Coyote Blog

One of the most fundamental premises of economics is that in a free society, an exchange or transaction only takes place when it benefits both the parties.  Unfortunately, given how simple this axiom is and how easy it is to prove, it is either not accepted or not understood by a huge number of Americans.  Thus we get any number of variations of the zero-sum wealth fallacy, and we get this, from Overlawyered:

A reader writes: "Am I wrong to believe that businesses and
consumers are natural enemies in that their economic interests are
diametrically opposed?"

Yes, you're wrong. Transactions don't occur unless both parties are
better off. Businesses thus only profit if they can create consumer
surplus"”the ability to sell a product at a price that is less than what
a consumer values the good or service. Businesses' interests are thus
aligned with consumers who seek consumer surplus. Businesses more often
prosper by creating satisfied consumers who become repeat customers who
promote the business's reputation rather than trying to extract every
last ounce of wealth from them in a single transaction. This is why
brand names and advertising are so important, because they are market
signals of long-term commitment to customer satisfaction. It's not
profitable to invest in creating a brand name if one intends on having
a bad reputation. (Note the key word "intends" there; no doubt one can
intend to have good customer service and fail to achieve it, and I'm
looking at you, Comcast.) And one will note that businesses that tend
not to have repeat customers or rely on word of mouth are more likely
businesses that have reputations of indifference about customer
satisfaction: tourist traps, traveling carnivals, etc.

A while back a made a purchase of a number of modular cabins for one of the campgrounds we operate.  After the delivery, the sales person called me to thank me for my business.  My reaction was "Thank me?  I should be thanking you."  The cabins are a huge boost to my business -- already I am getting great customer feedback -- and the modular technology saved me a ton of money on construction.  See?  Both the buyer and the seller were thrilled, because we were both better off.

I am releasing version 1.0 of my Skeptical Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming.  You may download the pdf (about 2.7 mb) from the link above or by clicking on the cover photo below.  In the next few days, I will also be posting an online HTML version as well as offering a printed version at cost.

Update:  The HTML version is here, and the book can be purchased at cost through this link

The purpose of this paper is to provide a layman's critique
of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory, and in particular to
challenge the fairly widespread notion that the science and projected
consequences of AGW currently justify massive spending and government
intervention into the world's economies. This paper will show that despite good evidence that global temperatures
are rising and that CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas and help to warm the Earth,
we are a long way from attributing all or much of current warming to man-made
CO2. We are even further away from being
able to accurately project man's impact on future climate, and it is a very
debatable question whether interventions today to reduce CO2 emissions will substantially
improve the world 50 or 100 years from now. 

I am not a trained expert on the climate. I studied physics at Princeton University before switching my
major to mechanical engineering, where I specialized in control theory and
feedback loops, a topic that will be important when we get into the details of
climate change modeling. For over ten
years, my business specialty was market prediction and sales forecasting using
modeling approaches similar to (if far less complex than) those used in climate.

My goal for this paper is not to materially
advance climate science. However, I have
found that the global warming skeptic's case is seldom reported well or in any
depth, and I wanted to have a try at producing a fair reporting of the
skeptic's position.  I have been unhappy
with several of the recent documentaries outlining the skeptic's case, either
because they skipped over a number of critical issues, or because they
over-sold alternate warming hypotheses that are not yet well understood.  To the inevitable charge that as a
non-practitioner, I am not qualified to write this paper --I believe that I am
able to present the current state of the science, with a particular emphasis on
the skeptic's case, at least as well as a good reporter might, and far better
than most reporters actually portray the state of the science. Through this paper I will try to cite sources
as often as possible and provide links for those who are reading this online,
this report is best read as journalism, not as a scientific, meticulously
footnoted paper.

An outline of the paper is as follows:

Forward: What Are My Goals For This Paper

Chapter
1: Management Summary

Chapter
2: Is It OK to be a Skeptic?

Charges
of Bias

The
Climate Trojan Horse

The
Need to Exaggerate

Chapter
3: The Basics of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) Theory

Chapter
4: The historical evidence

The
long view (650,000 years)

The medium view (1000 years)

The
short view (100 years)

Sulfates,
Aerosols, and Dimming

The
Troposphere Dilemma and Urban heat islands

Using
Computer Models to Explain the Past

Chapter
5: The computer models and predicting
the future

The
Dangers in Modeling Complex Systems

Do
Model Outputs Constitute Scientific Proof?

