Coyote Blog

A while back, we finally finished reworking our backyard, one of those 3 month projects that eventually threaten to be a multi-generational saga.  We turned our existing pool, with a bit of trickery, into a zero-edge thing, put a dark bottom in it and ended up with a nice effect.  I probably could have posted it upside down and no one would have been able to tell the difference.  The pool design creates a surface like glass.

The tree is an ironwood.  A lot of the more interesting plants will not grow in the desert, but an exception is the native ironwood tree.  We have three now and every one is a work of art.

From the WaPo

With United Nations climate negotiators facing an uphill battle to advance their goal of reducing emissions linked to global warming, it's no surprise that the woman steering the talks appealed to a Mayan goddess Monday.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also "the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving.

The Mayans used to also cut the hearts out of living human beings as sacrifices to their gods, an apt metaphor for what the assembled UN delegates want to do to development and the world economy.

Regular readers will have no doubts about my skepticism of the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming.  In particular, in these pages and at Climate Skeptic, I have repeatedly criticized the details of Michael Mann's work on the hockey stick.  I won't repeat those issues today, though some of the past articles are indexed here.

That being said, efforts by Republicans in Virginia to bring legislative or even criminal action against Mann for his work when he was at the University of Virginia is about the worst idea I have heard in quite some time.  Though nominally about forcing public disclosure (something I am always in favor of from state entities) the ultimate goal is to drag Mann into court

Cuccinelli has said he wants to see whether a fraud investigation would be warranted into Mann's work, which showed that the earth has experienced a rapid, recent warming

[As an aside, this is actually NOT what Mann's hockey stick work purports to show.  The point of the hockey stick is to make the case that historic temperatures before 1850 were incredibly stable and flat, and thus recent increases of 0.6-0.8C over the last 150 years are unprecedented in comparison.   His research added nothing to our knowledge about recent warming, it was on focused on pre-industrial warming.   The same folks that say with confidence the science is settled don't even understand it].

For those frustrated with just how bad Mann's work is and upset at the incredible effort to protect this work from criticism or scrutiny by hiding key data (as documented in the East Anglia climategate emails), I know it must feel good to get some sort of public retribution.  But the potential precedent here of bringing up scientists on charges essentially for sloppy or incorrect work is awful.

Bad science happens all the time, completely absent any evil conspiracies.  Human nature is to see only the data that confirms ones hypotheses and, if possible, to resists scrutiny and criticism.  This happens all the time in science and if we started hauling everyone into court or into a Senate committee, we have half of academia there  (and then likely the other half when the party in power changed).  Team politics are a terrible disease and the last thing we need is to drag them any further into science and academia.

Science will eventually right itself, and what is needed is simply the time and openness to allow adversarial scrutiny and replication within academia to run its course.  Seriously, are we next going to drag the cold fusion guys in to court?  How about all the folks in the geology field that resisted plate tectonics for so long.  Will we call to account the losers in the string theory debate?

If legislators want to help, they can

• Make sure there are standards in place for archiving and public availability of any data and code associated with government funded research
• Improve the governments own climate data management
• Ensure that state funding is distributed in a way to support a rich dialog on multiple sides of contested scientific issues.

University of Arizona President Robert Shelton absolutely berates the state legislature as a bunch of Neanderthals for slashing his budget:

During this period, we have seen our state appropriation cut by nearly one-quarter, going from approximately $440 million to $340 million. The impact of these cuts has been amplified because they have come at a time when we have been asked to grow our enrollment substantially, and indeed we have done just that, setting records for enrollment in each of the past four years.

So the sound bite for this year is that we are being asked by the state to do much, much more, while being given much, much less....

The sad thing, though, with some of these legislators is that they have no idea how much they risk our state's future (and the quality of life for people who live here) when they try to lay waste to the single greatest engine of economic mobility that has ever been created. Because that's what public higher education in this country is.

Here he gets over the top -- look at the words he uses for the state legislature

When malevolent people talk about wanting to dismantle and destroy great universities, all they achieve is dire consequences for the human condition.

