Coyote Blog

I couldn't have expressed my frustration with the economic illiteracy of the press and the general population better than does TJIC:

Jane Galt has a series of posts
explaining why a competitive free health care market creates new drugs,
and why strict regulation and/or nationalization wouldn't improve
things.

Mostly, this series just makes me sad and tired, the same way
I'd be sad and tired if I saw smart verbal well educated people
spending their time explaining that, no, Jews don't have horns, and
it's a bad idea to drown your neighbors to see if they are witches.

The sheer wasted effort combating idiocy and ignorance, when
these talented people could be doing so much more, if not for the
resting levels of stupidity and ignorance cloaked with self-righteous
anger that permeate the population.

The only proviso I would add is that for those of our political class, I suspect the ignorance may be more willful than actual, since a clear understanding of economics in the general populace might stand in the way of gaining personal power.  I expressed related sentiments here:

Economics is a science.  Willful ignorance or emotional
rejection of the well-known precepts of this science is at least as bad
as a fundamentalist Christian's willful ignorance of evolution science
(for which the Left so often criticizes their opposition).  In
fact, economic ignorance is much worse, since most people can come to
perfectly valid conclusions about most public policy issues with a
flawed knowledge of the origin of the species but no one can with a
flawed understanding of economics.

TJIC points out a dynamic in coffee houses I have also observed at work among restaurants:

"¦Strange as it sounds, the best way to boost sales at your
independently owned coffeehouse may just be to have Starbucks move in
next-door.

That's certainly how it worked out for Hyman. Soon after
declining Starbucks's buyout offer, Hyman received the expected news
that the company was opening up next to one of his stores. But instead
of panicking, he decided to call his friend Jim Stewart, founder of the
Seattle's Best Coffee chain, to find out what really happens when a
Starbucks opens nearby. "You're going to love it," Stewart reported.
"They'll do all of your marketing for you, and your sales will soar."
The prediction came true: Each new Starbucks store created a local
buzz, drawing new converts to the latte-drinking fold. When the lines
at Starbucks grew beyond the point of reason, these converts started
venturing out - and, Look! There was another coffeehouse right
next-door!

One wonders if smaller niche book stores, who complain about Borders and Barnes & Noble, have had any similar experiences.

As to the part about "When the lines
at Starbucks grew beyond the point of reason," I can say from my limited observations as a non-coffee drinker that there are a lot of things wrong with the Starbuck's model, particularly vis a vis lines.  First and foremost seems to be that their production process doesn't make a lick of sense.  I'd have been laughed out of the room in almost any operations course if I had proposed the production process they use to deliver coffees.  At some point, people are going to realize that waiting in lines does not have to be part of the coffee experience, and then Starbucks is in trouble. 

For years, the Einstein's Bagels near me had the worst production process I had ever seen.  People had to criss-cross one another constantly behind the counter just to complete one order, and the assembly line, from ordering through payment, always had a horrible bottleneck somewhere, thought the bottleneck moved around as they played with staffing.  Every Saturday morning the line and wait would be awful.  I pretty much had given up on them when they suddenly closed for three weeks.  When they reopened, they had a new layout behind the counter, new electronics, and a whole new process.  Since then, I have never seen a line longer than 2 people even in peak periods.  And look at Southwest Airlines.  They have reinvented their boarding process for about the third time  (and I like the changes).  Is it really possible that no one at Starbucks has thought about re-engineering the coffee delivery process?

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.

TJIC has a great roundup of 20th century lending regulation:

Once upon a time, when we had a free market, bankers made loans to poor people.

Then, FDR came into office, and he and the Democratic Congress
passed laws to pressure banks to stop making loans to poor people.

Then, in the 1980s, Democrats heckled banks for not making
sufficient loans to poor people, and pass laws to force them to change
their ways.

Then, in the 21st century, Democrats heckled banks for making
too many loans to poor people, and passed laws to force them to change
their ways.

The Democrats of late seem to be pining for the "Ward Cleaver" economy of the 1950's, lamenting that a) the middle class is worse off today financially, b) it takes two income earners to "survive" today rather than one and c) the middle class faces more risk without any additional reward.  Rather than refute all this mess in detail yet again, I will leave you with this quiz, via TJIC, from Tamara K:

1) The balance on Ward Cleaver's three most frequently used credit cards is?

