Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive
Wow, its hard to believe that even a hard core statist believes this in the face of historical evidence, but there it is. The example (and remember even a single correct example does not support the word "every") is an interesting one:
"In the middle of the Civil War you had a guy named Lincoln paying people $16,000 for every 40 miles of track they laid across the continental United States. "¦ No private enterprise would have done that for another 35 years."
I am actually stunned that he is historically literate enough to get the second part of this right, that there was in fact a single transcontinental railroad, James J Hill's Great Northern, that completed its line without government subsidies or land grants. He even gets the date about right. A few thoughts:
Not mentioned by Biden is the emergence of the entire rest of the US railroad industry, which by 1860 had about 30,000 miles of track, mostly via private initiative.
I think the original transcontinental railroad has interesting parallels to the Apollo program -- certainly government action got us into space and a transcontinental railroad faster than private action, but it could be argued that both delayed private initiative in these areas longer than would have occurred without the action.
For Lincoln in the Civil War, the transcontinental had as much to do with cementing Union control of California as it did promoting commerce or any other values
Here is my favorite fact -- Every single transcontinental railroad went bankrupt at least once before 1925, except one. Can you guess which one did not? Yes, it was the Great Northern, the only one built entirely with private capital.
The National Park Service says it has no permit filed for zombie activity at the Lincoln Memorial Tuesday morning by AMC, a posse of zombies, or anyone else.
Wow, that was easy to stop. And here I thought government permitting and licensing requirements were counter-productive. Chalk one up for the statists.
Via TJIC, Copblock releases links to police officers accused of committing crimes. The list for just one week is ridiculously long, and surely would be longer if not for the law of Omerta among police that cause only a small percentage of their crimes to see the light of day. Congratulations to Phoenix area police (including Mesa and Maricopa County) for making the list seven times.
I thought we should have opened up years ago to Cuba, even when they were at their most totalitarian. After all, 60 years is probably enough time to prove sanctions are not enough to bring Cuban leadership to their knees, and in the intervening time we have seen any number of examples of the power of trade and open interaction helping to topple bad regimes.
Unfortunately, I think we have been prevented in doing so by pure ego (we don't want to admit a failed policy we put so much bipartisan effort into) as well as Florida electoral politics (anti-Castro votes considered swing votes in a swing state). I don't know what to do about the latter -- we have ethanol subsidies for the same reason (ie Iowa's prominence in the presidential selection process). However, with Cuba currently mitigating some of its worst socialist impulses, it strikes me that now is the time we can overcome the ego problem and simply declare victory. Unfortunately, we now have a President that may want to continue punishing Cuba, this time for lowering taxes and reducing the size of government.
This guy thinks he has found evidence of time travel, in the form of a person talking on a cell-phone-like device caught on film in 1928. But wouldn't having a cell phone in 1928 be like having the first fax machine?
From the Thin Green Line, a reliable source for any absurd science that supports environmental alarmism:
Sending and receiving email makes up a full percent of a relatively green person's annual carbon emissions, the equivalent of driving 200 miles.
Dealing with spam, however, accounts for more than a fifth of the average account holder's electricity use. Spam makes up a shocking 80 percent of all emails sent, but most people get rid of them as fast as you can say "delete."
So how does email stack up to snail mail? The per-message carbon cost of email is just 1/60th of the old-fashioned letter's. But think about it "” you probably send at least 60 times as many emails a year than you ever did letters.
One way to go greener then is to avoid sending a bunch of short emails and instead build a longer message before you send it.
This is simply hilarious, and reminds me of the things the engineers would fool the pointy-haired boss with in Dilbert. Here was my response:
This is exactly the kind of garbage analysis that is making the environmental movement a laughing stock.
In computing the carbon footprint of email, the vast majority of the energy in the study was taking the amount of energy used by a PC during email use (ie checking, deleting, sending, organizing) and dividing it by the number of emails sent or processed. The number of emails is virtually irrelevant -- it is the time spent on the computer that matters. So futzing around trying to craft one longer email from many shorter emails does nothing, and probably consumers more energy if it takes longer to write than the five short emails.
This is exactly the kind of peril that results from a) reacting to the press release of a study without understanding its methodology (or the underlying science) and b) focusing improvement efforts on the wrong metrics.
