Coyote Blog

A little while ago I wrote a post to say I was excited by the new generation of IPods.  I was ready to replace my 30GB v5.5 iPod classic with an 80GB that has the same form factor.  I am still hoping the iPod Touch (think iPhone without the phone) will turn out to be great, but there is a LOT of bitching out there about the new IPod classics.  Apparently, in a bid to make the interface prettier, it has become a lot slower (kindof like Vista).  Also, apparently some of the video functionality has been nerfed.  Research before you buy!  For example, check out the Amazon reviews.

For those who are new to my blog, I run recreation sites like campgrounds, mostly with retired people as labor.  Retired people love these jobs, because they are looking for a nice place to live for the summer in their RV.  Often they are willing to work just for their site and utilities, though as a private entity I must pay them minimum wage as well (when they work for the government, they don't get paid).  We sometimes get into odd situations -- for example, because of a disability payment or Social Security limits, it is not unusual I have employees that ask me if I could not pay them or pay them below minimum wage, and I have to tell them no (minimum wage is absolutely required, even if the worker begs to be paid less).

This relationship works out well.  The retired persons bring conscientious and low-cost management to the campgrounds.  Our employees, who usually are living comfortably off their retirement savings or pension, get a few extra bucks and a nice place to live for the summer.  These folks may work a bit slow, but I can afford that at $6 an hour.

But what happens when a state like Maryland, because it's got its blood up against Wal-Mart, passes a $11.30 "living" wage?  A number of problems result.  First, a camping night generally consumes, on average, about an hour of labor.  At $6 an hour with 22% burden for payroll taxes and workers comp, this totals to $7.32  per night of camping in labor.  At $11.30 an hour, this totals $13.79 per night of camping.  Most of our campsites are tent camping sites and more primitive natural campgrounds (see here) and a typical price for a night of camping is $16.  This is a very low price for camping when compared to large RV parks, and makes our sites particularly popular with lower income people.  The Marlyland minimum wage would add at least $6.50 to this price, or increase prices by 41% in one swoop.  And this is before considering second order cost increases in other purchased goods and utilities due to the minimum wage increase.

The other problem is one I would have thought so obvious that it is amazing to me that no one seems to talk about it -- not everyone earning minimum wage is trying to live on it.  Certainly people new to the work force are one example, as they are often willing to trade lower initial wages for training and experience and a work record and other valuable but non-quantifiable benefits.  In my case, while I am perfectly happy to tolerate lower productivity from older, retired workers at $6 an hour (the average age of my employees is over 70), when wages are forced arbitrarily to over $11, then I have to think about changing my business model, substituting younger workers for older folks.  As any economist would predict, lower productivity workers get pushed out of the market.

For more on this topic, I discussed four case studies in my business dealing with the minimum wage.

I could probably fill this blog with absurd examples of American middle class snobbery, but I thought this one from TJIC was particularly good:

"¦Eleven tonnes of papayas were dumped outside the Agriculture and
Cooperatives Ministry yesterday by Greenpeace in protest at "¦
open-field trials of genetically-modified crops.

"¦people flocked to load up on the free papayas, ignoring the environmental organisation's campaign against "¦ GM fruit"¦

Many passers-by, who mostly knew nothing about transgenic fruit, said they did not care about any health risks.

They were just thinking about how hungry they were"¦

A while back I wrote about this same phenomenon:

Progressives do not like American factories appearing in third world
countries, paying locals wages progressives feel are too low, and
disrupting agrarian economies with which progressives were more
comfortable.  But these changes are all the sum of actions by
individuals, so it is illustrative to think about what is going on in
these countries at the individual level. 

One morning, a rice farmer in southeast Asia might faces a choice.
He can continue a life of brutal, back-breaking labor from dawn to dusk
for what is essentially subsistence earnings.  He can continue to see a
large number of his children die young from malnutrition and disease.
He can continue a lifestyle so static, so devoid of opportunity for
advancement, that it is nearly identical to the life led by his
ancestors in the same spot a thousand years ago.

