Coyote Blog

Until my visit to London, I would have said that a "politically correct war memorial" was an oxymoron, since political correctness nowadays seems to embrace a disdain for all things military.  However, I was proved wrong by this memorial:

Yes, that is a memorial to all the fallen animals in British wars.  There are statues of dogs, donkeys, horses, and elephants.  Remember that the UK is a country that finds it politically uncorrect to build a holocaust memorial (though the Imperial War Museum has a holocaust exhibit) and may well abolish its annual holocaust remembrance day because its considered insulting to Muslims (my history here must be a bit rusty -- I don't remember many Muslims in the SS).  Well, never-the-less, we can all rest easier now that we know that the donkey's will be remembered.  I know this was supposed to be serious and solemn, but I must admit that the key "tag line" on the monument only got me laughing:

Yeah, as if the human victims of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, etc. did have a choice.

Not being much of a pro soccer fan, I have been surprised to find that the sport can be compelling, at least in stretches.  For example, the 30 minutes of overtime between Italy and Germany was quite exciting.

However, I think the sport should be ashamed at the state of affairs in its refereeing.  In any one game, you might see players rolling around on the ground faking injuries as many as 15 or 20 times.  It became a source of immense amusement for my son and I to see not only how much faking was going on, but how often the faking involved holding a body part that seemed unrelated to any contact  (e.g. holding their head as if they received a concussion when they were accidentally tripped).  If these were all real injuries, the field would look like Omaha beach by the end of the game.

Why do they do it?  Because the referees reward them for it, of course.  It was pretty clear that on many occasions acting and injury-faking turned accidental falls into penalties and minor penalties into yellow and red cards.  It's disgraceful.  I know refereeing is hard given the speed of today's athletes, but for god sakes soccer has got to be an order of magnitude easier to referee than say basketball or particularly American football. 

Even more, I wonder why fans tolerate the pretend injuries?  Can you imagine Pittsburgh Steelers fans fondly embracing a wide receiver that faked ankle injuries two or three times a game to try to get an interference call?

Most all the regulation goals in later games of the world cup have been
scored on penalty kicks.  It seems that the game has devolved into
lofting the ball into the box and then hoping to draw a penalty, sort
of like a hail Mary play at the end of a football game.  I would love
to see the game opened up a bit to allow more scoring of real goals in
regulation -- how about eliminating the offsides penalty?

Happy Birthday to the greatestn nation on earth.  I spend a lot of time criticizing our leaders and their policies, but there is no place else I would live.  The US Constitution is still, over two-hundred years after its creation, the greatest single document ever written.  Many other countries since have written constitutions and spilled tons of ink pontificating on theories of government, but none have had similar success in protecting individual rights while creating an environment where every individual can focus their productive energies in whatever direction they choose with generally minimal interference.

A while back I wrote about how wealth was created, and I pointed out that the great leaps we have made in human well-being over the last two hundred or so years stem from two effects:

Sure, our leaders, our military, and sometimes the nation as a whole screws up.  I and others are quick to point these screw-ups out and sometimes we find ourselves wallowing in them.  But at the end of the day, unlike in the majority of countries in the world, these screw-ups are treated as such, talked about and debated, and dealt with rather than treated as the norm. 

Take the US military in an occupying role in Iraq.  Out of 100,000 or so people, you are going to have some criminals who commit criminal acts, even in the military.  The US army, unlike nearly every occupying army in history, generally treats its soldiers' crimes as crimes, and not as the inherent right of victors to rape and pillage.  US soldiers who have committed crimes in Iraq will generally go to jail, while worse malefactors in most armies, even the holier-than-thou UN peacekeepers who seem to be engaging in rape and white slavery around the world, generally go unpunished.  For all the crap the US military takes around the world, I bet you that if you took an honest vote on the question of "Which world army would you choose to occupy your country if you lost a war" most people would answer the US.  If for no other reason because, despite all the charges of imperialism, our armies eventually leave rather than remain on as lingering masters.

So tomorrow, I will start dealing out more crap to our leaders, to the administration, to Congress, to the SCOTUS, and most especially to most every bureaucrat who thinks they can better manage my business or my property.  But today I will step back and see the forest rather than the trees, and observe I am dang lucky to be an American.

For further thoughts, I refer you to .  They tend to celebrate first the "right to vote", when in fact many people get to vote but few enjoy the freedoms we do.  The greatness of our country is in our protection of individual liberties and the rule of law.  And the great insight our country was founded with is that rights flow from the very fact of our humanity -- they are not granted to us by kings or Congress.  This last is perhaps most important, as I wrote:

At the end of the day, our freedoms in this country will only last so
long as we as a nation continue to hold to the principle that our
rights as individuals are our own, and the government's job is to
protect them, not to ration them.  Without this common belief, all the
other institutions we have discussed, from voting to the rule of law to
the Constitution, can be subverted in time

Now I am off to see Buckingham Palace.  If I see the Queen, would it be in bad taste to wish her a happy Fourth of July?

