Coyote Blog

Unlike many libertarians, I am not particularly rabid about gun rights.  It's just not an issue I am that passionate about one way or another.   I have always thought that the one monopoly the government rightly should have is on the use of force for anything other than self-defense (e.g. military, police & law enforcement, incarceration, etc.)  Given this one monopoly, it makes sense that the government should have some interest in regulating private weapons ownership.  However, we can theorize all day but as long as the Second Amendment exists, the government may wish to limit gun ownership but its ability to do so is severely restricted.

Anyway, the point of this post was really just fun and not philosophy.  Take four states:

• Connecticut
• Pennsylvania
• Texas
• Florida

Two of these states have concealed handgun carry rates by private citizens 3x higher than the other two.  Guess which.

Here, via Instapundit, is the linguistic map for how people refer to a soft drink.  Its interesting how you adjust.  I grew up in Texas and called every soft drink a "coke" and now I call it a "soda", which are both the dominant terms in the places I have lived in each phase of my life.   For the record, though, I have never, ever called it a "pop", or as they say in the midwest, a "pahhhp" (click for larger map)

In this post on Social Security reform at Powerline (Time blog of the year, congrats guys) they take as a starting point a Sabastian Mallaby article in the WaPo who says:

Privatizing social security would increase stress levels, says Mallaby, because determining where to invest one's retirement money entails making tough choices and taking risks. Thus, Mallaby believes that many, perhaps even most, people would prefer to have the government handle their social security funds as it does now than to "agonize over health stocks vs. Asian bonds."

In this we see two things that characterize liberals and progressives:  "1) distrust of individual decision-making and 2) willingness to accept much less wealth in return for more certainty.  By the way, I have no particular problem with #2 when this decision is made on an individual level.  However, I do have a problem when politicians make this decision at a societal level.  As regards Social Security, I have no problem with people being offered the "let the government continue to keep your money" option as long as it is voluntary.  The Powerline guys have other good comments, read the whole thing.

By the way, I will take a moment for a bit of "I told you so" here.  This "capitalism is too stressful for us dude" attitude is entirely consistent with what I said about progressives and capitalism here.

UPDATE:

Here is a nice post on the same topic at Cafe Hayek.

Via Instapundit:

THE NEXT HARRY POTTER BOOK, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is finished, and will be out in July.

I had no idea this is what they were doing, but it is insane (via Marginal Revolution):

THE queue of angry motorists stretches for miles. Baghdad's petrol stations are drier this month than they have been since just after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Some drivers wait for as much as 24 hours, sleeping in their vehicles. When told that there is no petrol, some have lost their tempers and started shooting. How, asks a furious driver, can an oil-producing country run out of fuel?

Ask an insurgent, and he will assure you that the American army steals the oil for its tanks. Others might blame the lack of capacity at Iraqi oil refineries or the fact that the insurgents keep blowing up the pipelines. But the most important reason is that the government has fixed the price of petrol at approximately zero"”barely one American cent a litre.

I wonder if the problem in the electic power sector is similar.  See the post for the whole article, from the Economist.

This week's Canival of the Capitalists is up at XtremeBlog.  Don't miss my post on the difficulty of managing corporate public relations in the web age here.

This week's Canival of the Capitalists is up at XtremeBlog.  Don't miss my post on the difficulty of managing corporate public relations in the web age here.

I hope this is a joke, but fear that it is true.  BlogCritics is posting on a Boston Globe article that teachers (presumably not in the red states!) are moving away from correcting papers in red ink because they fear it hurts self-esteem.  It sounds eerily similar to this, which actually is a joke.  I called that story "Almost to Real to be Satire", thus the name of this post.

I wonder if red ink hurts self-esteem more than, say, graduating high school and not being able to read.

Hats off to ex-Arizona Cardinals cheerleeder and Phoenix resident Sarah Coggin for being part of the work to support our troops by visiting them overseas.  And here is more on other cheerleader visits here at the NFL Cheerleader Blog (as I have said in the past, if I could get paid to write that blog, my life would be set).  And shame on you cynics who think that I posted this just to have an excuse to get a cheerleader picture on the front page.  I actually did it to get two cheerleader pictures up:

Two different inputs recently have gotten me thinking about public relations and the web, and just how far behind the technology curve many PR departments may be.

