Coyote Blog

There was no particularly good way to resolve the banking mess in Cyprus.  But what worries me about how things played out is that there appears to be no rule of law that applies to bank failure in Europe.  There should be some clear principle that guides a bank resolution - e.g. equity holders and bondholders get wiped out first, then uninsured depositors, then insured depositors.  Or perhaps there is some ratio of pain between insured and uninsured depositors.

It is clear that no such rule exists across Europe (or if it does, it does not enjoy any particular force such that folks feel free to ignore it in real time).  That is the real danger here.  Results, however bad, should be transparent and predictable in advance, which is far from what happened in Cyprus.  Without a rule of law, one gets a rule of men -- in other words, rules are set by individual whim, often based on which government or corporate interests wield the most influence.

Think I am being too cynical?  Here is a detail that was new to me about the depositor haircuts in Cyprus:

A few weeks ago, the Central Bank of Cyprus published a curious set of "clarifications for the better understanding of the resolution measures." The principle of a bail-in—that uninsured creditors should suffer losses before taxpayers are on the hook—turns out to contain a few lacunae. "Financial institutions, the government, municipalities, municipal councils and other public entities, insurance companies, charities, schools, and educational institutions" will be excused from contributing to the depositor haircuts, though insurers later were removed from the exempt list.

Apparently, individual parties are lining up for special exemptions as well (much like connected corporations did with the Obama Administration to get exemptions from early provisions of the PPACA).  Essentially, all bank losses will be assigned to depositors who don't have access to powerful friends in the government.

I spent years, before I burned out on the task, picking over bad climate studies, and at the time reached the conclusion that there was something about the climate science field that was anomalous,  tolerating so much bad science, bad sampling methodology, and bad statistical approaches.

However, now I am coming to the conclusion that perhaps most studies in every field are dominated by this same crap.  Here is an example, from the NTSB on busses.

For years I have been blogging from articles in my Google Reader, which is going away in a month.  When I cut and paste the article URL from the reader, I get a Google shortcut like "http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Twistedsifter/~3/BohimNYue3Y/".  This resolves to "http://twistedsifter.com/2013/04/strangely-similar-movies-released-around-the-same-time/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Twistedsifter+%28TwistedSifter+%29".  The links are written in my wordpress data base, in many cases, as the feedproxy version.  So they depend on this Google service remaining live to work.

Does anyone know if the Google feedproxy servers are going away with Reader?  If so, about a zillion links on my site are about to break.  My hope is that Google uses these for more than just reader.  Perhaps at Feedburner? (though if Google is bailing on RSS that might be next on the kill list).

I would normally just do a Regex search to fix this, but there is no systematic way to do it, you have to resolve the link and then replace the resolved URL.  Someone seems to have an app for this, but I am not sure it is ready for prime time and I do not want to use it unless I have to.  But once the servers are turned off, it will be too late.

Anyone know about this or have advice?  Obviously, I have been trying not to use these feedproxy URL's if I can remember not to do so.

I had some problems on the site when my credit card failed at my caching / proxy server company Incapsula and my account got deleted.  I think all is well now.  But there is a certain problem I never know how to address on the Internet -- after all, its not really of much use to post something here and ask people to email me if they are having trouble reading it.  But maybe a Twitter or Facebook reader will let me know if there is a problem.

Today I got three letters with a subject line and/or opening sentence accusing me of discrimination.  Here are the three complaints:

1. A camper did not get the $8 senior discount to which he was entitled, in large part because my new employee did not recognize his very old-style government recreation access card (I processed a refund immediately).
2. A 20-year-old accused me of age discrimination when we told her she was too young to work in a store, despite the fact our manager explained patiently several times that we are prevented by law from hiring minors to sell alcoholic beverages
3. A camper accused me of discrimination because we would not let him occupy a site clearly marked as having been reserved by another camper (who had not yet arrived).  This obviously is odd -- I am discriminating against people without reservations for reserved sites?