I write in this blog often on my frustrations with regulation, but last night I learned, if I did not know it already, that things could be much worse.  I had dinner with some friends in London who are in the middle of a home improvement and renovation project on their 1830's era townhouse.  Now, I just completed a renovation of my own (1980's era) home in Phoenix, and, while home improvement is always frustrating, I at least had few problems with the city.  Phoenix will let you do about anything you want to your home as long as you respect your setbacks and don't install a nuclear reactor.

My London friends were not so lucky.  Their home is rated a class 2 historic structure, which means it gets a bit less scrutiny than class 1 palaces and stuff, but it still comes in for a lot of regulation.  Their plans had to be approved in detail, and I mean in gory detail, with the local history Nazis.  And this is for a building that really has little historic or aesthetic value (the owners would be the first to admit this) in a neighborhood that was nearly blighted thirty years ago. 

My hosts pointed out the dining room lighting, which was really dim (you could not see your food very well) band told me that the authorities would not let them add lighting fixtures to the room.  No doorways, moldings, or walls could be changed.  The funniest example of this was a doorway cut in a wall 20 years ago.  The government inspector came through the house and said "well, that door is not historic but I like it so you can't change it."  They thought the inspector was joking, but, after a lot of effort to get approval to change the door, found out she was not kidding. 

The staircase to the top floor (originally the servant's quarters) was steep and unsafe for their children, but the inspector insisted it could not be changed because the "logic" of having the servant's quarters accessible by a difficult staircase needed to be maintained.  The homeowners rebuttal that they had no servants and were more concerned with safety than the history of class differences in Britain had no effect.  In several cases where the homeowners argued that the portions of their house they wanted to change was not original to the house (and therefore not covered by restrictions) it was made clear that the burden of proof was on them, the homeowners, and not on the government.

As one other funny sidebar, the basements and below grade areas of these homes apparently don't fall under this scrutiny or are exempted in some way.  As a result, everyone in his neighborhood seems to be tunneling out into their backyards to expand their house.  One homeowner bought three adjacent homes and tunneled out enough area for an indoor underground swimming pool.

Can you imagine if someday the US government decided that those 1970's homes were subject to such historic restrictions?  Suddenly, by government fiat, instead of being stuck forever with insufficient lighting and unsafe staircases, you might get stuck with orange shag carpet and gold-mirrored walls.  If you think this is ridiculous, read this.

Suffice it to say, I am tired of a relatively small group of people imposing their wishes on other people's property, a practice I call eminent domain without compensation.  If you want something specific done to a piece of property, then buy it and have at it.

One of the problems I have making common cause with many of the civil rights critics of the Bush administration is that they tend to hurt legitimate civil rights by exaggerating their claims into the ridiculous. 

A good example is detentions at Gitmo.  I believe strongly that the Bush administration's invented concept of unlimited-length detentions without trial or judicial review is obscene and needed to be halted.  But critics of Bush quickly shifted the focus to "torture" at Gitmo, a charge that in light of the facts appears ridiculous to most rational people, including me.  As a result, the administration's desire to hold people indefinitely without due process has been aided by Bush's critics, who have shifted the focus to a subject that is much more easily defended on the facts.

Interestingly, as I watch the Beeb this morning, Britain is having a similar debate.  Its hard to figure the whole thing out from the TV coverage and sound bites, but apparently Britain has the ability to detain suspected terrorists for 90 days, and wants the power to extend this.

Many people have told me that I am an insanely naive Pollyanna for not accepting the need for indefinite detention without trial of suspected terrorists.   I have explained in the past that we don't have the right to do this with our own citizens, but we also don't have the right to do this with any other human being (the short explanation:  The individual rights we hold dear are our rights as human beings, NOT as citizens.  They flow from our very existence, not from our government and not from the fact of our citizenship.   In some ways, the government probably has less right to abuse non-citizens, not more).

Here is a test:  If the government had always had this power, ie to detain indefinitely people it thought somehow "dangerous" to "someone"  (with the government getting to define both these terms), how abused would it have been in the past.  My answer is "very much".  Who would J. Edgar Hoover have detained?  Would Martin Luther King have spent his life in jail, much like Nelson Mandela?

By the way, I have no idea what Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld means for all this, since I haven't read it and pundits seem to disagree on what it means  (unfortunately, this may be something we live with a while, a feature of the new muddled "Justice Kennedy compromise" we seem to have to live with on a number of decisions).  If anyone thinks they have seen a definitive analysis, please link it in the comments.

I am kind of a video snob so you can take this rant with that in mind. 

I am getting tired of looking at five thousand dollar flatscreens with the picture distorted.  As most of you will know, the new generation of TV sets are wider than the old sets, with a ratio of length to width of 16:9 rather than the old 4:3.  Unfortunately, most current broadcasting and all legacy TV shows are filmed in 4:3.  To watch these programs without distortion on a new flatscreen HDTV, you will either have black bars on the sides or you will have to zoom it such that you lose the top and bottom of the picture. 

