Coyote Blog

From the USA Today:

In working-class areas here, homes for sale
have begun to move briskly. But in the ritzy Uptown district and other
well-to-do neighborhoods, the picture is bleaker. "New Price" and
"Reduced" signs adjoin grand Victorian homes "” symbols of a struggling
upscale housing market.

They're the lingering effects of Hurricane
Katrina. In coastal Louisiana and Mississippi, a glut of higher-end
homes points to soaring property insurance costs that are pricing many
people out of the market. It also speaks to the legions of doctors and
other professionals who have left the area and have yet to return. The
price of their exodus could be severe: Economic development experts
warn that if these professionals stay away en masse, it could cripple
the region's recovery.

For anyone with a stake in the region's recovery, the loss of
higher-income residents "” and their job skills "” is alarming. The
problem is compounded by the shortage of upper-income buyers willing to
put down stakes to replace those who have left.

So what is the problem?  I thought this would make New Orleans a progressive paradise.  No rich to get richer and create envy in the working classes.  No issues with income distribution.  Just a worker's paradise with no capitalist oppressors.  Huge portions of the populations dependent on the government and refusing to rebuild until they get government handouts to do so.  This sounds like everything Progressives are working for.  But...

Doctors, bankers and other professionals are "the backbone of the
community," says William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings
Institution, a Washington think tank. "They're the people who will help
the tax base. If they leave, they are going to be very hard to replace."

Oh, I see.  We don't really want them around, but we need milch cows we can tax so we can have handouts for everyone else.  It must be a hard tightrope for progressives to walk -- they hate rich people but need them to pay for their schemes.

From a USA Today story on All-Star Ballot counting:

The technology used is so advanced that not even the government has caught up.

Maybe the govenrment might be assumed to lead the private sector in missile defense systems and such.  But in ballot counting?

Of late, Democratic lawmakers have argued that gasoline prices are set at the caprice of oil companies, and mainly serve to provide them with undeserved profits.  However, we here at Coyote Blog try to bring you breaking news at the frontiers of scientific inquiry, and, via the USA Today, we get this fascinating revelation:

The average American motorist is driving
substantially fewer miles for the first time in 26 years because of
high gas prices and demographic shifts, according to a USA TODAY
analysis of federal highway data.

The growth in miles driven has leveled off
dramatically in the past 18 months after 25 years of steady climbs
despite the addition of more than 1 million drivers to the nation's
streets and highways since 2005. Miles driven in February declined 1.9%
from February 2006 before rebounding slightly for a 0.3% year-over-year
gain in March, data from the Federal Highway Administration show.
That's in sharp contrast to the average annual growth rate of 2.7%
recorded from 1980 through 2005....

The nation has not seen such stagnant growth in
driving since 1981, when the USA staggered through an oil shortage and
a recession. Gas prices reached an all-time high of $3.223 in March
1981 when adjusted for inflation in today's dollars.

Wow!  This seems to imply that prices have a here-to-for unsuspected utility.  They might actually be useful for matching supply and demand of scarce resources.  Fascinating.  Maybe Congress can commission a study of this phenomenon.

Postscript: Leaving the snark aside, it is hilarious in this article to see an urban planning group trying to bend over backwards to say that really, price was only a minor factor -- this really had to do with demographics and the success of our urban planning and public transportation.  Of course, it's just a coincidence that this step change occurred at the same time as a gas price spike, and that the last time it happened was the last time that gas price spiked.  Note that none of the data in the article actually supports the point of view that this was anything but a direct response to price signals.

Sean Lynch of Catallarchy is dead on with this:

The headline showing on Google News reads: "NJ's Move Toward Same-Sex Unions Called Undemocratic." My first thought upon reading that was, "Duh!"

It seems to me that civil rights are undemocratic by their very
definition, since they are rights that cannot be taken away, even by
the will of the majority, at least in theory. The whole reason our
Constitution even contains anything other than voting procedures is
that it was clear to the framers that if they left everything to the
will of the majority, they'd end up with an even worse tyranny than the
one they just threw off.

As much as some libertarians may complain, the fact that civil
rights today are in as good of a state as they are is a testament to
what a great job the framers did at making the USA an
"undemocratic" country. Heck, even the Second Amendment survives mostly
intact in most states. And the rate at which technology seems to be
empowering individuals seems to be outstripping the rate at which
democracy is attempting to take away our rights, even using that same
technology.

Terrific!  I shared similar thoughts but from a different angle when I wrote that "the right to vote" is the least of our freedoms.