The way to save power is to use your computer less, and to shut it down when not in use rather than leaving it on standby.
If one wants to argue that the energy is from actually firing the bits over the web, this is absurd. Even if this had a measurable energy impact, given the very few bytes in an email, reducing your web surfing by one page a day would keep more bytes from moving than completely giving up email.
By the way, the suggestion for an email charge in the linked article is one I have made for years, though the amount is too high. A charge of even 1/100 cent per email would cost each of us about a penny per day but would cost a 10 million mail spammer $1000, probably higher than his or her expected yield from the spam.
"American company Fiberglass Freaks is producing officially licensed, road-legal 1966 Batmobiles. And yes, the flamethrower works.Each car costs $149,999 (£95,000), takes six months to build and features an array of working gadgets, including a red flashing beacon, a radar screen called "˜Detect-a-scope', a retractable, gold-coloured "˜Batbeam' and a dashboard DVD player.
But e.g. James Cameron apparently assumes that people won't be able to notice that he is using
3 houses in Malibu (24,000 sq ft in total - 10 times the average U.S. home), a 100-acre ranch in Santa Barbara, a JetRanger helicopter, three Harleys, a Corvette, a Ducati, a Ford GT, a collection of dirt bikes, a yacht, a Humvee firetruck, a fleet of submarines...
Nevertheless, he demands that people live with less - the same people who made him rich by watching his movies....
There simply doesn't exist any justification of the need to lower the world population that would make the life of James Cameron sustainable. It's just amazing to think about the societal atmosphere that makes it natural for him to defend these inhuman concepts.
Long time readers will know that after years of being a death penalty hawk in my younger years, have turned against the death penalty because I do not think that our government run legal system is capable of handing out death sentences fairly. In particular, we see too many case overturned 20-30 years after the fact by DNA and other evidence, as well as changing social pressures (e.g. increased sympathy for blacks in the deep south) that I don't like the death penalty because it cuts off the ability to appeal. Sure, folks on death row get a zillion appeals, but after 6-8 years these run out and the person is killed. How is that going to help the black man convicted in 1962, when changing societal dynamics might only offer him a fair hearing in 1985, or DNA evidence in 1995, or help from the Innocence Project in 2005?
Never-the-less, I have to say this may be the worst appeal I have ever seen against the death penalty, with one man trying to hold up the process because the lethal drugs were obtained from a non-US supplier. LOL, I don't think he is really worried about the drugs somehow being ineffective. I sympathize with him, I would be doing everything I could too, particularly in a state like Arizona where law-of-the-west politicians compete to see who can send prisoners to the grave fastest.
If you are young (I suppose 20's or younger) and have been actively involved in some way as a climate skeptic in the Washington DC area, reporter Andrew Restuccia of the Washington Independent would like to talk to you. He is writing an article on young climate skeptics, I think. Drop him a note, he seems to be developing a hypothesis that skeptics are all crusty old dudes and showing him some fresh faces would help: arestuccia --at-- washingtonindependent.com
California state treasurer Bill Lockyer is urging public employee pension fund to divest itself of stocks of companies because of their support for a particular state ballot initiative. Check that again - a sitting state official using his position in power to punish folks during an election campaign for their stand in that election.
"¦ state Treasurer Bill Lockyer, a former attorney general, urged the state's largest public employee investment funds to divest themselves of Valero and Tesoro stock.
Lockyer sent a letter to the public pension funds, known as CalPERS and CalSTRS, asking them to rid themselves of any stock connected to the refiners Valero and Tesoro. Lockyer charged the companies with attempting to constrain gasoline supplies in California to ensure profits for years to come "” and opposing the state's climate change law as a means to ensure that constraint.
"CalPERS and CalSTRS should not be investing in Texas oil companies that hurt the California economy, no more than they should invest in companies that spend millions of shareholder dollars to undermine California's environmental laws and the state's green energy industries and green tech jobs," Lockyer wrote.
Lockyer, a board member at CalPERS, is expected to ask the board tomorrow to divest Valero and Tesoro holdings during a meeting."
The Green Hell blog added:
It was also reported to this blog that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who views the global warming law as his signature accomplishment, kept Chevron out of the Proposition 23 battle by threatening the company with adverse tax measures.