The first input was a comment I got on one of my posts that I wrote while on vacation last month.  In this post I mentioned that I would be heading for Disney World for our traditional family reunion, but that growing crowds on Thanksgiving week would probably force us to try a different week next time.  I got a comment from someone who sounded like a Disney employee, recommending a better week.  Now, it turns out that it was not a Disney employee, just a helpful reader (one of my loyal 34 or so).  But it got me to thinking.  Are corporate PR departments keeping up with the web?  If Disney was not doing stuff like this, why aren't they?

The second input was this post in Reason's Hit and Run blog.  They point out TIVO efforts to manage the use of the TIVO copyright to ensure that they do not lose the rights to the name.  (Though the article mentions Xerox and Kleenex, my understanding is that Formica actually came the closest to losing its copyright on that name due to overuse as a generic term for, uh, whatever Formica is).  How can companies possibly keep up with their trademark usage on the web?

Back when I worked for a large corporation, we had PR people, either in or out of house, who would provide us with weekly news summaries of where the corporation was in the press.  This was particularly helpful to those of us in marketing, who wanted to make sure we saw all the reviews of our product (so we could use the good ones and refute the bad ones).

In the world of the Internet, this approach seems hopelessly dated.  In the "old days" I used to walk to school 20 miles each day in the snow, up hill both ways  (sorry, always feel like I am channeling my dad when I say "in the old days") the media might have 10  or 15 mentions of our product every two weeks.  Now, on the web, there might be 10 or 15 an hour. Every day employees may be talking about the company in a chat room, customers may be commenting on the company in some place like epinions.com or in Amazon reviews, blogs may be posting on the company, and authorized or unauthorized vendors may have set up shop to sell the company's products online.

How does  a company keep up with all this?  If I was a large company, I would be actively searching the web for key words associated with my company and competitors, looking for new posts or entries or reviews or even whole websites.   Employees spilling secrets in a chat room?  Need to tell legal.  New web site selling our product? Send it to marketing to make sure they are authorized and are using our trademarks and product descriptions correctly.  Blogs posting on us?  We might want to add our own comment to the post.

What we need is the modern technology version of the clipping service.  The technology would probably be pretty straight forward - a company wouldn't even have to build it's own search engine - it could just take a full snapshot of the Google results one day and compare those results to a search the next week, and look for changes.

Or, better yet, why doesn't Google provide this service to corporate accounts itself?  After all, they do need something to justify their sky-high PE ratio, maybe this would help.  Wouldn't Exxon pay $50,000 a year for this service?  Heck I pay D&B several hundred dollars a year for a credit watch service on my company's credit rating, I would certainly pay some hundreds a year for a PR watch of my small business and my competitors.

UPDATE:

One company that seems to be doing something ike this is BuzzMetrics.  Link courtesy of RatherBiased.com

I thought this demographic and psychological study by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (caution:  I have not idea who these guys are) and linked via Little Green Footballs is pretty interesting.

Most people think that terrorism comes from poverty, broken families, ignorance, immaturity, lack of family or occupational responsibilities, weak minds susceptible to brainwashing - the sociopath, the criminals, the religious fanatic, or, in this country, some believe they're just plain evil.

Taking these perceived root causes in turn, three quarters of my sample came from the upper or middle class. The vast majority"”90 percent"”came from caring, intact families. Sixty-three percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent that's usual for the third world. These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways.

Al Qaeda's members are not the Palestinian fourteen-year- olds we see on the news, but join the jihad at the average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. The natural sciences predominate. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Zawahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supposedly the head of the military committee.

This is not particularly surprising to me.  The "terrorism comes from poverty" mantra has more to do with trying to make a political point (generally to excuse terrorism and totalitarianism and often to blame the US) rather than any particular facts on the subject.  In fact, the description above matches surprisingly well with US domestic terrorists and mass murderers.  Though there is a lot of argument nowadays about this stereotype, Phillip Simpson describes the FBI's serial killer profile (emphasis mine):

He is usually a white male between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, though of course there are teen-aged and elderly serial killers as well. Generally, the male serial killer is at the height of his physical powers, a fact which not only serves him in the practical matter of overpowering victims but also empowers him in the public arena: his strength and apparent potency (and of course, choice of innocent victims) render him an effective media monster. He is also likely to be an eldest son or an only child and of average or above-average intelligence. His childhood may have been marked by incidents of sexual or physical abuse, and his parents may be divorced or flagrantly unfaithful to one another. He usually possesses a strong belief that he is more intelligent and privileged than ordinary people (a belief that only grows stronger when confronted by evidence to the contrary) and thus exempted from the social restrictions that govern the masses. No safe predictions can be made about his economic origins, but as Leyton notes, serial murder in our era is more a crime of the middle classes than of the lower or upper ranges of the socioeconomic hierarchy.