2)
Does Wally have an Xbox3 hooked to a flatscreen TV in his room, or is
he making do with an old Play Station hooked to a hand-me-down 19" Sony?

3)
In addition to electricity, water, and the telephone, the Cleaver's
largest monthly bill is: a. Cellular Service, b. Cable TV, c. Broadband
Internet Access, or d. Late Fees At Blockbuster.

4) The Cleaver's timeshare is in: a.) Destin, or b.) Gatlinburg.

5) June's bread maker was made by: a.) Sunbeam, or b.) Krupps.

6)
The amount of money Ward loses annually playing Powerball, Online Slots
at home, and Texas Hold 'Em on vacation in Branson, Missouri is: $____
(Round to the nearest dollar.)

I really wanted to make a serious point about TJIC's post on Medicare overpaying for medical devices.  However, that may be nearly impossible because the post selects "penis pumps" as the example medical device, and it is difficult to have a meaningful political dialog over penis pumps:

amount Medicare spent last year on penis pumps so that old can could stand at attention: $21 million

average price/ pump Medicare paid: $450

cost of the identical pump online: $108

Well, I will try anyway.  I am sure if someone pointed this out in the Democratic debate as a potential issue with letting the government, famed for buying $800 hammers, run our health care system, they would all have stated piously that such things would not happen under their plan.  But how?  I mean, this kind of government waste has been going on for time immemorial.  It is so closely tied to the unchangeable incentives of government managers that it could rightly be called a feature of rather than a bug in the system.

But I think I have figured it out.  This is why most socialized health care systems do not allow one to go out of system to get private care.  By banning all private care, the government eliminates all those irritating private analogs that might demonstrate they are inefficient.  So, in the example above, the government typically tackles the problem not by reducing the $450 paid by Medicare, but banning the private sales of such devices so no annoying snoop can uncover the fact that a private system could have delivered it for 1/4 the price.  Genius!

Awesome!  Via TJIC:

Ten minutes after finding out I passed the Bar, I changed my
long-running position on licensure, which it turns out is awesome. Not
only does it allow me to collect above market rents"“which lawyers need
because law school is so damned expensive"“but it also keeps those who
can't afford law school or Barbri from practicing law. This is good
because poor people make bad choices anyway, and I know that because
one week in college I ate Ramen noodles for a week, and that's the week
I decided to major in music. Also your average poor person, usually
cursed with some manner of hump or undeveloped siamese twin, will not
fit into a decent suit"¦

In sum, remember when choosing a lawyer that I was the first
one to finish the New York Bar exam, and though I probably didn't get
the highest score, I got the not-highest score the fastest. So if
you've got the choice between an attorney who will show up at 7 AM
sharp, with an obviously freshly dry-cleaned suit, and me, who will be
jogging fifteen minutes behind him while pulling on a shirt and
cleaning up some stubble with an electric razor, remember: the other
guy's smarter, of course, but I'm still competent. And a lot better
rested. Plus I'm not going to judge you for running that red light and
hitting that old lady"“that's what this case is about, right? Or was
that my other client?"“because chances are I nailed two or three myself
on the way over this morning.

More on licensing

Romney-care, which looks surprisingly like v1.0 of Hillarycare, is over-budget by $135 million (and counting*) in Massachusetts.  TJIC is stunned.

* must be pronounced in that deep eastern European voice from the early James Bond films, where in the bad guy's lair the PA system kept saying "one minute, and counting."

I really don't like Barry Bonds.   I found his home run chase last summer almost painful, and was happy it was over just to stop hearing about Barry Bonds.

That being said, I am pretty non-plussed by his recent indictment on perjury charges.  I really am deeply concerned about going after high-profile people on perjury charges, particularly ones that are associated with cases where no underlying crime was even prosecuted (Martha Stewart and Bill Clinton also come to mind in this category).

The problem is that these cases get prosecuted incredibly selectively.  The vast, vast majority of people in Bonds situation never get prosecuted, much less have four year investigations.  As a result, it is pretty clear that those who do are selected on some basis having more to do with their profile (Martha Stewart), political animus (Bill Clinton) or just because the person is incredibly unsympathetic (e.g. Bonds).  As evidence for this in Bond's case, where are the similar investigations into McGwire or Giambi?