If I was an economics grad student, here is a study I would love to do. Identify products or industries for which third-party payers, and particularly the government, contribute a substantial amount of the purchase volume, either from outright payments or loan guarantees. Here are three biggies I can think of:
Health care
Houses
College
Then look at the differing inflation rates over the last 20 years for these vs. a basket of other goods purchased the traditional way (ie with your own damn money). I think you can see just from visual inspection where the answer is going to go.
In that 2005 incident, Chrisman and his partner arrested a homeless woman on an outstanding warrant. According to the internal affairs investigation, Chrisman and his partner planted drug paraphernalia on the woman -- because they wanted to play a joke on the woman, who is mentally challenged.
Take a look at the video -- Chrisman puts a brilo pad and pipe in his partner's left hand. His female partner then pretends to pull the pipe out of the woman's dress.
Chrisman said he knew the suspect, and just wanted to get a rise out of her. He was suspended for one day and put on the Brady List -- his partner was also suspended for one day and put on the Brady List.
The woman wasn't charged with anything related to the planted evidence.
Video at the link.
It is hard to find the humor in planting evidence on a mentally-challenged homeless woman, though my guess is this became a joke only after the video appeared.
No matter what the officer's explanation, the disturbing fact is that Phoenix police officers seem to carry on their person, as part of their equipment, throw-down drug paraphernalia. Why is no one asking why Chrisman had the crack pipe in the first place, or how his team was so well trained that they could wordlessly set up the plant. This whole episode smacks of something well-practiced.
I am a terrible photographer and seem to struggle getting any good pictures. But with a little patience and some study, my yield has gone up, though it still is well under 20%. Just for self-motivation, rather than any sense anyone out there is interested, here are a few of my recent photos that I thought came out pretty well. A couple are experiments with HDR photography. As usual click for enlargement:
Cinque Terre. The HDR process in the first one really brings out the details, but like a sharpness filter turned up too high, the image falls apart when zoomed too much.
The next one could have been awesome if I had waited, say, 12 hours for the sun to be in the right place
This is the town of Portovenere
And at night, which was beautiful but I tried a zillion exposures and could never get quite what I wanted
I loved all the little winding staircases. I struggled to capture the romantic element that attracted me to them. This one came out the best, but still failed to get what I wanted
A couple of views from the roof of the Milan Duomo. I really loved walking among the flying buttresses and thought these made interesting subjects. These are probably my favorite shots from the whole batch. They are both HDR shots.
And here are the spires on the same roof:
The Grand Canyon and Sedona
Haze seems to be my never-ending enemy of good landscape photos. I have tried filters of various sorts. In the shot below, I tried HDR which really cut the haze but left the tree in the foreground as a blur (due to its movement between the photos that were combined to make the picture).
Several people sent me this Reason video on light rail in Detroit
I was really struck by the cargo cult reasoning here and the confusion of cause and effect. Because we see rail in highly developed urban areas (e.g. Manhattan) then if we build rail in a blighted area, it will soon look like Manhattan.
Note the mentions of serving sports stadiums. As I have observed earlier, light rail systems almost always service professional sports stadiums. Is there no limit to the public subsidies that politicians are willing to throw at sports franchise owners?
Then ending is a classic
Update:From Wikipedia, for those not familiar with cargo cults:
Cargo cult activity in the Pacific region increased significantly during and immediately after World War II, when the residents of these regions observed the Japanese and American combatants bringing in large amounts of material. When the war ended, the military bases closed and the flow of goods and materials ceased. In an attempt to attract further deliveries of goods, followers of the cults engaged in ritualistic practices such as building crude imitation landing strips, aircraft and radio equipment, and mimicking the behaviour that they had observed of the military personnel operating them.
Sure sounds a lot like Detroit, trying to bring back the prosperity. This is actually pretty endemic in modern-day policy making, as so few people really understand the origins of wealth. Obama's stimulus programs can be seen in the same light, as cargo cult economics.
A patent troll company thinks it owns exclusive rights to rollover messages on web sites, among many other common features as outlined in the brazenly, ridiculously general patent entitled "Accessing, assembling, and using bodies of information." I am just waiting for the patent on breathing or metabolizing food. Story here, via Overlawyered.