I am sure for the children shows up in there somewhere.  But is he right.  Well, technically, the legislature did cut his general fund appropriation.  But then they gave it back to him, and more, in different budget categories.  As it turns out, Shelton is being unbelievably disingenuous about this, and only the fact that most of his students went to public high schools and therefore can't do math lets him get away with such an address.  Greg Patterson tracks down the facts:

I contacted the Joint Legislative Budget Committee and asked for UA's total funding.Here's the response:

Mr. Patterson

UA's originally enacted FY 2008 General Fund appropriation was $362.4 million, and their current year (FY 2011) General Fund appropriation is $271.3 million, which is a decrease of $(91.1) million.

UA was appropriated $117.7 million in Other Appropriated Funds in FY 2008 and $219.3 million in the current year, which is an increase of $101.6 million.

UA's Non-Appropriated and Federal Funds budget was $786.7 million in FY 2008 and $911.3 million in FY 2011, which is an increase of $124.6 million.

In total, UA's FY 2008 budget was $1,266.8 million and their FY 2011 budget was $1,401.9 million, which is a total increase of $135.1 million.

So the University of Arizona's total budget has increased by $135.1 million--over 10%--during the period in which the "malevolent" state leaders have been "slashing" the funding.

Unbelievable.  I am so sick of statists crying budget cut when in fact their budgets are increasing.  Mr. Shelton goes on for thousands of words of drivel about the poor state of public discourse in Arizona while simultaneously dropping this turd in the punch bowl.  How is public discourse supposed to improve when the president of one of our two state universities is spewing out what he must know are outright fabrications and misrepresentations.  Pathetic.

This is awesome.

Note the wealth axis is logarithmic, so the rightward velocity is understated

I have never really understand all the hatred directed at ticket scalpers.  They only make money because the original sellers of a scarce resource  (e.g. tickets to a concert) under-price their product.  Scalpers live on the difference between the list price of the ticket and the true market clearing price.  So they buy the tickets when they first come out for $80 and resell them for, say, $200.

Scalpers will never go away.  Even if there were not a mispricing problem, there is always going to be a secondary market for date/time specific products that are non-refundable  (just think how great it would be if there were a secondary market for airline tickets you could no longer use, though alas TSA and airline rules pretty much make this impossible).

But scalping would be a lot, lot smaller if concerts just sold the tickets originally at the market clearing price, or held some sort of auction for them.  Then the original price would be $200, not $80, and the margin for flipping the tickets goes away.

Which then presents us this irony for those consumers who whine about scalped ticket prices.  The fact is the higher market clearing price never goes away, even if it is achieved in some sort of black market.  In fact, what eliminating scalping really means is that instead of some people paying $80 and some paying a higher price, everybody pays a higher price.  There is no mystical low price, larger supply solution to the problem.  In fact, the lower price with scalping model really is a gift from bands and concert promoters -- the scalping margin really could be theirs if they wanted it.

I am reminded of all this by this notice to fans posted by the White Stripes' Jack White and linked by TJIC.  The subject in question is limited edition vinyl but the discussion is exactly similar.  White took some small steps as publisher to capture some of the scalper's margin discussed above, and apparently some fans freaked.

Libertarians are always somewhere between irate and amused at how the Coke and Pepsi parties suddenly change their principles based on who is in the White House.  The latest example:  As the left cries foul on the Republican use of the filibuster in the lame duck session, Democratic leader Harry Reid once praised the filibuster, at least back in the day it was a bull-work against Bush-Cheney fascism:

"¦when legislation is supported by the majority of Americans, it eventually overcomes a filibuster's delay, as public protests far outweigh any senator's appetite for filibuster. But when legislation only has the support of the minority, the filibuster slows the legislation, prevents a senator from ramming it through and gives the American people enough time to join the opposition.

Mr. President, the right to extended debate is never more important than when one party controls Congress and the White House. In these cases, the filibuster serves as a check on power and preserves our limited government. "¦

For 200 years we've had the right to extended debate [i.e., filibuster]. It's not some procedural gimmick. It's within the vision of the founding fathers of our country. "¦ They established a government so that no one person and no single party could have total control.