Tom Kirkendall has a great roundup of posts for those who are more concerned that titillated by Bond's indictment.  Or then there is TJIC's take, which is always, uh, not moderate:

What I find most amazing about cases like this, and the Martha
Stewart thing, is that there's some sort of unstated presupposition
that the state has a right to extract information from people.

Lying to government officials on fishing expeditions isn't just a right; it's a duty.

My wife watches Dancing with the Stars, and has a bunch of old episodes she was plowing through this weekend on TIVO.  Contestant Mark Cuban, Internet billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, seems to want to cultivate a geek image.  Each dancer is given a score of 1-10 from each of three judges.  Upon getting his score of 7+7+7=21, Cuban made a comment that one would classify as fairly unusual for such a show: "I was kind of hoping for a higher prime number."

I am sure most of the viewers ooohed and aaahhhed.  What an intellectual Mark Cuban is!  Except there is a problem.  21 is not a prime number.  Yes, it's sort of seductively odd, like 51 or 87, but like those numbers it is divisible by 3.  Which makes sense since his score was computed as 3x7.  OK, so maybe he was talking about the "7" he received from each judge.  Well, the number 7 is indeed prime.  But there are no other prime numbers less than or equal to 10.  It would be impossible to get a higher prime number score than 7 unless the judges went up to a Spinal-Tap-esque 11.

I really wasn't going to publish this little insight until I saw TJIC publish this.

Update:  Fixed link.  I guess it is a bad sign of my own geek-dom if I can't get an html link right.

One of my favorite bloggers, TJIC, has opened a cool-looking web-site selling comics and graphic novels for 20% off with free shipping.  The site is called HeavyInk.com and is worth a look if you are interested in that genre.  I know TJIC's other online business SmartFlix.com gets very good reviews for service from its customers.

Activist:  A person who believes so strongly that a problem needs to be remedied that she dedicates substantial time to ... getting other people to fix the problem.   It used to be that activists sought voluntary help for their pet problem, and thus retained some semblance of honor.  However, our self-styled elite became frustrated at some point in the past that despite their Ivy League masters degrees in sociology, other people did not seem to respect their ideas nor were they particularly interested in the activist's pet issues.  So activists sought out the double shortcut of spending their time not solving the problem themselves, and not convincing other people to help, but convincing the government it should compel others to fix the supposed problem.  This fascism of good intentions usually consists of government taking money from the populace to throw at the activist's issue, but can also take the form of government-compelled labor and/or government limitations on choice.

I began this post yesterday, with the introduction above, ready to take on this barf-inducing article in the Washington Post titled " Fulfillment Elusive for Young Altruists In the Crowded Field of Public Interest."  Gee, who would have thought it difficult for a twenty-something with no real job experience to get someone like me to pay you to lobby the government to force me to pay for your personal goals for the world?

Fortunately, since it is a drop-dead gorgeous day outside, TJIC has already done the detail work of ripping this article apart.  Here is one snippet, you should read the whole thing:

So the best they can imagine doing is "advocating".

Here's a hint: maybe the reason that your "sense of adulthood"
is "sapped" is because you haven't been doing anything at all adult.

Adults accomplish things.

They do not bounce around a meaningless series of do-nothing graduate programs, NGOs, and the sophisticated social scene in DC.

If you want to help the poor in Africa, go over there, find
some product they make that could sell here, and start importing it.
Create a market. Drive up the demand for their output.

Or find a bank that's doing micro-finance.

Or become a travel writer, to increase the demand for photography safaris, which would pump more dollars into the region.

Or design a better propane refrigerator, to make the lives of the African poor better....

One thing that disgusts me about "wannabe world changers" is that
mortaring together a few bricks almost always is beneath them - they're
more interested in writing a document about how to lobby the government
to fund a new appropriate-technology brick factory.

Special mutual admiration bonus-points are herein scored by my quoting TJIC's article that quotes me quoting TJIC.