But there is an even better reason why the stimulus bill will never work: it is simply impossible to break ground on any new government construction project in less than a year.A year from now, any truly new incremental project in the stimulus bill will still be sitting on some planners desk with unfinished environmental impact assessments, the subject of arguments between multiple government agencies, tied up in court with environmental or NIMBY challenges, snarled in zoning fights, subject to conflicts between state, county, and city governments, or all of the above. Most of the money will have been spent by planners, bureaucrats, and lawyers, with little to show for in actual facilities.
In the magazine article, Mr. Obama reflects on his presidency, admitting that he let himself look too much like "the same old tax-and-spend Democrat," realized too late that "there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects"
How smart can the guy be if it takes him two years to figure out what random schmoes like me thought was obvious?
Nick Rahall, a Democratic Congressmen from WV and a supporter of the global warming alarmist position (probably an issue in coal-dependent WV this election cycle) gave an analogy I think is right on:
"Climate change "” to deny it exists, to just put your head in the sand and, "˜oh no, it doesn't exist, what are you talking about,' is about like standing on the floor of Macy's during the month of December and claiming Santa Claus doesn't exist.
While he was trying to actually denigrate climate skeptics, in fact he confirms exactly what we believe. Saying Santa Claus does not exist is absolutely correct, but doing so would get in the way of everyone around us making money off the myth. Via Climate Depot
One of the perils of being a small school is that sports requires a lot of travel. In Arizona (unlike Texas where I grew up) the private schools do not have their own prep league for athletics, but play with the public schools based on their size (e.g. 1A to 5A). Ours is a 1A school that generally plays 2A because we get more teams to play that way. In soccer we play 3A, which can be a tough road when a school that has barely 120 boys in the high school play schools with 900+ kids. But we made it to the state finals last year, so we hold our own.
Anyway, last week we actually played a school within the boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park, just a stones throw from the south rim visitors center and the El Tovar lodge. That was awesome - nothing like post-game parent cocktails on a deck looking at the sunset over the rim of the canyon. (I am on the road but will post a few photos next week).
The Grand Canyon is spectacular, but there is something about looking down into it that reduces its beauty. You only really see its real drama hiking down into it (e.g. the Bright Angel or the harder but more beautiful Kaibab trail from the South Rim). If you want to talk about really spectacular scenery, I think Sedona beats the Grand Canyon, at least from the rim.
This week my son's team played a small school in Sedona, a pretty old boarding school called Verde Valley HS. Its got an IB program and a lot of horses and a drop-dead location, and has been getting some popularity in this area and in SoCal. Anyway, I have seen some nice kids fields, but this one was pretty spectacular. Unfortunately I only had my crappy cell phone camera but here is a sample:
"¦.a federal judge has just ruled that the federal government can force me to purchase a product from a private company, under the argument that my not purchasing that product affects interstate commerce.
For those of you who support this ruling: Under an interpretation of the Commerce Clause that says the federal government can regulate inactivity, can you name anything at all that the feds wouldn't have the power to regulate?
And if you can't (and let's face it, you can't), why was the Constitution written in the first place? As I understand it, the whole point was to lay out a defined set of federal powers, divided among the three branches, with the understanding that the powers not specifically enumerated in the document are retained by the states and the people.
But if that set of powers includes everything you do (see Wickard and Raich), and everything you don't do (what Obamacare proponents are advocating here), what's the point in having a Constitution at all?
Raich was bad enough. In that case the high court said the Feds could regulate home-grown marijuana that was grown and consumed entirely in California because that activity might still affect prices in other states (presumably because Californians could have smoked imported weed if they had not grown their own). (I can't understand how anyone can call this a "conservative" court when it handed down Raich. Clarence Thomas wrote in Raich:
Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.
Private companies often come running to the government to protect themselves from competition. Sometimes they are successful, and get government licensing and certification requirements that help create barriers to entry that protect incumbents (if incumbents are lucky, they will actually get to control the licensing and certification board and testing process).
