Dispatches from District 48
The new rules, issued in September and October, tell officers "screening may not be conducted to detect evidence of crimes unrelated to transportation security" and that large amounts of cash don't qualify as suspicious for purposes of safety.
NFL players - its safe now to carry your Whizzinator.
On any number of occasions from October through February, I predicted that this recession would top out at perhaps 9% unemployment at the most, and would probably not be as bad as the recession of the early 1980's. My logic was that we had a mortgage-driven banking crisis, but that the crisis was perhaps not as bad as that of the late 1980's and that many fundamentals (e.g. interest rates) were looking way better in this recession than in the early 1980's. I honestly thought that Bush and Obama Treasury and Fed officials were declaring the sky was falling more from the danger to their beloved former employers on Wall Street than due to any economic fundamentals.
Well, obviously I was wrong. Unemployment has topped 10% and could be headed higher.
So the question is, do I accept that others saw something I did not, or do I crack open the self-serving excuses. Well, at the danger that this will fall into the latter category (I will leave that to readers to decide) I do think some things have changed since late last year that have contributed to worsening the economy.
Businesses are reluctant to invest when the returns on their investment are wildly unpredictable, particularly when future income changes are more driven by changing acts of Congress rather than fluctuations in the market. Over the last year the Congress and Administration have:
I am sure this is just a subset (Louis Woodhill has more in this vein here), but these all have negative effects on investment. My company for one has backed out of several planned expansions this winter for four reasons:
I used to work as for several years in St. Louis as VP of Planning for Emerson Electric. I worked for a guy named Chuck Knight, who could be a real pain in the *ss to work for, but was a) brilliant and b) always willing to speak his mind without the typical filters a lot of other executives apply. It appears that his successor Dave Farr, who I also knew at Emerson, is following in this tradition:
Emerson Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer David Farr said the U.S. government is hurting manufacturers with regulation and taxes and his company will continue to focus on growth overseas."Washington is doing everything in their manpower, capability, to destroy U.S. manufacturing," Farr said today in Chicago at a Baird Industrial Outlook conference. "Cap and trade, medical reform, labor rules."...
Companies will create jobs in India and China, "places where people want the products and where the governments welcome you to actually do something," Farr said.
The unemployment rate in the U.S. jumped to 10.2 percent in October, the highest level since 1983. Emerson, which Farr said employs about 125,000 people worldwide, has eliminated more than 20,000 jobs since the end of 2008 to lower expenses.
"What do you think I am going to do?" Farr asked. "I'm not going to hire anybody in the United States. I'm moving. They are doing everything possible to destroy jobs."
Politicians in both parties are generally clueless about this kind of thing, because very few of them have ever run a business or even even been in a real business position other than as lawyer or lobbyist. Just look at how George McGovern feels now that he has run a business.
But the Obama administration is almost scary clueless. In defending their promotion of a good business environment, they cite the most hostile item on their agenda:
"This administration has made a significant commitment to U.S. manufacturing, including reforming the country's health insurance system to bring down costs and make American companies more competitive globally," Griffis said.
Not. One. Single. Clue.
Actually, I think the Obama administration may believe this, which just accentuates their preference for a corporate state wherein "business friendly" means support for the top 20-30 corporations in the country. In the context of a few old-line corporations with politically powerful unions, health care reform is helpful in that it dumps a bunch of the corporation's commitments to present and past workers onto the taxpayers. But these are not the companies that grow the economy -- they are just the ones with out-sized power in political elections.
From a press release from the Environmental News Network that landed in my inbox:
It's Time to Re-think Economic Growth for Advanced Nations
LONDON - In Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, published by Earthscan this week, Professor Tim Jackson raises fundamental questions about the economics needed to tackle climate change. Jackson argues that, faced with the limits imposed by carbon sinks and the scale of "˜de-carbonization' of the world's economy required to stay within them, continued economic growth in the already affluent world does not offer the solution; it represents the problem....
there is a strong case for the developed nations to make room for growth in poorer countries. It is in these poorer countries that growth really does make a difference. In richer countries the returns on further growth appear much more limited; for example subjective well-being diminishes rapidly at higher income levels."
Assuming that such thinking is not just a crass excuse for totalitarian control, it represents an enormous failure of imagination. The author cannot imagine what benefits increased wealth would provide, so he assumes those benefits to be zero. There is absolutely no reason that this same exact thinking could not have been applied in 1300 or 1750 or 1900. Fortunately it was not.
Wonder where the communists went when their philosophy was shown to be bankrupt? Wonder where the anti-globalization folks went after they looted in Seattle. Look no further than the global warming movement. The author suggests, among other things:
Just say no to ecological Marxism.