Instead of these two options, most people have their widescreen TV's set to stretch the picture horizontally to fit the wider screen.  What this results in is a picture that is distorted and stretched by 33% in width, giving you lots of fat faces.  Yuk!  Why would someone buy a $5000 (or more) TV set with state of the art high-definition picture and then set it up so most of the programming looks like it was viewed in a fun-house mirror?  Especially when you only have to press one button usually to cycle the setup between regular and widescreen programming. 

Anyway, the teli is always on here in the breakfast room of the hotel (one of the realities of modern travel is that you can't seem to escape the blaring TV in either hotels or airports) but I have no idea what the BBC announcers look like.  The way the TV is set up, it looks like they all are fat with cheek fulls of acorns.

A while back Glenn Reynolds had a series of posts on European birth rates and the social costs of having children (I would link the articles but my timer on this computer in the library is running out and I don't have time to search). 

Our first few days here in the [English] countryside have really reinforced different cultural attitudes about children.  The first night here, we walked into a restaurant with our kids, and the whole place went silent, staring at us.  We were told children were not allowed.  In retrospect, it felt like that scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when the townspeople are all staring at the family because in that town kids are illegal.  The next restaurant did not let kids in after 7.  The next saw us and said that they had a large group arrive and couldn't serve us (despite the fact the parking lot and restaurant were empty). 

We thought at first this might have something to do with liquor laws, since many local restaurants are also the pub.  But that first night when we finally found a restaurant that would serve our children, they said we could not sit in the restaurant but they could seat us in the bar!

Not sure I have a conclusion here, except to observe how different attitudes about children and families are here.  Kids here are also much quieter in public than American kids, perhaps because they have learned to keep a low profile in a society that doesn't always want them around.  It will be interesting to see if London is any different.

Bonus trivia question, answer below the fold:  The writer, producer and several of the actors in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang also were responsible for what other quite famous series of movies?

Update:  I left off that it was in the English countryside (near the border of England and Wales).  Sorry.  I am finally on a decent Internet connection and just caught onto the confusion.

Continue reading ‘Eek! Children!’ »

I have been in the English countryside this week, right on the border between England and Wales.  In fact, the house I am staying in has one of those great Welsh names that don't have enough vowels, something like Cwmmau or such.  Anyway, Internet access has turned out to be nearly impossible -- I finally found a library across from the Hereford Cathedral that lets me have access in 30 minute increments.  Hopefully I can blog more from London next week.

ABCNews is asking viewers to submit stories of evidence they have found for Global Warming in their back yard.

Witnessing the impact of global warming in your life?

ABC News wants to hear from you. We're currently producing a report on the increasing changes in our physical environment, and are looking for interesting examples of people coping with the differences in their daily lives. Has your life been directly affected by global warming?

We want to hear and see your stories. Have you noticed changes in your own backyard or hometown? The differences can be large or small--altered blooming schedules, unusual animals that have arrived in your community, higher water levels encroaching on your property.

Show us what you've seen.

So I submitted my story:

I can remember that just five years ago, the summers at my house used to be relatively cool and very wet.  Our summer temperatures never got much above 80 degrees, and it would rain every few days, at least.

The last couple of summers, temperatures have soared as high as 112 degrees at my house, and we have at times gone whole months without rain.

I am terrified at these effects of global warming.  Several of my "friends" have said they think this change has more to do with my move from Seattle to Phoenix, but they are clearly in the pay of the oil companies.

I have explained to them that ABC News and their climate reporting have educated me that small anecdotal blips in the local weather are scientifically valid proof of long-term global climate changes.

For example, my Exxon-butt-kissing friends tried to claim that for over a century, hurricane activity has followed a 20-40 year cycle, and that the recent upsurge in hurricane activity is due to the return of the "busy" end of the cycle.  I know from ABC that in fact our two-hundred years of burning fossil fuels have cause CO2 to build up and lurk in the atmosphere, ready to jump out and increase hurricane activity suddenly in 2005.

Its great to see that ABC has adopted the same lofty levels of scientific proof that are used by the rest of the environmental community.

For a while now I have meant to write a post on immigration and terrorism, specifically to refute the argument made by anti-immigration folks that cracking down on immigration is an important part of the war on terror.  Now, I tend to agree that we are too slow in kicking out visitors who commit crimes.  I've always thought in fact that if Mexico found itself send millions of productive workers to the US only to get back a stream of the small percentage who were thugs and criminals they might finally address the root causes of why their own country can't offer productive people any opportunity.