But whether or note private companies have the political muscle to get this kind of protection, the government almost always protects itself whenever it embarks on any sort of quasi-commercial enterprise. The ban on first class mail delivery competition is one example (as an aside, when email began making an end run around this ban, the USPS actually made a [fortunately failed] play to be the monopoly email provider). In Denver, there was a story a while back that after they built a new toll road, they added traffic lights and lowered the speed limit on a parallel free road to drive more people to the toll road.
"When the old arena for the Orlando Magic opened 21 years ago, it was common for Parramore neighborhood residents who lived nearby to charge Magic fans and concert-goers to park on their property. But five weeks ago, the Orlando City Council approved standards that will likely keep most Parramore homeowners from profiting on parking near the Orlando Magic's new $480 million Amway Center (pictured above).
Among other things, property owners must pay a $275 application fee and provide a business tax receipt. Lots must have an attendant, signs, proper lighting and a paved, gravel or grass surface free of potholes or ruts. City officials also recommend hiring security. Even when all those requirements are met, temporary parking lots are allowed only during an event expected to draw at least 5,000 attendees. So far, five applications have been approved, but all are for large properties such as churches, not homeowners.
The city, meanwhile, has doubled its event-parking rate to $20 at the two garages closest to the Amway Center; elsewhere, event parking at city garages and lots is $10."
The last sentence explains the first two. They are trying to charge an above market price for parking, so must constrain supply to avoid being undercut.
Ex Post Facto law, meaning law retroactively criminalizing past practices, is explicitly banned in the Constitution. But big government folks have found a way around this prohibition through the massive government regulatory bureaucracies that have been created over the last half-century.
Here is a great example. In short, an online site accepted advertising from a company that the FTC later went after for deceptive advertising. Note, the online site was not involved, they just ran the add, just as your web site may be running ads or Google adwords right now. The FTC actually settled the case with the company accused of wrongdoing for $0. So obviously, they were not that worked up about the ad. But in order to establish a new legal principal that sites that run advertising can be liable for the entire liability for a deceptive ad, they went after the web site for $6 million!
Forget for a moment what bad policy this is -- can you imagine being fully liable for any fraud involved with any company that runs an add on your site? But beyond that, the basic approach -- of legislating from the administrative branch, abuse of power to cow small companies and individuals through threat of bankrupting legal costs, and ex post facto rule-making -- is just staggeringly scary.
This is why I cringe every single day whenever the phone rings in my small business.
My suspicions were confirmed when I looked up the law the FTC said I had violated, a law that was vague and didn't seem to have much to do with what the FTC was accusing me of. And it certainly did not say that the FTC was entitled to the amount of money it wanted. My lawyers explained that the amount the FTC was suing for was based not on laws that Congress had passed but seemed to be based on what judges had awarded in previous cases over the years.
Moreover, in our case, the FTC was now trying to go beyond what previous judges had awarded. What lay behind their actions seemed to be this: they were trying out a new legal theory. They wanted to establish a new principle "“ that a person who was in any way connected to the advertising at issue, no matter how trivial their involvement, was liable for the entire amount of all purchases of the product by consumers. I felt as if I had been struck by lightning. I was the sacrificial lamb. I had the rotten luck to be chosen, of all people, to be the test of their novel legal theory. [...]
I'm all for getting tough on deceptive advertising, including Internet fraudsters. But what seems terribly wrong is the FTC playing Goliath where they just outspend everyone they go after, regardless of whether there was any wrongdoing. Unfortunately, that appears to be the direction in which they're going. David Vladeck, the new head of the Bureau of Consumer Protection (the person I met with), advocates pursuing test cases "even if the legal theory has not been accepted by the court prior to that time." (see http://www.abanet.org/antitrust/at-source/10/04/Apr10-VladeckIntrvw4-14f.pdf) In other words, you may be violating a law that doesn't exist yet. That is downright scary. The only thing the FTC is going to "prove" by "winning" these cases is that they can establish their new principles by bankrupting anybody but the very wealthiest Americans "“ the only people who could afford to take them on.
"I don't want people talking on phones, having them up to their ear or texting while they're driving," LaHood said this week calling for research on hands-free systems. Hands-free phone conversations are a "cognitive distraction,"
And because Ray LaHood is US Transportation Secretary, we may soon all be forced to abide by Mr. LaHood's personal preference.
