Coyote Blog

This week's Carnival of the Vanities is up at Lets Try Freedom.  Look who's right up top!

OK, the 1993 movie Demolition Man was not that great of a movie, though Wesley Snipes was pretty cool and Stallone was a lot less stiff than usual.  And the shell gag was pretty funny.  The highlight, however, was the debut (I think) of Sandra Bullock in a major picture.

For a number of years, Stallone and Governor Arnold, the two major action movie stars of the time, traded barbs with each other in their flicks.  For example, in the 1993's Last Action Hero, Arnold makes a joke about Stallone in a video rental store.  In 1994's True Lies (an awesome movie) Jamie Lee Curtis, Arnold's movie wife, says "I married Rambo". 

In Demolition Man, it was Stallone's turn.  Driving through future-era LA, Stallone is trying to adjust to waking up in the future after being frozen for a fifty years or so.  He has this conversation after seeing a large building out his window:

Stallone: "Hold it! The Schwarzenegger Library?"
Bullock: "Yes, the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library. Wasn't he an actor?"
Stallone: "Stop! He was President?"
Bullock: "Yes. Even though he was not born in this country, his popularity at the time caused the 61st Amendment"¦"

After which Stallone looks like he is going to puke.  At the time, in 1993, this was a ridiculous joke, the stupidest thing you could imagine.  Now, ?

PS, how did I ever leave True Lies off this list?  Gotta add it.

Previously, I explained why I like Football Outsiders here. Their week 9 statistical rankings of teams is here.

Miami still can't nail down that bottom spot. San Francisco and the Raiders both have fallen below the Fish (so much for Bay Area football). Miami has the worst offense in the league by a HUGE margin, but its defense keeps it off the bottom, as it probably should:  A good defense will win you a few games, no matter how bad the offense is.  My Arizona Cardinals continue to fall, down to their rightful place in the bottom quartile, despite having a pretty good defense. At the top, Pittsburgh, New England and Philly are threatening to run away and hide, which just goes to show that every once in a while, BCS notwithstanding, computers and common sense can converge.

OK, I could not ultimately resist the need for a red/blue map on my site.  This map is county by county, and shows bright red or blue in counties Bush and Kerry won over 70% of the vote.  Counties with votes in between are shades of blue-purple to red-purple.  Courtesy of Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman, University of Michigan

Click for Larger Image

Our business is seasonal, meaning that most of the facilities we run are open from about mid-April to mid-September.  Our employees are hired in the spring and then laid off in the early fall.

The unemployment bill is a killer.  Everyone we lay off in the fall, whether they intend to work in the winter or not, files for unemployment.  Like any insurance, your premiums are based on your actual claims, and as a result our unemployment insurance rates are sky-high. 

A few or our employees are actively looking for winter work, and I am OK with their claiming unemployment.  However, the vast vast majority of our employees work for the summer and vacation all winter, since working for us really just supplements their retirement pay.  I know for a fact that some of those who have claimed unemployment in the past weeks are in Mexico on vacation or on the Colorado River or wherever.

Unemployment agencies are NOT doing their job.  By law, in most states, they are not supposed to pay unemployment to people unless they are actively looking for work.  Heck, most of our employees, during the winter, are not even in the state that is paying them unemployment - they are down south or even out of the country vacationing.  However, I have not found a state agency yet that has any interest in dealing with this fraud.

One of my favorite blogs, Marginal Revolution, pointed to a digital beauty contest here.  The imagery is pretty amazing - this, for example, can hardly be discerned from a photo of a real person.

This imagery reminded me of the old Turing test.  I don't hear much about Turing tests nowadays, which is odd, because we are so close to having systems that will pass it.  (Jerry Pournelle, in the old Chaos Manner columns in Byte, use to write a lot about Turing tests).    In a Turing test, a person is connected in some blind manner to another entity, and they have to determine if it is a machine or a live human.  Having a computer pass a Turing test means that a human, in interacting with it blindly, could not discern that it was not another human.  In the same way, one could propose a Turing test for digital imagery like the one above, ie is it Live or is it Memorex?

By the way, no one asked me, but in my mind the reigning beauty queen of digital imagery is still Aki from the otherwise forgettable computer-animated movie Final Fantasy. 

I try not to impose too much of my personal life on this blog, but I couldn't resist showing off our weekend project.

This is my 10-year-old son's recent science project.  They are required to do a report on a subject (in this case, he chose the biology and physics of hitting a home run) and supplement the report with a model that has to be entirely edible - i.e. all made out of food (Seriously - what sadistic maniac thinks up this stuff?).  He and I worked most of Sunday on this, while mom laughed her butt off watching.  He presents tomorrow, and then the class eats it (who wants to bet that they will fight over eating the eye?)