Or, he can go to the local Nike factory, work long hours (but
certainly no longer than he worked in the field) for low pay (but
certainly more than he was making subsistence farming) and take a shot
at changing his life.  And you know what, many men (and women) in his
position choose the Nike factory.

Much of the opposition to factory wages in Asia can be boiled down to members of the American middle class saying "I would never accept that job at that rate, so they should not either."

Not surprising, but certainly sickening:

They [the PMA GROUP]  sank $1,333,074 into the campaigns last year of 3
Democratic members of the House defense appropriations subcommittee and
walked away with $100.5 million in defense earmarks for PMA clients,
Roll Call reported.

That means for every buck they spent, their clients got back $75.39. In less than 1 year.

The 3 Democratic rent-to-own congressmen are John
Murtha, Jim Moran and Peter Visclosky. These antiwar Democrats see
nothing wrong with steering military money to PMA clients.

And why not? PMA money made up 20% of Murtha's war
chest, 18% of the Moran money and 33% of the Visclosky dough. For 2008,
PMA already has steered $542,500 to the 3 amigos.

Related thoughts from Radley Balko:

So I guess once you're elected to Congress, you're immune from drunk driving laws; you can stash the evidence that you've committed a crime in your office, because investigators aren't allowed to search it; if you kill someone because you've got a lead foot and blew a stop sign, the taxpayers will cover your financial liability; and, we learn today, you can commit whatever Internet-related crimes you please, because the police aren't allowed to search your computer.   

Meanwhile, the same  Congress that has immunized itself from much of the law is also responsible for the ever-expanding federal criminal code, which we can thank for our shamefully enormous and still-soaring prison population, which is by far and away the largest in the world. 

You
have lawmakers who feel they're above the law. And who at the same time
are criminalizing anything and everything they find tacky, repugnant,
or immoral.

We seem to be getting these stories in batches lately (others here and here) but leave it to the EU to trump even San Francisco in anti-consumer stupidity:

Microsoft lost its appeal of a European antitrust order Monday
that obliges the technology giant to share communications code with
rivals, sell a copy of Windows without Media Player and pay a $613
million fine - the largest ever by EU regulators.

The EU
Court of First Instance ruled against Microsoft on both parts of the
case, saying the European Commission was correct in concluding that
Microsoft was guilty of monopoly abuse in trying to use its power over
desktop computers to muscle into server software.

It also said regulators had clearly demonstrated that selling media software with Windows had damaged rivals.

"The
court observes that it is beyond dispute that in consequence of the
tying consumers are unable to acquire the Windows operating system
without simultaneously acquiring Windows Media Player," it said.

"In
that regard, the court considers that neither the fact that Microsoft
does not charge a separate price for Windows Media Player nor the fact
that consumers are not obliged to use that Media Player is irrelevant."

Yes, you are reading it correctly.  Microsoft is being penalized for giving the consumer too much value by bundling in additional features and programs for free into its OS.  And just to make sure that you understand that this has nothing to do with the consumer, but is purely a complaint of large competitors that can't keep up, they make it clear that they want the bundling stopped even if it does not change the price of the OS one penny (pfennig or whatever the Euro equivalent is).  They want the product stripped down and are deliberately trying to reduce its value to customers.

Gwynnie at Maggie's Farm has a funny comment, saying, "Microsoft is guilty of succeeding while American."

Regulation is a frequent topic on this blog, and one of the points I try to make over and over is that most supposedly pro-consumer regulation is in fact put in place to protect incumbents from competition and new entrants.   It's worth repeating this Milton Friedman quote:

The justification offered is always the same: to protect the consumer. However, the reason
is demonstrated by observing who lobbies at the state legislature for
the imposition or strengthening of licensure. The lobbyists are
invariably representatives of the occupation in question rather than of
the customers. True enough, plumbers presumably know better than anyone
else what their customers need to be protected against. However, it is
hard to regard altruistic concern for their customers as the primary
motive behind their determined efforts to get legal power to decide who
may be a plumber.