None of these folks appear to be a part of a legally protected group, nor did they site any treatment they received that was different from similarly situated people at the same location.  They just didn't like a particular policy and wanted to complain, but have been taught by society that the best way to get attention is to claim DISCRIMINATION -- sort of like a witchcraft accusation in the 17th century.

All of this is to answer the question of why someone like myself who has vocally supported gays and gay marriage for decades would oppose legislation naming homosexuals as another government-protected class.  I have defended openly gay employees of mine against ignorant accusations that their homosexuality somehow posed dangers to the kids camping at the park they helped to maintain.   But discrimination law makes me crazy.   Think of it this way -- bad things happen to everyone from time to time.  I am a white male, but despite this status I have gotten turned down for jobs, have been laid off from jobs, and frequently have received bad, even rude customer service.  Everybody does.     Discrimination law often takes these typical day-to-day indignities we all face and converts them, literally, into a Federal case.

Every year I am required by law to fill out what is called the "Accommodation Report" by the Census Bureau.  As a lodging company (we run campgrounds) I must reveal my revenues and some of my expenses.  They ask for numbers aggregated differently from how we collect them for GAAP, so it is not a simple exercise.  But I do it under protest, even though several of my competitors do not seem to be similarly punished with this requirement.

Well, I don't actually fully comply.  We run over 150 small locations, and technically I am supposed to fill out an 8-page accommodation survey for every one of them.  This would take a week of my time.  So I pretend I have only one campground and report my summary revenue numbers for all our campgrounds as if they were for one location.   Also, a year ago the Census folks began demanding the data quarterly, and I told them to pound sand, that I was on the verge of not doing the annual report and so I definitely was not going to do all that work quarterly.

Well, this year it got worse.  For some reason, the survey this year had 3 extra pages asking me to break down my expenses in detail, in many categories that do not match those that I use in my bookkeeping.  Here is an example page:

First, not only do I not have time to figure this out (who tracks software purchases as its own item in the accounting system?), but it is not the government's business, particularly given that I am a private company.  Even the IRS is not this intrusive.

Further, at best the data I report will be used for nothing.  More likely, it will be used to justify new taxes on me, new regulations on me, or new subsidies for my competitors.  I have no desire to aid any of these activities.

Postscript:  And you know what I have zero patience with? -- otherwise free market academic economists who support this kind of data gathering because it is critical.  Yes, I am sure they much prefer to get free statistics for their work gathered via government coercion  rather than have to pay for it, as one would have to do if we relied on private companies to gather this data rather than the government.  There is absolutely no difference between an economist supporting government statistics gathering and any other company or individual asking that the government subsidize their inputs.  But, but, we are critical to the country!  Yeah, the sugar industry says the same thing.

Via the AZ Republic

The true cost to operate Jobing.com Arena ranges from $5.1 million to $5.5 million a year, which is about $10 million to $20 million a year less than the Glendale City Council has agreed to pay hockey-related interests to manage the facility in recent years.

The net management costs, included in documents recently published on the city’s website, are bundled in the city’s solicitation for a new company to operate the city-owned arena.

Glendale council members interviewed by The Arizona Republic said they hadn’t reviewed the documents and were surprised by the figures.

“I wasn’t aware of that,” Mayor Jerry Weiers said. “Then again, I know damn good and well that the way it’s been run, they’re not putting anything extra into it whatsoever.”

This is unbelievably easy to understand .  It is a hidden subsidy, and everyone knows it.  The pictures of politicians running around saying "what, we had not idea" is just hilarious.  The Phoenix Coyotes hockey team has the lowest attendance in the league, and loses money.  In addition, the NHL, which owns the team, has committed to its members that it will not take a loss on the team, meaning that it needs to sell the team for north of $200 million.  The team is worth over $200 million, but only if moved to Canada.  In Glendale, it is worth $100 million or less.

The city was close to a deal a few years ago to sell the team.  It tackled the team value problem by basically throwing $100 million in taxpayer money into the pot for the sale (to make up for the difference in value between the asking price and actual worth).  When this encountered a Constitutional challenge (under the AZ Constitution corporate welfare is illegal though you would never know it living here) the city council disguised the subsidy in the form of an above-market-rate payment for running the arena.

