. The army and navy viewed any sort of Japanese invasion of California, Oregon, or Washington as impracticable. They were neither anticipating nor preparing for any such event. Indeed, during the key time period of early 1942, the Army was more concerned with scaling back the defense of the West Coast from land attack than with bolstering it.

Wow.  Exaggeration of a security threat as an excuse to curtail civil rights.  Gee, I'm sure glad that doesn't happen anymore.  HT:  Jonathon Adler

Michael Cannon writes about the new trend in airline pricing to charge extra fees for different services (ranging from sodas to checked baggage).  I have seen several writers of the progressive ilk all up in arms about these extra fees.  Which in my mind confirms that there is no foundational position among progressives on such matters, only opportunistic attacks on corporations for whatever they happen to be doing.  They want air travel pricing to be bundled into one rate, covering all potential services one may or may not use.  But wait, they want cable TV pricing to be unbundled, with a la carte pricing rather than one rate so viewers can pay for only what they use. 

Anyway, the only irritation I have with the new airline pricing is that it drives people to try to carry on every bag they can, particularly since, at least on US Airways currently, bags that are gate-checked are not charged a fee.  This is fouling up security lines and making it a necessity to board early on a plane to have any hope of finding a carry-on space.  Which may add another revenue opportunity, that of charging extra for the option to board early.  Which, come to think of it, Southwest is already doing.

US Airways has chosen to try to cover rising fuel prices by unbundling their ticket price and charging for services that were here-to-fore free, or built into the base ticket price.  They now charge $15 for the first piece of checked baggage ($25 for the second), and charge for most in-cabin services, including for soft drinks.

I'm not going to argue with them about this.  Airline pricing is a wickedly complex topic, and folks who know more than I do think this is the best way to get incremental revenue.  Really, these charges don't affect me (I almost never check bags, except when on vacation with my family).  In fact, as I write this, it strikes me that the baggage charge is really a price hike mostly on non-business travelers, which is interesting as it bucks the trend of having increasing price spreads over the years between business/last-minute and tourist pricing.

Anyway, the net effect has been to absolutely jam the security screening station this morning.  Every passenger seems to be carrying every bag he or she can on board to avoid the $15 charge.  What a mess.  I can't wait to see what the boarding process is going to be like.  Glad I don't have any bags today.

By the way, a few weeks ago I shipped a 60 pound trunk to my kids' camp for about $16 via UPS.  If these airline bag charges stick, it might be time for UPS to start soliciting the send-your-luggage-ahead business in earnest.  Next time we go skiing or some such place, I am going to seriously consider sending a couple of duffle bags ahead by UPS.

Update: The luggage bins were completely full before the fourth group out of six were called.  There was a fairly long line down the jetway of people gate-checking their bags.  Apparently, the airline is not set up to charge the $15 when they gate-check the bags, so everyone is hauling all of their bags to the gate and either bringing them on the plane or checking them at the gate for free.

I say a sign the other day at the airport that full-body millimeter-wave imaging was coming soon to the Phoenix airport.  I guess this was pretty inevitable, and has certainly been predicted in many movies, including Total Recall:

I can't really decide if this is any more invasive and humiliating than what we already do, ie get undressed, put our medications and creams in clear plastic bags for all to inspect, and subject ourselves to full-body pat downs.  For my part, based on this and numerous other humiliations, I am working as hard as I can to minimize how often I fly.  JD Tuccille has more, and observes that body cavity searches aren't just for airplanes any more:

If you think that air travel is starting to resemble a very-expensive
East Germany-nostalgia tour and you'd prefer a less-intrusive
alternative, you might consider traveling by train. Well, except, not
on Amtrak, which implemented random bag searches, armed guards and bomb-sniffing dogs earlier this year.

Even local travel is iffy, since New York City has been subjecting subway passengers to annoying searches for the past three years. Los Angeles's MetroLink implemented a similar policy this week, apparently just so officials there wouldn't feel left out. Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell told the Los Angeles Times

As a postscript, I had a meeting the other day with the National Park Service in Denver.  To get inside - remember this is the park service, no other agency shares this building - I had to give up my driver's license, have all my bags searched, and go through an X-ray machine.  Does anyone think that maybe we have lost some perspective when I have to go through full-on invasive security to discuss merchandising at a gift shop?

