The first thing I do when I buy a DVD is rip it to my video server. I have a 10TB RAID and I don't even try to compress the disks, just copy them over in video_ts format using DVDfab6. I run SageTV on the server with the absolutely essential SageMC mod. I then can watch the video at every TV that has a Sage HD200 box. The whole system works for Bluray as well.
I built the system to try to duplicate a $60,000+ Kaleidoscape system for less than $2000, and the functionality, with some tweaking, comes pretty dang close. The real work was the drudgery for ripping hundreds of DVD's, but I had already performed this death march with a much larger CD collection so I knew what I was getting into. SageTV, by the way, is very rewarding if you want to get your hands dirty messing around in the innards but it is not for those who want plug and play.
Anyway, one of the reasons I did all this, beyond the coolness factor, was this. I can rip just the main movie out of the DVD, leaving behind menus, trailers, FBI warmings, special features, etc.
Over five years ago, I wrote this article about retirees in RV's who have become the new American nomads. Many of these folks work for my company each season, getting wages and a camping site in exchange for taking care of campgrounds. This is often called work camping.
A reader sent me this video from the NY Times discussing the same phenomenon (here is the print article). The only difference is these folks work for the government, which means that unlike at private companies, they don't get paid. I find it kind of fascinating that the NY Times thinks it's a wonderful innovation that "cash-strapped state governments" help balance the budget on the backs of free labor from older people. Can you imagine what the headlines would be if all the facts were changed, but the entity was a manufacturing company rather than a state park? It would have been torches and pitchforks (it is illegal except in narrow cases for private companies to accept free labor -- the government of course exempts itself from this requirement, as it does from much of labor law).
I actually think my article was better. The way work campers tend to disperse over the summer and then congregate over the winter in a couple of gathering spots (Colorado River in AZ, South Texas, Florida) reminds me a lot of the plains Indian tribes. And the challenges of a nomadic lifestyle when the world wants you to have a permanent address are interesting, and there are whole business models being crafted to solve these problems.
Anyway, our company hires nearly 500 of these folks every year, and are huge supporters of this lifestyle (and we pay!) If you are interested, check out our websites above and sign up for our job newsletter.
Well, maybe the second best reason... the first best is that it was 75F today. But the second best reason is that my son got his driver's license today, and it expires in the year 2059. I kid you not -- get your license at 16 and there are no more renewals until you are 65 years old. Have fun at the DMV.
The AZ Republic, which editorialized against our parks proposal before they had even seen it, gave us a brief mention today:
Separately, a Senate committee on Monday recommended passage of Senate Bill 1349. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Barbara Leff, would allow the parks board to lease the parks to public or private entities without going through normal procurement procedures.
That freedom could allow the parks to be leased quickly.
The lessee, who would be responsible for maintaining the park, could then charge admission fees and earn additional money through concessions.
"I'm trying to find a way immediately to make sure those parks do not close," said Leff, R-Paradise Valley. "There are private companies that will manage those parks for us."
Phoenix-based Recreation Resource Management, which operates 175 public parks around the country, has written a letter to parks officials offering to take over at least six of the parks.
While it shouldn't be, this is the last thing AZ State Parks wants to do. However, with their options narrowing, they may be getting down to the last thing. The outlines of the proposal we made is here.
I saw some news story that Tiger Woods was going to publicly apologize. Why? What did he do to me? He is either good with his wife and kids or he is not. The rest of us are irrelevant. I suppose he could apologize to us for letting us down by under-performing his public image, but in turn we should all apologize for feeding like emotional vultures on his family's personal problems. Besides, he has taken a $100 million a year hit for the damage he did to his own image. I am willing to call things square between us.
When I compare Obama's rehtoric on health care, where he attempts to avoid any detail and runs quickly away from being responsible for making any hard tradeoffs (in fact works to fool the public into believing there are no hard tradeoffs) with Chris Christie's budget speech, the difference is startling.
I will be suitably thrilled if the Obama administration renounces some of the creeping executive power grabs of the last 16 years, but he has been oddly silent about this. It seems that creeping executive power is a lot more worrisome when someone else is in power.
The White House is considering endorsing a law that would allow the indefinite detention of some alleged terrorists without trial as part of efforts to break a logjam with Congress over President Barack Obama's plans to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Monday.