(Click for larger image)

Anyway, this thing includes cookie bones (we used foil for molds for the bones and bat) licorice muscles, gummi worm brains and nerves, cake baseball, chocolate bat, and fondant hand and eye (with almond nails).  Thank God for fondant - usually a smooth finish layer for cakes, it basically acts like edible clay.

Move over Martha, coyote is here!

For several years, I worked for a major supplier to the commercial airline industry.  Eventually, I had to leave, because the entire industry just drove me nuts - some of the worst structural problems in any industry I have seen combined with an incredible unwillingness to do anything about them.  Marginal Revolution reminds me about the airline industry with this post.

Through the 1990s, the average weight of Americans increased by 10 pounds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The extra weight caused airlines to spend $275 million to burn 350 million more gallons of fuel in 2000 just to carry the additional weight of Americans, the federal agency estimated in a recent issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (fee req'd).

As entertaining as this is, the industry is still totally unwilling to address the real problems in the industry.

Continue reading ‘Airline Industry and Inventory Pooling’ »

America experienced no major terrorist attack on its soil in the run-up to the election.  This can't be for lack of trying.  If the terrorists bombed Spain, at best a peripheral country in the war on terror, to influence its election, you know that they would have loved to have bombed the Great Satan.  But they didn't.  All we got was a VHS valentine from Osama.

Thank you to the US Military, to the administration, to the department of homeland security, to the FAA, to the Phoenix Police, to the FBI, to the CIA, and to everyone else who made this non-event possible.  And, thank you to all the citizens of the US, who, whatever issues they might have with those in power, would never harbor a terrorist.  This sounds like an obvious statement, but its not.  It is in fact our best defense against terrorism.  Europe is much more vulnerable, because it has communities and groups and various cities who ARE willing to aid and abet terrorists.

First, I will say there are no books out there about what business is really like, probably because reality can be pretty grim -- I don't think that people would be hanging on the edge of their seat reading about a manager arguing with the Department of Labor about a fine for his minimum wage poster not being in the right location.  Maybe if Dave Berry wrote it.

Anyway, most fiction that involves a business is either about some rapacious capitalist who is stealing or killing or destroying the environment or whatever or it is a sort of Machiavellian opera ala Dallas or Dynasty. Few actually portray a business leader as a hero.

For business people that are heroic and multi-dimensional, and exempting Atlas Shrugged as in a class by itself, I recommend James Clavell's Noble House.  This zillion page book covers but 8 days of time in early 1960's Hong Kong, but is epic none-the-less.  I just finished reading it a second time and I enjoyed it even more than the first time.

Readers may or may not know that our company runs campgrounds, mostly on public lands.  I must say, though, despite running hundreds of campgrounds, I have never seen this.  It just looks....wrong.

More here on Gizmodo, one of my favorite sites. If you are not reading Gizmodo, particularly if you have a Y chromosome, you should be.

This series explained, and other past featured products, here. We get many of our featured products here.

This week's product was purchased by the Bush administration, soon to be used in Fallujah:

Two election-related Princess Bride posts in one day.

From Vodkapundit - "Incomceiveable"

From Asymmetrical Infromation - "Iocane powder"

I think the Princess Bride is one of the 10 most quotable movies of all time, at least for guys (Caddyshack being #1).  So here is my Princess Bride reference for the election:

Rove (election night, 7PM EST): I admit it, Kerry is leading us in the exit polls
McAuliff: Then why are you smiling?
Rove:  Because I know something you don't know.
McAuliff: And what is that?
Rove: I... am not left-handed.

UPDATE

Jane Galt & Co. have their servers down at Asymmetrical Information.  Here's hoping they are back soon.

This is a pretty good list of the 50 best "guy" films of all time.

Films I would add:

• Where Eagles Dare
• Kelley's Heroes
• Deliverance
• Patton

UPDATE

And True Lies, how could I leave that off?  Also, I might tend to add Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Not a classic guy movie in the action sense, but there are sure dang few women who seem to get into it like guys do.  Nee.

According to Overlawyered.com, notorious judicial hellhole Madison County, IL has elected a new set of judges much less likely to be in the pocket of the litigation bar.

This is awesome:

Robert Swetich and Raymond Urrizaga each received 1,847 votes in Tuesday's general election. Under the law in this gambling state, tied elections can be settled by lot.

After the election was certified by the commission Thursday morning, the two settled over a shuffled and fanned deck of cards.

Urrizaga drew first. Queen of clubs. Swetich pulled a seven of diamonds, then offered his congratulations to the winner.