The sexual material may or may not be parallel, though it is interesting to think about in terms of the anti-women male dominance of radical Islam.

An oldie but a goodie from Bob & Doug McKenzie to get you in the holiday mood, courtesy of Aeon.

Apparently blue state Democrats, who a couple of months ago were bashing Bush for his "tax cuts for the rich", have a new-found concern about...taxes being too high on the rich.  Specifically, as in this post on BlogCritics, the AMT is apparently hurting blue state rich folks disproportionately:

There is certainly a measure of rich irony in hearing stalwart Democrat Congressman Marty Meehan fretting (in front of microphones and camera of course) that the Bush administration's future tax policies will hit the well-to-do among his constituents. Says Meehan, "if this tax is not fixed, virtually every four person family in Massachusetts making $75,000 a year will have its taxes automatically increased by the AMT".

Duh.  I have been saying for years that the AMT, particularly without indexing, will soon constitute a huge stealth tax increase.  Which is why I hate this kind of unprincipled partisanship out of the Republicans:

Some Republicans have suggested leaving the minimum tax in place because those hardest hit tend to be in states that did not support Bush, including Massachusetts, California, and New York. "˜"˜It is a tax of people living in "˜blue' states,'' said Grover Norquist, the conservative activist who heads Americans for Tax Reform.

Wrong.  Taxes on the rich, even with recent tax cuts, are unbelievably high, even after the Bush tax cuts.  As I wrote here, the wealthiest 10% already pay 2/3 of the income taxes.  It is time for AMT reform.

I have written a number of times about how I hate public funding of sports stadiums for billionaires.  But, via the Arizona Republic, this is perhaps worse:

Mired in debt, the Insight Bowl is considering leaving downtown Phoenix's Bank One Ballpark unless the postseason college football game receives a public subsidy.

Great - using tax money to fund random college bowl games.  And where does the money go - most of the money does to the participant teams and their conferences which this year are Notre Dame and Oregon State.  Why does Arizona need to subsidize the State of Oregon's athletic programs.  And Notre Dame?  They have one of the largest endowments in the country.  Neither of these teams have any connection to Phoenix or Arizona.

OK, I am being purposefully naive.  The money may go directly to the teams, but the purpose of the subsidy is to get those teams' fans to come to Arizona on the week between Christmas and New Years and buy hotel rooms.  In fact, it is an indirect subsidy of the lodging industry.

Why does the lodging industry have so much power in Phoenix?  People come here anyway, because it is warm - our climate is the best advertising.  And during the week between Christmas and New Years all the hotels are probably full anyway - certainly their rates are the highest of the year, as I have found when family have come to town that week.  And don't even get me started on tax money for this.

If the lodging industry values this stuff, let them pay for it via one of their trade groups.  The city of Phoenix does not advertise my business.  In fact, it does not advertise most of the businesses in town.  Why is lodging the exception?

Kyoto and similar protocols are dying, and for entirely predictable reasons.  Story in TCS from Buenos Aires.

The conventional wisdom that it's the United States against the rest of the world in climate change diplomacy has been turned on its head. Instead it turns out that it is the Europeans who are isolated. China, India, and most of the rest of the developing countries have joined forces with the United States to completely reject the idea of future binding GHG emission limits. At the conference here in Buenos Aires, Italy shocked its fellow European Union members when it called for an end to the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. These countries recognize that stringent emission limits would be huge barriers to their economic growth and future development.

None too soon for me.

For years I have called groups like the Center for Science and the Public Interest the health or food Nazis for their continuing desire for the government to interfere with all of our individual decision-making.  They have even been google bombed with that term, it appears, so I will help -- Food Nazis!

Anyway, Reason has an interesting post linking to a study of Nazi Germany:

In a brief BMJ article, George Davey Smith describes Nazi Germany's pioneering campaigns against smoking, drinking, overeating, and other unhealthy habits. (Robert N. Proctor's 1999 book The Nazi War on Cancer explores this topic in more detail.) "It may seem paradoxical that the robust identification of one of the most important environmental causes of disease of the 20th century occurred in a totalitarian state," Smith writes, referring to Nazi research on the link between smoking and lung cancer.