From the USA Today:

The City Council here voted late Tuesday to
ban certain giant retail stores, dealing a blow to Wal-Mart's potential
to expand in the nation's eighth-largest city.

The measure, approved on a 5-3 vote, prohibits
stores of more than 90,000 square feet that use 10% of space to sell
groceries and other merchandise that is not subject to sales tax. It
takes aim at Wal-Mart (WMT) Supercenter stores, which average 185,000 square feet and sell groceries....

Supporters of the ban argued that Wal-Mart puts
smaller competitors out of business, pays workers poorly, and
contributes to traffic congestion and pollution. Opponents said the
mega-retailer provides jobs and low prices and that a ban would limit
consumer choice.

Certainly such a ban represents a total disdain for consumers and a populist political stunt to cash in on fashionable Wal-mart bashing.  But what is really behind the ban?

A Wal-Mart Super Center differs from a large Wal-Mart mainly in that is sells groceries.  And in fact the legislation does not ban all super-large stores, just ones that sell groceries (Wal-Mart could still build a super-honkin large store in San Diego as long as it didn't sell food).  Well, this should give us a clue.  It tells us that the politicos are not against large stores, just against large new stores that compete with existing grocery stores.

And this puts the lie to supporters statements that their concern is that Wal-Mart "puts smaller competitors out of business."  There aren't any "smaller competitors" in California grocery stores, they are all large chains run by corporations.  And if there are any local fresh produce shops out there, I don't think their customer base is one to run off to Wal-Mart.  This is about protecting grocery retailers from competition.  Why?  Well, there is one other thing we need to know, and that is that California grocers all have extremely powerful and politically connected unions.  This is a story from the LA Times way back in 2003:

Inglewood seemed to offer the perfect home for a new Wal-Mart
Supercenter, with low-income residents hungry for bargains and a mayor
craving the sales-tax revenue that flows from big-box stores.

But nearly two years after deciding to build on a 60-acre lot near
the Hollywood Park racetrack, Wal-Mart is nowhere near pouring
concrete. Instead, the world's biggest company is at war with a
determined opposition, led by organized labor.

"A line has been drawn in the sand," said Donald H. Eiesland,
president of Inglewood Park Cemetery and the head of Partners for
Progress, a local pro-business group. "It's the union against Wal-Mart.
This has nothing to do with Inglewood."

Indeed, similar battles are breaking out across California, and
both sides are digging in hard. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. wants to move into
the grocery business throughout the state by opening 40 Supercenters,
each a 200,000-square-foot behemoth that combines a fully stocked food
market with a discount mega-store "” entirely staffed by non-union
employees. The United Food and Commercial Workers and the Teamsters are
trying to thwart that effort, hoping to save relatively high-paying
union jobs.

The unions have amassed a seven-figure war chest and are calling
in political chits to fight Wal-Mart. The giant retailer is
aggressively countering every move, and some analysts believe that
Wal-Mart's share of grocery sales in the state could eventually reach
20%. The state's first Supercenter is set to open in March in La
Quinta, near Palm Springs....

Yet the Supercenters also threaten the 250,000 members of the UFCW
and Teamsters who work in the supermarket business in California.

For decades, the unions have been a major force in the state
grocery industry and have negotiated generous labor contracts. Wal-Mart
pays its grocery workers an estimated $10 less per hour in wages and
benefits than do the big supermarkets nationwide "” $19 versus $9. As
California grocery chains brace for the competition, their workers face
severe cutbacks in compensation.

"We're going to end up just like the Wal-Mart workers," said Rick
Middleton, a Teamsters official in Carson who eagerly hands out copies
of a paperback called "How Wal-Mart Is Destroying America." "If we
don't as labor officials address this issue now, the future for our
membership is dismal, very dismal."

The push for concessions has already started, prompting the
longest supermarket strike in Southern California's history. About
70,000 grocery workers employed by Albertsons Inc., Kroger Co.'s Ralphs
and Safeway Inc.'s Vons and Pavilions have been walking the picket
lines since Oct. 11, largely to protest proposed reductions in health
benefits. The supermarkets say they need these cuts to hold their own
against Wal-Mart, already the nation's largest grocer.

Rick Icaza, president of one of seven UFCW locals in Southern
California, has taken issue with much of the supermarkets' rhetoric
since the labor dispute began. But he doesn't doubt that Wal-Mart is
the biggest threat ever posed to the grocery chains "” and, in turn, his
own members.