The Democratic party, which so often accuses others of adopting superstition over science, are themselves pursuing Medieval economics:

The Democratic Party's protectionist make-over was completed yesterday,
when Nancy Pelosi decided to kill the Colombia free trade agreement.
Her objections had nothing to do with the evidence and everything to do
with politics, but this was an act of particular bad faith. It will
damage the economic and security interests of the U.S. while trashing
our best ally in Latin America.

The Colombia trade pact was signed in 2006 and renegotiated last year
to accommodate Democratic demands for tougher labor and environmental
standards. Even after more than 250 consultations with Democrats, and
further concessions, including promises to spend more on domestic
unemployment insurance, the deal remained stalled in Congress.
Apparently the problem was that Democrats kept getting their way.

I am sure the Columbians, who for years have been told by the US to export something other than cocaine, are scratching their heads at this rebuff when they actually try to do so.  My sense is that the Democrats are reacting to this ugly picture of US manufacturing output post NAFTA:

We can see that since the passage of NAFTA in the mid-1990s that US manufacturing output has, uh, has.... can that be right?

The US Government requires that garage door openers include an electric eye system that prevents the door from closing if the beam is broken.  Unfortunately, given dirty garages, it is really easy for this beam to be blocked by dust and such.  Two years ago, the beam system caused my door to go back up without my knowledge (I just hit the button and went inside) and as a result our garage was robbed that night. 

This time of year is especially frustrating for us.  My garage faces south, so the low sun this time of year overwhelms the electric eye system in most garage doors and causes them to refuse to close.  It is hugely frustrating, and a real security issue.  I glued tubes around each eye to try to shade the sun, but it is still working erratically.  I spent much of last weekend trying to figure out how to bypass the system electrically but I could not make it work.  Finally, I have had enough.  I have spent ten times the cost of the garage door opener in stolen goods and my personal time fighting this stupid device.  Tonight I am going to remove the two eyes and just mount them facing each other on a wall so I don't have to worry about them any more.  Unless someone can come up with a better solution. 

In my mind this is a classic example of government technocracy -- someone decided for us that we should value a minuscule increase in safety over a substantial reduction in security.

I just bought a new Fujitsu Lifebook P8010  (which I love).  It came installed with a 90-day trial for Norton security suite.  Here is my observation on Norton:  It is hard for me to imagine a piece of spyware or malware that puts as many spam messages on the screen, exhibits so many bad behaviors, or is so hard to remove as Norton itself.  In the middle of a 30-minute task that was within 30 seconds of completion, Norton just rebooted my computer for some reason.  It spams me with messages every startup, keeps adding its own toolbar to my browser, and I am having a terrible time getting it off my computer.   Norton is perhaps the worst spyware I have ever had on a computer.  Except maybe for the McAfee trial version on my last laptop. 

It turns out, according to Barack Obama, (who hales from the party that doesn't believe in questioning anyone's patriotism) that I am not a "Patriot Employer."  This is from the text of Senate Bill S. 1945 of which he is a co-sponsor  (My snark is interspersed in italics):  Patriot Employers are to be given tax breaks over unpatriotic employers (I presume this means that their tax rates will be raised less in an Obama presidency than those of other folks) with "patriot employers" defined as such:

(b) Patriot Employer- For purposes of subsection (a), the term
`Patriot employer' means, with respect to any taxable year, any
taxpayer which--

  `(1) maintains its headquarters in the United States if the taxpayer has ever been headquartered in the United States,

OK, I guess I can comply with this.  Though I am not sure the best way to begin an Obama "kindler gentler foreign policy" is to tell the nations of the world that we will be taxing their company's income in the US at a higher rate than our own companies.