Last summer, White House officials said they had ruled out seeking a "preventive detention" statute as a way to deal with anti-terror detainees, saying the administration would hold any Guantanamo prisoners brought to the U.S. in criminal courts or under the general "law of war" principles permitting detention of enemy combatants.
However, speaking at a news conference in Greenville, S.C., Monday, Graham said the White House now seems open to a new law to lay out the standards for open-ended imprisonment of those alleged to be members of or fighters for Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
That is a really, really bad idea. What would J Edgar Hoover had done with such a law? Would Martin Luther King have been declared a terrorist. And speaking of King, who the FBI kept under illegally deep surveillance for years, we have a second related story via Disloyal Opposition:
Last Friday, federal attorneys told the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals that government officials should be able to track the location of Americans by following their cell phone transmissions -- without having to get a warrant. While the FBI and state and local officials have already obtained logs from mobile phone companies that reveal the locations of customers' telephones, the practice has never formally been endorsed by the courts. The latest federal arguments -- and rebuttals by civil liberties organizations -- give the courts the opportunity to either support or repudiate federal claims that Americans have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" so long as they carry cell phones.
Yes, I blame Bush for getting the ball rolling on both these fronts, but wtf did we elect Obama for? Many libertarians held their nose at his interventionist economics in order to try to thwart what they saw as a scary trajectory for executive power and civil liberties. If we had wanted populist economic machinations combined with limitations on individual liberties, we could have voted for Pat Buchanon.
I know conservatives get as excited about nuclear energy as a progressive at hempfest, but can anyone tell my why conservatives are so quick to endorse $8 billion of government loan gaurantees to a private company? We are headed for a corporate state and our two parties are simply competing with each other to see who can get us there first.
I wish I had my cell phone camera with me - in a single intersection (somewhere around 14th and Mass) there were a full 6 -- count them SIX -- traffic cops directing traffic. Jobs created or saved, baby.
Hosting the Olympics practically bankrupted Montreal. Via Megan McArdle, Victor Matheson argues that the current Greek financial problems may have stemmed from hosting the Olympics.
Greece's federal government had historically been a profligate spender, but in order to join the euro currency zone, the government was forced to adopt austerity measures that reduced deficits from just over 9% of GDP in 1994 to just 3.1% of GDP in 1999, the year before Greece joined the euro.
But the Olympics broke the bank. Government deficits rose every year after 1999, peaking at 7.5% of GDP in 2004, the year of the Olympics, thanks in large part to the 9 billion euro price tag for the Games. For a relatively small country like Greece, the cost of hosting the Games equaled roughly 5% of the annual GDP of the country.
Of course, the Olympics didn't usher in an economic boom. Indeed, in 2005 Greece suffered an Olympic-sized hangover with GDP growth falling to its lowest level in a decade.
Hosting Olymics is just a super-sized version of the fallacy that causes governments to fund billion dollar sports stadiums.
There just seems to be a tremendous mental block people have about paying cash for health care. Megan McArdle is surprised at how strong this bias is in some of her readers. I'm not, as I see it in my wife and friends all the time.
Several years ago we switched to a high-deductible catastrophic health care policy. We save a TON of money with this policy, such that year in and year out, even with fairly high out of pocket expenditures, our total health care expenses have been lowered.
Generally, I go ahead and wash all of the charges through the policy so I get credit for them against the cumulative deductible. But since we have never hit the number, I am increasingly less attached to this approach. Particularly since a number of doctors and other providers are offering cash discounts now for bypassing insurance and paying cash.
Here is an example -- my son has had some elbow pain pitching lately, so seeing all the kids who are having to get Tommy John surgery before they are out of high school, we decided to make sure everything was OK. We took him to a GP who specialized in sports medicine and works with a number of MLB pitchers as a team physician to the Brewers. For cash, he charged me $50 and spent nearly 30 minutes with my son. Then he sent us downstairs for some x-rays of his elbow, and the radiology group there, again for cash, charged us $35 total for three x-rays. There are people who pay more for a pedicure.
Nothing is ever going to improve in health care costs until individuals take more responsibility for the cost-benefit tradeoffs of the services they receive.
"As the government assumes a larger share of health care costs, it is increasingly able to use that as a justification to intrude into personal decisions or private enterprises, whether it's a matter of smoking policy, trans-fats, or salt," we wrote last month. Now the Wall Street Journal is out with an editorial praising Michelle Obama's campaign against childhood obesity, reasoning, "the reality is that U.S. obesity imposes huge costs on taxpayers. In 2006, the per capita increase in spending attributable to obesity was 36% for Medicare and 47% for Medicaid, according to a paper last year in Health Affairs. Many fat kids grow up to be fat adults, and you've got to start somewhere."