Econometrics and CO2 Forecasts

Climate
Sensitivity and the Role of Positive Feedbacks

Climate
Models had to be aggressively tweaked to match history

Chapter
6: Alternate explanations and models

Solar
Irradiance

Cosmic
Rays

Man's
Land Use

Chapter
7: The effects of global warming

Why
only bad stuff?

Ice
melting / ocean rising

Hurricanes
& Tornados

Temperature
Extremes

Extinction
and Disease

Collapse
of the Gulf Stream and Freezing of Europe

Non-warming
Effects of CO2

Chapter
8:  Kyoto and Policy Alternatives

Kyoto

Cost
of the Solutions vs. the Benefits: Why
Warmer but Richer may be Better than Colder and Poorer

Chapter
9: Rebuttals by AGW Supporters

Please feel free to download and share.  If you find errors, omissions, mistakes, gaps or anything else you would like to comment on, please email me at the address on the cover.  In particular, I have tried to be careful with copyrighted material, but if I have used any of your material without your consent, let me know ASAP and I will remove it.

. 68

This is so wildly out of character for me that I have a hard time believing I am posting on it, but I have come to like many of the more casual shirts made by Robert Talbott.  He also seems to have a lot of nice dress shirts and ties, but since I don't wear suits and ties any more, I do not pay them much attention.

Anyway, when we were on the Monterrey peninsula last week, my wife and I found the Robert Talbott outlet in Carmel Valley Village (inland of Carmel).  Most all the $250 shirts were $49 and the ties seemed similarly discounted.  Cool.  Also, they have a large selection of fabrics in the back that you can get shirts custom made.   I don't care for wine much, but my wife is also a fan of his Chardonnay, which he makes a few blocks away.

By the way, here are a couple of Monterrey pix:

Previously, I posted how my book BMOC foresaw a new business model in giving product placements to the most popular high school kids as opinion leaders who would drive adoption by their fellow teens.

This week, TJIC points out that the New York Times is starting to sniff around another business model in the book, that of fountain coin harvesting.  They are starting to see the market:

In all these babbling places, the story is the same: Coins pile up, Mr.
Mendez removes them and people's fascination with tossing pocket change
into water continues, unexplained"¦

But miss the real business model (from the book):

On
the basis of this market research and his quirky insight, Preston Marsh founded
3Coins, Inc, and began an intensive six month research and development
program. He hired engineers from several
hot tub and spa companies that had developed the modular spa, a design where
all the necessary pumps and plumbing were integrated with the tub into a single
portable unit. His designers worked long
weeks coming up with three modular fountain designs, driving down the estimated
manufacturing cost to just $350 per unit. 

Next,
Preston Marsh took these fountain designs to mall owners, architects, building
managers, landscapers and anyone who designed or owned public spaces. In every case, the deal was the same: Preston Marsh would give the client one or
more free fountains to adorn their public spaces, and would even provide the
labor to clean and treat the fountains once a week. In return, Preston Marsh literally "kept the
change". Preston Marsh paid local
entrepreneurs 25% of the change drop to clean the fountains and empty and
deposit the change. The rest was pure
profit.

The
resulting economics were startling. For
each installation, Preston Marsh had up-front investments of about $750,
including the $350 tub plus delivery and installation. In return, Preston Marsh gained about $50 a
week in revenue, or $37.50 after the servicing agent took his 25%. Over a year, the fountain would produce
$1,950 in revenue, with virtually no expenses or overhead. 

After
five years, 3Coins had nearly 10,000 fountains in place, generating almost $20
million in annual revenue, over half of which was profit. And Preston Marsh owned 100% of the company.

You can still buy BMOC at Amazon, which has had a bit of a sales resurgence of late after a couple of press mentions.   Servers are standing by.

Previously, I posted how my book BMOC foresaw a new business model in giving product placements to the most popular high school kids as opinion leaders who would drive adoption by their fellow teens.

