By the way, I find it likely that there are factories in China making products with household names for western markets that have practices from wildly unsafe to outright slavery that deserve shaming and boycotts, as a minimum, when discovered.
But I often find the discourse around "sweatshops" to be colored by weterners' middle class notions of what our own personal alternatives are. "I would never work for a $1 a day..." Sure, but your alternative is not 15 hours a day in a rice paddy with the constant threat of outright death and starvation for your entire family if one years' crops fail.
Scathing report on how NY police gamed the process to improve their reported crime numbers. Nothing in this should be the least surprising to anyone who watched a few seasons of The Wire.
These are not just accounting shenanigans. There were actions the directly affected the public and individual liberty. People were rounded up on the street on BS charges to pad arrest stats while real, substantial crimes went ignored in a bid to keep them out of the reported stats.
There is one part in here that is a good illustration of public vs. private power. People who fear corporations seem to have infinite trust for state institutions. But the worst a corporation was ever able to do to a whistle blower was fire him. This is what the state does:
For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraftsecretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the "stats" that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports.
Arresting bystanders made it look like the department was efficient, while artificially reducing the amount of serious crime made the commander look good.
In October 2009, Schoolcraft met with NYPD investigators for three hours and detailed more than a dozen cases of crime reports being manipulated in the district. Three weeks after that meeting—which was supposed to have been kept secret from Schoolcraft's superiors—his precinct commander and a deputy chief ordered Schoolcraft to be dragged from his apartment and forced into the Jamaica Hospital psychiatric ward for six days.
As I wrote previously, I am entering business in Tennessee, trying to reopen some closed TVA campgrounds. I was initially pissed off that Tennessee is one of the few states that double taxes S-corp earnings. I expect this kind of BS in California, but I keep finding more Tennessee taxes I have to pay. Here is what I have so far:
Pay annual Secretary of State registration fee (Fixed $)
Must collect state sales tax (% of revenue)
Must collect county sales tax (% of revenue)
Must collect a county lodging tax (% of lodging revenue)
Pay state Franchise tax (% of net worth)
Pay state Excise tax (% of corporate earnings, even for S-corp)
Pay something called a county business tax (% of revenues)
Pay annual registration fee for county business tax (fixed $)
Withhold employee state income taxes (% of wages)
Pay state unemployment taxes (% of wages)
Pay state individual income tax (% of pass-through corporate earnings)
Pay county property tax (% of assessed asset value)
I am sure I am missing a few. Except for #2 and #3 which are collected together, every single one of these requires a separate registration and separate monthly or annual filing.
My company is moving into Tennessee as a campground operator. I was disappointed to see Tennessee is one of only a couple of states that double tax s-corporation earnings. The state takes a straight 6.5% cut of all corporate earnings, even of an S-corp, and then charges regular income tax rates on the same income as it passes through to the individual. This makes Tennessee one of the few states where, from a state tax perspective, S-corps are worse than C-corps, because if you are going to be double taxed, at least with the C-corp you can indefinitely delay taxation by not issuing dividends.
PS- TN lodging tax rates are horrendous. Whenever I see tax rates higher than comparable rates in CA, I know they are too high.
Note: This post sticky through 3/15. Look below for newest posts.
Back by popular demand is the annual Coyote Blog NCAA Bracket Challenge. We typically have about 150 entries. Yes, I know that many of you are bracketed out, but for those of you who are self-employed and don’t have an office pool to join or who just can’t get enough of turning in brackets, this pool is offered as my public service.
Everyone is welcome, so send the link to friends as well. There is no charge to join in and I have chosen a service with the absolutely least intrusive log-in (name, email, password only) and no spam. The only thing I ask is that, since my kids are participating, try to keep the team names and board chat fairly clean.
To join, go to http://www.pickhoops.com/CoyoteBlog and sign up, then enter your bracket. This year, you may enter two different brackets if you wish.
Scoring is as follows (its the same scoring we have always used)
Special March Madness scoring bonus: If you correctly pick the underdog in any round (ie, the team with the higher number seed) to win, then you receive bonus points for that correct pick equal to the difference in the two team’s seeds. So don’t be afraid to go for the long-shots! The detailed rules are here.
Bracket entry appears to be open. Online bracket entry closes Thursday, March 15th at 12:18pm EDT. Be sure to get your brackets in early. Anyone can play — the more the better. Each participant will be allows to submit up to two brackets.
Have fun resetting all those clocks this weekend. Sorry about the hour you lose.
Love, Arizona
PS- we have to have something to make up for Sheriff Joe, and not farting with DST eases the pain a bit. See my article here about why DST is an outdated concept that no longer saves energy -- it turns out that the nature of electricity demand has changed over the last 100 years since DST was first tried. Who would have thought? Anyway, this research essentially demonstrates that Arizona is at the forefront of modern, science-based environmentalism.
There is an ever-present effort among corporations, government officials, and public figures to suppress criticism. A new tool in this war on speech is the trademark or copyright, where folks argue that criticism that uses even their name is somehow in violation of intellectual property protections.