Obama continues to deny that the health insurance mandate which is backed with a penalty to be collected by the IRS is a "tax." He says "For us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase." Three responses:
Competition is a "discovery procedure," Nobel-prize-winning economist F. A. Hayek taught. Through the competitive market process, we producers and consumers constantly learn things that force us to adjust our behavior if we are to succeed. Central planners fail for two reasons:
First, knowledge about supply, demand, individual preferences and resource availability is scattered -- much of it never articulated -- throughout society. It is not concentrated in a database where a group of planners can access it.
Second, this "data" is dynamic: It changes without notice. No matter how honorable the central planners' intentions, they will fail because they cannot know the needs and wishes of 300 million different people. And if they somehow did know their needs, they wouldn't know them tomorrow.
Cafe Hayek has a series of articles here and here on the absurd numerical games going on to pump up the stimulus numbers (which I also offered example of here, where pay increases were considered a "job saved").
For example:
Up to one-fourth of the 110,000 jobs reported as saved by federal stimulus money in California probably never were in danger, a Bee review has found.
California State University officials reported late last week that they saved more jobs with stimulus money than the number of jobs saved in Texas "“ and in 44 other states.
In a required state report to the federal government, the university system said the $268.5 million it received in stimulus funding through October allowed it to retain 26,156 employees.
That total represents more than half of CSU's statewide work force. However, university officials confirmed Thursday that half their workers were not going to be laid off without the stimulus dollars.
"This is not really a real number of people," CSU spokeswoman Clara Potes-Fellow said. "It's like a budget number."
Also here:
While Massachusetts recipients of federal stimulus money collectively report 12,374 jobs saved or created, a Globe review shows that number is wildly exaggerated. Organizations that received stimulus money miscounted jobs, filed erroneous figures, or claimed jobs for work that has not yet started.
The Globe's finding is based on the federal government's just-released accounts of stimulus spending at the end of October. It lists the nearly $4 billion in stimulus awards made to an array of Massachusetts government agencies, universities, hospitals, private businesses, and nonprofit organizations, and notes how many jobs each created or saved.
But in interviews with recipients, the Globe found that several openly acknowledged creating far fewer jobs than they have been credited for.
One of the largest reported jobs figures comes from Bridgewater State College, which is listed as using $77,181 in stimulus money for 160 full-time work-study jobs for students. But Bridgewater State spokesman Bryan Baldwin said the college made a mistake and the actual number of new jobs was "almost nothing.'' Bridgewater has submitted a correction, but it is not yet reflected in the report.
It is becoming clearer and clearer that the vast majority of "jobs saved" were in government, and in effect the stimulus merely had the effect of bailing out state governments that were able to use stimulus money to put off their budget reckonings.
I am a bit late to this but from Arnold Kling:
The further into this crisis we go, the greater the share of subprime loans and mortgage losses are turning out to be located at Freddie and Fannie. Even one year ago, if you had asked me, I would have told you to expect at least 2/3 of the losses to be at companies like Citi and Bear, with less than 1/3 at Freddie and Fannie. It now looks quite different. Conservatively, 3/4 of taxpayers losses will be at Freddie and Fannie. Perhaps as much as 90 percent of taxpayer losses will be there.
Given the large role of Freddie and Fannie, it makes sense for politicians to create as large a diversion as possible. Hence, the brouhaha over bonuses at bailed-out banks.
Incidentally, the debate over the "public option" in health reform also can be viewed as an exercise in symbolic politics and diversion. The point is to divert attention away from the bankruptcy of Medicare.
On January 20th of this year, Barack Obama probably had perhaps the strongest personal position to work from of any President in recent memory. Everybody wanted to hear what he had to say and many were prepared to do what he asked.
Today, he seems to have frittered away much of this authority and devalued his own brand. How else to explain that he is relying on a former president (Bill Clinton) to sell his health care agenda in Congress and it took another former president (George W Bush) to visit the Ft. Hood tragedy.
Via Flowing Data, a cool chart in the NY Times with every batter faced by Rivera in the playoffs.
I argued last week that all the electric vehicle talk we heard so much of at Chrysler and GM during their restructuring (remember all those GM electric car ads on TV, which have now disappeared?) were just a honey trap for Obama. Auto makers knew that they were not designing a car for the masses, but for one man, to get him to put taxpayer money into their companies. Now that they actually have to think about selling these cars to the public, the ads have disappeared and now Chrysler is ending its EV program.