But the guard-the-border folks go further than this, arguing we must stop all immigration with troops and "minutemen" at the border as part of the effort to defend ourselves from terrorism.  I've always thought that this was a fabricated argument, since its so easy to prove that fear of terrorism is not their real motive for troops at the border (if it were, then why are all the troops going to the Mexican border - shouldn't the long stretches of empty land on the Canadian border be just as vulnerable to terrorists?  In fact, it is Canada and not Mexico where Islamic terrorist cells have been found in the last month).

Open and legal immigration would make finding illegal entry of terrorists much easier.  Right now, by pushing Mexican immigrants out into desert, rather than marked border crossings, one gives terrorists a very large haystack to hide in.  Terrorists with violent intent must somehow be sorted out from millions of perfectly peaceful immigrants looking for work.  Arizona Watch quotes James Valliant:

If every person who wanted into America in order to find work was legally
permitted into America, I'll bet they'd be happy to stop by the front gate, show
some i.d., get checked against a terrorist watch-list, etc. Only those with
criminal records, or reasons to flee justice, those with contagious diseases,
and, well"¦ terrorists would have any reason to "jump the gate" at all.

This would concentrate our resources on those who actually posed a threat to
the country. Thousands of border patrol agents would, then, not be going after
thousands "“ ultimately, accumulated millions "“ of people everyday, but just a
few hundred "“ ultimately, a few thousands. I, personally, prefer those odds when
it comes to catching terrorists and mass-murders.

I have written before about the silliness of the liquor licensing process.  A regulatory procedure perhaps necessary when the government was trying to drive organized crime out of liquor in the 1930's, its insanely useless today.

For example, last winter we replaced a store building at the same address with a brand new building.  It did not even occur to me that I might have to make any changes to my liquor license.  Surprise!  Here is the paperwork required to activate my existing, already paid-for license at the exact same address, only in a newer building:

Its hard to tell from the picture, but we are talking lots and lots of detail, much of it repeated several times through the application.  And most every page has to be notarized.  How much of this is new and not already on file with my current license?  Just one-half of one page, down in the lower right where I draw the floor plan of the new building.  Everything else is a total repeat of the information on file.

My favorite question I had to answer to move my liquor license to a new building?  They require I give them the date and location of my wedding.

Update: Oh, and it has to be approved by the County planning department, who for several days now have not returned my calls.  And it may have to go in front of the county commisioners.  And I am pretty sure it will have to be publicly posted on the new building for a 30-day comment period, and I will have to pay for an announcement for three weeks running in the local paper.  And then it will probably be approved, just about when it will be time to close for the season.  For those who have not been there, though, McArthur-Burney Falls State Park is gorgeous, and, if I can brag, I think our new building is a big improvement as well.

By now, most will have heard that the young star quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Ben Rothlesburger, crashed his motorcycle and sustained head injuries in part because he was not wearing a helmet.  You can bet that someone in the legislature will introduce a helmet law in the next week, since most nanny-state legislation of this type usually gets passed in reaction to one high-profile incident where some legislator can grab some press.

Here is what really upset me yesterday:  Listening to a sports-talk radio station yesterday talking about this accident, I heard a number of people call in and say the following:

"I don't blame Ben for riding without a helmet -- that's legal in Pennsylvania.  I blame the state for not having a helmet law"

Wow - you don't see the death of individual responsibility highlighted any more starkly than that.  Much more on the topic here.

By the way, helmet laws are a particularly interesting bit of nanny-statism, since motorcyclers are such a small percentage of the population.  In most states where this law gets passed, the votes of people who will never ride a motorcycle and for whom the law will always be irrelevant generally overwhelms the wishes of motorcyclers themselves.  I wonder how many women who piously preach that the government can't tell us what to do with our bodies typically vote for helmet laws that tell people, uh, what they can do with their bodies.

Increasingly, you hear people justify helmet laws by saying "well, taxpayers have to pay the medical bill if someone gets hurt riding without a helmet."  I addressed this argument that public health care justifies total control of our lives in this post on health care as a Trojan horse for fascism.  (and here)

A while back, I observed that liberal statists and technocrats were upset that conservative statists were using the machinery of big government they created for the "wrong" ends:

I am reminded of all this because the technocrats that built our
regulatory state are starting to see the danger of what they created.
A public school system was great as long as it was teaching the right
things and its indoctrinational excesses were in a leftish direction.
Now, however, we can see the panic.  The left is freaked that some red
state school districts may start teaching creationism or intelligent
design.  And you can hear the lament - how did we let Bush and these
conservative idiots take control of the beautiful machine we built?  My
answer is that you shouldn't have built the machine in the first place
- it always falls into the wrong hands.  Maybe its time for me to again invite the left to reconsider school choice.