I will add one thing:  I have to lay a lot of this failure on universities like my own.  Having made students jump through unbelievable hoops just to get admitted, and then having charged them $60,000 a year for tuition, universities feel like they need to make students feel better about this investment.   Universities have convinced their graduates that public pursuits are morally superior to grubby old corporate jobs (that actually require, you know, real work), and then have further convinced them that they are ready to change to world and be leaders at 22.  Each and every one of them graduate convinced they have something important to say and that the world is kneeling at their feet to hear it.  But who the f*ck cares what a 22-year-old with an Ivy League politics degree has to say?  Who in heavens name listened to Lincoln or Churchill in their early twenties?  It's a false expectation.  The Ivy League is training young people for, and in fact encouraging them to pursue, a job (ie 22-year-old to whom we all happily defer to tell us what to do) that simply does not exist.  A few NGO's and similar organizations offer a few positions that pretend to be this job, but these are more in the nature of charitable make-work positions to help Harvard Kennedy School graduates with their self-esteem, kind of like basket-weaving for mental patients.

So what is being done to provide more pretend-you-are-making-an-impact-while-drawing-a-salary-and-not-doing-any-real-work jobs for over-educated twenty-something Ivy League international affairs majors?  Not enough:

Chief executives for NGOs, Wallace said, have told her: "Well, yeah, if
we had the money, we'd be doing more. We can never hire as many as we
want to hire." Wallace said her organization drew more than 100
applicants for a policy associate position. "The industry really needs
to look at how to provide more avenues for young, educated people," she
said.

Excuses, excuses.  We are not doing enough for these young adults.  I think the government should do something about it!

Update:  Oh my God, a fabulous example illustrating exactly what universities are doing to promote this mindset is being provided by the University of Delaware.  See the details here.

One of the recurring themes in my climate video "What is Normal?" is that despite the fact that we have only observed climate for about 100 years, and have only studied it with modern tools like satellites for about 30 years, we want to insist on calling some condition "unusual."  My favorite example of late was when a number of news sources claimed "Arctic Ice at All-Time Low."  Really?  The lowest in the 6 billion year history of Earth?  Well, no, "all-time" means since satellite measurement began ... 28 years ago.  (By the way, the simultaneous story that Antarctic ice hit an "all-time" high on the exact same date failed to be mentioned in the press for some reason).

TJIC has a great post (mercifully unrelated to climate, for all of you with climate fatigue):

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/"¦

As the price of crude oil approaches $100 a barrel, New Englanders are bracing for their most expensive winter ever.

May I suggest that the average family expended more hours of labor
to procure their firewood in 1650, and more hours of labor to procure
their coal in 1750, and more hours to procure their gas in 1850 than
they are spending, today, to heat their (much larger, much better
furnished) homes today?

I swear, whenever a journalist says the word "ever" I hear
"since I was in high school, or since 1990, whichever was more
recent"¦and I was drunk at the time, so I honestly can't tell you which
one that was".

LOL

TJIC points to an article in the local Boston news that planners are shocked -- SHOCKED -- that the carpool lanes they spent tens of millions of dollar on are going unused.  I thought this was the best line:

Amazing.

I would never in a thousand years have guessed that people, -
if they have the means - prefer to commute to work on their own
schedules, in their own cars instead of in some sort of communitarian
Charlie Foxtrot where they have to coordinate schedules with their
neighbors, and have no flexibility to do errands on the way home, and
must welcome other people into their private domain.

And it's not just me - no one at all thought that people might
prefer privacy, individualism and freedom over enforced contact,
compromise, and obligation.

Quite a while ago, I made a counter-proposal for using the carpool lanes:

Several years ago, I sent in a proposal to the Arizona
Dept. of Transportation for their new HOV lanes in the Phoenix area,
though I never got a response back.  I suggested that HOV lanes
probably did not really increase carpooling, since they probably just
shifted vehicles that would have already been carrying 2+ people into
the faster lane.  Why should I get this artificial subsidy of a
dedicated lane when I am driving my kid to a soccer game but not when I
am driving myself to do productive work?  Either way, the lane is not
changing my behavior.

Anyway, I suggested that instead, AZ DOT should create a
number of special passes for exclusive use of the HOV lane.  The number
of passes should be set as the largest number that could be issued
while keeping the HOV lane moving at the speed limit at rush hour.
Maybe 5000?  Anyway, they would have the stats to set the number, and
it could be adjusted over time.  I proposed that they then auction off
these passes in a dutch auction once a year.  I posited that the
clearing price might be as high as $1000, thus raising $5,000,000 a
year that could be used for other transportation projects.