Apparently, the NY Times has discovered the phenomenon, and argues that it is accelerating under the Bush administration.  I have no evidence to refute this claim, though I note that the NY Times offers no evidence in support of it either.

Never-the-less, it certainly is a feature of most governments to try to protect politically powerful businesses against competitors, foreign and domestic.  Basically, the entire German and French economy is built on this practice, which is why the top corporations in these countries in 1960 are still the top companies today, whereas the list has completely turned over in the US.  Our economy thrives because of entrepreneurship.  New entrants replace senescent competitors, or at least keep the pressure on them so they stay sharp and focused.

This is an enormous issue in my business.  My industry is characterized by about 4-5 larger companies that operate many recreation facilities, of which we are one, and hundreds or perhaps thousands of individual operators.  Over the last five years, the US and state governments have passes a myriad of rules and regulations that are making it virtually impossible for smaller companies to compete.  I don't know if these are being suggested by any of the larger players (they certainly aren't coming from me) but these regulations are serving the purpose of strangling smaller competitors and making it nearly impossible for new entrants to compete.

Or not.  Via Cafe Hayek and the WSJ, the median new home is 40% bigger than just a generation ago.

Apparently Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged is turning 50, a fact I know only because my fairly libertarian-tilted feed reading list has been deluged of late with retrospectives. 

One of the oddities of posts on Ayn Rand is that every author seems to feel required to say something like "I like her work but I am not in total agreement with everything she says."  Uh, OK.  I'm not clear why this proviso seems so necessary.  I have never heard someone saying "I am a big fan of Mozart" and then following up with "but I don't like all of his works."  I am sure that is true, but they don't bother saying so.   I am a big fan of Ayn Rand, in particular with her non-fiction essays, but of course there are parts of her writing I don't agree with.  For example, I would be less likely to take her advice on managing my love life than I would to eat out of Hannibal Lecter's cookbook.

What Rand did so well in Atlas Shrugged was to take collectivist and anti-rational philosophy and play it forward in practice in a very compelling way. She demonstrated with almost mathematical precision the end results of collectivist philosophy.   The entropic United States in Atlas Shrugged, running down under the weight of socialism, has turned out to be repeatedly prescient.  For this reason, I find her anti-heros to be more memorable.  I see analog's to the Jim Taggerts and Lee Hunsackers and Starnes children nearly every day in the news.  Through these analogs, Rand still helps me place current events in their philosophical context. 

By the way, if you enjoyed her novels but have never read her essays, I encourage you to do so.  The Virtue of Selfishness is a reasonable place to start.  She was not the first person to voice many of these messages (Hayek and others were saying many of the same things) but because of her novels, I, like many others, heard them first from her.

The media has built an image through shows like Dynasty and Dallas of private companies being battlegrounds for petty feuds and revenge plots, all played out with little concern for the actual performance of the business.  While I suppose that such things do happen, I have worked in a lot of large companies and have seen a lot of stupid stuff, but I have never seen the pettiness you will find in the average government office:

In his first day as DA, Nifong had fired a longtime rival, Freda Black.
She quickly made clear her intent to run in 2006. Well-known from her
work in a high-profile murder trial, Black soon became the
front-runner. Nifong knew that Black would fire him, as he had fired
her, the first chance she got. His concern, he told his initial
campaign manager, Jackie Brown, was not that he cared about being DA;
he needed another three years in the Durham DA's office for his pension
to fully vest.

Ooh, I am in charge, now I can seek revenge on all the people I don't like.  How petty can you get?  Its absolutely assumed here that the first thing a newcomer will do is fire all the people who have rubbed them the wrong way over the years, without regard to performance or capability.  And we want to make these folks our masters?

From San Francisco, of course! via Market Power

Prop. G obligates the
Planning Commission to conduct a hearing for any chain store (also
known as "formula retail") proposed in neighborhood commercial
districts.

Formula retail is defined as any retail sales establishment with 11
or more stores in the United States that maintains two or more
standardized features, including decor, facade, color scheme, uniforms,
signage or a trademark.