Almost any behavior or decisions, from eating to driving to sports participation, has implications on one's potential future health care costs. So by this logic, almost anything can be regulated. For example, I would argue that sex has a much higher health care cost impact than eating, not just in STD's but in the cost of pregnancies and pediatrics. Or as another example, our family spent far more in health care costs on treating our kids' accidents while playing sports than in dealing with any obesity costs. Should we be requiring kids to stay indoors playing on the computer where they will be safe from potentially expensive accidents?
The American blogosphere is going increasingly "viral" about a proposal advanced at the recent meeting of the Davos Economic Forum by Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, that an equivalent of a "driver's licence" should be introduced for access to the web. This totalitarian call has been backed by articles and blogs in Time magazine and the New York Times.
As bloggers have not been slow to point out, the system being proposed is very similar to one that the government of Red China reluctantly abandoned as too repressive. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the usual unholy alliance of government totalitarians and big business would attempt to end the democratic free-for-all that is the blogosphere. The United Nations is showing similar interest in moving to eliminate free speech.
WASHINGTON (AP) - If snow keeps 230,000 government employees home for the better part of a week, will anyone notice?
With at least another foot of snow headed for Washington, Philadelphia and New York, we're about to find out. The federal government in the nation's capital has largely been shut down since Friday afternoon, when a storm began dumping up to 3 feet of snow in some parts of the region. Offices were remaining closed at least through Wednesday.
I find it pretty hilarious that folks on the left suddenly feel the US is ungovernable, largely because they have not been able to pass a couple of complicated and risky legislative initiatives. Was the US ungovernable when Bush couldn't pass Social Security reform? It seems that showing leadership on a national scale with diverse interests is a tad harder than running a grad school policy round-table. Oddly, the left seems befuddled by actual diversity of opinion, rather than the faux diversity with lock-stepped beliefs they built in academia and among themselves.
Let's acknowledge that governing the United States of America is an extremely difficult task. Intentionally so. When designing our system, the Founders were faced with a dilemma. How to empower a vigorous government without endangering liberty or true republicanism? On the one hand, George III's government was effective at satisfying the will of the sovereign, but that will had become tyrannical. On the other hand, the Articles of Confederation acknowledged the rights of the states, but so much so that the federal government was incapable of solving basic problems.
The solution the country ultimately settled on had five important features: checks and balances so that the branches would police one another; a large republic so that majority sentiment was fleeting and not intensely felt; a Senate where the states would be equal; enumerated congressional powers to limit the scope of governmental authority; and the Bill of Rights to offer extra protection against the government.
The end result was a government that is powerful, but not infinitely so. Additionally, it is schizophrenic. It can do great things when it is of a single mind - but quite often it is not of one mind. So, to govern, our leaders need to build a broad consensus. When there is no such consensus, the most likely outcome is that the government will do nothing.
The President's two major initiatives - cap-and-trade and health care - have failed because there was not a broad consensus to enact them. Our system is heavily biased against such proposals. That's a good thing.
One of the roles of the President is to bring some adult supervision to his party in Congress. Bush failed on this, allowing Republicans to run rampant in earmarking excess, and Obama has if anything been even worse on this dimension. He routinely remains aloof from the legislative details (some would say he just got rolled by Nancy Pelosi) and then proceeds to speak as if the actual bill matches his grand words and promises when it is obvious to all that it does not.
Many states managed to grow state spending in the last decade far faster than inflation and population growth, soaking up every new dime in bubble-generated tax revenue they could. It may seem like states were forced to make a lot of hard decisions last year, but in fact they were sheltered from really dealing with the full measure of their own fiscal problems by large influxes of Federal "stimulus" money. As I demonstrated way back in January of 2009, most of the stimulus was actually ear-marked not for the mythical shovel read project, but for "stabilization" of state and federal budgets. This is a couple of months old, but still applies:
A historic nosedive in state tax collections extended into the third quarter of the year, and only an infusion of federal economic stimulus money has averted widespread program cuts and worker layoffs.