I have friends that said I was crazy, that no one would
spend $1000.  Back then, I argued it in two ways.  First, thousands of
people in town spend not $1000 but tens of thousands of dollars, in the
form of purchasing a nicer-than-basic-car, to make their driving
experience better.  In those terms, to the Mercedes or Lexus owner,
$1000 was nothing and in fact the price might go higher.  Second, if
each pass holder saved 15 minutes per commute, or 30 minutes per day
over 250 work days, they would save 125 hours of their time each year.
Bidding just $1000 for this would mean that people would have to value
their free time (since commuting generally comes out of free and family
time) at $8 an hour.  I certainly value my free time at a MUCH higher
rate than this.

TJIC quotes Scott Rafer:

Rafer's Rule #1: "˜Un-sexy' is good business. This is a riff on a market
principle Rafer picked up from a couple of his ancestors back east: one
who ran Rafer's Kosher Meats; and his grandfather, who ran Rafer's Army
Navy Surplus (both were in business in the 1950s, long before Rafer was
born.) The idea here is that there is potential in furnishing a
(seemingly) boring business that plenty of people need, but which few
people want to do - a.k.a. stuff that ain't sexy. Which also means
you're likely to have a reliable market for your business, and might
not have so much competition - good!

I absolutely agree.  I have been in sexy and I have been in boring, and from a long-term profit perspective, boring is better.  Here is the way I put it to friends:  "Avoid any business where there are substantial non-monetary reasons why people might want to start a business there."  For example, the bankruptcy roles are littered with brew-pubs.  Guys have a male fantasy of owning their own bar and brewery, and, shazam, there are way too many of them.  Many parts of aerospace are the same way, filled with guys who love aviation more than making money.

From reading the press, it would seem that what the world is short of is "bold new visions."  But in fact bold new visions are a dime a dozen.  I had to try to sell a number of them when I was in the Internet world.  I would argue that what is in fact in desperately short supply is managers and companies who can focus, day after day, ruthlessly on operational excellence.  I worked for years for a company called Emerson Electric in St. Louis, a conglomerate that owned the world's greatest collection of boring businesses.  In their prime, under CEO Chuck Knight, they were unbelievable at blocking and tackling in boring businesses.

This point about boring and sexy is so important that when I was at Harvard Business School, the first two classes in the first year competition and strategy course hammered these points home.  Class one was the story of Rockwell Water Meters.  Class two was the story of some go-go semiconductor business (maybe Fairchild?)  These two cases epitomized "cool" and "uncool", but in the end it turned out the semiconductor firm never made a return on capital, while the water meter business had stratospheric returns.

The common response I get to this is, "but what about all of those Internet millionaires?"  With a few exceptions (Amazon, eBay), most of the folks who made millions in the Internet did not make them from operating profits.  They made them with timing, selling out inflated stock to the public or to a bigger sucker (e.g. Yahoo) before the whole Ponzi scheme crashed.  Does anyone really think that Maria Cantwell created real value in the marketplace?

I have argued on numerous occasions that government-funded health care is a Trojan Horse for detailed regulation of how we treat our bodies.  The Economist Blog has a great post on this topic:

Why exactly is obesity a public health issue? Well, when,
by force of law, you externalise responsibility for providing a good,
such as health care, then the effects of all individual choices that
affect the cost of providing that good for the individual are thereby
transformed from internal to external effects. If you, like
Mr Dubois, are in the grip of the blithe assumption that reducing
negative externalities by raising the cost of the behaviour that causes
them is simply what government does, then obviously my gluttony and sloth are public problems. Because public policy made them public problems! So, obviously,
it's up to the government to fiddle with prices to manipulate our
behavior in order to minimise its impact on the tax-financed national
budget.

This sort of thing drives me crazy because it's just so
thoughtlessly arbitrary -- intellectual empty calories. Why
specifically a tax on junk food? Yes, one
of the causes of obesity is "the consumption of too many calories."
Another is the failure to burn the calories one consumes. So why not
levy huge fines on people for not showing up at "voluntary"
government-funded yogalates classes? Or if people are consuming too
many calories, then just put a tax on calories. Why tax some calories
but not others? You can get fat eating steak, too. Maybe a national
"cap and trade" system of calorie credits would do the trick. Hey, do
you know who's healthy? Mormons are. Maybe the government should
provide giant tax credits for being Mormon. Or perhaps it would be
easier if the national health care system could just deny services for
ailments it judged to be obesity-related.  You could even decide not to
have a national health care system at all and allow insurance premiums to reflect the actuarial risk of individual behavior! But that would be crazy. 