Incredibly, freaking 58% of the voters passed this turkey.  It's hard to know where to start, but here are a few thoughts:

• Equal protection?  Anyone?  Buehler? 
• One of the most obvious punishments of success I have ever seen.  If you only have one store, you are fine.  But if you are succesful and your concept flourishes and you have many stores, then you are automatically penalized.
• One of the single most anti-consumer pieces of legislation I have ever seen.  Stores using a proven formula that has been succesful in other areas have a sort of consumer good housekeeping seal of approval.  They are by definition retail establishments where many consumers have already voted with their wallet "we like this."  So in effect, proven customer favorites are penalized vs. less proven concepts.  What an odd zoning concept when you put it that way -- we don't want anyone doing business here that has already proven themselves to be succesful with customers.  We only want you if you have no proof customers want what you are selling.

The other night I was staying in Arcadia, CA (a suburb of LA near Pasadena) on what I was told was the old Route 66.  There were a ton of restaurant choices, many of which I did not recognize, and there was a Chile's, which I grew up with in Texas.  I am positive some of those restaurants would have provided me a more satisfying meal than Chile's.  I am also sure some would have been worse.  Sometimes I am in the mood to find something new, but that night I just wanted a predictable experience.  All that stuff San Francisco is trying to penalize -- those standardized features -- bring real value to many consumers.

I almost never post about politics, because I don't really have a horse in the Democrat-Republican race.  However, this post from Kevin Drum quoting E.J. Dione kind of tickled me.  They claim Democrats are winning the suburbs from Republicans, which I have no particular reason to dispute.  But the whole concept of Democrats competing in the suburbs is kind of funny to me.  Almost at every turn, the Left tends to use the suburbs as its great cultural whipping boy.  We hate your SUV's and your lack of public transportation and your large houses and your Walmarts and your churches and your private schools and we take your money and send it to the city centers which culturally we have much more affinity for, but thanks for voting for us.

Over at Climate Skeptic, I discuss Anthony Watt's preliminary findings as to the quality of measurement in the surface temperature installations that are used to measure global warming.  If we call global warming "the signal", then the signal is currently thought to have been about 0.6C over the last century.  However, Watt has good reason to estimate that 85% of the US Historical Climate Network has installation biases that create errors from 1-5C,or about 2-8 times the signal.  And these are not random biases that cancel out, but tend to all bias the numbers higher, leading to systematic over-estimation of temperature increases.

Over at Climate Skeptic, I discuss Anthony Watt's preliminary findings as to the quality of measurement in the surface temperature installations that are used to measure global warming.  If we call global warming "the signal", then the signal is currently thought to have been about 0.6C over the last century.  However, Watt has good reason to estimate that 85% of the US Historical Climate Network has installation biases that create errors from 1-5C,or about 2-8 times the signal.  And these are not random biases that cancel out, but tend to all bias the numbers higher, leading to systematic over-estimation of temperature increases.

I am sure everyone has heard that Arctic sea ice is, as the National Geographic described it, at an "all-time low."  Of course those would expect the words "all-time" to mean just that will be disappointed to learn that they really mean "since 1979 when we started measuring it by satellite."

At Climate Skeptic, I write that it has come to my attention that the earth has two poles, and it's odd no one talks about the other one.  Maybe they forgot?  Well it turns out that Antarctic sea ice is at an all time high (using the term in the same way that National Geographic does). 

As an end note, I also discuss Glacier Bay, Alaska.  It turns out the glaciers there are retreating, but about 99% of the retreat occurred between 1793 and 1907. 

I hesitated to even post this link, because if you haven't been following the Rack & Roll / Manassas Park story for a while, it is so rich and convoluted that it's almost impossible to catch up.  Like starting to watch the Sopranos in the sixth season.  But Radley Balko has a long update.

Here is the short answer.  A group of folks in Manassas Park, VA, both in and out of the town government, want to take the land where the Rack & Roll pool club and bar sits for a lucrative off-track betting establishment.  As part of that effort, they have worked to deny the owner his liquor license and his business license.  The town has also harassed the club with numerous over-the-top raids, including a full-on 60-man SWAT raid.  The town has in the past tried to portray the club as a haven for drug dealing, in part by having police pay the club's bouncer to allow and/or encourage drug deals on the property and then tip police to them.