This week, TJIC points out that the New York Times is starting to sniff around another business model in the book, that of fountain coin harvesting.  They are starting to see the market:

In all these babbling places, the story is the same: Coins pile up, Mr.
Mendez removes them and people's fascination with tossing pocket change
into water continues, unexplained"¦

But miss the real business model (from the book):

On
the basis of this market research and his quirky insight, Preston Marsh founded
3Coins, Inc, and began an intensive six month research and development
program. He hired engineers from several
hot tub and spa companies that had developed the modular spa, a design where
all the necessary pumps and plumbing were integrated with the tub into a single
portable unit. His designers worked long
weeks coming up with three modular fountain designs, driving down the estimated
manufacturing cost to just $350 per unit. 

Next,
Preston Marsh took these fountain designs to mall owners, architects, building
managers, landscapers and anyone who designed or owned public spaces. In every case, the deal was the same: Preston Marsh would give the client one or
more free fountains to adorn their public spaces, and would even provide the
labor to clean and treat the fountains once a week. In return, Preston Marsh literally "kept the
change". Preston Marsh paid local
entrepreneurs 25% of the change drop to clean the fountains and empty and
deposit the change. The rest was pure
profit.

The
resulting economics were startling. For
each installation, Preston Marsh had up-front investments of about $750,
including the $350 tub plus delivery and installation. In return, Preston Marsh gained about $50 a
week in revenue, or $37.50 after the servicing agent took his 25%. Over a year, the fountain would produce
$1,950 in revenue, with virtually no expenses or overhead. 

After
five years, 3Coins had nearly 10,000 fountains in place, generating almost $20
million in annual revenue, over half of which was profit. And Preston Marsh owned 100% of the company.

You can still buy BMOC at Amazon, which has had a bit of a sales resurgence of late after a couple of press mentions.   Servers are standing by.

From a WSJ online article on the iPone:

Aaron Rheingold, an intern at Universal Music, said his boss sent him
to wait in line. "I got stuck on iPhone detail," he said. "I'm not
getting anything out of this, except maybe a pat on the back and free
lunch." He says his boss postponed his flight to Puerto Rico today to
be back in the office when Mr. Rheingold returns with the goods.

Perhaps I am just a modern, soft, girly-man, oprah-fied manager, but I could not in a million years imagine asking one of my employees to go wait overnight in line for me so I could get an iPhone before my peers.  And that is in a private company where my employees' salary comes out of my pocket.  I would be even less likely to send out an employee whose salary is paid by the shareholders of a publicly-traded company.

A while back, I discussed an effort by Anthony Watts to create a pictorial data base of the US Historical Climate Network, the 1000 or so temperature and weather sensors whose data are used in historical climate numbers, including IPCC and NOAA and GISS global warming data bases. 

Already, this effort has identified numerous egregious installations that call into question the quality of historical temperature measurement.  Note here and here and here and here.  The whole data base is at SurfaceStations.org and my humble contributions are here and here.  Was 2006 the second warmest of all time, or did 2006 have the most hot exhaust blowing on measurement instruments?

Roger Pielke, a climate scientist in Colorado, reports on an odd response by the NOAA to this effort:

Recently, Anthony Watts has established a website [www.surfacestations.org] to record these photographs. He has worked to assure that the photographs are obtained appropriately.

As a result of this effort, NOAA has removed location information
from their website as to where they are located. This information has
been available there for years.

There are a few USHCN stations at people's homes, so in some cases there may be privacy concerns, but most all of the ones I have seen are at public locations, from fire houses to ranger stations to water plants.  Pielke offers up a logical solution for where there are privacy issues:

"over 4 years ago there was a big push in the Cooperative Observer
program to make sure that all 7000+ sites across the country were
photodocumented. All 120 Data Acquisition Programs were equipped with
high quality digital cameras. Most took photos. However, at the higher
levels where they were developing the upload and archive system for the
photos the issue of observer privacy was raised and as best we can tell
the result was that those photos were not archived and certainly are
not available."

This is a very disturbing development, as individuals in NOAA's
leadership have used their authority to prevent the scientific
community and the public access to critical information that is being
used as part of establishing climate and energy policy in the United
States.