Hat tip to TJIC, who has more.  I think this would be a great anti-universal-coverage T-shirt:

Ironically, this shirt is produced by the National Organization of Women, who are strong government health care supporters.  Go figure.

I really wanted to fisk in depth this post at Government Is Good.  While there are loads of factual inaccuracies and logical fallacies, the most common is the assumption that if the government does something today, that activity would not have been performed by anyone without government.  For example, if the government did not educate our kids, we'd all be happy to let them lay around all day and play Nintendo.

The article reminds me of nothing so much as the old "better living through chemicals" commercials which were so ably parodied with the Kentucky Fried Movie skit about zinc oxide.

Unfortunately, I don't have the time. Fortunately, TJIC has already done a great job. Here is one example from a long post:

7:01 a.m. Government also helps you own your house in more than the
legal sense. On a more practical level, the federal government actually
gives you money every year to help pay for your house. It's called a
mortgage interest tax deduction

So I earn $100, and the government would normally steal $30 of
that, but because I fill out certain forms, the government only steals
$20 of it"¦and the $10 that the government would have stolen, but chose
not to, is a "gift" ?

From the New York Post via Carpe Diem and TJIC:

For
seven hours a day, five days a week, hundreds of Department of
Education employees - who've been accused of wrongdoing ranging from
buying a plant for a school against the principal's wishes to
inappropriately touching a student - do absolutely no work.

The
Post has learned that the number of salaried teachers sitting idly
waiting for their cases to be heard has exploded to 757 this year -
more than twice the number just two years ago - at a cost of about $40
million a year, based on the median teacher salary.

The city pays millions more for substitute teachers and employees to replace them and to lease rubber-room space.

Meanwhile,
the 757 - paid from $42,500 to $93,400 a year - bring in lounge chairs
to recline, talk on their cellphones and watch movies on portable DVD
players, according to interviews with more than 50 employees.

I don't have a problem with someone who has had a bankruptcy in the past.  Bankruptcy is not some Scarlet B that should ruin one for life.  Ideally, its bad enough that folks should want to avoid it but forgiving enough that people can move on and get a fresh start.  Via TJIC

"¦ moderator Tim Russert asked former senator Mike Gravel about Gravel's
somewhat troubled financial history. A condominium business started by
Gravel went bankrupt, and Gravel himself once declared personal
bankruptcy. "How can someone who did not take care of his business,
could not manage his personal finances, say that he is capable of
managing the country?" Russert asked.

Here would be my answer:  "Bankruptcy does not necessarily mean that one has managed finances poorly or that one is somehow guilty of malfeasance.  It can mean those things, but it can also mean that one took a risk on a business vision, did the best job possible, but the vision turned out to somehow be wrong.  Some of the greatest names in American business backed Internet ventures that went bankrupt.  Some were just poorly managed, but many just made poor bets as to what would and would not work over the internet.  When people look at Enron, they assume that there must have been malfeasance for the company to go bankrupt.  And while folks were indeed breaking some laws there, those actions had nothing to do with Enron's bankruptcy.  Enron died because they made some huge bets on things like broadband that didn't pan out."

Here, in contrast, is Gravel's response:

"Well, first off, if you want to make a judgment of who can be the
greediest people in the world when they get to public office, you can
just look at the people up here," Gravel said in a nod to his fellow
candidates.

"Now, you say the condo business," he continued. "I
will tell you, Donald Trump has been bankrupt 100 times. So I went
bankrupt once in business.

Doesn't this guy sound like some overweight guy wearing a wife-beater and sitting in his trailer with a cheap beer watching a baseball game on his old black and white TV, railing against all the rich guys that never gave him a chance?  But the best is yet to come:

who did I bankrupt? I stuck the credit card companies with $90,000 worth of bills, and they deserved it "“ "

People in the audience began to laugh.

"They
deserved it," Gravel repeated, "and I used the money to finance the
empowerment of the American people with a national initiative."

That sound you hear is the dying gasps of individual responsibility.  And what the hell is that last part about "empowerment of the American people?"  Sounds like Gravel is channeling Lee Hunsacker.