The owner has been standing up for himself, and has taken to video-taping the premises at all times and recording interviews with employees and customers.  A lot of the back story is here, start at the bottom.

In this most recent update, the owner addresses the other major charge being used to pull his licenses -- that he allowed lewd behavior on site, specifically girls flashing their boobs on the dance floor.  He has impressive evidence that he threw out anyone he caught doing so, and instructed his other employees to do the same.  In fact, the flashing seems to have occurred when the owner was not present, and was led and encouraged and photographed by the club's DJ.  Ironically, the DJ is the Manassas Park vice-mayor.  So the town is trying to shut the club down for activities opposed by the club's owner but encouraged by the town's own official.  Bizarre.  Now the town finds itself the proud owner of a file of soft-core child pornography, in the form of pictures from the club taken by their vice-Mayor of topless girls, several of whom may have been under-age  (apparently VA law allows under-age patrons as long as they are not served alcohol).

After NASA was forced to restate its US temperature data downward, James Hansen argued that the US doesn't matter.  After it was observed that long-term temperature measurement is flawed in South America and Africa, James Hansen agreed and argued that South America and Africa don't matter.  Since oceans cover 75% of the globe and we have no long-term temperature record for these oceans or for Antarctica, I ask the question at Climate Skeptic:  What does matter?

I am a big fan of Consumer Reports the magazine.  However, Alex Tobarrok identifies a priceless quote highlighting the befuddled technocrat:

Not so long ago you could count on most washers to get your clothes
very clean. Not anymore. Our latest tests found huge performance
differences among machines. Some left our stain-soaked swatches nearly
as dirty as they were before washing. For best results, you'll have to
spend $900 or more.

What
happened? As of January, the U.S. Department of Energy has required
washers to use 21 percent less energy, a goal we wholeheartedly
support. But our tests have found that traditional top-loaders, those
with the familiar center-post agitators, are having a tough time
wringing out those savings without sacrificing cleaning ability, the
main reason you buy a washer.

How can they "wholeheartedly support" such a goal when they themselves have demonstrated it effectively castrates an important consumer appliance?  How can they support a goal that effectively raises the price of a washing machine that actually cleans clothes to $900 or more?

It is often said that capitalism won over socialism in the late 20th century, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of powerful Asia market economies.  Be that as it may, this statement certainly does not apply to American university campuses.  In the ivory tower, capitalism is still the number one whipping boy. 

An interesting illustration of this is Jacob Sullum's review of a pair of books that attempt to debunk the myth that being mildly overweight is deadly.  This is a rich topic, given some of the really bad science that has gone into trying to make being overweight the next smoking, and the review is worth a read.  However, this part caught my eye:

Both he and Campos blame the unjustified obsession with weight and the
cruel vilification of fat people on capitalism, which, they say, prizes
self-discipline and stigmatizes those seen as lacking it. To be fair,
Campos more specifically blames a pro-capitalist Protestant asceticism
that encourages the pursuit of wealth but frowns on those who enjoy it
too much. There's an element of truth to this analysis; a similar
ambivalence regarding pleasure helps explain American attitudes toward
sex, drugs, and gambling.

But wait!  Aren't most of the folks like the food nazis who are launching government obesity campaigns leftists?  They are, and Sullum makes this point:

But it does give you pause when you consider that the obesity
obsessives also blame capitalism, for precipitating the current crisis
by making food plentiful, inexpensive, appealing, and convenient. New
York University nutritionist Marion Nestle, for example, blames
America's adiposity on "an overly abundant food supply," "low food
prices," "a highly competitive market," and "abundant food choices,"
while Kelly Brownell claims restaurants exploit consumers when they
give them more for less, since "people have biological vulnerabilities
that promote overeating when large portions are available, a strong
desire for value, and the capacity to be persuaded by advertising."

Great.  So capitalism causes obesity as well as anti-obesity.  You can't win.