  `(2) pays at least 60 percent of each employee's health care premiums,

So the #1 determinant of patriotism is not commitment to individual rights but paying 60% of employee health care costs.  I guess I am so unpatriotic

And, just from a practical standpoint, 90% of my employees are seasonal, hired for about 4 months of the year.  To be patriotic, I have to pay their health care costs all year long?  Also, since most of my employees are retired, they are on Medicare or an employee retirement medical plan.  If they pay $0 in premiums and I pay $0 of that, do I get credit for 60%?  Maybe the government can mandate a solution for zero divided by zero, like they did for the value of pi years ago

  `(3) has in effect, and operates in accordance with, a policy requiring neutrality in employee organizing drives,

I presume neutrality means that in a hypothetical union drive, I do not express my opinion (and likely opposition) to said unionization drive?   I am told that this also entails allowing card checks rather than hidden ballot voting.  In other words, patriotism is being defined here as 1) giving up your free speech rights and 2) opposing hidden ballot voting.  Uh, right.  Besides, if a union organized our company, as unlikely as that would be, I would probably have to do a Francisco d'Anconia on the place.

  `(4) if such taxpayer employs at least 50 employees on average during the taxable year--

`(A) maintains or increases the number of full-time
workers in the United States relative to the number of full-time
workers outside of the United States,

In other words, we don't want American companies growing overseas.  This could also be called the "give up international market share act."  This implies that it is unpatriotic for US-based Exxon to explore for oil in Asia and that it is more patriotic to let the Chinese national oil company do it.  This implies that it is more patriotic for Coke to lose market share in Germany than to gain it.  This means that it is more patriotic for Mattel to buy its toys in China from Chinese companies rather than run the factories themselves (and thereby be accountable themselves for product quality and working conditions).

This is beyond stupid.  We LIKE to see US companies doing well overseas.  If we have to import our raw materials, we feel more comfortable if it is US companies doing the extraction.  Don't we?  In the name of patriotism, do we really want to root for our domestic companies to fail in international markets?

`(B) compensates each employee of the taxpayer at
an hourly rate (or equivalent thereof) not less than an amount equal to
the Federal poverty level for a family of three for the calendar year
in which the taxable year begins divided by 2,080,

90% of my workers are retired.  They work for me to supplement their income, to live our in nature, and to stay busy.  They need me to pay them based on the poverty line for a family of three, why?  I will tell you right now that if I had to raise wages this much, most of my employees would quit.  Many of them force me to give them fewer hours so they can stay under the social security limits for income.  I discussed what rising minimum wages often force me to do here, but just as an illustration, a $1 an hour across the board wage increase would easily wipe out all the money I make in a year and put me into a loss position.  In which case the lowered tax rate would not do me much good anyway.

  `(C) provides either--

  `(i) a defined contribution plan which for any plan year--

`(I) requires the employer to make
nonelective contributions of at least 5 percent of compensation for
each employee who is not a highly compensated employee, or

`(II) requires the employer to make
matching contributions of 100 percent of the elective contributions of
each employee who is not a highly compensated employee to the extent
such contributions do not exceed the percentage specified by the plan
(not less than 5 percent) of the employee's compensation, or

`(ii) a defined benefit plan which for any plan
year requires the employer to make contributions on behalf of each
employee who is not a highly compensated employee in an amount which
will provide an accrued benefit under the plan for the plan year which
is not less than 5 percent of the employee's compensation, and

Uh, I am not sure why it is unpatriotic for an employee to save for themselves, but I think 401k plans are a nice benefit.  I would certainly offer one except for one tiny fact - ALL MY EMPLOYEES ARE ALREADY RETIRED!!  They are over 65.  They are drawing down on their retirement, not contributing to it.

This is at the heart of the problem with all US labor law.  Folks up in Illinois write laws with a picture of a steel mill in mind, and forget that employment and employees have infinite variations in circumstances and goals. 

So I am unpatriotic, huh.  But if forcing companies to contribute to emplee retirement plans is patriotic, why is hiring folks once they are retired to give them extra income in retirement unpatriotic?  In fact, maybe I could argue that 100% of the wages I pay go to retirement spending

`(D) provides full differential salary and
insurance benefits for all National Guard and Reserve employees who are
called for active duty, and

In other words, we of the government are not going to pay our employees (ie reservists on active duty) what they are worth and are not going to give them benefits, so to be patriotic you need to do it for us.  We in Congress are not really very patriotic and don't support the troops, so you need to do it for us.