Via Reason's Hit and Run

Hello to Arizona Watch, which seems to focus on politics and news here in AZ.  Anyone with links all over their site to Cato, Eugene Volokh, Virginia Postrel, and Assymetrical Information can't be all bad!

CNN has some pretty fun exit poll data here.  As both an engineer and an analyst at heart, I enjoy plowing around in data to find new conclusions.

One interesting thing I found was where the vote for Bush and Kerry came from in terms of urban vs. rural locations:

Because people are thinking of the red/blue state map, and even more the red/blue county map, they want to portray the red/blue split in part as an urban-rural split.  This is reinforced by the perception of Bush as the NASCAR loving gun toting country redneck and Kerry as the overeducated stiff urban intellectual. 

The problem is that the exit poll results don't necessarily support this.  Note two things:

1. The suburbs drive the result.  Rural and urban basically cancel each other out, with a larger urban than rural population but a larger relative Bush lead in rural.  In both '00 and '04, the suburban vote split closely mirrors the total tally.
2. Bush won the popular vote because he improved about 3 points and added 4 million votes to his differential.  This table says that nearly all of that came in the urban vote, with a whopping 10 point improvement that drove a 3 point improvement in the total.

Because a lot of this urban improvement occurred in Blue states, the electoral college margin was still close because he ended up closing the gap in blue states rather than flipping many.

Assymetrical Information mines the same data to demonstrate the surge in Latino support for Bush.  Interestingly, it also shows that Bush led among both high school and college graduates (defeating some of his stereotype).  Kerry, on the other hand, carried both high school dropouts and post-grads (ie, the under and over-educated)

UPDATE

Welcome to Professor Bainbridge readers.  If you are not burned out on election news, here is my winner for the most over the top post-election article, and my response.

UPDATE #2

Confirming data from New York City via The Galvin Opinion

I am feeling a little guilty tonight.  I just dumped a pain in the butt troublesome employee on another company.  Without warning.  Specifically, we fired him a couple of weeks ago, for a variety of issues, but mentioned no negative information in his reference check from his new employer.  Here's why.

It has become dangerous to give out negative references.  Ex-employees have become increasingly succesful at suing employers for bad references.  I don't have to tell any small business owners that  lazy, incompetent, unreliable, whining, trouble-making employees never believe that they are lazy, incompetent, unreliable, whining, or trouble-making.  You give them a negative reference, and before you know it they are in front of a jury saying "I never did any of those things, that employer was just biased against me, that's why he fired me and then tried to get revenge on me by lying to all these other companies and blackballing me from getting a job to feed my family".  Now, you are stuck trying to prove in a court of law that the reasons for termination, and what you said in the reference check, are valid.  It's always good to document these situations well, but no business documents this stuff well enough to survive a plaintiff's attorney's cross examination.

You can learn more about these lawsuits here and here and here.

As a result, our company policy is to not allow any employee to give out any references whatsoever.  They are not allowed to give out any information about employees except the dates of their employment.  They are most definitely not allowed to discuss reason for termination.  In a few cases, I will make an exception for good employees, but even in that case I require their permision in writing.

So, sorry employers out there.  I feel bad about it, but I have to protect myself because the sharks are always circling.  While its inconvinient to hire a bad employee in our business, it can be a disaster in places like hospitals that have life and death situations.  Crazy?  Check this out.

Dear Congress:  If you would like to do something useful for a change, please consider granting employers some sort of liability shield for the information they give out in references.

I like this list. The over-under for actual legislation is maybe 1.

Hat tip: Cal Ulmann

I had this turly over-the-top article from Mark Morford in SF Gate forwarded to me via email, with the forwarding comment "This about sums it up..." After today, I will return to more business topics from politics, but this article gives me the excuse to write my own post-election recap.

Its hard to do this article justice in excerpting it, so I encourage you to follow the link above and read the whole thing, but hear are some choice highlights (bold emphasizes some particular passages I will comment on)

And now Kerry's conceded and the white flag has been raised and we are headed toward the utterly appalling notion of another four years of Bush and another Republican stranglehold of Congress and repeated GOP chants of "More War in '04!"

Which is, well, simply staggering. Mind blowing. Odd. Gut wrenching. Colon knotting. Eyeball gouging. And so on.

You want to block it out. You want to rend your flesh and yank your hair and say no way in hell and lean out your window and scream into the Void and pray it will all be over soon, even though you know you're an atheist Buddhist Taoist Rosicrucian Zen Orgasmican and you don't normally pray to anything except maybe the gods of really exceptional sake and skin-tingling sex and maybe a few luminous transcendental deities that look remarkably like Jenna Jameson.