"The No. 1 enemy has still got to be Wal-Mart," he said.

The unions and their community allies have stopped Wal-Mart in
some places and slowed it down in others. They have persuaded officials
in at least a dozen cities and counties to adopt zoning laws to keep
out Supercenters and stores like them.

Hat tip to the Mises blog, which has more here.  In 2004 I wrote how the California grocery unions were using the state pension fund (Calpers) to support their strike.

There is nothing bloggers enjoy more than ranking themselves. Brian Gongol issues the latest rankings, this time of Business and Economics blogs.  Coyote Blog actually makes the rankings, with between 8-9% of the traffic of the leader Marginal Revolution (which is a great site).  Gongol uses a newspaper analog to say that if Marginal Revolution is USA Today, I am the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.  Uh, OK. 

Maybe someone can set up trade futures on business blog rankings.  If that were to happen, you know what Marginal Revolution would title the post....

By the way, he leaves off two of my favorites, probably because they are not in the NZ Bear data base:  Cafe Hayek and Mises Blog.

I have written several times about the phenomena of certain nativist Americans who get absolutely freaked out whenever they even encounter Spanish in the good old USA.  Here is another example of what I have started calling Spanish Derangement Syndrome:

A Spanish-language billboard promoting iced coffee is getting a chilly reception from some Bogota officials.

Mayor Steve Lonegan said the McDonald's billboard on River Road near
Elm Avenue and the railroad overpass is offensive because it sends the
message that Spanish speakers and immigrants do not need to learn how
to speak English.

Boy would this guy ever blow a gasket here in Phoenix!  So I have a counter proposal.  Everywhere that Steve Lonegan travels overseas, I think they should remove their English signs and everyone should refuse to speak English.  No English signs in airports, no English-speaking people at the hotel desk, no International Herald Tribune on the newsstand.   After all, having English signs and English-speaking customer contact people all over, say, Germany, just sends the message that Americans don't have to learn German to travel there.

I am reminded that nearly every country in the world has an "American School" where expats send their kids to learn in English and avoid as much contact and assimilation as possible with the local populous.  For example, I had several business associates in Singapore who all sent their kids to the local American School.  Can you imagine what a hissy-fit nativists in the US would throw if there were similar Mexican schools in the US?

Update:  By the way, I don't have any particular problem with English as a criteria for citizenship, but not for mere presence in the country.  Note that I don't consider citizenship the restrictive license that nativists do, as I explained here, among other places.

Also, one would be hard-pressed to argue that the Constitution somehow restricts first amendment speech protections to speech made in English.

Update #2:  Formatting has wigged out a couple of times with this post, with the word "English" formatted out on separate lines each time it appears.  Weird.  Hacker?

Just before my body decided to purge itself for a few days, USA Today ran a story that the NSA was doing more than just listening in on overseas calls to suspected terrorists.  It claimed that the NSA was also compiling a database of domestic call records.

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone
call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by
AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the
arrangement told USA TODAY.

This bothers me, as much for separation of powers issues that I will describe below as for any  worry about the data being collected.  Conservatives, however, immediately criticized the article, as summarized well here, making a number of points:

1.  Its old news
Shame on conservatives.  This is the same tired line that Clinton used to drive them crazy with.  The theory here is that once a story has run a full news-cycle, it is then too late to report on it or show any further outrage about it.  Once the political boil is lanced, its time to "move on".  Sorry, I don't buy it.

2.  USA Today is exaggerating
The USA Today and those who picked up on the story  are indeed sloppy, perhaps purposefully to make a better story, in blurring the line between collecting phone numbers and eavesdropping.  To date, the evidence is only that phone numbers were collected, which is in fact less intrusive than eavesdropping.  It still pisses me off, for reasons below.

 3.  The IRS already has more data
Yes, and that bothers me too.  Does anyone really doubt that IRS data has been peeked at and used for political purposes?  And I am flabbergasted at how far conservatives have wandered over the last several decades that they hold up the IRS as a model to be emulated.  But here is the key difference that I will get into in a minute:  The IRS is allowed to collect this data by legislative statute passed by Congress.  This statute includes rules for data management and access, with steps for judicial review and criminal penalties for its violation.  The NSA data base has ... none of this.  No legislative authorization.  No process and privacy protections.  No penalties for misuse of data.  No judicial review steps.