Uh, no it doesn't seem paradoxical at all that totalitarians would try to micro-manage individual decision-making.

New, via Reason, comes this excerpt from an article by Milton Friedman:

After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily socialist. We have largely won the battle of ideas; we have succeeded in stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in reversing its course. We are still far from bringing practice into conformity with opinion. That is the overriding non-defense task for the second Bush term. It will not be an easy task, particularly with Iraq threatening to consume Bush's political capital.

Reason links to the whole article.  I have said on a number of occasions that as a libertarian, one of the downsides of the Iraq war that does not get discussed much is that it diverted Bush II from promised market reforms, including tort reform and social security.  There appears to be some hope that these can be addressed in the second term.

Europe has never had the strong tradition of or protection of free speech and press that we enjoy in the US.  For years, I have criticized the use of libel laws in Europe to stifle speech -- similar things are attempted in the US, but seldom get very far in the courts.

Now comes this proposal (courtesy of Captains Quarters):

The Council of Europe has called on its 46 member-states to introduce legislation on the right of reply to correct false information on online media.

It said the Committee of (Foreign) Ministers, executive of the European human rights watchdog body, had adopted a recommendation on the right to reply for online Internet media.

This recommended that members consider introducing legislation on the "right of reply or any other equivalent remedy, which allows a rapid correction of incorrect information in online or off-line media......"

Fortunately, our government does not have any legal or constitutional right of reply in any media, though the implications for the Internet are interesting since about 20% of my readers are in Europe, if you can trust my referral logs.  So lets give it a test:  the EU is a bureaucratic, statist nightmare.  There, lets see if that gets a response.

In my post "Fisking the NEA's Improvement Ideas", I said that all of the NEA's calls for teacher certification were less about teacher quality and more about increasing the union's power and increasing salaries.  This strategy is as old as guilds from the 15th century.

Here is a study about the American Bar Association and the bar exam and its effects on quality and salaries.

A newly constructed data set on lawyers' licensing exam difficulty, candidate quality and exam results allows to distinguish the alternative theories. Public interest theory is rejected in favor of capture theory. The results imply that professional licensing has a significant effect on entry salaries. On average, licensing increases annual entry salaries by more than $20,000. This implies a total transfer from consumers to lawyers of 36% of lawyers' wages and a total welfare loss of over $6 billion.

Thanks to Volokh for the link.  This same post from Volokh also talks about how lawyers are trying to prevent non-lawyers from performing certain duties, including workers comp hearings and real estate closings.  And don't even get me started on hair braiding.

An interesting post from the Knowlege Problem.  An interesting fit with my post earlier this week on Progressives are too Conservative to Like Capitalism.

The interviewer characterizes Hayek's Road to Serfdom as "a bible for people on the conservative political side". I really must object to this characterization, and I'd like to think that Hayek would too. Indeed, one of his most powerful essays was titled "Why I am Not a Conservative".

Powerline notes that this week is the 60th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, or Wacht am Rhein as the Germans called it.  However, I will say that "nuts" was not my favorite quote coming from the 101st Airborn.  My favorite was the one from about every soldier in the 101 when asked how it felt to be "rescued" by Patton.  Their nearly universal answer was, and still is, that no one in the 101st ever thought they needed to be rescued.  I don't know if it is apocryphal, but as Captain Winters in Band of Brothers says "We're paratroopers, we're supposed to be surrounded."

I reported a similar story last week, but here is another:  Workers get $211,000 in back salary, their lawyers ask for $2,570,000 in fees.

I have harped on the subject of public funding of stadiums a number of times.  Here we go again, though.  Our nation's capital (which means all of us, probably) is going to pony up $ for a new sports stadium.  Reason takes it on here.

Yes, I know the Cuban government sucks.  No, I do not want to give it a moral sanction.  However, our continuing total embargo of Cuba smacks more of saving face at this point rather than a very effective strategy to end communism on the island. 

While it is important to have sanctions against totalitarian governments, cutting off all contact with the democratic nations is just counter-productive.  Cross-pollination of democratic ideas has done more to bring countries like China and South Africa closer to the democratic fold than any number of sanctions.  In particular, limitations even on intellectual contact between Americans and Cubans makes no sense any more.

OK, I am not trying to make this the global warming blog, so hopefully this will be it on the climate posts for a while, but Bjorn Lomborg, perhaps the most disliked scientist in the world for his critiques of many environmental arguments, makes the argument that global warming is a fact, but stopping it may be more expensive than it is worth.