The solution to this issue is, of course, straightforward. Either
make the photographs where datasets are being used in research (i.e.
the HCN sites), available, or permit others to take them. Privacy
rules, such as not publishing the names and addresses of the observers,
should be made, however, the photographs themselves, viewing the site,
and views in the four orthogonal directions must be public. Volunteers
who are HCN Cooperative Observers need to either grant this permission
or not volunteer.

If you observe the state of climate science at all, you will know that any measurement (e.g. satellite or radiosonde temperature measurements) that conflict even the slightest with the main story line of anthropogenic global warming are subjected to intense and withering scrutiny.  Even the tiniest source of error or methodological sloppiness in these conflicting data sets cause global warming zealots to throw out the data as flawed.  It is instructive that perhaps the sloppiest data set of all is the surface climate measurement system they use primarily to support their case, and it is one they show absolutely no interest in scrutinizing, or letting anyone else scrutinize.

I am sitting in the airport now about to fly back to Phoenix.  I generally fly America West / US Airways, because they have a hub in Phoenix and doing so maximizes my chance both of getting non-stop flights as well as accumulating a meaningful frequent flier balance with a singe airline.

After way too many round trips, I have the following observation:  I am much more likely to get an elite upgrade returning home than on the outbound leg.   I have seen this effect both flying the hub airline out of Phoenix and previously flying United out of Denver.   Now, as a hub city, Phoenix has a disproportionate number of US Airways elite members, just as Denver has a disproportionate number of United elite members.  So competing with a lot of other elite members for limited upgrade seats is understandable out of Phoenix, but shouldn't it be symmetric coming back?  I have three theories:

• Observer error, though I will say I have a fairly large number of observation points to many different cities from two different hub cities
• I am flying when the Elite's like to fly outbound, but I tend to take unpopular flights back.  Possible.  Most business travelers tend to fly outbound in the morning on the first flight, but they may all come back different times of day depending on their business.  This is one potential asymmetry.
• The airlines give preference on upgrades to through passengers.  I have never heard this, but it might explain it.  Outbound from a hub, many of the people on my flight are on the second flight, having just changed planes.  Going home, towards a hub, everyone is in the same boat as me, on their first leg.  I don't think the airlines differentiate, but this is the only other asymmetry I can come up with.

Today, the price of gasoline at the pump before taxes is about $2.50 a gallon.  The price of milk per gallon is about $3.50 a gallon, and may rise to $5.00 by the fall. 

So I will present you with a heresy:  Gasoline is an absolutely screaming deal.  Having worked a brief stint in the oil industry, it is incredible what has to happen and the investments that are in place to get gas into your car.  Offshore oil platforms, dealing with unstable governments, thousand mile long pipelines, fleets of supertankers, huge complex refineries, and massive distribution networks are required to get gas to your car.  And yet, it's a buck cheaper than milk, which in comparison is nearly trivial to produce.  Sure, the milk needs a little processing and transportation, but compare this to oil, where processing involves reforming the very molecules in the oil to perfect the gas, and where transportation is across distances one to two orders of magnitude greater than for milk.  And don't even get me started on production:  a) cow  b) offshore oil platform in 1000 foot deep water.

It is perhaps even more instructive to see how the government regulates these two commodities.  Oil companies are constantly harassed by government as the world's great Satans, with windfall profits taxes and price gouging regulations, all on an industry that barely makes a 10% profit on sales in the best of times.  Milk, on the other hand, gets huge government subsidies and handouts, including a price support system that is both arcane and incredibly costly.  So Oil:  windfall profits taxes.  Milk, which is pricier but easier to produce: price supports.  Does anyone really want to argue that regulation is a result of real market realities rather than just populist pandering for and against favored and unfavored groups?

Michael Canon has proposed for principles of an anti-universal health care coverage club:

1. Health policy should focus on making health care of ever-increasing quality available to an ever-increasing number of people.
2. To
   achieve "universal coverage" would require either having the government
   provide health insurance to everyone or forcing everyone to buy it.  Government provision is undesirable, because government does a poor job of improving quality or efficiency.  Forcing
   people to get insurance would lead to a worse health-care system for
   everyone, because it would necessitate so much more government
   intervention.
3. In a free country, people should have the right to refuse health insurance.
4. If governments must subsidize those who cannot afford medical care,
   they should be free to experiment with different types of subsidies
   (cash, vouchers, insurance, public clinics & hospitals,
   uncompensated care payments, etc.) and tax exemptions, rather than be
   forced by a policy of "universal coverage" to subsidize people via
   "insurance."