All kidding aside, I would do this in my company if it was applicable, but I really resent being piously told to do so by several Senators who don't really model this behavior themselves.

  `(5) if such taxpayer employs less than 50 employees on average during the taxable year, either--...

blah, blah.  Basically the same stuff repeated, though slightly less onerous.

Since when did patriotism equate to "rolling over to the latest AFL-CIO wish list?"

Yesterday, I had what will likely (given ticket prices) be a once in a lifetime experience for me -- I got to take my son to the Superbowl.  Our ability to afford this event really was a result of our living in the same city as the Superbowl.  The obvious reason for this is that we did not incur any significant travel costs and did not have to pay peak demand level hotel pricing.  The less obvious, but ultimately more important, reason was because we could afford to watch the ticket prices on the secondary market up until the absolute last minute.  If your were bringing a group from New York, waiting until Friday or Saturday to buy tickets might have been a bit uncomfortable, given other sunk costs. 

As it turned out, Superbowl ticket prices this year on the secondary market  (e.g. TickCo, Stubhub, et al) followed a parabola.  They were below their peak early-on, particularly since sellers did not have the tickets in hand.  You can buy tickets weeks before the Superbowl, but they will be listed as "for this general area."  You could end up in the front row or the back -- it is a bit of a crap shoot.  So they are cheaper because of this.  The peak pricing came the week before the AFC and NFC championship games when many sellers had tickets in hand and could advertise specific seats.  All along, I was looking for a ticket to just get in the door, so I was looking for the cheapest seats (likely upper deck end zone).  At their peak, there was nothing gong for less than about $3800 (when you included the seller commission or transaction fees, typically 10-20% for this type of ticket).  Beginning the Monday before the game, prices started falling  -first 10%, then 20-30%, and finally as much as 50%.  I jumped in towards the end of the week because a pretty good (or at least better than the worst) seat came up for a good price.  I am told by a friend who showed up on game day at the ticket company office that he got in for less than $1500.

Anyway, here is the stadium - yes it is kind of odd looking.  This was taken about halfway through our walk from the car to the stadium.  We just barely parked in the same county.  We showed up about 6 hours before game time and were in the last half of arrivals:

The stadium is a taxpayer-funded boondoggle that is a good hour away (on the complete opposite side of a very large city) from old Scottsdale where most of the parties and social activities and player hotels were. 

The security included a ban on any bag over 12x12x12 inches, a pat down, and a metal detector.  And the NFL did a MUCH better job than the TSA.  MUCH.  It is hard to see, but the tent on the left is about 1/4 of the length of the full security screening area.   They had  at least 25 lanes open in parallel.  Despite thousands of people, we had no wait at all (the lines below are all moving briskly and continuously).

And look!  We must be in the front row!  Well, of the upper deck, but these turned out to be great seats and, having watched prices for weeks, a very good price-value point (in context).  My son braves the wrath of all the surrounding Giants fans by wearing his Cowboys jersey.

I thought the fast set up and takedown of the stages was pretty amazing, and something you miss on TV.  Here is Tom Petty's stage going out (or in, I can't remember).  The funniest part was the crew of NFL guys who followed along with rags and buckets to dust off the grass after the equipment passed to make sure it looked good for TV.

We had a decent view of Tom Petty's back, which once I saw his scraggly beard was probably a good thing.  The crew of screaming fans at the stage was pretty funny.  They ran these folks out for Alicia Keyes, then kicked them out of the stadium, then ran them back in for Tom Petty, and then back out again.  I saw one show on TV last night, and the audience looked young, but to my eye the great mass of the crowd was middle aged women, which I thought was kind of funny.

And here is the last play and confetti burst:

It was a great, perhaps historic game, and we loved the whole experience.  Now back to work to pay those bills.

So, here are the [sports-related] events on my must-see list I have tackled:

Baseball all-star game, Superbowl, game at Fenway, game at Yankee stadium, 16th hole at the Phoenix Open, center court at Wimbledon, BCS Championship game, Daytona 500, personally playing golf at St. Andrews, Big 10 home football game, Rose Bowl, Cowboys home game [update: and an original 90s-vintage American Gladiators filming live]

Yet to be tackled:

the Masters, Packers home game, game at Wrigley, NCAA final four, SEC home football game (maybe Tennessee or the cocktail party), maybe at World Series, maybe a World Cup

What else?