Today, via Instapundit, comes this story about the GAO audit of the decision by the FDA to not allow the plan B morning after pill to be sold over the counter.
And, knock me over with a feather, it appears that the decision was
political, based on a conservative administration's opposition to
abortion.  And again the technocrats on the left are freaked.  Well,
what did you expect?  You applauded the Clinton FDA's politically
motivated ban on breast implants as a sop to NOW and the trial
lawyers.  In
establishing the FDA, it was you on the left that established the
principal, contradictory to the left's own stand on abortion, that the
government does indeed trump the individual on decision making for
their own body  (other thoughts here).
Again we hear the lament that the game was great until these
conservative yahoos took over.  No, it wasn't.  It was unjust to scheme
to control other people's lives, and just plain stupid to expect that
the machinery of control you created would never fall into your
political enemy's hands.

Suprisingly, James Taranto in Best of the Web, who I sometimes find too partisan and socially conservative for my tastes, makes a similar point:

Liberal Democrats take credit for creating an enormous government, which, according to them, doesn't work--but would work just fine if only the populace were smart enough to elect liberal Democrats.

In sum: Republicans favor small government but embrace big government when they have the power to control it. Democrats favor big government but insist that it can work only when they have the power to control it. Politicians in both parties, then, seem to see government as a means to the same end: their own political power. Little wonder that voters are suspicious of government.

Our brave city of Scottsdale has come up with this pioneering idea:

Scottsdale's Historic Preservation Commission wants city staff to look
into designating '50s-era garden apartments as an entire historic
district

For those who have not struggled with this, being named a historic building or site can be the kiss of death - basically it means that the government has restricted your ability to do anything with your property.  You certainly can't tear the sucker down and put something more modern on your own land and you have to go through mind-numbing approvals and use special super-high-cost contractors even to do the smallest amount of work on the structure.  In some of the public parks we run, I know of several historic buildings that are falling apart because they have been named historic buildings and the bureaucratic headaches to even stabilize the roof and stop leaks is insurmountable.  (A few years ago I nearly got arrested for putting some tar paper on the roof of a historic cabin to try to stop the rain from getting in and ruining the building.  I was told that they would rather the building crumble to dust than let any non-authentic work be done on it).

Can you imagine having your dated 50's-era ugly home or condo designated so that you can't tear it down?  Does this mean that you can't even update it, to get rid of the avocado appliances? Apparently so:

Valarie Hartzell of Park Paradise, 6936 E. Fourth St., said condo
owners there also are making improvements, but city-approved
contractors balk at installing authentic, and perhaps hard-to-get,
fixtures

The woman driving this effort reveals the thinking so typical of these efforts:

Preservation Commissioner Nancy Dallett said the rare configuration of
the apartments in a single neighborhood may qualify them for a
geographic designation.

"The strength of our district is in the clustering of the apartments,"
Dallett said at Thursday's commission meeting. "I wouldn't want to let
go of any of these within the boundaries."

Don't you love that last line?  Look Nancy, if you want something specific done with this property, buy it yourself.  But don't try to manage property you don't own at costs you don't bear for an outcome you desire.

In a nutshell, such efforts result in the effective taking of the private property to meet some public good, without any compensation.  This is eminent domain without any payment at all, thereby taking Kelo even one step further.

By the way, this means you have about 20 years before your 1970's style house is declared a landmark, and you will be stuck forever with the orange deep shag carpet and mirrored walls, so move quickly on that renovation.

Via Liz Lightfoot in the Telegraph:

Nearly 60 per cent of girls aged 12 to 15 described themselves as
overweight when only 15 per cent met the medical criteria for excess
body fat.

The findings prompted the Schools Health Education Unit, which carries
out the annual survey, to issue an appeal for an end to the "obsession"
with skeletal body shapes in the media and fashion industry.

Yeah, I know this is the UK, but I bet you would get similar results in the states.  While the article points the finger at the media and fashion industry, how about government and academic know-it-alls who with their recent obsession on teenage obesity are reinforcing this message?  For example, remember this previous post about the Arkansas governor's new program:

I get email and comments from time to time that my language deriding
government's intervention into every aspect of our lives is overblown
and exaggerated.  My answer:  Oh yeah, well how about this:

Mike Huckabee, the Governor of Arkansas, now
requires annual fat reports. These are sent to the parents of every
single child aged between 5 and 17; a response, he says, to "an
absolutely epidemic issue that we could not ignore" in the 1,139
schools for which he is responsible.

I
just cannot craft any reasonable theory of government where this is the
state's job.   The "obesity" crisis in this country just amazes me.
"Experts" every few years broaden the definition of who is overweight
or obese, and suddenly (surprise!) there are more people defined as
overweight.  Even presuming it is the state's job to optimize our body
weights, is it really the right approach to tell everyone they are too
fat?  Having known several people who were anorexic, including at least
one young woman who died of its complications, is it really a net
benefit to get young people more obsessed with looks and body style?
And what about the kids that are genetically programmed to be
overweight?  Does this mean that years of taunting and bullying by
their peers is not enough, that the state's governor wants to pile on
now?