4.  Its no big deal, and its good for you
Maybe.  Or maybe not.  The trouble is that we are only getting tiny leaked glimpses into whatever the administration is doing.  The President has created the theory that he can declare war against a vague and in fact impossible to define target, and then take on absolute dictatorial non-reviewable powers to prosecute this war in any way he likes, and that any steps taken in this war can be considered legitimate steps (rather than overstepping his bounds) based on his say-so alone. 

The problem is not the database per se, but the fact that the NSA and this administration feels it can do anything it wants outside the bounds of traditional separation of powers.  If the NSA needs a phone call database, then the President can go to Congress and solicit such an authorization.  A well-crafted piece of legislation would put strict limits on how the data is used, would provide some sort of outside review of its use, and would provide for stiff penalties for its misuse.  This is what I wrote previously:

Here is how we have generally interpreted the 4th amendment:  The
legislative branch sets the ground rules, as followed by the
Administration.  The administrations selection of targets is reviewed
by the Judiciary (warrants) and is also subject to later review at
trial (via the admissibility of evidence).  What we try to avoid is
allowing the same person to set the rules, choose the target, and
perform the surveillance, all in secret and without outside review.
The problems with the NSA wiretapping program is not that it is wrong
per se, but that it may violate this process.  The administration is
claiming the right to choose the target and perform the surveillance
under the own rules and in secret with no possibility of review.   

What really irks me about this is the crass politics going on.  Does anyone doubt that if a Clinton White House had been revealed doing this that Conservatives would have been screaming in outrage?  And liberals are, if anything, even funnier.  These are the folks that trust the government but distrust corporate America.  So why is it that they are upset about a transfer of phone records from evil old AT&T to benevolent old Uncle Sam?  Except, of course, because it is being done by a Republican.

More on eroding separation of powers here and here.

Update: This database may be being used to see who reporters are talking to in order to root out leaks.  Anyone uncomfortable now?  And this is priceless:

Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for
the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.

Duh.  Under Bush Administration guidelines, nothing the administration wants to do is considered illegal.

More: Several sources have used the Supreme Court decision to make the case that collection of the phone records is legal without a warrant.  Here is a key passage:

Petitioner in all probability entertained no actual expectation of
privacy in the phone numbers he dialed, and even if he did, his
expectation was not "legitimate." First, it is doubtful that telephone
users in general have any expectation of privacy regarding the numbers
they dial, since they typically know that they must convey phone
numbers to the telephone company and that the company has facilities
for recording this information and does in fact record it for various
legitimate business purposes. And petitioner did not demonstrate an
expectation of privacy merely by using his home phone rather than some
other phone, since his conduct, although perhaps calculated to keep the
contents of his conversation private, was not calculated to preserve
the privacy of the number he dialed. Second, even if petitioner did
harbor some subjective expectation of privacy, this expectation was not
one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." When
petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the phone
company and "exposed" that information to its equipment in the normal
course of business, he assumed the risk that the company would reveal
the information  to the police,

First, it would be interesting to see if the SCOTUS would agree that this ruling extends to sharing such information with non-law-enforcement branches of the government (NSA is not a law enforcement arm).  Second, it would be interesting to see if the Court came to the same conclusion if the target for the the data sweep was "every citizen in the US" and not just targets of law enforcement investigations.

Third and most importantly, this decision seems to suck.  This exact same logic seemingly applies to any piece of data submitted to any private third party unless the data is specifically protected (e.g. medical records).  Sorry, but this is wrong.  I should be able to have commercial transactions with third parties without the expectation that the government can take the records for its own use without any kind of a warrant. 

Also, the premise that this ruling is based on is provably false, though only by technology instituted after the decision.  There is an entire industry of phone company services and 3rd party technologies aimed right at this area of phone call (and email; and Internet surfing) anonymity and privacy.  With the Internet for example, there is a very, very clear expectation that sharing information with a company for one purpose (e.g. to complete a transaction) does NOT authorize the company to use or share the data for any other purpose.  This use of transaction data and its limits is a CRITICAL and front-of-mind issue for modern communicators.  It is absurd to say, as the justices did, that:

When
petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the phone
company and "exposed" that information to its equipment in the normal
course of business, he assumed the risk that the company would reveal
the information  to the police

The implication is that by giving a company data for use in a transaction, we are giving them an unwritten license to do whatever they want with the data.  Do you believe you are granting this?  Is it true that you "entertain no expectation of privacy" in such transactions?  If you agree with this ability, then I assume you also agree that the government should be able to see all your:

• Credit card bills
• Records of who you have emailed
• Records of which Internet sites you have visited
• Records of what searches you made in search engines

These are all 100% amenable to the logic the Justices used in this decision.