Henry Payne has an interesting tidbit:  The government is now concerning itself with what cars its employees purchase.

Your tax dollars at work. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last week sent an email urging its 67,000 employees not to buy SUVs, lecturing that fuel efficiency should be their "top priority" when buying a car.

 

"Every
new sport utility vehicle on the road produces 60 percent more climate
threatening CO2 emissions than a smaller vehicle," said Energy News,
a quarterly newsletter from a department that has nothing to do with
energy, but everything to do with energy morality apparently.

 

"The
toll that vehicles take on the environment includes air pollution, oil
spills, pollution of our water supplies, and damage to natural
habitats," continues the HHS sermon. "In order to really cut CO2
emissions, higher fuel efficiency in all vehicles will be essential."

American auto makers were not amused by the recommendation to buy Toyotas or Hondas. 

This surprises me not at all.  A few weeks ago, I had an EPA audit of a marina and store I operate in Colorado (the report in all its glory is here).  In that audit, the Environmental Protection Agency recommended that we begin selling fair trade coffee in our store.  What that has to do with emissions into the lake, I have no idea.  They also recommended that I put an environmental message on our shopping bags, replacing the current boating safety message.  The audit did say that they could not require these two things.  Well, give them some time, they will probably make it a requirement soon.

Increasingly MADD and the tea-totaling Nazis are after parents who allow kids to drink alcohol at home.

Research published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2004 found
that adolescents whose parents permitted them to attend unchaperoned
parties where drinking occurred had twice the average binge-drinking
rate. But the study also had another, more arresting conclusion:
Children whose parents introduced drinking to the children at home were
one-third as likely to binge....

In fact, the American Medical Association has actually put out press releases
lamenting the fact that most teens get their first sip of alcohol from
their parents. I'd say that's exactly who ought to be giving it to them.

While I have no intention of throwing wild parties and getting my kids' friends drunk, I do intend to introduce alcohol as well as a respect for it at the dinner table, just as my parents did.  I am a firm believer that letting you kids drink a bit in the very controlled home environment is the best possible way to take the edginess and mystery out of drinking -- after all, how cool can it be if you do it with your parents.

While we can argue about the projected impacts of man-made global warming (my skeptics site here), it is almost certain than any solution that puts a real dent in CO2 production will bar from the middle class about a billion people who are just climbing out of subsistence poverty.  TJIC notes a particularly odious proposal by environmental groups to encourage human power over industrialization in the third world:

See, first world Volvo-driving environmentalists!  We can help
the Third World! All we need to do is build them human hamster wheels,
so that they can set their children to work pumping water, instead of
using nasty diesel pumps (like we do here in the First World, while our
children attend soccer practice or piano lessons).

Don't miss the really awful animation from the environmentalist's site.

The government is worried that you will do harm to yourself if you self-medicate pain pills.  So what is their response?  They will throw you in jail for 25 years.  Yeah, much better to have someone rot in jail for a quarter of a century than make a bad decision that only affects himself.

For years, banks have been sued for "red-lining" poor neighborhoods, meaning they were accused of purposefully avoiding doing business in these poor areas.  National retail chains have been accused of something similar, causing poorer the oft-commented-on irony that poorer neighborhoods often have the highest retail prices.

The City of Los Angeles seems to like this practice and wants to pass new legislation aimed at further limiting retail choices in poorer neighborhoods:

"Amid worries of an obesity epidemic and its related illnesses,
including high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease, Los Angeles
officials, among others around the country, are proposing to limit new
fast-food restaurants -- a tactic that could be called health zoning."
Zoning restrictions on fast-food outlets in towns such as Concord,
Mass. and Calistoga, Calif. are typically based on traffic or aesthetic
concerns, rather than a determination to second-guess what residents
choose to eat. The proposed L.A. restrictions would not be city-wide
but would instead be specifically targeted to the city's poorest
sections in and around South Central. Mark Vallianatos, director of
something called the Center for Food and Justice at Occidental College (more about it), says "bringing health policy and environmental policy together with land-use planning" is "the wave of the future."