It is interesting to note that governor Huckabee apparently started
this initiative after his own personal battle with weight loss:

[Huckabee] lost 110lb after being warned that his
weight, more than 280lb after a life of southern fried food, was a
death sentence. A chair even collapsed under him as he was about to
preside over a meeting of state officials in Little Rock.

We
all have friends who have lost weight or gotten into homeopathy or
became a vegan and simply cannot stop trying to convert their friends
now that they see the light.  Now we have the spectacle of elected
officials doing the same thing, but on a broader scale and with the
force of law, rather than  just mere irritation, on their side.  One
can only imagine what report cards kids would be carrying home if
Huckabee had instead had a successful experience with penis
enlargement.  What's next, negative reports for kids with bad acne?
For women whose breasts are too small?  For kids who are unattractive?

Apparently Google is about to announce a new online spreadsheet product.  My first reaction was - that's stupid, who would want to have their spreadsheet app. online -- its slower and probably less secure.  Online applications strike me as a step back to the bad old days of mainframe-terminal applications.

But then I thought about my 30 managers who send me excel spreadsheets each week with their revenue data, and it occurred to me that this might be exactly what we need.  Its a constant headache keeping everyone on the right version and managing all these submissions.  Also, it would be nice if we can eliminate buying 40 copies of MS Office.  Currently we are implementing OpenOffice 2.0 to eliminate the MS Office expense, but a real online collaborative spreadsheet solution at Google type pricing (e.g. zero) might be cool.

I don't see it up on their site yet, but they have a lot of cool stuff in Beta I had never played with before.  Check out Google Labs here.

Per the NY Times:

As he left the soccer field after a club match in the eastern German
city of Halle on March 25, the Nigerian forward Adebowale Ogungbure was
spit upon, jeered with racial remarks and mocked with monkey noises. In
rebuke, he placed two fingers under his nose to simulate a Hitler mustache and thrust  his arm in a Nazi salute.

In April, the American defender Oguchi Onyewu, playing for his
professional club team in Belgium, dismissively gestured toward fans
who were making simian chants at him. Then, as he went to throw the
ball inbounds, Onyewu said a fan of the opposing team reached over a
barrier and punched him in the face....

Players and antiracism experts said they expected offensive behavior
during the tournament, including monkey-like chanting; derisive
singing; the hanging of banners that reflect neofascist and racist
beliefs; and perhaps the tossing of bananas or banana peels, all
familiar occurrences during matches in Spain, Italy, eastern Germany
and eastern Europe.

I am sure many American black athletes still have stories to tell about encountering racism, but didn't we at least climb out of this kind of pit of overt racism forty years ago or so?  While European sophisticates have looked down their noses at US racial problems, European monocultures seem now not to be ahead of us but behind us in dealing with ethnic diversity.  Though there do seem to be plenty of Americans who long to take our country back to being a monoculture.

A few days ago, I posted that people seem to make strange tradeoffs between the cost of gasoline and the value of their personal time.  Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek makes a similar observation about recent calls to reinstate the 55 MPH speed limit, pointing out that slower speed limits may save gas but they cost people time, and time is one resource that is truly finite:

In short, for every 75-miles covered on a highway, reducing the speed limit from
75 MPH to 55 MPH will save a driver $2.58 in fuel cost -- and this assuming that
the increase in fuel efficiency of the average car caused by the lower speed
limit is a whopping 10 mpg.  But the resulting greater time on the road will
cost a driver earning the average non-supervisory wage $5.82 worth of his or her
time per 75-miles driven.

By the way, it is no surprise that this always seems to be proposed by Easterners who have no conception of the travel distances out west.

After the Supreme Court in Kelo gave its imprimatur to local authorities using eminent domain for economic development (which is a fancy way of saying the government can take your home and give it to real estate developers) many states have passed limitations on such activity. 

Apparently, the Iowa legislature passed just such limitations, but governor Tom Vilsack has chosen to veto it (via State 29).  Apparently the governor echoed this pro-Kelo thinking:

Cities, chambers of commerce and other development agencies argued [the legislation]
would shut off opportunities to develop businesses and create jobs.

Aaarrgghh.  Can anyone imagine their local city councilman actually creating a viable business?  In point of fact, most of these cases are not job creation but job transfers, from a less-preferred person to a more-preferred person.  Preferred on what standard?  By the standard of campaign support, of course!  Many other related posts here.

But its dry heat.

As a public service, Arizona is taking onto itself all the worldwide effects of global warming, thereby saving polar bears in Greenland and archipelago-living indigenous peoples.  Once it gets over about 108 you don't really notice the difference anyway.  Picture taken at 4:50PM MST today in the inappropriately-named (at least for today) Paradise Valley, AZ.  For all those who want to compare this to hell, I would remind you that the core of Dante's hell was frozen and cold, not hot.  Dante knew what he was talking about.  It may be hot but there is nothing to shovel off my driveway.