You know I'm in;  after all, I am the one that has said that "universal coverage is as if, in the Great Society public housing programs, everyone in the country, not just the poor, had been required to tear down their current houses and enter monolithic public housing structures."

However, I would have added a fifth principle:  Health care decision-making and tradeoffs amongst cost, quality, and
content of care should belong to the individual, except when an
individual delegates this decision in some way by his own choice (say
by joining a very structured HMO program).

I wrote about the joys of actually shopping for health care under a high-deductible policy here and here.  Michael Canon also has a new post on shopping and HSA's here.

Michael Canon has proposed for principles of an anti-universal health care coverage club:

1. Health policy should focus on making health care of ever-increasing quality available to an ever-increasing number of people.
2. To
   achieve "universal coverage" would require either having the government
   provide health insurance to everyone or forcing everyone to buy it.  Government provision is undesirable, because government does a poor job of improving quality or efficiency.  Forcing
   people to get insurance would lead to a worse health-care system for
   everyone, because it would necessitate so much more government
   intervention.
3. In a free country, people should have the right to refuse health insurance.
4. If governments must subsidize those who cannot afford medical care,
   they should be free to experiment with different types of subsidies
   (cash, vouchers, insurance, public clinics & hospitals,
   uncompensated care payments, etc.) and tax exemptions, rather than be
   forced by a policy of "universal coverage" to subsidize people via
   "insurance."

You know I'm in;  after all, I am the one that has said that "universal coverage is as if, in the Great Society public housing programs, everyone in the country, not just the poor, had been required to tear down their current houses and enter monolithic public housing structures."

However, I would have added a fifth principle:  Health care decision-making and tradeoffs amongst cost, quality, and
content of care should belong to the individual, except when an
individual delegates this decision in some way by his own choice (say
by joining a very structured HMO program).

I wrote about the joys of actually shopping for health care under a high-deductible policy here and here.  Michael Canon also has a new post on shopping and HSA's here.

In a prior post, I asked the left if they were uncomfortable with liberal judges being on the wrong side of free speech in the recent BCRA-related decision.  As equal time, in the spirit of the heinous Fairness Doctrine again raising its ugly head, I will ask the right if they are comfortable with conservative justices being on the wrong side of property rights and government power in Wilkie v. Robbins.

By the way, speaking of the Fairness Doctrine, its instructive that the incumbent political parties consider fairness to mean equal time for all the ... incumbent political parties.  Its interesting that no one in Congress takes the law to mean equal time for Greens or Libertarians or White Supremacists.

I know a number of readers are tired of my writing about climate, so I am instead taking a shot at writing a comprehensive skeptic's argument on Anthropogenic Global Warming.  A free pdf will be available for download next week, with a bound copy available for purchase at manufacturing cost.

In the mean time, Luboš Motl presents one of the core skeptics arguments, that CO2 heat absorption is a diminishing return relationship to concentration, making frequent predictions of runaway climate scenarios a real head-scratcher.

In terms of numbers, we have already completed 40% of the task to
double the CO2 concentration from 0.028% to 0.056% in the atmosphere.
However, these 40% of the task have already realized about 2/3 of the
warming effect attributable to the CO2 doubling. So regardless of the
sign and magnitude of the feedback effects, you can see that physics
predicts that the greenhouse warming between 2007 and 2100 is predicted
to be one half (1/3 over 2/3) of the warming that we have seen between
the beginning of industrialization and this year. For example, if the
greenhouse warming has been 0.6 Celsius degrees, we will see 0.3
Celsius degrees of extra warming before the carbon dioxide
concentration doubles around 2100.

It's just like when you want
your bedroom to be white. You paint it once, twice, thrice. But when
you're painting it for the sixteenth time, you may start to realize
that the improvement after the sixteenth round is no longer that
impressive.

If CO2 is not responsible for all the 0.6C of historic warming (a proposition for which there are good arguments) then future warming is even less.  Read it all for more detail, or look for my paper next week which covers this topic and many, many others in more depth.  There are lots of complications - aerosols, dimming, feedbacks - that are discussed in the paper.