I don't mean that law enforcement shouldn't be able to subpoena these records ever.  But they need to at least go to a judge and say "we want to see Warren's phone records from X to Y date because we suspect him of Z for the following reasons."

I've made this point myself, but David Boaz says it great:

So here's your challenge, lefty bloggers: If you don't like the
tree-chopping, Falwell-loving, cowboy president - if you want his
presidency fatally wounded for the next three years - then start
praising him. One good Paul Krugman column taking off from that USA Today story on the surge in entitlements recipients under Bush, one Daily Kos
lead on how Clinton flopped on national health care but Bush twisted
every arm in the GOP to get a multi-trillion-dollar prescription drug
benefit for the elderly, one cover story in the Nation on how Bush has
acknowledged federal responsibility for everything from floods in New
Orleans to troubled teenagers, and maybe, just maybe, National Review
and the Powerline blog and
Fox News would come to their senses. Bush is a Rockefeller Republican
in cowboy boots, and it's time conservatives stopped looking at the
boots instead of the policies.

I can't speak to the "future technology" that Bush alluded to in his SOTU address, but the history of ethanol gives me no confidence that there is anything here.  Ethanol is all about rent-seeking, not energy Independence.  Quality studies have consistently shown that the whole life-cycle energy use of ethanol is far higher than what it provides.  In other words, at least with current technologies, every gallon of ethanol used actually INCREASES total petroleum use.  Its hard to find any scientist outside of the ADM boardroom or the state of Iowa that takes ethanol seriously.  If we took the small step of moving the Iowa caucuses out of the first primary position in the presidential race, ethanol might go away.

Right now, I am running out the Phoenix Mardi Gras, where a golf tournament often breaks out mid-party, so I don't have a lot of time.  However, trust me that this USA Today article has bent over backwards to cherry pick scientific studies in favor of ethanol.  The figures mentioned for ethanol providing 26% more energy than it consumes are the absolute most optimistic study, not the consensus average, of scientific studies.  Also, the Berkley study is on "potential" technologies, and even it admits that using current technologies actually deployed ethanol consumes more energy than it provides. But even at 26%, note that this means that more than 4 gallons of ethanol substitute net out only 1 gallon of gasoline, which is pretty pathetic.  Anyway, more later.  I am sure others in the blogosphere will be hacking away at this mess today, and I will try to link some of them tonight.

Update: I am in sports heaven today, at the golf tournament all day and watching the Superbowl tonight, so I still have not gotten back to this topic in depth, but our commenters have taken over for me on this one anyway, so I may just kick back with another beer let y'all do the work for a while.  No one would be happier than me to find that we could grow things cheaply to net increase our supply of clean fuels.  Unfortunately, I am not optimistic about the interaction of the government with any market for things that grow.

For some time, I have secretly harbored the theory, without any scientific knowledge to back it up, that somehow bioengineering might long term lead to the most efficient solar conversion technology.  And in a sense, this is what we are talking about here -- finding a
biological solution to converting sunlight into energy in a usable form.  I suspect we are on the cusp of an exponential growth curve in biology like we experienced with thermodynamics, electromagnetics, and semiconductors over the last two centuries.  But if we are at such an inflection point, it just highlights how hopeless it is for government in general and George Bush in particular to pick winners at this point.  What combustion technology might the government have locked us into in 1800?  What computing technology might we have been locked into in 1950?

More at the Knowlege Problem.

Well, I had a number of emails asking for the specifics of my computer build, so all you non-geeks can move on.  Hopefully I will get a post up on the USA Today putting for-gods-sakes ethanol on the front page of today's paper.  Anyway, here is my computer build components:

• ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard.  This basic motherboard platform is rock-solid.  The premium version mainly brings a quieter heat-pipe design to cool the mobo chipset and a software rather than hardware switch for single to dual SLI.  It is one of the better overclocking platforms, with good BIOS options.  It has a couple of quirks, probably the most important of which is that it tends not to like RAM in 4 sticks -- better to use two.  I chose not to use the newer A8N32-SLI, which is supposed to increase the bandwidth when 2 SLI cards are used.  However, I think the Nvidia chipset for this was rushed (to please Dell) and tests show its not necessarily faster, even with 2 SLI cards, than the one I bought.  Also, I wanted to shy away from bleeding edge for my first build
• AMD 64 Athlon X2 (dual core) 4400+ microprocessor.  This is the 2.2Ghz Toledo core with the larger cache.  As I mentioned yesterday, its a notch or two less fast than the top of the line, which tends to be a better value.  And the consensus opinion is that AMD is dusting Intel right now.  I got the large cache because you can always overclock but you can't overcache.  The dual core is clearly the wave of the future, and more games and programs will support it in the future.  I was a bit worried that I would have some compatibility problems at first, but I have had none, even on Star Wars Battlefront 2, which was reported to have a compatibility issue with dual core
• 2 gigs of memory from Corsair, in 2 1GB sticks.  Corsair is a top company in memory.  I can't tell you how many people struggle to overclock their PC a few percent but have too little memory.  Tests show even going from 1 to 2 gigs shows real results.  I got the Twinx-2048-4000.  I debated between lower speed (ddr 400), lower latency memory and higher speed (ddr 500) higher latency memory.  I went with the latter, hoping that it was better for overclocking, but this is one issue not well addressed online.  The answer is probably here, but I decided it would not matter that much for me.  If you go with 512K sticks rather than 1 Gb sticks there are more options for memory that is both low latency and higher ddr.
• I wanted to try my hand at overclocking, so I wanted a good CPU fan.  Zalman has a lot of great products, so I went with the CNPS9500, which looks cool too.  Its quiet and keeps the cpu ice cold.  It looks huge but it fit fine.
• I may have made a mistake on the case.  I went with an Aspire X-Navigator, which is cool looking and keeps everything cool inside but is loud.  I might next time research for a quieter case.
• I splurged and went with dual SLI, because I love games, and bought two evga 7800GT sli cards.  I never really understood the variations in their 7800GT cards - some variations of memory speed, I think.  The nvidia sli chipset right now blows anything else away - it is the ONLY choice for gaming.  A pair of GTX's would have cost me $400 more.  Again, I find the best price-value point a step or two below top-of-the-line.  I didn't realize until later that DirectX 10 will be a pretty substantial upgrade, which will require new chips to support it.  That means that if you are a gamer, you will probably want a new card in 12-18 months.  Knowing this, I certainly wouldn't pay for GTX right now and might have only gone with one rather than 2 cards.
• I bought a couple of 250Gig Seagate SATA 3gb/s hard drives and put them in a raid 0 configuration.  This makes a 500 gig hard drive that is fast as hell.  This is cheaper than buying a single 500 gig and it is faster, but it will be less reliable since data is "striped" across the two drives, so that if either fails, you lose ALL the data.  Because of this issue, I bought a smaller 160 gig drive that runs separately as a backup for my data.  By the way, this was the one issue I had with my install.  Basically I had to leave this 160 gig drive unplugged until I get windows installed on the raid 0 drives and make them bootable, or else the system would get confused.  Once windows was installed on the raid drives and was bootable, then I plugged in the third drive and partitioned it and all was well.
• Power supplies seem to be a nightmare in terms of failure rates.  I use a 650 watt Silverstone Zeus and it has been fine and it had all the cables I needed.  Note you need at least 500 watt and probably 600 if you are going dual sli.
• Other components include a fast NEC DVD read-write drive (whichever one was highest rated on newegg), a floppy drive (you HAVE to have one to load the drivers for this self build if you are using a raid drive array) and a nifty little drive that accepts all kinds of memory cards on the front panel.  And windows of course.

This article on the Corsair web site provides an outstanding walk-through of how to build and set up your PC, demonstrably sufficient for even the noob since it got me through it.  I actually found this after I bought my components so I was happy to see that the component selection in the article for a high-performance gaming box was very similar to mine.  I also have the logitech cordless keyboard and mouse shown and love those too.

Have fun.

Update:  In response to the question in the comments, this build cost about $2000, which is expensive for a desktop, except that I expect to get much longer life out of this thing with performance that stays top notch for a while and many upgrade paths.  It might have been more but several parts were on weekend sale at newegg and others had cross-promotions (i.e. if you buy the AMD procesor and the evga card you get an extra $30 off).  Also note that this is a very competitive system to gaming rigs (e.g. Alienware) costing over $4000. You could take a few steps to bring this under $1500:  One 6800 GT rather than two 7800GT graphic cards would save almost $400.  One graphics card would let you save about $50 or more in the power supply, and you could easily get a good case for $50-$75 less.  Making these subs would get you a very very good rig for under $1500.  Dropping down a notch on the CPU could save another $200.  Smaller hard drive capacity could save $100-150, though hard drives are so cheap, I think it is short-sighted not to overdo it a bit.  I still remember my first hard drive card for my original IBM PC.  It was 10 meg, and my thought was "I'll never be able to fill that much memory".  LOL.