Jesus, the Center for Food and Justice?  Another clear leading edge of health care as the Trojan Horse for fascism, which I have been warning against for years.

One of the arguments for banning adult legal access to drugs like marijuana (and even allergy medications) is that it helps to prevent abuse of these drugs by underage kids.  This would be nice to test in a true control group setting, but we really don't have the opportunity under current laws to do so.  But we can work by proxy.  We can compare drugs that are illicit for everyone, like marijuana, to drugs that are legal for adults but not for minors, like tobacco. 

If drug warriors are correct, teenage tobacco use should be much higher than use of other illicit drugs.  This is particularly true because the proxy is an imperfect one, since the tobacco is a far less intimidating drug to try than, say, heroin.  However, it turns out not to be the case.  The new figures our out from our friendly US Government drug warriors, and it turns out that tobacco use is barely higher among teens than illicit drug use.

For example, the study shows that past month tobacco use among kids 12-17 was 12.9% in 2006, while past month illicit drug use in the same group was 9.8% (tables G.16 and G.7).  That's lower, but certainly not decisively so.  Both of these use numbers have fallen since 2002 at about the same rate.

Even more interesting are the figures for the number of kids 12-17 who had initiated use of certain substances in the past year (table G.26).  In that year, 2.45 million had initiated cigarette use, but 2.79 million had initiated illicit drug use.  Further, when asked if certain substances carried "great risk" in trying to purchase them, 68.7% of underage cigarette smokers said yes (table G.25).   This response was 10 or more points higher than that of teenage occasional users marijuana, cocaine, or even heroin.  In short, teenagers are saying it is more difficult and/or riskier to support cigarette use than it is to support a weekly marijuana, cocaine, or heroin habit -- exactly the opposite of the drug warriors' argument for prohibition  (but consistent with the libertarian argument that bringing these drug sales above ground will make underage purchase more visible and easier to combat).

HT: Hit and Run for the link

The laptop I bought my kids 6 months ago is rapidly becoming the worst purchase I have ever made.  Not because the laptop is bad, but because of a momentary lack of diligence I bought one with Vista installed.  It has been a never-ending disaster trying to get this computer to work.  A while back, I put XP on a partition and my kids spend most of their time on XP since, well, it works.  Vista does not.  It is the Paris Hilton of OS's -- looks pretty but does not work.

In particular, the networking is an enormous step backwards from XP.  The wireless networking was a real pain to get set up in the first place, in contrast to XP and my wife's Mac which both worked and connected from the moment the power switch turned on. 

Now, we are getting two new errors.  First, at random times, the computer will stop being able to connect to the internet.  It will have a good wireless signal, and see other computers on the network fine, and the other computers on the network will see the internet, but Vista does not.  Just rebooted the computer into the XP partition, and XP sees the Internet fine -- its just Vista that is broken.

Second, and perhaps even more inexcusable, I have to reinstall the printer driver in Vista at nearly every log on.  There is a bug in Vista such that laptops that move off the network and come back will find that the network printers are now marked "offline" and there is nothing one can do to bring them online short of reinstalling the drivers.  Really.  I thought I was doing something wrong, but searching the web this is a known problem.  None of the suggested workarounds are working for me.

Vista is rapidly becoming the New Coke of operating systems.  I have had every version of windows on my computer at one time or another, including Windows 1.0 and the egregious Windows ME, and I can say with confidence Vista is the worst of them all by far.  More: corporate demand for upgrading to XP from Vista;  DRM hell in Vista;  how I set up dual-booting on a Vista machine; and what happened to the File menu?

Looks like the XP partition is soon going to be the only partition.  But recognize how serious this step is:  Laptops, unlike desktops, have more model-specific device drivers.  For example, instead of one Nvidia graphics driver for all cards, you tend to need the driver for your specific card in your specific computer model.   The computer I have has never and will never publish XP drivers.  I have found drivers that work for XP for most things, but not for sound.  So I will be giving up a substantial piece of functionality -- sound-- in exchange for never having to swear at Vista again.