I want to take you back to their restructuring plan. The plan had 7 steps, listed in priority order. The first and second priority was restructuring. The third priority was a deal with Fiat. The next priority, ahead of any others beyond the initial restructuring and Fiat deal, was their EV car program. Here is the page from their plan (click to enlarge)
In fact, this was very clearly a business plan aimed at Obama. Look at the #4-7 priorities and their order. Only one potential investor in the whole world would appreciate these priorities. Any private investor would find these priorities nuts:
4) Commitment to Energy Security and Environmental Sustainability
5) Compliance with Fuel Economy Regulations
6) Compliance with Emissions Regulations
7) Achieving a Competitive Product Mix and Cost Structure
So "achieving a competitive product mix and cost structure," arguably the problem that drove them into bankruptcy, is their dead last priority! Welcome to government motors, where commitment to energy security is more important than having a competitive product mix or cost structure.
My company exited business in Washington State about 3 years ago, and since then I have routinely turned down new business opportunities in the state. The workers comp system is expensive, the sales and lodging tax regime is both expensive and complicated, and minimum wage rates are set to crack $10 an hour, and are indexed in some raise that they seem to rise substantially every year. The state made it very difficult to manage a fleet of vehicles in the state, and generally made it clear that they would rather me not doing business there. So I don't.
And apparently, Boeing has come to the same conclusion.
From CBS News, Via Matt Welch:
In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.
The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization...
The subpoena (PDF) from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded "all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us" on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to "include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information," including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers' Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.
This is remeniscent of the indimidation subpoena and later arrests at the Phoenix New Times orchestrated to stop the paper from criticizing Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
We had a really good crowd out last night for my climate lecture. I am currently working on publishing the video and the slides. I am going to destroy the email list for this lecture, but before I do so I am going to send everyone a link to the slides and video when I get them posted. If you would like to be notified when these are up, you may join the email list here.
Via a reader, from the AZ Republic:
A Phoenix ordinance banning charity dining halls in residential neighborhoods withstood a challenge by a north-central Phoenix church.
Retired Arizona Supreme Court Justice Robert Corcoran, serving as a hearing officer, ruled Monday that feeding the homeless at a place of worship can be banned by city ordinance. The decision affects all Phoenix churches with underlying residential zoning.
Over the summer, city officials maintained that CrossRoads United Methodist Church, 7901 N. Central Ave., violated Phoenix zoning code by feeding the poor and homeless on its property, a use that can only occur in commercial or industrial zones.
You will be relieved to know that this has nothing to do with a wealthy people fearing that their Xanax-induced equilibrium will be upset by actually seeing a poor person in their neighborhood. We are assured as such by Paul Barnes, a "neighborhood activist" who presumably participated in the suit to stop the Church from holding pancake prayer-breakfasts:
"It's not a problem with homeless people in wealthy neighborhoods. That would be a matter of prejudice. This issue would be setting churches up to avoid zoning ordinances."
Wow, I am so relieved. And we all know what a problem it is when churches are organized solely to evade zoning regulations. Why, just last week the First Baptist Church and Gas Station as well as the United Methodist Church and Topless Bar opened right in my neighborhood.
You will be happy to know as well that the Constitution in no way limits the government in any way when it wants to regulate your property:
In a 19-page opinion, [Judge] Corcoran said the city can restrict where the homeless and poor can be fed and that zoning regulations apply to everyone equally. Additionally, he said that trumping land-use regulations is not a constitutional right.
Whew - yet another assault on the rights of government bureaucrats has been bravely turned aside.
Update: More random embedding of ads by the Republic. They are putting them between words in the paragraph now. RRRRRR. Hopefully it is gone now.
Never heard of tilt-shift photography until today, but it is cool. Here is an example - real scenes are digitally manipulated to look like it is a model. Which in fact is exactly the opposite of what I try to achieve with my model railroading.
Update: The video seems to have left the building.
The private homes that New London, Conn., took away from Suzette Kelo and her neighbors have been torn down. Their former site is a wasteland of fields of weeds, a monument to the power of eminent domain.
But now Pfizer, the drug company whose neighboring research facility had been the original cause of the homes' seizure, has just announced that it is closing up shop in New London.
To lure those jobs to New London a decade ago, the local government promised to demolish the older residential neighborhood adjacent to the land Pfizer was buying for next-to-nothing. Suzette Kelo fought the taking to the Supreme Court, and lost. Five justices found this redevelopment met the constitutional hurdle of "public use."