Tax collections from July through September dropped an average of 8.3% from a year earlier in the eight states that release up-to-date monthly tax figures, a USA TODAY survey found. New York's tax collections fell 8.9%, despite an income tax hike earlier this year. States reporting partial third-quarter results showed a similar downward spiral in tax collections, including 13.2% drop in Arizona.
Federal stimulus money has protected states from making big cuts in the number of government workers, in aid to schools or in spending on Medicaid, the health care program for the poor. But most federal stimulus money ends in December 2010.
This is not a new trend, from Tad DeHaven of Cato:
According to the Goldwater Institute, over a third of the AZ state budget is federal money.
How can there possibly be any accountability for how this is spent, though it actually is larger than the amount raised by state taxes? If we want the government to buy us goodies in this state, we should at least pay for them ourselves and not take money from others. By the way, every time I raise this argument, someone says "well our state pays more federal taxes than it gets back." First, every state says this so it can't possibly be true in every case. Second, it's a terrible practice from the standpoint of accountability.
The biggest single national political donor in the country during the 2007-08 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org, was the overwhelmingly Democrat-supporting teachers union the National Education Association. What category of worker was the biggest single beneficiary of stimulus spending? Public school teachers. Who, according to Vice President Joe Biden, accounted for 325,000 of the first 640,000 jobs "created or saved." While it's true that teachers are Americans (even my brother), in the vast majority of these cases, the jobs in question weren't "created," just maintained, since it is nearly impossible to fire public school teachers.
I often respond to various articles that a group of politicians are going to create a strategic plan** for the local economy that this is similar to my trying to choreograph a ballet . TJIC has similar words for this effort:
Governor Deval Patrick and Senate President Therese Murray plan to propose this week several ways to improve the Bay State's business climate, saying they need to be more aggressive in steering the region out of its economic malaise.
Both have lifelong careers in non-business sectors (government, academia, journalism, legal, non-profit). TJIC responds:
Asking them to design programs to better the business climate is about like asking me to design menstrual pads "“ I don't understand the sector, I don't understand the features, I don't understand the problems, and there's no way that the effects of my work will ever come back to make an impact on me.
This is reminiscent of this great comment from Kevin Williamson via Instapundit
The good news is that, when it comes to reshaping the U.S. mortgage market [any market for that matter "” ed.], the Obama administration's top guns are bringing to bear all of the brisk, rough-'n'-ready entrepreneurial know-how they picked up in their previous careers as university professors, nonprofit activists, and holders of political sinecures.
But we are spending more and more to get this "expertise", as documented in a depressing post at Carpe Diem on the growth of government employment and salaries. One chart out of many:
** Footnote: About once a month we get some group lamenting that Phoenix has no master plan to create some kind of economic focus for itself. One of the hilarious things about this is that if you go back and look, about half of the past proposals have Phoenix focusing on some super-hot industry (e.g. semiconductor manufacturing, e-commerce) that is just about to crash. Lately, everyone has decided that Phoenix should be the center of the solar industry, because, uh, we have a lot of sun, without any particular explanation of why having a lot of sun should be an advantage in precision manufacturing and assembly of solar components. But we are shelling out all kinds of tax breaks and subsidies for these companies to come here. My prediction - solar will be the next ethanol. In ethanol, increases in government subsidies caused a lot of manufacturing capacity to be built. But subsidies could not grow as fast as capacity, and a glut resulted in a huge shakeout. The solar boom will occur when a technology is perfected that makes solar economic without subsidies. When that occurs, I will be the first in line to cover my roof in the new tech.
The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.
Don't hold your breath. As it is, Democrats don't even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponents' obstructionism.
It should be a simple message (and it should have been the central message in Massachusetts): a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis.
Mr. Bush has reacted by railing against Democrats for obstruction -- as if Democrats are duty-bound to breathe life into his agenda and, even sillier, as if opposing a plan that the people do not want is an illegitimate tactic for an opposition party.
Am I the only one who is wildly less likely to buy an Audi after Sunday? Advertising is often about image. Frankly, almost none of the ads yesterday addressed their product's or service's value propositions in any real way. They are trying to connect their product with images and emotions - Coke has always been great at that. Beer commercials always try to connect their product with, well, sex with hot women. This is pretty traditional for beer, though less so for ISP hosting until GoDaddy came along.
So now "Audi" has been permanently tied up in my mind with intrusive state control and loss of individual liberty. Perhaps they were trying to be funny, but I really got the impression they were more than half serious, maybe because several of the examples (composting, light bulbs) are real issues subject to state control even in parts of this country.