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.

I am happy to see others making the point I have tried to make for years:  That the coming financial problems with Social Security are not its biggest problem.  Megan McArdle and Clive Cook say it very well:

In this post on Paul Krugman and Social Security,
Clive, as usual, targets with laser accuracy the real problem with the
Social Security system: not that it is bankrupt, but that it encourages
people to make extremely bad decisions about providing for their future.

It starts with childbearing:  social security systems seem to exert downward pressure on birthrates,
in effect undermining their own actuarial base. Social security
socializes the benefits of childbearing in providing for retirement,
but no one has yet figured out how to socialize the main cost, which is
turning your life choices over to a screaming pre-verbal dictator.
People are thus tempted to free ride on the childbearing of others, and
the more generous benefits are, the more they seem to free ride. This
is one reason that Social Security, which used to have more than 30
workers for each retiree, now has only three, headed towards two.

Social Security also encourages people to leave the workforce
earlier than they otherwise would. People are healthier than ever at
65, but while in 1950, almost half of all men over the age of 65
worked, that number is now less than 20%. This appears to be highly
correlated with the spread of defined benefit pensions such as social
security, which offer no advantage to delaying retirement. Indeed,
Social Security perversely penalizes anyone who takes early benefit but
continues to work, docking a third of their earnings.

Finally, Social Security discourages private savings. This is
terrible for two reasons. If future fiscal problems force the
government to reduce benefits, the people who didn't save enough
because they relied on those promises will be made much worse off than
they would otherwise have been.

The other problem is that Social Security is not a productive
investment. Privately saved money is mostly lent to corporations that
mostly use the money to do things that make the economy more
productive, such as R&D and capital equipment upgrades. Social
security "contributions" are lent to the government, where they are
mostly spent on things that could not be remotely described as
improving our economy's productive capacity, such as farm subsidies.

Excellent.  I ran the numbers and discussed what a bad investment return was paid by Social Security here.  I discussed Social Security as intellectual welfare here.

Yoggie makes a Linux computer that performs 12 network security functions, including firewall and filtering. The cool part is they put the whole thing on a USB key.

Years ago, I, without really knowing what I was doing, established a bunch of my URLs through Network Solutions.  I didn't understand at the time that Network Solutions was both irritating and the high-cost provider. 

Now that I know more, I have doing my registrations via a much lower cost supplier (GoDaddy).  A few weeks ago, I did a mass transfer from Network Solutions.  Apparently, Network Solutions locks the domains down, ostensibly for security (which is probably true) but also to make it harder to leave them, which makes sense as given their prices there must be a serious net drain of business out of the company.  Most of my domains cleared this Berlin Wall to freedom, but I screwed up on a couple, one of which was CoyoteBlog.com.  As a result, the domain ended up expired, and email dead.

Thanks for all of you who have tried to notify me of the problems.  Nearly two days ago I went ahead and renewed at Network Solutions for another year, just to get things back up ASAP.  Unfortunately, the URL still seems to be marked expired.  I don't know if that is their poor service or because I am in Hawaii and at the absolute end of the earth for name server updates.  Hopefully all will be right tomorrow.  For those who visited CoyoteBlog this weekend, I am sorry about the flurry of tacky popups Network Solutions was dealing out at the URL (as many as three at a time, the losers).  For those of you who access via https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/ you should have been able to read the blog but without formatting.  I believe that RSS access was unaffected.

Rad Geek has three awful stories of petty little thugs hired by government schools to harass and intimidate students.  At least one of these stories has racial overtones, but it would be a mistake to ascribe these actions merely to prejudice.  This is what inevitably happens when government employees are given carte blanch to exercise cohesive power.

In the first story, a 13-year-old girl was asked to strip naked because school security thugs has "reliable" information that she had an ibuprofen tablet - basically a freaking aspirin.

In the second story, security officers quiz high school girls about whether they are having their period to see if it is OK that they are carrying a small purse.