By the way, when people laugh at Arizona for not observing Daylight Savings Time, this is why we don't.  At nearly 5:00, we are hitting our peak temperature.  If we observed DST, we would not be hitting this peak until 6:00.  Temperatures here will cool over the next two hours by 20 degrees  (its already fallen nearly 3 degrees in the 20 minutes since I took the picture, and the sun is not down yet).  With this fast temperature drop typical of the desert combined with evening shade, it will be nice enough to be outside, eating or relaxing or watching a little league game by 7:00.  If I had my druthers, I would observe reverse daylight time, going back rather than forward an hour in the spring.  More observations on DST from myself and Virginia Postrel here.

States all require that you register your corporation to do business in that state.  Most all states require that you have a registered agent in that state.  Sometimes this can be an employee, but since we are a seasonal business we have no full-time employees in many states to nominate.  This means that we have to pay an outsider a fee every year just to be this named agent.

And in my experience this person does ... NOTHING.  Zero.  Nada.  Bupkis.  But it is worse than that.  In many states like Minnesota, the secretary of state (who generally manages corporate registrations) absolutely insists that they will send no mail to your corporate headquarters, they will only send mail to your in-state registered agent.  Its like they don't have mail service or phone service that goes out of state in Minnesota.  Unfortunately, many of my agents repeatedly fail to forward this mail to me.  I just paid a $300 fine to Minnesota because I did not respond to an annual renewal notice that was sent to my local agent and never forwarded.

I have asked this question of my readers before but never gotten an answer.  My question is simple:

In this day of modern communications, what is the justification for requiring a corporation to have a registered agent in that state?

Is there any justification?  Or is this just a holdover from some past era when communication was by horse and telegraph.

Via the Consumerist:

When Greenpeace mobilized to protest nuclear energy at a recent appearance by
President Bush to promote his nuclear energy policy, they forgot to fill in all
the boiler-plate.

From the Greenpeace anti-nuclear-armageddon flier. Capitals and brackets are
theirs:

In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear
accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID
HERE]."

LOL.  By the way, I am not sure why those paranoid about global warming would refuse to reconsider nuclear power.   In that article, i pointed out that a different regulatory regimed would greatly reduce costs and actually enhance safety:

If aircraft construction was regulated like nuclear power plants,
there would be no aviation industry.  In the aircraft industry,
aircraft makers go through an extensive approval and testing process to
get a basic design (e.g. the 737-300) approved by the government as
safe.  Then, as long as they keep producing to this design, they can
keep making copies with minimal additional design scrutiny.  Instead,
the manufacturing process is carefully checked to make sure that it is
reliably producing aircraft to the design already deemed safe.  If
aircraft makers want to make a change to the aircraft, that change must
be approved with a fairly in-depth process.

Beyond the reduction in design cost for the 2nd airplane of a series
(and 3rd, etc.), this approach also yields strong regulatory benefits.
For example, if the
in a particular aircraft, then the government can issue a bulletin to
require a new approved design be retrofitted in all other aircraft of
this series.  This happens all the time in commercial aviation.

One can see how this might make nuclear power plant construction
viable again.  Urging major construction companies to come up with a
design that could be reused would greatly reduce the cost of design and
construction of plants.  There might still be several designs, since
competing companies would likely have their own designs, but this same
is true in aerospace with Boeing, Airbus and smaller jet manufacturers
Embraer and Bombardier.

And a while back I linked to a story on how the ultimate fallout from Chernobyl was not nearly as bad as was feared.  That article said in part:

Over the next four years, a massive cleanup operation
involving 240,000 workers ensued, and there were fears that many of
these workers, called "liquidators," would suffer in subsequent years.
But most emergency workers and people living in contaminated areas
"received relatively low whole radiation doses, comparable to natural
background levels," a report summary noted. "No evidence or likelihood
of decreased fertility among the affected population has been found,
nor has there been any evidence of congenital malformations."

In
fact, the report said, apart from radiation-induced deaths, the
"largest public health problem created by the accident" was its effect
on the mental health of residents who were traumatized by their rapid
relocation and the fear, still lingering, that they would almost
certainly contract terminal cancer. The report said that lifestyle
diseases, such as alcoholism, among affected residents posed a much
greater threat than radiation exposure.

Today, Microsoft came under fire from a number of activists:

Activists today accused Microsoft of spending all of its time focusing on software.  "All they want to do is write code for operating systems and applications".  Activists were complaining that Microsoft does not invest any of its huge profits into alternatives to software and operating systems.  "They have not invested one dime in trying to come up with computing technologies that don't require operating systems or business applications."  Activists also accused Microsoft of not investing in any alternative computational approaches, such as abacus research or mechanical calculators.

Makes no sense, right?  Well, that's because I made it up.  But I did not make this up, which is essentially the exact same charge, just against a different target:

Unlike
other major oil companies that essentially acknowledge the very real
threat of global warming and the need to transition to renewable energy
and off of a finite, non-renewable resource such as oil, ExxonMobil is
using its profits and its power to continue to keep this country
addicted to oil, as President Bush has noted," Hoover said.