It simply boggles the mind: we've already had four years of some of the most appalling and abusive foreign and domestic policy in American history, some of the most well-documented atrocities ever wrought on the American populace and it's all combined with the biggest and most violently botched and grossly mismanaged war since Vietnam, and much of the nation still insists in living in a giant vat of utter blind faith, still insists on believing the man in the White House couldn't possibly be treating them like a dog treats a fire hydrant....

This election's outcome, this heartbreaking proof of a nation split more deeply and decisively than ever, it simply reinforces the feeling among much of the educated populace: It is a weirdly embarrassing time to be an American. It is jarring and oddly shattering and makes you rethink what it really means to be a part of this country. The answer: It doesn't mean much at all. Not really. Not anymore...

Maybe we're not all that sophisticated or nuanced or respectable a nation as we sometimes dare to dream....

Maybe, in fact, we're regressing, back to the days of guns and sexism and pre-emptive violence, of environmental abuse and no rights for women and a sincere hatred of gays and foreigners and minorities. Sound familiar? It should: it's the modern GOP platform....

So then, to much of Europe, Russia, Asia, Canada, Mexico, the Middle East -- to all those dozens of major world nations who want Bush out almost as much as the educated people of America, to you we can only say: We are so very, very sorry. We don't know how it happened, either. For tens of millions of us, Bush is not our president and never will be. That's how divisive. That's how dangerous. That's how very sad it has become.

We are not, with another four years of what we just endured, headed toward any sort of easing of bitter tension, a sense of levity, or sexual openness, or true education, or gender respect, or a lightness of spirit and of step.

It is important to recognize that this article is insane. Not slightly over the top or humorous exaggeration, but a truly insane loss of perspective.

Continue reading ‘On Totally Losing Perspective’ »

I got a good laugh today at all the folks, mostly on the left, who were saying that they will leave the country now that Bush is re-elected.

I was a reluctant Bush supporter. As a Libertarian, voting for major-party candidates is seldom a satisfying experience. I am well aware of the baggage Bush carries - he is not a small government libertarian. He is, however, also not a trial lawyer, not promising to balance the budget on my back, and not assuming that terrorists are wronged freedom fighters we should negotiate with.

Anyway, for all the flaws of either candidate, a Bush or Kerry America is still the best place on earth. Period. Those of you who want to leave will quickly find that, for one, America has some of the freest immigration policies in the world - just try to get a green card or a work permit for Canada or France. Good luck finding a job in Germany or France, as the semi-socialist policies that you likely admire there keep unemployment rates in the double digits. And by the way, don't expect any welfare benefits if you perhaps are imagining a slacker paradise, for though we in the US may be generous and argue how many benefits to give immigrants, you aren't getting anything as a new immigrant over there. Oh, and if you find a job, have fun with that first tax bill. And for those who want to go the extra mile and be human shields in the Gaza strip or Fallujah, you will certainly have an interesting time as you discover that that "religious fundamentalist" Bush looks like Madeline Murray O'Hare compared to your new islamo-fascist buddies.

UPDATE #1

I know the above seems exaggerated. It is not. Go read the comments section at Kos or Wonkette or Atrios. However, for just one example, try No Right Turn which has this:

There's not a fuck of a lot separating Osama bin Laden's Islamo-fascists and Dubya's Christian fundamentalists - they even follow the same god. The only real difference lies in who they want to kill. There's nothing there worth believing in, and nothing to hope for, except maybe that they'll all kill each other so that we members of the reality-based community can get on with our lives in peace

Hard to know where to start. OK, for fun, lets compare Bush to the Islamo-fascists on the three areas that most tick off Bush's detractors. Remember that I am a libertarian, so "Bush detractors" on many of these issues includes me:

Gay Rights: In the US, gays can live many places openly with some but decreasing harassment. Bush does not want them to marry. In some Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, pre-invasion Afghanistan, and Iran, homosexuality is punishable by death. Lets see, can't get married vs. death penalty. Equivalent?

Women's Rights: For some reason, this is defined in our country as being able to have an abortion. I would have thought free speech, ability to vote, right to bear arms, etc. would be women's rights too, but that is not what people seem to be talking about when they say it. So, on abortion. Abortion today in the US is legal, safe, and readily available. Bush has attempted to put some restrictions on it, such as parental consent for teenagers and elimination of certain types of procedures, but has never publicly advocated making it entirely illegal. In most of the Arab world, abortion is illegal. And, if the pregnancy is the result of sex out of wedlock, the woman risks being stoned to death. In addition, women have virtually none of those "other" women's rights we have in the US, like being able to vote, drive, show some skin, have a job outside the home, speak freely, etc. A black man in apartheid South Africa had far more rights and freedoms than a woman in the Arab world. Lets see - restrictions on certain abortion procedures vs. the status of a slave and the likelihood of getting beaten or stoned to death. Equivalent?