The build time was probably 8 hours, including windows installation and disk formatting.  This includes three false starts:  one, when I thought the power supply was bad but I had just forgotten to hook up the on/off signal wire; two, when the floppy drive actually was bad and I had to run to compUSA to get a new one; and three, when I struggled, as mentioned above, to get windows installed with the hard drive configuration I had chosen.  If everything had gone smoothly, I could easily have done it in 4-5 hours.

Did I mention I love this rig?  Its like the geek version of showing up to your high school reunion in a Ford GT.

Its good to be back in the USA, though my wife and I had a great time in Paris.  In the extended post, I have some pictures from our trip.  However, don't expect any tourist sites.  My business-related travelogue includes pictures of a gas station, a few cool new cars, my restaurant bill from hell, and other stuff...

Continue reading ‘Some Final Observations from Paris (with Pictures!)’ »

After my earlier post on Walmart, I got to thinking about a number of Walmart-related topics.  My brain is a bit too fried on Friday night to organize these thoughts too much, so here they are, roughly following my stream of consciousness:

Exxon may have finally handed off the Great Satan title

The socialists of this country (who now generally call themselves progressives but its pretty much the same thing) usually need a company they can focus their attention on.  In the 1960's, this was probably General Motors, though defense contractors in the Vietnam War made a run at the title.  After the oil embargo of 1972, that title clearly moved to Exxon. I remember in one month in the early 1970's, the head of Exxon got called into Congress twice in a few weeks, once to combat the urban myth that oil companies were greedily holding oil off the market to drive up prices, and once to explain to Congress why they were greedily trying to expand oil production in Alaska.  My family and many of my friends worked for large oil companies, and we had several friends who were injured by letter bombs from domestic leftist terrorists (though the media did not call them terrorists then).

Exxon held the great Satan title for a long time.  It probably could have shed the title with low oil prices in the 80's, but the stupidity of the Valdez mess in the mid-80's and the vociferous opposition to the politically correct Kyoto accords in the mid-90's help them retain the title for a record number of years.

Finally, however, it appears that a new contender is at hand.  Walmart, so recently the most admired corporation in America, has become the new socialist whipping boy and lawsuit magnet.  Just search for Walmart in Google and you will get pages and pages of Wal-mart bashing sites.  Its kind of an amazing story how the former blue collar low-price hero of the working man trying to make ends meet has suddenly become a class enemy.  However, coming from a family that had many members who worked for Exxon, it comes as some relief to pass the Great Sata title on.

I wish everyone at Walmart could make $100,000 per year

In this, I am exactly in the same boat as Walmart detractors.  I would love for everyone at Walmart to make a ton of money.  Whether this is realistic is another story.

In America, people take jobs voluntarily

I would generally class this as a blinding glimpse of the obvious, but it appears that it has to be said.  And, if you accept that people are operating in their own rational self-interest (by the way, this is not a given -- many on the left do not think the average American is smart enough to make decisions for themself and that they need smart technocrats to look after them).  Anyway, were was I?  Oh yes, if you accept that people operate in their own rational self-interest, then by definition the job for Walmart employees is their best option, and any other option is worse.

This is the logical fallacy of those who attack Walmart (or offshore companies) for paying too low of wages.  Their concern is that these wages are lower than they, as an outside obviously smarter than everyone else observer, think they should be.  The reality is that these wages are higher than that employee's other options, and therefore is an improvement over that job not existing at all.  Note this story I told in an earlier post:

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 face 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.  And progressives hate this.  They
distrust this choice.  They distrust the change.  And, at its heart,
that is what opposition to globalization is all about - a deep seated
conservatism that distrusts the decision-making of individuals and
fears change, change that ironically might finally pull people out of
untold generations of utter poverty.  (update:  good post in the Mises blog on Taco Bell and wages here)

It's Wages vs. Prices, not Wages vs. Profits

In aggregate, because they have so many stores, Walmart makes about $10 billion a year in pre-tax net income.  Which is a lot.  But when looked at as a percentage of sales, it is pathetic.  Given its nearly $300 billion in sales, this is about a 3.5% return on sales, which while not unusual for retailers, in the grand scheme of American business is pathetically low.  I would have to shut down my business tomorrow if I only made 3.5% of sales -- I couldn't support the investments I have to make.