I don't have a problem with someone who has had a bankruptcy in the past.  Bankruptcy is not some Scarlet B that should ruin one for life.  Ideally, its bad enough that folks should want to avoid it but forgiving enough that people can move on and get a fresh start.  Via TJIC

"¦ moderator Tim Russert asked former senator Mike Gravel about Gravel's
somewhat troubled financial history. A condominium business started by
Gravel went bankrupt, and Gravel himself once declared personal
bankruptcy. "How can someone who did not take care of his business,
could not manage his personal finances, say that he is capable of
managing the country?" Russert asked.

Here would be my answer:  "Bankruptcy does not necessarily mean that one has managed finances poorly or that one is somehow guilty of malfeasance.  It can mean those things, but it can also mean that one took a risk on a business vision, did the best job possible, but the vision turned out to somehow be wrong.  Some of the greatest names in American business backed Internet ventures that went bankrupt.  Some were just poorly managed, but many just made poor bets as to what would and would not work over the internet.  When people look at Enron, they assume that there must have been malfeasance for the company to go bankrupt.  And while folks were indeed breaking some laws there, those actions had nothing to do with Enron's bankruptcy.  Enron died because they made some huge bets on things like broadband that didn't pan out."

Here, in contrast, is Gravel's response:

"Well, first off, if you want to make a judgment of who can be the
greediest people in the world when they get to public office, you can
just look at the people up here," Gravel said in a nod to his fellow
candidates.

"Now, you say the condo business," he continued. "I
will tell you, Donald Trump has been bankrupt 100 times. So I went
bankrupt once in business.

Doesn't this guy sound like some overweight guy wearing a wife-beater and sitting in his trailer with a cheap beer watching a baseball game on his old black and white TV, railing against all the rich guys that never gave him a chance?  But the best is yet to come:

who did I bankrupt? I stuck the credit card companies with $90,000 worth of bills, and they deserved it "“ "

People in the audience began to laugh.

"They
deserved it," Gravel repeated, "and I used the money to finance the
empowerment of the American people with a national initiative."

That sound you hear is the dying gasps of individual responsibility.  And what the hell is that last part about "empowerment of the American people?"  Sounds like Gravel is channeling Lee Hunsacker.

Via TJIC, really needs no comment:

I could probably fill this blog with absurd examples of American middle class snobbery, but I thought this one from TJIC was particularly good:

"¦Eleven tonnes of papayas were dumped outside the Agriculture and
Cooperatives Ministry yesterday by Greenpeace in protest at "¦
open-field trials of genetically-modified crops.

"¦people flocked to load up on the free papayas, ignoring the environmental organisation's campaign against "¦ GM fruit"¦

Many passers-by, who mostly knew nothing about transgenic fruit, said they did not care about any health risks.

They were just thinking about how hungry they were"¦

A while back I wrote about this same phenomenon:

Progressives do not like American factories appearing in third world
countries, paying locals wages progressives feel are too low, and
disrupting agrarian economies with which progressives were more
comfortable.  But these changes are all the sum of actions by
individuals, so it is illustrative to think about what is going on in
these countries at the individual level. 

One morning, a rice farmer in southeast Asia might faces a choice.
He can continue a life of brutal, back-breaking labor from dawn to dusk
for what is essentially subsistence earnings.  He can continue to see a
large number of his children die young from malnutrition and disease.
He can continue a lifestyle so static, so devoid of opportunity for
advancement, that it is nearly identical to the life led by his
ancestors in the same spot a thousand years ago.

Or, he can go to the local Nike factory, work long hours (but
certainly no longer than he worked in the field) for low pay (but
certainly more than he was making subsistence farming) and take a shot
at changing his life.  And you know what, many men (and women) in his
position choose the Nike factory.

Much of the opposition to factory wages in Asia can be boiled down to members of the American middle class saying "I would never accept that job at that rate, so they should not either."

While we can argue about the projected impacts of man-made global warming (my skeptics site here), it is almost certain than any solution that puts a real dent in CO2 production will bar from the middle class about a billion people who are just climbing out of subsistence poverty.  TJIC notes a particularly odious proposal by environmental groups to encourage human power over industrialization in the third world:

See, first world Volvo-driving environmentalists!  We can help
the Third World! All we need to do is build them human hamster wheels,
so that they can set their children to work pumping water, instead of
using nasty diesel pumps (like we do here in the First World, while our
children attend soccer practice or piano lessons).

Don't miss the really awful animation from the environmentalist's site.