In story number three, a fifteen-year-old girl was tackled by security officers, forced down on a table, and had her wrist broken in an arm lock.  Later she was arrested and charged with assault.  All because she failed to fully clean up a piece of cake she dropped on the floor. 

In the same incident, two onlookers were attacked, tackled, handcuffed, and arrested for photographing and video-taping the incident.  This is what you get for trying to record video of government employees at work:

Twenty years ago, when I would have called myself a conservative instead of a libertarian as I do today, I probably would have said, "Oh, there are probably two sides of the story.  He probably provoked them."  I am embarrassed to admit it, but that might have been my reaction.  But watch the video that is linked from Rad Geeks post.  What could he have possibly done to warrant this?  You can see in the video he was just circling the security guards filming them until one pointed at him, the other came at him, and then this.  This boy was led from the school in handcuffs and spent the night in jail.  Sick.

Hat tip Catallarchy.

NASA's GISS was recently forced to restate its historical temperature database for the US when Steve McIntyre (climate gadfly) found discontinuities in the data that seemed to imply a processing error.  Which indeed turned out to be the case (store here).

The importance of this is NOT the actual change to the measurements, though it was substantial.  The importance, which the media reporting on this has entirely missed, is it highlights why NASA and other government-funded climate scientists have got to release their detailed methodologies and software for scrutiny.  The adjustments they are making to historical temperatures are often larger(!) than the measured historical warming (here, here, here) so the adjustment methodology is critical. 

This post from Steve McIntyre really shows how hard government-funded climate scientists like James Hansen are working to avoid scientific scrutiny.  Note the contortions and detective work McIntyre and his readers must go through to try to back into what NASA and Hansen are actually doing.  Read in this context, you should be offended by this article.  Here is an excerpt (don't worry if you can't follow the particular discussion, just get a sense of how hard NASA is making it to replicate their adjustment process):

If I average the data so adjusted, I get the NASA-combined version
up to rounding of 0.05 deg C. Why these particular values are chosen is
a mystery to say the least. Version 1 runs on average a little warmer
than version 0 where they diverge ( and they are identical after 1980).
So why version 0 is adjusted down more than version 1 is hard to figure
out.

Why is version 2 adjusted down prior to 1990 and not after? Again
it's hard to figure out. I'm wondering whether there isn't another
problem in splicing versions as with the USHCN data. One big version of
Hansen's data was put together for Hansen and Lebedeff 1987 and the
next publication was Hansen et al 1999 - maybe different versions got
involved. But that's just a guess. It could be almost anything....It would be interesting to check their source code and see how they get this adjustment, that's for sure.

A basic tenant of science is that you publish enough information such that others can replicate your work.  Hansen and NASA are not doing this, which is all the more insane given that we as taxpayers pay for their work.

Hansen cites the fact that Phil Jones gets somewhat similar results as
evidence of the validity of his calculations. In fairness to Hansen,
while they have not archived code, they have archived enough data
versions to at least get a foothold on what they are doing. In
contrast, Phil Jones at CRU maintains lockdown anti-terrorist security
on his data versions and has even refused FOI requests for his data.
None of these sorts of analyses are possible on CRU data, which may or
may not have problems of its own.

A while back, I wondered if the highest paid public employee of every state was a university men's football or basketball coach.  Well, its not exactly answering the same question, but via the Sports Economist comes this article that head coaches beat the governors 49-1 in the salary sweepstakes.  Only the Alaska governor makes more money than the state university head coaches (probably because there is no college football in Alaska).  Governors probably have more job security, though.

Unlike my question, the author considers coaches at any college, public or private.  For example, my readers found that NY is probably an exception -- there are public employees paid higher than public university coaches.  This article comes to the opposite conclusion, but only because they use Syracuse University, which is a private institution.

Today, the world is a safer place.  Federal Agents from the Department of Homeland Security have siezed my Crest toothpaste.  You can all fly safely now.

Update:  Hey, I have an idea.  The airplane liquids ban makes so much sense, let's promote its author to Attorney General.  Nothing says "able to make clear-headed choices on tradeoffs between security and civil rights" like the liquids ban.  4oz - safe.  4.2 oz - security threat.