Its illuminating to compare this to all those small family owned boutique
businesses that Walmart supposedly shuts down.  So here is a little
example.  Lets say that the alternative to Walmart in Smallsville, USA would be a series of boutique stores, like
the mythical Nan's Clothing Shop.  Lets
say Nan does $250,000 a year in sales,which
would actually make her shop more successful than average, particularly for smaller town mid-America.  If Nan had to live with Walmart's profit margin of 3.5%, she would end up with an annual profit of  ... $8,750.   And, if Nan is working full-time trying to make the store work, and assuming 2300 hours a year, which is probably low for a small business person, she would be making a whopping  $3.80 an hour running her store, such that she would be much better off (leaving out the personal satisfaction of running your own business) working for Walmart at the average wage there of $6.50 an hour. 

While socialists and progressives are programmed in the deepest recesses of their DNA to blame everything on profit, the wage savings Walmart may get are not going to profit.  Their profit margins are low, in fact lower than most of the smaller stores they are replacing.  If there is a wage trade-off going on, it is between lower wages and lower prices to consumers.  Which obviously makes socialist demagoguery a bit less compelling, since it means that in some sense consumers and not Walmart are to blame if wages are too low, since presumably it is consumers who make the choice to switch from the higher cost traditional boutique alternatives to Walmart.

Walmart detractors have one good point - Walmart gets far too much preferential tax treatment

I don't know why it is, but Walmart is a magnet for taxpayer subsidies.  Not only does the government love to hand out tax breaks to Walmart, it local governments go so far as to use eminent domain to put together land parcels for them.  If I was a local retailer and had my tax money used to subsidize a new competitor, or worse got my land siezed to hand over to Walmart, I would be pissed off too.

I have not really studied Walmart's tactics in this, but my sense is that they have gotten good at getting neighboring communities competing with each other.  This is a crock and a waste of taxpayer money, and nearly as bad as subsidizing sports teams.  I have a long post on the sad practice of subsidizing business relocations here.

A final thought on the most unpublicized economic miracle of the last century

Since many of Walmart's attackers focus on their treatment of women, in part due to numerous accusations of discrimination in pay and promotions, it led me to a final thought about a great economic miracle that occurred in this country in the last decades of the 20th century.

Check this data out, from the BLS:

• In 1968, the unemployment rate was 3.8%.  22.9 million women were employed in non-farm jobs, accounting for 34% of the work force.
• In 2000, the unemployment rate was 4.0%.  62.7 million women were employed in the work force, accounting for 48% of the total
• In these years, the number of women employed increased every single year.  Even in the recession years of 1981-1983 when employment of men dropped by 2.5 million, women gained 400,000 jobs

This is phenomenal.  After years of being stay-at-home moms or whatever, women in America decided it was time to go to work.  This was roughly the equivalent of having 40,000,000 immigrants show up on our shores one day looking for work.  And you know what? The American economy found jobs for all of them, despite oil embargos and stagflation and wars and "outsourcing".

I would love to see women at Walmart making more money, and some day they probably will.  Even so, though, the fact that so many have found work there is a miracle unto itself. Remember that the alternative to a $6.50 job at Walmart if the left is successful in eliminating these jobs is probably not new $15.00 jobs - it is no job at all.  Just ask the French.  Also see my recent post on the minimum wage.

Update:  This is some pretty smart PR by Wal-Mart to deflect the sprawl argument often used against it.  By the way, I challenge someone to define sprawl adequately for me in the context it is used by people who are decrying it.

See Updates Below -- Update #1: Sarin test kits, most probably. Update #2: MSM still waddling along, left in the dust by blogs

This is not a huge surprise, but it is still bad news.  Sarin find announced a few days ago confirmed in pictures, and it sure looks legit.  Memo to Republicans:  This is bad news.  Do not make the same mistake as Democrats in deciding what is good and bad news based on how it vindicates or hurts Bush.

Larger version is picture #2 in USA Today Slideshow

Story courtesy of Powerline and Captains Quarters

Update #1

More information in the link above at Captains Quarters.  The betting line now is that these are Sarin test kits, rather than Sarin, which makes more sense anyway given how they were found.

It is amazing to me that USAToday and others could have this story now for days, and make less progress on what is really in this picture than amateur blog readers can in a couple hours in a comment thread.  Interesting.

UPDATE #2 (1AM EST Thursday): 

It has been well over 8 32 hours since readers at a number of sites, including Powerline and LGF, deconstructed this photo and concluded that these were Sarin test kits.  USAToday has still not changed their story or their caption.