"Obscene" or profane speech
In the US, people have an incredible amount of freedom to say about any jackass thing they want to say. People such as Michael Moore who skewer our leaders or like Larry Flint who produce pornography are not only tolerated, but feted and made wealthy. The one exception is that the Bush administration has been more aggressive in enforcing decency standards against broadcast TV and radio, in part because of the anachronistic way these were originally licensed. This has resulted in fines related to Janet Jacksons breast and Howard Stern' language. In the Islamo-fascist world, no dissent is tolerated, nor is pornography, bad language, or anything else unacceptable to the priests. In the US, priests can complain about your low standards, but can't generally make you shut up. In Iran, for example, the priests can have you killed for your speech or form of expression, and they do. Routinely. The Janet Jacksons and Howard Sterns of Iran are probably dead. Let's see - some restrictions on TV and radio stations using the 7 banned words and showing nudity or death. Equivalent?

I am sick of these moral equivalencies. As it turns out, I actually disagree with the Bush position on many of the issues above, but I think it is absurd to say that Bush is as bad as the Islamo-fascists. The tone of the piece is to somehow pitch this as a religious war, that it is just about Christians trying to kill Muslims. But go back to September 10, 2001. Not many people in this country spared many thoughts to the Muslim world. It was only after about 3000 non-denominational deaths that people got worked up. By the way, WTC attack 1 occurred long before anyone in the Arab world ever heard of W, and the September 11 attack was planned long before he was in office. I swear that people increasingly are trying to reverse the causality here - it won't be long before I read somewhere that the 9/11 attacks were in revenge for W's invasion of Iraq.

By the way, I can't resist one last quote from this same post:

A recent New Statesman editorial commented that having watched one great beacon of hope - the Soviet Union - collapse into a nightmare, the world could hardly bear it if the other one - the United States - fell as well.

Stalin? Soviet Union? Beacons of hope. Unbelievable. The far left increasingly calls itself the "reality-based" community. Does any of this match your reality? For more, see here. Hat tip to Kiwi Blog for the link

UPDATE #2

In my original post, I jokingly said that I was taking up a collection to help people by buying them airplane tickets out of the country if they so choose. Though it was a joke, I still took it off. It sounds too much like the old conservative "America, love it or leave it" junk. America is a better place for having the broadest possible range of opinion, and I would be sad to see this end.

UPDATE #3

This post turns out to be a warm-up for this more complete post on trying to keep some sense of perspective post-election

Overlawyered.com has a roundup of how litigation-related propositions faired, the results are mostly good news for those of us shocked at the growing power of trial lawyers.

Yesterday, Florida apparently passed a new minimum wage $1.00 higher than the Federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour.

This is actually an oddity - a red state with a higher minimum wage. Before the election, this Department of Labor map, showing the states with minimum wages higher than the Federal rate (shown in green) looked a lot like the presidential election map. With the exception of Alaska (which has price and wage levels so different from the lower 48 that it should have its own currency) all the states with higher than federal minimum wages are also strong Kerry states (e.g. Left Coast, New England and Illinois).

This is going to have huge implications for us. Camping is a low margin business, and most hosts are paid minimum wage. In fact, many of our hosts, who are retired, don't want to get paid at all, so they don't mess with their social security, but that of course is not possible. The total increase in wages will be higher than what we make in Florida, so we are going to be spending a lot of time evaluating price increases vs. cutting back on labor somehow.

UPDATE

I see from our logs we are getting a lot of hits on this post from search engines.  For those of you looking for more information on the implementation of this increase, we still have not seen any enabling regulation to go along with it.  Will it have the same exemptions as the Federal law?  Anyway, the go-live date is apparently 6 months from approval, which I presume equates to early April, 2005.

Previously, I explained why I like Football Outsiders here. Their week 8 statistical rankings of teams is here.

Miami assumes its rightful position back at the bottom of the list. The surprise, at least based on pre-season expectations, is to see the Titans in the bottom 5. My Cardinals continue to regress back to mediocrity, though their defense remains among the 10 best -- last week against Buffalo was more of an Offense and Special Teams failure than a defensive lapse.

I don't think anyone can disagree with the Outsiders' top 3. KC at number four doesn't seem right to me; however, for some reason, both this season and last, their statistical system seems to over-rank KC.