Some in this chamber want to throw out 214 years of Senate history in the quest for absolute power. They want to do away with Mr. Smith, as depicted in that great movie, being able to come to Washington. They want to do away with the filibuster. They think they're wiser than our founding fathers. I doubt that that's true.

I like the filibuster most all the time.  I once suggested that the rules be changed to not allow filibuster when the Senate is exercising its duty to approve administrative officials and judges, but I am not sure I support even that exception.

Apparently, Congress just before the election appropriated $900 million to build part of a high speed rail line in CA.  Rather than focusing either on LA or SF, Congress apparently appropriated the money for a mostly rural district that just coincidentally had a Democratic Congressman embroiled in a difficult election.  So now Congress has dedicated a billion dollars of your money for this high speed rail line, from Borden to Corcoran:

I am not kidding you.  More here from the AntiPlanner.

I discussed the CA high speed rail project here and here.  I discussed the practice of building even one useless section as a way to commit the public to building the whole thing here.  An excerpt of how this is done the Chicago way:

But what is really amazing is that Chicago embarked on building a $320 million downtown station for the project without even a plan for the rest of the line "” no design, no route, no land acquisition, no appropriation, no cost estimate, nothing.  There are currently tracks running near the station to the airport, but there are no passing sidings on these tracks, making it impossible for express and local trains to share the same track.  The express service idea would either require an extensive rebuilding of the entire current line using signaling and switching technologies that may not (according to Daley himself) even exist, or it requires an entirely new line cut through some of the densest urban environments in the country.  Even this critical decision on basic approach was not made before they started construction on the station, and in fact still has not been made.

Private companies can be jerks too, but they don't write the laws or control law enforcement.  That is why government is so dangerous, not because I necessarily trust it less, but because there is nothing acting to circumscribe its power.

Ian Cotterell got bad news Monday night when he learned that a city tow truck had plowed into a Roxbury apartment building he owns, blasting a hole in the brick facade and forcing his 17 tenants to vacate. Yesterday, he got more bad news: The city is ticketing him.

After building inspectors examined the building to assess damage from the crash, they cited Cotterell for "structural defects" including collapsed bricks, damaged windows, and other "unsafe and dangerous" conditions, according to an order issued by the city yesterday.

The order noted that a Boston Transportation Department truck "drove into building," but it also ordered Cotterell to fix the problems within 24 hours and appear in court."It's unfair; the code violations I have because the truck made them,"

TJIC has more at the link

One issue I discussed in my article on buying your own business was business valuation.  This article from Inc magazine talks about business valuations during this recession, and includes an interview with Walt Lipski, a terrific investment banker in the small business sector who represented me in my purchase.

From the view count (over 3 million), I seem to be the last person to have seen this, but I found this pretty amusing (yeah, I know, I am such a guy). Maybe I need to restart the 100 pushup program.

I will tell you that no matter how confidence in one has in his own intellectual ability, it's hard not to experience an "am I crazy?" moment when one reaches a conclusion different from everybody else's.  Case in point is my critique of the EPA's mpg numbers for electric vehicles.   The EPA's methodology strikes me as complete BS, but everyone, even folks like Popular Mechanics, keep treating the number like it is a serious representation of the fossil fuel use of vehicles like the Volt and Leaf.

Sot it was therefore nice to see a mechanical engineering professor independently make the same points I did in this Pajamas Media article. Also, my Princeton classmate Henry Payne, who often writes on automotive issues, linked my article at the Michigan View.

Via Overlawyered:

As part of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA), Congress mandated that the CPSC create a "publicly available consumer product safety information database" compiling consumer complaints about the safety of products. Last week, by a 3-2 majority, the commission voted to adopt regulations that have dismayed many in the business community by ensuring that the database will needlessly include a wide range of secondhand, false, unfounded or tactical reports. The Washington Times editorializes:

"¦[Under the regulations as adopted last week] anybody who wants to trash a product, for whatever reason, can do so. The commission can leave a complaint on the database indefinitely without investigating its merits "even if a manufacturer has already provided evidence the claim is inaccurate," as noted by Carter Wood of the National Association of Manufacturers' "Shopfloor" blog"¦.