A while back, writing about charges of discrimination by white referees against blacks in NBA foul calls, I said:

My sense is that we make snap decisions about other people based on a
wide range of physical attributes, including height, attractiveness,
clothing, tattoos, piercings as well as visible racial characteristics
(e.g. skin color) and race-related appearance choices (e.g. cornrows).
It would be interesting to see where skin color falls against these
other visible differentiators as a driver of third party decisions
(e.g. whether to call a foul).   My sense is that 60 years ago, skin
color would be factor #1 and all these others would be orders of
magnitude behind.  Today?  I don't know.  While skin color hasn't gone
away as an influencer, it may be falling into what we might call the
"background level", less than or equal to some of these other effects.
It would be interesting, for example, to make the same study on level
of visible tattooing and the effect on foul calls.  My sense is that
this might be of the same order of magnitude today as skin color in
affecting such snap decisions.

I may have been on to something:

Russell says in the last two months he's applied for over 100 jobs. In
almost half of them, he says he was denied because of his tattoos. He
says that's discrimination.

I know that no one seems to really give a crap about due process for accountants nowadays, perhaps an over-swing of the pendulum from the days when no one really cared much about prosecuting white collar crime, but some of the Justice Departments prosecutorial abuses are finally coming back to haunt them.

The Justice Department's case against 16 former KPMG partners for tax
evasion continues to unravel, with prosecutors themselves conceding
late last week that federal Judge Lewis Kaplan has little choice but to
dismiss the charges against most of the defendants.

Judge Kaplan ruled
last year that Justice had violated the defendants' Constitutional
rights by pressuring KPMG not to pay their legal fees. He is now
considering a defense motion to dismiss. Prosecutors continue to
protest the judge's ruling but on Friday they admitted in a court
filing that dismissal is the only remedy for the rights violations. The
more honorable route would have been for prosecutors to acknowledge
their mistakes and dismiss the charges themselves.

The truth is that
this tax shelter case should never have been brought. Both KPMG and its
partners believed the shelters they marketed were legal, and no tax
court had ruled against the shelters before Justice brought its
criminal charges. Then prosecutors used the threat of criminal
indictment against all of KPMG to extort an admission of guilt from the
firm and force it to stop paying the legal bills of individual partners.

David Boaz:

Maybe libertarians should try to describe their philosophy by saying
"libertarians believe in the free speech that liberals used to believe
in, and the economic freedom that conservatives used to believe in."

I found this when I went to Pandora today (one of those applications that makes the Internet so entirely cool and worth all the spam and flame wars).  I found this message:

Hi, it's Tim from Pandora,

I'm sorry to say that
today Pandora, along with most Internet radio sites, is going off the
air in observance of a Day Of Silence. We are doing this to bring to
your attention a disastrous turn of events that threatens the existence
of Pandora and all of internet radio. We need your help.

Ignoring all rationality and responding only to the
lobbying of the RIAA, an arbitration committee in Washington DC has
drastically increased the licensing fees Internet radio sites must pay
to stream songs. Pandora's fees will triple, and are retroactive for
eighteen months! Left unchanged by Congress, every day will be like
today as internet radio sites start shutting down and the music dies.

A bill called the "Internet Radio Equality Act" has already
been introduced in both the Senate (S. 1353) and House of
Representatives (H.R. 2060) to fix the problem and save Internet
radio--and Pandora--from obliteration.

I'd like to ask you to call your Congressional
representatives today and ask them to become co-sponsors of the bill.
It will only take a few minutes and you can find your Congresspersons and their phone numbers by entering your zip code here.

Your opinion matters to your representatives - so please take just a minute to call.

Visit www.savenetradio.org to continue following the fight to Save Internet Radio.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

 

  -Tim Westergren
  (Pandora founder)

Jane Galt takes on some of the more common anti-immigration talking points.  Just for example:

5. There were ethnic newspapers, but nothing like today's ethnic media.

This is just ridiculous. Immigrants in 1900 could get all the
entertainment that was then available in their own language; for
example, by 1918, New York City boasted 20 Yiddish theaters.
The idea that Latin American immigrants are somehow uniquely unable to
assimilate because they can now watch soap operas and the Venezuelan
version of Eurovision in their very own language seems to me
self-evidently absurd; an immigrant at home watching television in
Spanish is immersed in her own culture no more thoroughly than was the
typical resident of an ethnic neighbourhood who shopped, worked, went
to services, and partied entirely with their compatriots.