Of course, this is all so much BS, and courts have been pretty good about protecting speech in these circumstances, but the need for vigilance never goes away. Example
The rest is worth reading, written in Ken's, uh, trademark style that is both informative and enjoyable. Like Ken, I have to confess to a deep befuddlement as to the appeal of Louis Vuitton gear, which generally look like brown Hefty bags with a pattern printed on it. Why someone would go to the effort of copying them seems as odd to me as building a replica of the Peabody Terrace apartments where I used to live in Boston.
My Forbes article is up for this week, and discusses 10 reasons why legislation frequently fails. A buffet of Austrian economics, Bastiat, and public choice theory that I wrote for the high school economics class I teach each year.
Here is an example:
3. Overriding Price Signals
The importance of prices is frequently underestimated. Prices are the primary means by which literally billions of people (most of whom will never meet or even know of each others' existence) coordinate their actions, without any top-down planning. With rising oil prices, for example, consumers around the world are telling oil companies: "Go find more!"
For a business person, prices (of raw materials, labor, their products, and competitive products) are his or her primary navigation system, like the compass of an explorer or the GPS of a ship. And just as disaster could well result from corrupting the readings of the explorer's compass while he is trekking across the Amazon, so too economic damage can result from government overriding price signals in the market. Messing with the pricing mechanisms of markets turns the economy into a hall of mirrors that is almost impossible to navigate. For example:
In the best case, corrupting market prices tends to result in gluts or shortages of individual products. For example, price floors on labor (minimum wages) have created a huge glut of young and unskilled workers unable to find work. On the other side, in the 1970s, caps on oil prices resulted in huge shortages in the US and those famous lines at gas stations. These shortages and gas lines were repeated several times in the 1970's, but never have returned since the price caps were phased out.
In the worst case, overriding market price mechanisms can create enormous problems for the entire economy. For example, it is quite likely that the artificially low interest rates promoted by the Federal Reserve over the last decade and higher housing prices driven by a myriad of US laws, organizations, and tax subsidies helped to drive the recent housing and financial bubble and subsequent crash. Many will counter that it was the exuberance of private bankers that drove the bubble, but many bankers were like ship captains who drove their ships onto the rocks because their GPS signal had been altered
Say what you want about the NY Times, but they are the lords of interactive info-graphics. Note you can play with the date as well as, on the left, which component of benefits you want to view.
OK, those of you looking for a business opportunity, Taylor dominates the soft-serve ice cream machine business. Today one of our machines broke. We got a quote for a refurbished machine -- with trade-in of our old macine - $14,000! The brand new ones cost as much as a car.
So investors -- there is your flashing price signal. There should be a big enough umbrella here to make some money with a good design and thoughtful sourcing. And I can tell you everyone who uses these machines is eagerly awaiting such an entrant.
Maybe I am missing something, but "friction-reduced" tires seem to be going in the wrong direction. Hopefully friction-reduced brake pads or inflation-reduced airbags are not next.
Apparently electric vehicle maker -- and recipient of lots of your and my money -- Fisker Automotive is struggling. Who would have thought that a company that could not fully fund itself privately and had to rely on political connections to use the coercive power of government to take money from taxpayers might be a bad investment?
As a reminder, Fisker's taxpayer largesse likely came at the behest of politically powerful Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins. It is his firm's investment returns we taxpayers are supporting. So it should come as no surprise that Ray Lane says, in the video below, that he thinks Obama is the greatest public sector venture capitalist ever. What does he use as justification for this conclusion? Why, Solyndra! I kid you not, check it out.
By the way, if you did not see it, check out my Forbes article on how the Fisker Karma gets worse mileage than an SUV when you trace its electricity back to the power plant.
This quote from Michael Mann [of Hockey Stick fame] is a great example of two common rhetorical tactics of climate alarmists:
And so I think we have to get away from this idea that in matters of science, it's, you know, that we should treat discussions of climate change as if there are two equal sides, like we often do in the political discourse. In matters of science, there is an equal merit to those who are denying the reality of climate change who area few marginal individuals largely affiliated with special interests versus the, you know, thousands of scientists around the world. U.S. National Academy of Sciences founded by Abraham Lincoln back in the 19th century, all the national academies of all of the major industrial nations around the world have all gone on record as stating clearly that humans are warming the planet and changing the climate through our continued burning of fossil fuels.
Here are the two tactics at play here:
He is attempting to marginalize skeptics so that debating their criticisms is not necessary. He argues that skeptics are not people of goodwill; or that they say what they say because they are paid by nefarious interests to do so; or that they are vastly outnumbered by real scientists ("real" being defined as those who agree with Dr. Mann). This is an oddly self-defeating argument, though the media never calls folks like Mann on it. If skeptics' arguments are indeed so threadbare, then one would imagine that throwing as much sunlight on them as possible would reveal their bankruptcy to everyone, but instead most alarmists are begging the media, as in this quote, to bury and hide skeptics' arguments. I LOVE to debate people when I know I am right, and have pre-debate trepidation only when I know my position to be weak.