Trial lawyers pushing class-action suits could gin up hundreds of anonymous complaints, then point the jurors to those complaints at the "official" CPSC website as [support for] their theories that a product in question caused vast harm. "The agency does not appear to be concerned about fairness and does not care that unfounded complaints could damage the reputation of a company," said [Commissioner Nancy] Nord.

Commissioners Nord and Anne Northup introduced an alternative proposal (PDF) aimed at making the contents of the database more reliable and accurate but were outvoted by the Democratic commission majority led by Chairman Inez Tenenbaum. Nord: "under the majority's approach, the database will not differentiate between complaints entered by lawyers, competitors, labor unions and advocacy groups who may have their own reasons to "˜salt' the database, from those of actual consumers with firsthand experience with a product."

Any number of private actors have already tackled this problem. Amazon.com has probably the most comprehensive set of product reviews, and has taken a number of steps (e.g. real name reviews) to increase trust in their system.  Reviewers who are shills (either for or against a product) are quickly outed by other reviewers.   Another site whose reviews I rely on a lot is TripAdvisor, which has hotel and other travel reviews.   TripAdvisor allows the reviewed hotels to respond to individual reviews in a way that the consumer can see to get both sides of the story.

Apparently, none of this back and forth will be allowed in the CPSC data base.  The Democrats who wrote the process only want bad stuff in the data base, so it will not allow manufacturer responses or even positive reviews to appear.  The only possible justification for the government to run this database would be for the government to take a role in investigating and confirming or overturning claims and complaints, but it is clear it won't be doing this either.   This will just be a location for disgruntled people to drop turds on various manufacturers, all with the imprimatur of the government.  I can't see consumers finding much value here compared to the alternatives, but I can see the value in a courtroom to be able to stuff a government site with unsubstantiated claims and then use that site to say that the "official" government site is full of criticisms of the product.

From Overlawyered today:

"A new study in the Financial Analysts Journal casts serious doubt on the premise [of litigation social efficiency], at least when it comes to shareholder class actions. In most cases, the authors found, the litigation mainly serves to punish shareholders who have already suffered from a downturn in their stock. Only suits targeting illegal insider trading, and to a lesser extent, accounting fraud were associated with subsequent higher long-term returns."

Way back in early 2006 (have I been blogging so long?) I was guest blogging at Overlawyered and I wrote this:

But from a philosophical standpoint, shareholder suits have never made much sense to me. While I can understand the shareholders of the company suing a minority shareholder who might be enriching themselves disproportionately (e.g. Rigas family at Adelphia), suits by shareholders against the company they own seem"¦ crazy.

Any successful verdict for shareholders against the company would effectively come out of the pockets of the company's owners who are.. the shareholders. So in effect, shareholders are suing themselves, and, win or lose, they as a group end up with less than if the suit had never been started, since a good chunk of the payout goes to the lawyers. The only way these suits make financial sense (except to the lawyers, like Bill Lerach) is if only a small subset of the shareholders participate, and then these are just vehicles for transferring money from half the shareholders to the other half, or in other words from one wronged party that does not engage in litigation to another wronged party who is aggressively litigious. Is there really justice here?

OK, you could argue that many of these shareholders are not suing themselves, because they are past shareholders that dumped their stock at a loss. But given these facts, these suits are even less fair. If these suits are made by past shareholders who held stock (ie, were the owners) at the time certain wrongs were committed, they are in fact paid by current and future shareholders who may well have not even owned the company at the time of the abuses, and who may in fact be participating in cleaning the company up. So these litigants are in effect making the argument that because the company was run unethically when they owned it, they are going to sue the people who bought it from them and cleaned it up? Shouldn't the payment be the other way around, with past owners paying current owners for the mess they left?

I understand that theoretically they might have an incentive improvement from the threat of these suits that improves corporate governance.  But this is mitigated by the fact that most corporations consider these suits to be random landmines without merit, to be avoided if possible, to be settled if necessary, but that have little bearing on the underlying governance of the company.

This is absolutely awful.  A main who is chained and drugged is being beaten by Maricopa County officers (yes, these guys report to Arpaio).