A while back, I bought a copy of MS Office for my kid's computer.  The embarrassing part was, though, that I could not get the box open.  No how, no way.  I was just sure there was a simple obvious way to do so, but I never found it.  I finally got a hacksaw and cut open the hard plastic case. 

Now it seems I may not be the only one.  (via TJIC)

It's a hard plastic case, sealed in two different places by plastic
stickies. It represents a complete failure of industrial design; an
utter F in the school of Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things.
To be technical about it, it has no true affordances and actually has
some false affordances: visual clues as to how to open it that turn out
to be wrong.

This is the same box that Vista comes in. Nick White over at Microsoft seems proud
of the novel design, but from the comments on the web it seems I'm not
the only one who couldn't figure out how to open it. It seems like even
rudimentary usability testing would have revealed the problem. A box
that many people can't figure out how to open without a Google search
is an unusually pathetic failure of design. As the line goes from Billy Madison: "I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

And while we are banging on the box, I am reminded how my daughter called me over last night to help her print out of Word on her Vista computer running the new Office (My many problems with Vista here).  I yelled at her first across the room just to go to File-Print.  I mean, Microsoft has worked hard to make sure that in every program known to man that runs under Windows, you print by mousing to file-print or else type alt-f-p. 

"Where is 'file' dad?" 

"In the upper left corner"

"No it's not"

"yes it is"

"No it's not"

And sure enough, upon inspection, after years of developing a standard and training users, MS has abandoned the standard.  There is indeed no file menu drop down.  Only, it turns out, a circle in the upper left with the Windows logo that has the old file commands.  ERRRRRR.   Only from installing my wife's Mac this last weekend do I realize that for some reason MS is emulating the little Apple-shaped logo in the Mac OS where they put file commands.   

What a total slap in the face to your user base  (and don't even get me started on rearranging the control panel and start menus with every succeeding OS).  It's like MacDonald's randomly switching around the numbers for their value meals every few weeks. 

TJIC has a great link to an article about a guy who doesn't want to grub around in the details, but wants a job to help a company see the big picture and move forward.  LOL.  I can't tell you how many times I get a request for that job.  People are always saying they want a job doing "business development**" or "coordination" or "performance reviews."  The common denominator when I ask people to explain to me what these jobs actually would do is that they involve driving around a lot to different recreation sites I run or might run and "checking things out."

I tell people there is no such job.  I tell them I don't have that job, and I own the company.   It's a TV-inspired view of business, like Dynasty or Dallas, where the protagonists run around and do all kinds of stuff that doesn't look like real work.

Yeah, I get to enjoy some perks now and do some cool stuff running my company.  But how did I get here?   Well, the whole story is too boring to tell, but here is one vignette:  In March of 2003 I spent about 6 straight 90-hour weeks trying to get my new company registered on the fly in 12 states and about 30 counties for tax withholding, sales tax, occupancy licenses, unemployment taxes, workers compensation, and even egg licenses just so I could use the assets I just purchased.  This was at the same time I was programming some add-ons to Quickbooks so the finances could be tracked and setting up some of our first web sites.  All while I tried to keep an unfamiliar company running.  And, oh yeah, while I was thinking all that big picture stuff.  Yes, I think about the big picture - and in fact, I have radically reshaped the positioning of this company over the past five years.  But that is what you do in the shower or on the stationary bike.

I don't explain all of this, of course, I just tell people that I don't have a big picture job to offer them.   TJIC, as usual, is a bit more direct:

Or, phrased another way: you're a useless drama queen who - instead of
compromising your principals and taking a job that doesn't match the
job title you want, and then growing the job position around your
abilities - you'd rather stay home and live off your wife's salary.

** The world's one great moment for such jobs was in the late 90's Internet craze, when every soon-to-be-on-FuckedCompany.com startup employed hordes of business development guys who ran around making grand press-release inducing deals that generated absolutely no money.  "Let's trade our proprietary online merchant services framework no one wants to buy for your proprietary online price management algorithm no one wants to buy.  OK, cool."  When I came into the waning stages of several such companies, the first thing I did was blow all these guys away, followed by a quick inventory of our soft and hard assets to see if we actually had anything anyone wanted to, you know, pay money for.  I still think the whole IT world is tainted by the memory of these glory days for produce-nothings.  Everyone wants to be Steve Jobs without having to actually first produce a salable new technology with their own hands in their garage.