I am working on some research right now -- immigration opponents are claiming that "yes, immigration may have been OK in the past, but its different now."  I am in the process of putting together anti-immigration quotes from the late 19th and early 20th century that cover all of the same ground -- they're lazy, they breed too fast, they have disease, they don't integrate, they have divided loyalties -- but aimed at Irish and Italians.

On the positive side, the Supreme Court has struck down portions of the BCRA, also known as McCain-Feingold:

The Court concluded that Wisconsin Right to Life's ads, which urged
people to contact their senators (including one who was up for
re-election) about the confirmation of judicial nominees, did not
constitute either. The majority said "a court should find that an ad is
the functional equivalent of express advocacy only if the ad is
susceptible of no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to
vote for or against a specific candidate." To put it another way,
BCRA's pre-election blackout cannot be constitutionally applied to a
spot that reasonably can be viewed as an issue ad, which means interest
groups are once again free to engage in public policy debates on the
air, no matter what time of year it is.

By the way, does anyone on the left feel at all worried that the four liberal judges were on the "limit speech" side of this issue?

But at the same time, the Supreme Court upheld speech limitations against High School students based on the content of the speech.  The rights of non-adults is a complicated issue, but precedent has been set that student speech is generally protected unless it is significantly disruptive of the school's functioning.  Except, it appears, when it is related to drugs.  This is part of a disturbing trend where an increasing number of topics, from "hate" speech to drug legalization speech are considered to be exceptions to the First Amendment.  However, almost everyone on the court seemed to have a different view on this, so it may be hard to generalize here.  Even the concurring opinions ranged the gamut from "this is narrowly aimed only at speech about narcotics" to "there is no free speech right in schools for minors."

And, speaking of hate speech, out in wacky Oakland, the world leader in Ebonics studies,

Marriage is the foundation of the natural family and sustains family
values. That sentence is inflammatory, perhaps even a hate crime.

At least it is in Oakland, Calif. That city's government says those
words, italicized here, constitute something akin to hate speech and
can be proscribed from the government's open e-mail system and employee
bulletin board. ...

Some African American Christian women working for Oakland's
government organized the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), which
they announced with a flier describing their group as "a forum for
people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of
the day. With respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family
Values."

The flier was distributed after other employees' groups, including
those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and
activities on the city's e-mail system and bulletin board. When the
GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that
board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down
and destroyed by city officials, who declared it "homophobic" and
disruptive.

The city government said the flier was "determined" to promote
harassment based on sexual orientation. The city warned that the flier
and communications like it could result in disciplinary action "up to
and including termination."

We might as well just repeal the First Amendment now and save time if we continue to believe that the government should ban any speech that offends someone.

Oh, and while we were talking about kids and drugs, check out this awesome rant by Mayor Cory Booker of Newark.

He wants to reserve prison cells for those who do violence and
divert the nonviolent drug offenders into treatment programs and
halfway houses.

He wants to change the New Jersey laws that
bar many ex-cons from getting a driver's license. He wants a black kid
from Newark who sells marijuana to clear his record as easily as the
white kid from the suburbs who buys it.

He wants to stop banning ex-cons from such a long list of jobs, including warehouse jobs at the nearby airport.

The scale of the problem is staggering: About 1,500 convicts are
released from state prison to Newark each year, and 1,000 of them will
likely be arrested again within three years -- mostly for drug crimes.

"The drug war is causing crime," Booker says. "It is just chewing up young black men. And it's killing Newark."

Good, its about time.  Not to be misunderstood, I would kick my kid's asses from here to the moon if I found them doing hard drugs.  But I want the responsibility to mold and repair their behavior to be mine, an option that is cut off if they get thrown in jail (which they probably wouldn't, since my kids are well off and white).  It is fine and fairly rational that we have determined as a society that kids can mess up their life doing drugs.  It is insane -- totally insane -- that our response is that we will respond by ... messing their life up even worse by throwing them in jail.