We can award extra points here to Arpaio who is saying how incredibly difficult it is to detect these incidents - Just think, he says, how much video we would have to go through.  But my untrained eyes show in every case at least 3 and sometimes many more county employees looking on.  Apparently none of these folks reported the incident.  Which means that unlike what they are trying to portray here as an isolated incident due to one bad apple, this is a systematic culture of violence against citizens that pervades the whole organization.

Double extra credit for the implication that none of the onlookers who watched a violent felony in progress and who are nominally law enforcement officers will be punished for covering up the incident  (brief opening commercial)

The new food-safety bill, soon to be law, features all the usual suspects of the regulatory state

• Strong support from large corporations, who know the regulations will kill off their smaller rivals and make it harder for new entrants to compete with them
• Regulations nominally aimed at fixing a recent "crisis" (e.g. last year's salmonella outbreak) with no actual logic of how the new regulations would have prevented the past crisis.  In fact, they very likely would not have  (just as TSA new x-ray machines sold as a way to stop future underwear bombers likely would not have detected the original underwear bomber)
• Numerous special exemptions, subsidies, etc. for narrow, favored constituencies
• Pious statements from the priests of statism, who define small government per se as a problem.  Example from Tom Harkin, "It's shocking to think that the last comprehensive overhaul of the food-safety system was in 1938."  Why is the lack of new legislation a better indicator of a problem than, say, incidence or death rates which have fallen consistently for years.

For an extra bonus, those who most vocally support the law are also politically among those who most support the local food movement, which one can pretty much write off unless they get exemptions from this law.  And if they do, what's the point?  Do I really fear the operating safety of Nestle more than Joe who has a farm 30 miles away?  Remember the toy safety law -- it was spurred by a series of recall of mostly Matel toys, but in the actual law Matel became exempt from Federal inspection while the regulations have become a crushing burden for small toy makers.

More here.

I have a bunch of motorized shades on the high clerestory windows around my house (these are about 10 feet off the floor so impossible to manually open and close).  I had the ladder out this weekend and was replacing batteries when I found one of the battery cases was corroded beyond repair because a battery had leaked.

I checked the Hunter-Douglas web site, and found the parts request link.  It said that if they had the part in stock, they would send it to me for free.  That sounded like BS, and I wrote them that I was happy to be charged, I just wanted the part.

Today I got this email:

It's our pleasure to provide you with the replacement Duette PowerRise AA battery Wand requested and sending them to the address provided.  These parts are offered at no charge to our consumers.  You will receive your parts within 10 business days.

Awesome.

Google grew up providing a number of free services (email, search, etc.)  Given that they were free, it was not unreasonable to avoid providing any live customer support via email or phone.  Users weren't paying anything, so if they had a problem they could try to solve it on the boards.  In fact, I have criticized whiners on boards for their absurd expectations of customer support for a free product.

Today, Google now offers a number of paid services (e.g. Adwords search advertising) but it still brings its old customer service mentality to these free services.  I pay thousands of dollars a year in advertising to Google, and many others pay much more than this.   Unfortunately, there is absolutely no option for support from a real person on my advertising account.  Sure, there is a section marked "contact us" on their web sit, but all that is is a fairly lame troubleshooting script that does not lead to any sort of contact form or phone number. Just try searching "how do I contact google adwords" to see all the frustration.

I know many companies that are able to provide live support for a $12 purchase, much less a $1200 purchase.  Even Intuit Quickbooks, which pretty much defines the low end of customer service in my little world, is easier to reach than Google.

In the past, I have recommended Google Adwords because it gets results.  While that is still true, I have to withdraw my recommendation.  Right now, my account is effectively closed -- though not, as you might expect, in a fit of pique from 5 hours of trying to get an answer to a simple account question.  It's closed because something broke, and I cannot get it fixed.  The only workaround on the boards for this problem is to close my account (and lose all the records of past search terms used, campaign success details., etc) and open a new account.  Roughly the equivalent of tearing your house down to fix a bad electrical outlet.  No way.  I was looking for a way to economize and Google has apparently just volunteered themselves as my target.  Thousands of dollars of revenue tossed because they wanted to save five bucks of labor.