There is an enormous bait and switch going on in the last sentence. Note the proposition is stated as "humans are warming the planet and changing the climate through our continued burning of fossil fuels." I, and many other skeptics, don't doubt the first part and would quibble with the second only because so much poor science occurs in attributing specific instances of climate change to human action. What most skeptics disagree with is an entirely different proposition, that humans are warming the planet to catastrophic levels that justify immensely expensive and coercive government actions to correct. Skeptics generally accept a degree or so of warming from each doubling of CO2 concentrations but reject the separate theory that the climate is dominated by positive feedback effects that multiple this warming 3x or more. Mann would never be caught dead in public trying to debate this second theory of positive feedback, despite the fact that most of the warming in IPCC forecasts is from this second theory, because it is FAR from settled. Again, the media is either uninterested or intellectually unable to call him on this.
I explained the latter points in much more detail at Forbes.com
In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation." But beyond the irony lies China's true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region's Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.
Update: Maybe he will be reincarnated in Avignon:
At 72, the Dalai Lama, who has lived in India since 1959, is beginning to plan his succession, saying that he refuses to be reborn in Tibet so long as it’s under Chinese control. Assuming he’s able to master the feat of controlling his rebirth, as Dalai Lamas supposedly have for the last 600 years, the situation is shaping up in which there could be two Dalai Lamas: one picked by the Chinese government, the other by Buddhist monks.
Why? This certainly costs them money, not just from lost revenue but from the cost of restocking and returning to the manufacture (not to mention fraud).
Are they doing this because they are good guys? Hah. Do you really expect goodwill out of an electronic retailer?
They did it because they felt they had to. As the top dog in dedicated electronics stores, they are constantly under competitive assault. They are the reference point competitors start from. Wal-mart attacks them on price. Amazon.com attacks them on price and convenience. Smaller retailers attack them on knowledge and integration services. Everyone attacks them on the niche details like return policies.
Best Buy did this not because they wanted to, but because they felt they had to under competitive pressure. The accountability enforced by the market works faster, on more relevant variables, and far more powerfully than government regulation.
When the government does regulate variables such as this, such regulation often actually blunts the full accountability of the market. Retail laws in many European countries set maximum hours and discount levels, protecting large retailers like Best Buy from upstarts trying to provide a better of different service.
Because its important to have a diversity of skin pigment and reproductive plumbing in our intellectual mono-culture.
Update: Wait, wait! We aren't a mono-culture! For example, some of us think Ralph Nader would make a great President and voted for him and some of us think Ralph Nader would make a great President but we didn't vote for him because we thought he was unelectable. That's some real diversity.
Frequently, so-called consumer regulation is coopted by large corporations to limit the ways competitors can try to unseat them. For example, limo services will get laws passed that all limos have to have certain features. Ostensibly, this is so consumers will be protected from having a limo without a wet bar, or whatever, but in fact its to prevent upstart competitors from taking them on with a different kind of business model potentially using different kinds of vehicles.
I find that this is frequently the case with regulated utilities. Utilities are able to get all kinds of crazy laws passed to protect business practices that would never survive the marketplace. Just today I was trying to open a business account with Duck River Electric in Tennessee. We are attempting to reopen a TVA campground that has been closed for several years. The campground is tiny, so I was flabberghasted when the utility told me that we had to put down a permanent deposit of $4100. I found this to be shockingly high. Apparently, it is based on the highest two months demand in the highest year (several years ago) in history. Since the campground is only open for five months, it means that we have to give the utility an indefinite interest free loan equal to half the annual business we do with them.
This is simply insane. Name one reasonably competitive business where one has to put down anywhere near this kind of advanced deposit to become a regular customer. If there was any sort of competition in this business, the sales people for the other company would have a field day with this. Sure, vendors often do a credit check on us, and a very few times (mostly early in our history) we had to pay COD for orders. But this is absurd.
PS- The only vendors we work with that are even close to this for abusiveness are the state authorities from whom we buy fishing licenses for resale. Many of these agencies require expensive payment bonds not required by any of our other (private) vendors. Arizona Game and Fish even forces us in January to accept an inventory of many products we do not sell (e.g. hunting stamps) and cannot sell by the terms of our lease. We have to keep these in the safe for a year and if we lose any and are unable to return them at the end of the year, we have to pay for them. Imagine Amazon.com sent you a bunch of crap you did not want and required you to hold them for a year, and then pay the expenses of returning them, and then pay for any item you might have lost. Anyone like myself who was dumb enough to fall into the Columbia House records thing will know the danger of this.
I had never seen Ansel Adams series of photos from a US internment camp for Japanese-Americans during WWII. I had mixed feelings about them. Adams said that he wanted to portray the resiliency of those imprisoned, showing how they made the best of a bad situation. And certainly I have great respect for that, and the cultural strengths we see at work are a prelude to how Japan itself was rebuilt after the devastation of WWII.
But at another level I find these photos incredibly creepy. They look too much like the fake photos staged by Germans and Russians of various eras to airbrush the horrors of their concentration camps. I am willing to believe we Americans were better jailers, but none-the-less I was disturbed that these looked a lot like propaganda photos.