... but I am increasingly convinced it is real. Somehow I got on the mailing list of the "Environmental New Network" and got this press release:
Eco-Friendly Snow Thrower Is Alternative To Belching Snow Blowers
Sno Wovel Quietly Outperforms Snow Blowers Without Emissions, Noise, Strain
New Canaan, CT. November 9, 2009 -- Structured Solutions II LLC announced the launch of their newly-designed wheeled snow shovel this fall. The Sno Wovelâ„¢ is the only non-combustion alternative snow removal device performing equal to or better than a snow blower. The all new folding frame Sno Wovelâ„¢ debuts in a new category of hybrid tools, combining safety for the user, protection of the environment and high-performance. No fuel, fumes and deafening noise to harm the environment or the operator "“ no electric cords to tangle with. The Sno Wovel is 2-3 times faster than shoveling and comes with a folding frame design for easy and portable storage.
This seems like a fairly unsatisfying alternative to a big honkin' snow blower, but I live in Phoenix so what do I know?
Those of us who accused Chrysler and GM of hyping their electric car programs merely as a honey trap to capture money from the Obama Administration were accused of being ridiculous cynics. But...
Chrysler has disbanded a team of engineers dedicated to rushing a range of electric vehicles to showrooms and dropped ambitious sales targets for battery-powered cars set as it was sliding toward bankruptcy and seeking government aid.
The move by Fiat SpA marks a major reversal for Chrysler, which had used its electric car program as part of the case for a $12.5 billion federal aid package.
As late as August, Chrysler took $70 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a test fleet of 220 hybrid pickup trucks and minivans, vehicles now scrapped in the sweeping turnaround plan for Chrysler announced this week by Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne.
I don't know if you remember, but during the GM bankrupcy deliberations, the airwaves were flooded with commercials for the Chevy Volt. Seen one lately? It is clear in retrospect those messages were political ads seeking subsidies, not marketing ads seeking to sell cars.
Chocolate Bunny Kill:
Chocolate Bunny Kill
Tiffany | MySpace Video
I think it may be the music.
PS- the final scene with the hair dryer is the exact technique they used in Raider of the Lost Ark for the melting Nazi guy at the end.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told the military and civil militias today to prepare for war as a deterrent to a U.S.-led attack after American troops gained access to military bases in neighboring Colombia.
Chavez said a recently signed agreement that gives American troops access to seven Colombian bases is a direct threat to his oil-exporting country. Colombia has handed over its sovereignty to the U.S. with the deal, he said.
"Generals of the armed forces, the best way to avoid a war is to prepare for one," Chavez said in comments on state television during his weekly "Alo Presidente" program. "Colombia handed over their country and is now another state of the union. Don't make the mistake of attacking: Venezuela is willing to do anything."
Dictator play book page 1, paragraph 1: When domestic situation goes bad, find an external enemy.
One of the successes of US law vs. European is that we have generally maintained the inventive to work -- in other words, we have been able to relieve economic hardship while still making unemployment uncomfortable enough to provide incentives to find work.
Based on this Mises Institute post, this may no longer be true. If a family is comfortable with $45,000 a year, or doesn't think it has the prospect of earning more than that, there appears to be little incentive to work.
See the original post for explanation of the methodology and the exact programs driving these lines.
The fall of the Berlin wall is probably one of the 3-4 "Where-were-you-when..." events that I remember in my lifetime. I remember turning on the TV and seeing people dancing on top of the wall and being struck with a strong sense of cognitive dissonance, wondering if I was watching some war-of-the-worlds style fiction. I don't remember even today if this was a surprising event to the whole world, of if it was just I who was holed up in some ignore-the-outside-world zone, but it certainly was a stunning surprise to me.
It was truly a great day, in my mind more great than 9/11 was bad, so it is kind of amazing to me how much it is already almost forgotten. In the late 1970's, I had the opportunity to take the East Berlin tour through Checkpoint Charlie to see the wrong side of the wall. Many Americans I have talked to had the same reaction to this tour -- that it was meant to be one long propaganda spiel for communist East Germany but in fact was pathetically self-mocking. The propaganda failed because even the writers of the propaganda could not conceive of how wealthy the west was compared to the East. So when they bragged that 70% of the residents had running water or that "almost" all of the city had been rebuilt from the war 30 years later, Westerners were unimpressed.
Update: Remembering the victims of communism.
For those in Arizona, I will be on the Terry Gilberg show on 550 KFYI talking climate starting at 6:30 or 7:00 to about 8:00.
House passes health care bill. I wonder if anybody really knows what is in this thing. I am not much of a political expert, but I don't see how, if the vote was so close in the House, that they are ever going to get this pig through the Senate. Perhaps go the conference route so they can avoid cloture.