So absolutely everyone knows what is going on here.  This has become a massive black hole for the town of 250,000 people that achieves nothing but the self-aggrandizement of the local politicians, who feel like bigshots if they have a real major sports franchise in town.  Oh, you heard that this all actually pays for itself in tax money?  Hah!

The justifications for previous management deals revolved around a commitment to keeping the team in Glendale. Loyal fans pleaded with council members for the team’s future. And a council majority saw advantages, including thousands of fans trekking to their city 41 nights a year to watch hockey and spend money in the city’s restaurants and shops.

The city collects revenue associated with the team and arena through leases, parking fees and tax collections for food and merchandise sales in the nearby Westgate Entertainment District. Those figures have been on the upswing, particularly since an outlet mall opened last fall.

Total collections were $4.7 million in fiscal 2011, and reached $6.4 million through just the first eight months of the 2013 fiscal year, according to the city. That money helps pay, but doesn’t fully cover, the city’s debt to build the arena.

The town spent $300 million on a stadium and subsidized the team between $25 and $40 million a year, depending on how you count it, all to get an "incremental" $6-8 million in tax money.  And by the way, just because they collect it in this area does not make it incremental -- these sales could well have cannibalized another area of town.

Some professors are arguing about online education.  I will not comment on that particular topic right now, though it sounds a bit like two apatosauruses arguing about whether they should be worried about the comet they just saw.

I did, however, want to comment on this, from an SJSU professor to a Harvard professor, I assume pushing back on online course work designed by Harvard.  Emphasis added.

what kind of message are we sending our students if we tell them that they should best learn what justice is by listening to the reflections of the largely white student population from a privileged institution like Harvard? Our very diverse students gain far more when their own experience is central to the course and when they are learning from our own very diverse faculty, who bring their varied perspectives to the content of courses that bear on social justice…

having our students read a variety of texts, perhaps including your own, is far superior to having them listen to your lectures. This is especially important for a digital generation that reads far too little. If we can do something as educators we would like to increase literacy, not decrease it…the thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary — something out of a dystopian novel…

I would have said that teaching social justice at all and requiring students to take it at many universities was something out of a dystopian novel.  In fact, the whole concept of social justice, wherein it is justified that certain groups can use the coercive force of government to get whatever they may fancy merely by declaring that there is a right to it (e.g. health care), actually underlies a number of dystopian novels.

Postscript #1:  If find it hilarious that the SJSU rejects Harvard-created course materials because they are the product of white privilege.  I cannot speak to Harvard undergrad, but my son is at Amherst which could certainly be lumped into the same category (any college named after an early proponent of biological warfare against Native Americans has to be up there in the white privilege category).  My son actually gave up his earlier plan to study history when he looked at the course catalog.  It was impossible to simply study, say, the political and economic history of Western Europe.  All the courses are such things as "the role of women in the development of Paraguayan aboriginal rights."

Postscript #2:  I don't have the larger context for this letter but it strikes me the professor is stuck in the typical leftist technocratic top-down and centralized single mandated approach to anything.  Why is it that online courses would end up with no viewpoint or content competition?  The Internet has increased the access of most people to a diversity of ideas that go beyond what they got in the morning fish-wrap and from Uncle Walter on TV.  Why would it have the opposite effect in education?  Or perhaps that is what the professor is worried about, a loss of control of the education message by the current academic elite, to be feared in the same way the Left hates Fox News.

I have written many times about my problems with Phoenix light rail -- examples are here and here.  We paid $1.4 billion in initial capital costs, plus tens of millions a year in operating losses that must be subsidized by taxpayers, for a line that carries a tiny tiny percentage of Phoenix commuters.  Capital costs equate to something like $75,000 per daily round trip rider  -- If we had simply bought every daily rider a Prius, we would have save a billion dollars.