ExxonMobil cares only about drilling for more oil, Hoover alleged

You hear this stuff all the time.  But why are the major oil companies responsible for investing to obsolete their own business?  Why are they obligated to invest in things like wind farms or whatever that they know nothing about?   Did we demand that railroads invest in aircraft research?  Do we require cable companies to invest in DirectTV?  For all of its size, ExxonMobil represents a tiny fraction of World GDP -- if all these alternative energy ideas are such great opportunities, let the other 99.99% of the world economy take it on.  Besides, do these guys who think that XOM is evil incarnate really want them controlling the next generation of energy production?

By the way, I thought this was hilarious:

"We
believe that ExxonMobil -- primarily through its former president and
CEO, Lee Raymond -- has been involved in conceiving of and then
promoting the invasion and occupation of Iraq," Reed said. "When the
Iraq war was being cooked up, we think ExxonMobil was in the kitchen."

I love the "we believe" part.  I am sure that half these folks also "believe" that aliens are alive and well in Area 51 and that George Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks.  Would it be too much to ask to bring some facts to the table?  Or how about even a motive?  I could maybe come up with a motive if the US invaded Nigeria, since Exxon has assets at risk there that are threatened by rebels and general chaos, but Iraq?  Since Iraq's output was limited before the invasion, invading Iraq only served to put more oil on world markets, which would depress rather than raise prices and profits.  In fact, if there was really an evil genius oil company pulling the strings of government to maximize their own profits, UN-sanctioned Iraq would be just about the last oil producing country in the world you would want your government puppets to invade.

Today XOM has its annual shareholder meeting, and if you ever want to see a great parade of barking moonbats, buy yourself a share of XOM and attend.  Lee Raymond caught a lot of grief for his compensation package, and it did seem overly generous to me, but I am not an XOM shareholder right now so its not my concern.  I will say that having seen one of the XOM shareholder meetings and the ridiculous grief the CEO must endure for a day, my guess is that the XOM CEO would likely knock several million dollars off his comp. package if he could call in sick today.

Marginal Revolution links to a list of the most corrupt states, measured by the number of government corruption convictions per capita.  I bet you can come pretty close to the top three without even looking.  Here they are:

1. Alaska.  For all those who want to believe that pork is unrelated to corruption, look no further than the king of pork itself, Alaska, which also turns out to be the king of government corruption.  Kudos to Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake, who is about the only one brave enough in that lost and floundering body to connect the dots between Abramoff, cash-filled tuperware, corruption and pork.
2. Mississippi.  Who would have ever thought the state best known for being the #1 home of jackpot torts and the home state of the Senator who claims to be above the law would be a hotbed of corruption? 
3. Louisiana.  Probably the only surprise on the list, since one would expect the home state of Huey Long to be in first rather than third.  Heck, in 1991 the state got to choose between a wanna-be Nazi Klansman and a serially corrupt felon for Governor.  And God only knows where the money that should have been spent on building levees actually went.

Julian Sanchez revisits Smith vs. Maryland, the Supreme Court case currently used to justify letting the government take about any data they want on your life without a warrant.  Sanchez questions the logic of the case, particularly in light of sweeping technology changes since the early 70's:

Part of the problem here is that since the late '70s, we've gone a long way
toward a world in which a huge amount of our most private information is held by
third parties. A huge chunk of my e-mails from the last couple years are stored
on some server owned by Google, where ad-generating software sifts through my
private communications looking for keywords that will allow the company to
display personally-tailored advertisements for me. Now, maybe I'm naive to have
any expectation of privacy in the e-mails sitting on that server, but I do
pretty much expect that nobody at Google is actually looking through my
correspondence and passing it around to their friends. And I at least
didn't expect until recently that some government program would be
sifting through those e-mails to see whether I used the word "jihad" some
suspicious number of times in letters to people in Saudi Arabia.

I had similar concerns about Smith v. Marlyand here.  One of my arguments was:

This exact same logic [used in this case] seemingly applies to any piece of data submitted
to any private third party unless the data is specifically protected
(e.g. medical records).  Sorry, but this is wrong.  I should be able to
have commercial transactions with third parties without the expectation
that the government can take the records for its own use without any
kind of a warrant....

The implication is that by giving a company data for use in a
transaction, we are giving them an unwritten license to do whatever
they want with the data.  Do you believe you are granting this?  Is it
true that you "entertain no expectation of privacy" in such
transactions?  If you agree with this ability, then I assume you also
agree that the government should be able to see all your:

• Credit card bills
• Records of who you have emailed
• Records of which Internet sites you have visited
• Records of what searches you made in search engines

I also pointed out that since many people spend a lot of money to keep information private (e.g. anonymous surfing software), the market has demonstrated clearly that people, unlike the SCOTUS asserted,  do have an expectation of privacy with such data.