Well, as usual, the progressives have the rights and roles of private individuals vs. government exactly backwards, from Kevin Drum:

As I said earlier, I'm on the fence a bit about whether an indiscriminate release of thousands of U.S. embassy cables is useful. After all, governments have a legitimate need for confidential diplomacy. But when I read about WikiLeaks' planned financial expose [release of private emails from a private corporation], I felt no such qualms. A huge release of internal documents from a big bank? Bring it on!

The government and public officials acting in a public capacity have no rights to privacy of their work and work products from the public that employs them (except to the extent that privacy pays some sort of large benefit, which I would define pretty narrowly).  While things like the recent Wikileak are certainly damaging to things like sources and foreign relations, I have sympathy for such a mass dump when the government so systematically defaults to too much secrecy and confidentiality for what should be public business, mainly to avoid accountability.  The public has the right to know just about whatever the government is doing, in detail.

In the private sector, ordinary citizens have no similar "right to know" the private business of private entities, the only exception being in criminal investigations where there are clear procedures for how confidential private information may be obtained, used, and protected.  Had the proposed email dump related to alleged misconduct, I would have been pretty relaxed about it.  But the proposed document dump is just voyeurism.  One may wish for more accountability processes vis a vis banks, but in a country supposedly still founded on the rule of law, we don't get to invent new ex post facto rules, such as "if your industry pisses off enough Americans, all the material that was previously legally private is retroactively made part of the public domain."

Drum may be gleeful now, but someday he just might be regretful of establishing a precedent for consequence-free theft and publication of private information.   Had, for example, the words "big bank" in the paragraph been replaced by, say, "Major newspaper," we would likely see Drum in a major-league freak out, though the New York Times corporation has exactly the same legal status as Citicorp.

Everyone thinks his own information is "different" and somehow on a higher plane than other people's information.  Drum likely thinks his communication by email with sources is special, while I would argue release of my confidential internal communication about new service offerings and pricing strategies would be particularly damaging.  The way we typically settle this is to say that private is private, and not legally more or less private based on subjective opinions by third parties about the value of the data.

The Brits are selling an aircraft carrier via an internet auction.

I obviously need to go out and buy an SUV to reverse this:

Phoenix-area temperatures could drop as low as the mid-20s early Tuesday morning, possibly breaking the record low temperature of 30 degrees set in 1911.

This story just floored me:

"How much is sustainability worth?" asks Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Nigel Jaquiss. "Try $65 million in public money." That's how much taxpayers will be spending on a $72 million "green" building in downtown Portland. At $462 a square foot, it will be "perhaps the most expensive office space ever built in Portland."

The director of the Oregon Environmental Council defends the building as something that can "leverage long-term outcomes," whatever that means. But she would defend it, since the state is promising OEC, 1000 Friends of Oregon, and other left-wing environmental groups office space in the building at low rents that are guaranteed to stay fixed for decades.

Although the public is paying for most of the building, "tenants will be expected to share a commitment to help advance Oregon's leadership in sustainable development, collaborate with fellow tenants, and pursue OSC's standards for energy and water use." Apparently, people who don't share those "commitments" won't be welcome, even if their taxes helped pay for the building and even if they are willing to pay more for office space than the greenies.

Sustainability supposedly bills itself as being about using a reduced amount of resources.  But this goal is already accomplished by pricing signals, as they signal the relative scarcity of resources we might want to employ.  By definition, then, building the most expensive office space ever means that they are more resources (or a mix of scarcer resources) per square foot than any other previous construction project.  How in heavens name is this "sustainable?"

Like many such public projects (e.g. light rail), this project drains resources from millions of people via taxation to benefit just a few.  It takes an approach that could never, ever be scaled to benefit everyone in the city as it would be bankrupting.  This construction uses unreasonably large resources for an application that will never come close to returning this investment and can only be funded on a small scale using the resources drained from millions of people.  How is this "sustainable?"

I will leave the answer to these questions to the reader, but here is a hint:  Those advocating projects like this tend to treat human labor as free, to be deployed like Egyptian slaves to the whim of the state planner, either via taxation or more directly through demands for free labor (e.g. in recycling programs).