Though it is nominally called an "energy" bill, the Senate just passed the largest farm-subsidy bill in history:

The legislation would require ethanol production for motor fuels to
grow to at least 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, a sevenfold
increase over the amount of ethanol processed last year. It also calls
for boosting auto fuel economy to a fleet average of 35 miles per
gallon by 2020, a 40 percent increase over current requirements for
cars, SUVs, vans and pickup trucks.

The evidence is absolutely unequivocal that corn-based ethanol doesn't reduce net energy use, since it takes at least as much energy to grow and produce as it provides.  It is even worse as environmental policy, since it almost certainly increases total pollution and CO2 production, particularly as ethanol is produced with Midwestern coal-powered electricity.   In addition, it is going to cause marginal lands and open space to be brought into corn production, reversing a 70-year trend in the US towards increases in wilderness and forested land.  It is going to increase fuel costs to no real purpose.  This is dumb, dumb, dumb.  So stupid that I can't even get the energy to criticize the new CAFE standards.  If they really wanted to meet their goals, a carbon tax would have been cheaper and more effective, but that would have taken political guts.

Boy, I totally missed this, and I live in Arizona.  Not until Reason highlighted the case was it even brought to my attention.  Apparently, Arizona is going to collect DNA samples from many of the people they arrest:

State lawmakers voted Tuesday to expand the state's DNA database
dramatically by requiring all people arrested for certain crimes to
provide DNA samples for state records whether they are convicted or not.

Conservative and liberal lawmakers alike raised alarms that the measure
would violate the civil liberties of people never convicted of a crime
and set a dangerous precedent for government collection of sensitive
genetic information.

"I think it is egregious," Rep. Eddie Farnsworth, a conservative
Republican from Gilbert and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee,
said on the House floor Tuesday. "It tramples on the liberties and
freedom of the people."

Apparently, the change is sneaking through buried in a budget bill.  And there are people our there who still trust the government?

I am always sort of amazed when blogsphere debates erupt around issues of fact.  Specifically, people have been debating whether real income is increasing for the average person.  This seems a bizarre debate - lets just look at the table and see.  However, real vs. nominal numbers, cherry-picking end points, and the like, allow folks to come up with opposite conclusions.

Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek points to another reason we can debate:  Much of the real income growth over the last five years has been from non-cash benefits, like medical and pension contributions.

From Tyler Cowen:

The power of wealth creation to produce net value is extraordinary.
Most of America's poor are already among the best-off of all humans in
world history.  We should be putting our resources, including our
advocacy and our intellectual resources, into wealth creation as much
as we can.

Apparently, HMO's only have a 15% approval rate with Americans.  People don't like the waits, and the institutional service, but, more than anything, they don't like someone in the HMO back office rationing their care based on pre-set formulas about what care or test is appropriate in each given situation.

All well and good.  However, if this is so, then why does the idea of universal government health care appeal to so many people?  Because if universal health care turns out as well as it possibly could, then the best we could expect is that it will resemble... current HMO's.  And unfortunately, it will probably be worse.  Because today, the guy in the HMO back office who is setting up the allowed care formulas knows that if he cuts things back too far, you will go to another competitor.  No such threat or incentive will exist for the government bureaucrat, who will be setting the formulas based on stupid mindless rules and interst-group pressures and absolutely no concern about your satisfaction.

Anthony Watts and Steven McIntyre make an interesting observation, using an example temperature measurement point in the US and Global Historical Climate Network (the network that most historic global warming estimates are made from).

Over time, temperature measurement points, even those nominally in the same town, tend to change.  The measurement technology changes (from bulbs to electronics) the location can move across town, and towns with their heat islands can encroach.  As a result, scientists try to make guesstimate corrections to the historical data to take these events into account. 

Taking just one example measurement point, at Petaluma CA, Watts and McIntyre show how two different adjustment approaches by scientists at this location change the historic warming measured by over 1.5 degrees C.  Note that this "noise" is more than twice the value of the estimated "signal" -- the estimated 0.6 degrees C global warming over the last century.

More on signal to noise ratios in global warming measurement.