California high-speed rail advocates are already backpedalling on the numbers, and from experience with other such projects, it will only get worse.
In the face of the state's perpetual budget crisis, some Californians are beginning to regret their votes in favor of the $9.9 billion high-speed rail bond last year. Even though proponents of the train have now admitted the bond was only a down payment on the actual cost to build the system, the numbers that were projected are changing"”and all in the wrong direction.
The business plan released by the train's advocates last month show the dramatic differences in what the voters were told and what reality is. For example, the price of a ticket from San Francisco to Los Angeles is now projected at $105, up from the previous $55 estimate. That new number changed the ridership predictions: now 41 million annual riders by 2035, down from last year's prediction of 55 million passengers by 2030. The cost for building the train system has also grown. The proponents had been thinking $33.6 billion (2008 dollars) but have revised upward to $42.6 billion. Recently, the Obama administration announced $2.25 billion in funding for the project. Proponents said federal money would be used to close the gap between the voter-approved bond and the ultimate cost, but
this is a drop in the bucket and still will not work.
Do not expect a true LA to SF high speed rail line for less than $75 billion and the ridership numbers are still absurd, as discussed here. By the way, Southwest's advanced fair from LAX to SFO is $114 right now. If you are willing to go Burbank to Oakland, the fair is $90.
Via the WSJ, on the Mortgage Banker's Association (MBA) being underwater on their real estate loan:
On Friday, CoStar Group Inc., a provider of commercial real estate data, announced that it had agreed to buy the MBA's 10-story headquarters building in Washington, D.C., for $41.3 million. The price is well below the $79 million the trade group says it paid for the glass-walled building in 2007, while it was still under construction. The price also falls short of the $75 million of financing that the MBA received from a group of banks led by PNC Financial Services Group Inc. for the purchase.
John Courson, chief executive officer of the trade group, declined in an interview Saturday to say whether the MBA would pay off the full loan amount. "We're not going to discuss the financing," he said. A spokeswoman for the MBA added that the MBA has reached "an agreement with all relevant parties" regarding the outstanding amount on that loan but declined to provide any details.
...In an interview late last year, Mr. Courson said he believed mortgage borrowers should keep paying their loans even if that no longer seemed to be in their economic interest. He said paying off a mortgage isn't only a matter of personal interest. Defaults hurt neighborhoods by lowering property values, Mr. Courson said. "What about the message they will send to their family and their kids and their friends?" he asked.
The race for governor just got a whole lot sexier.
"Manhattan Madam" Kristin Davis is tossing her lacy brassiere into the political ring - with the help of one of the GOP's most fearsome strategists.
Though he's often labeled a "trickster," former Nixon, Reagan and Bushes operative Roger Stone tells us he's dead serious about getting Davis on the ballot.
"This is not a hoax, a prank or a publicity stunt," said Stone, who has been quietly huddling with Davis for months. "I want to get her a half-million votes."
I love this:
Davis laid out her credentials last weekend at a Libertarian Party convention on the lower East Side.
"I was valedictorian of my high-school class," said the golden-tressed Davis, sporting a modest black suit but wicked Christian Louboutins with 5-inch heels. "I worked 10 years in finance. I was vice president of a hedge fund. I went on to build a multimillion-dollar business from scratch."
While branding "taxation as confiscation," the former escort empress said the legalization of prostitution and marijuana could provide $2.5 billion in revenue to help close the budget gap.
"I'm a natural Libertarian," said Davis, who also embraces gay marriage and the views of the National Rifle Association.
And here is some great political strategy:
Even though she needs only 15,000 signatures to get on the ballot, she's shooting for 45,000 - and Stone doesn't see any problem getting them.
"Kristin knows lots of Penthouse Pets," he said. "We'll get four, make them notary publics and have them, suitably attired, collecting signatures at Grand Central Station during rush hour."
A reader sent me this list at of salaries at BART (via here). The amazing thing is to sort the list by overtime. Pages and pages of people with $50-$100 thousand a year in overtime. This is just insane. Either put these guys on salary or, if it really is a job that is non-exempt and legitimately pays hourly, hire some more freaking people. I can't in my wildest dreams imagine such overtime being paid in my company year in and year out. If it is not for isolated cases, it is a sign of poor management.