A decade ago, I was an executive at an Internet startup named Mercata.  Mercata was one of a couple of entrants in a field we had named "group buying."   In practice, this meant there were limited time sales where the price of a product would fall based on the number of people who agreed to buy.   Obviously the volumes were not large enough to get economies of scale of any sort, so they main advantage of the approach was viral marketing -- once you had agreed to buy, you had an incentive to get others to join in as more buyers would reduce your price.

The company eventually folded.  The company was very professionally run for an Internet startup of the day, but it had a lot of overhead for its volume, and, as eBay would learn, a lot of people wanted to buy immediately rather than wait for some sort of auction to play out.

But it turns out that one of our biggest failures was timing.  Recently, a company called Groupon has taken advantage of social networking that did not exist 10 years ago and has been quite succesful building a business using a very similar model to Mercata's.  It appears that Google has just bought Groupon for $2.5 billion.  Sigh.

This is not, however, even my largest financial missed opportunity.  I still have in my desk a 1984 job offer from Microsoft, which I eschewed at the time because it paid less than my other offers and tried to compensate me in these crazy pieces of paper called "options."  I once calculated the current value of the options just in the offer letter (ie not including any future grants over time) and their value was well north of any conceivable net worth I might reach currently.

Via the AZ Republic

10 of the 25 most lucrative stimulus-funded contracts for work inside the state were awarded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to one Alaskan company.

Bristol Environmental Remediation Services LLC, based in Anchorage, was not required to bid for the work, which is valued at more than $140 million and involves ground-pollution monitoring and cleanup at 10 Arizona sites, including San Carlos, Parker, Tuba City and Window Rock

Who wants to bet this company has had friends named Stevens and Murkowski?  What is it about Alaska?

As an added bonus, to my frequent point that regulation in general and our new emerging corporate state in general tend to favor large companies over small:

Tom Mertz is Tempe-based Sundt Construction Inc.'s federal division vice president, a position that has few counterparts among Sundt's smaller competitors.

Contracts funded by the federal government tend to favor larger companies such as Sundt, Mertz said, because there are additional steps involved in completing such a project, many of them involving protocol and paperwork.

"Federal-government work certainly is not for everyone," he said.

Sundt has landed both state and federal economic-stimulus projects, including one of Arizona's biggest, a $24.6 million contract to build federal-courthouse facilities in Yuma....

Mark Stapp, director of ASU's Master of Real Estate Development program and a longtime developer in the Valley, said that the problems smaller contractors encounter most often on public projects have little to do with the work itself.

"It's the administration of the work that kills them," he said.

As a result, many small and midsize contractors have avoided government-sponsored work, which adds to their current disadvantage now that the public sector is hosting the only game in town.

After several posts yesterday, I rewrote my thoughts on EV's and the new EPA mileage numbers.  I am more convinced than ever that this standard borders on outright fraud, particularly when the DOE published what should be the correct methodology way back in the Clinton Administration and the EPA has ignored this advice and gone with a methodology that inflates the MPG (equivilant) of EV's by a factor of nearly 3.  For example, the list the Nissan Leaf with an MPGe of 99, but by the DOE methodology the number should be 36.

The full article is in Forbes.com and is here.  An excerpt:

The end result is startling.  Using the DOE's apples to apples methodology, the MPGe of the Nissan Leaf is not 99 but 36! Now, 36 is a good mileage number, but it is pretty pedestrian compared to the overblown expectations for electric vehicles, and is actually lower than the EPA calculated mileage of a number of hybrids and even a few traditional gasoline-powered vehicles like the Honda CR-Z.

Supporters of the inflated EPA standards have argued that they are appropriate because they measure cars on their efficiency of using energy in whatever form is put in their tank (or batteries).  But this is disingenuous.  The whole point of US fuel economy standards is not power train efficiency per se, but to support an energy policy aimed at reducing fossil fuel use.  To this end, the more sophisticated DOE standard is a much better reflection of how well the Nissan Leaf affects US fossil fuel use.  The only reason not to use this standard is because the EPA, and the Administration in general, has too many chips on the table behind electric vehicles, and simply can't afford an honest accounting.