But, as with most things the government does, it is worse than I thought.  Over the last several years, I have been treating these daily light rail riders as if they are incremental users of the area's transit system.  In fact, they are not, by Valley Metro's (our regional transit authority) own numbers.  Here is the key chart, from their web site.

Compare 2009 to 2012.  Between those years, light rail ridership increased by just a hair under 8 million.  In the same time period, bus ridership fell by just a hair over 8 million.  So all new light rail ridership is just cannibalizing buses.  We have spent $1.4 billion dollars to shift people to a far more expensive transit platform, which does not offer any faster service along its route (the light rail has to fight through traffic lights on the surface streets same as buses).

This is a pattern seen in most cities that adopt light rail.  Over time, total ridership is flat or falls despite rising rail ridership, because rail is so expensive that it's operation forces transit authorities to cut back on bus service to balance their budgets.  Since the cost per rider is so much higher for light rail than buses, a dollar shifted from buses to light rail results in a net reduction in ridership.

Postscript:  Looking at the chart, light rail has achieved something that Valley Metro has not seen in decades -- a three year period with a decline in total ridership.  Sure, I know there was a recession, but going into the recession the Valley Metro folks were arguing that a poor economy and rising gas prices should boost their ridership.

I don't have time to excerpt but, as I predicted, the media is finally catching up to the enormous shift (mainly in the retail and service sector) to part-time work.    I had a long article on this at Forbes last week.

Apparently Leftist blogger Meg Lanker faked a rape threat against herself in an attempt to Conservatives look bad.  OK, this is sad and pathetic, even more so because it is almost guaranteed that her political allies will first forgive her, and then defend her actions as some sort of brave and necessary action to fight patriarchal... uh, whatever.    It is also an incredibly dangerous action at a university, given that the Obama Administration has demanded that schools eliminate due process from on-campus sexual assault allegations and tilt their judicial process, such that it is, against accused male students.  Had she done this at, say, Yale and actually framed a particular guy, that guy would probably be kicked out of school already.

I won't add any more critique of Ms. Lanker.  Just assume that I am appalled by her actions.  But let me raise an issue with the Conservative critique of Ms. Lanker:  No one seems to be able to resist the temptation to comment on her looks and her weight, two things that (to my knowledge) are absolutely irrelevant to the discussion.  They are just completely ad hominem.  Stacy McCain engages in it, for example.   The posts on this Facebook page (which perhaps is a hoax itself, given the ungrammatical and frankly absurd wording of the header phrase) are even more abusive in this same vein.  Seriously folks, it is rather undermining to your argument that Lanker was exaggerating the boorishness of men with her fake threat when you jump on her Facebook page and engage in boorish ad hominem attacks.

Update:  Holy moly did I get the wrong link for the Stacy MCain post.  I will leave the link above as-is because it is kind of funny.  I had this link on my clipboard because I wanted to suggest them to my teenage daughter as a way to deflect unwanted (by dad) male attention.  The Stacy McCain link is here.

I kind of like having a window in my office, but otherwise this is a pretty cool office / lair.

Host Gator usually does a good job for me but screwed up bringing the server back from maintenance.  To their credit they admitted the mistake.  All looks well EXCEPT for some reason we have picked up absurdly high Disqus Twitter reaction counts.

... expect a big price increase.

From my broker, in response to my wife's query as to why our health insurance renewal was so much more expensive this year.  It is by far the largest single year increase we have ever had.  He said:

this is just he beginning of higher costs for insurance and many changes will be taking place due to the full implementation of Obamacare

Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias think that 401-K's are a total ripoff.

After the new fee disclosure statements went out, roughly the same percentage—half!—of participants said that they still do not know how much they pay in plan annual fees and expenses, according to a recent survey by LIMRA, an association of insurance and financial services organizations.

....For those 401(k) participants who said they thought they knew how much they paid in fees, most of them were way off base. One out of four participants thought they paid 25% or more in fees, 16% thought they paid between 10% to 24% in fees, and 30% thought they paid between 2% and 9% in fees. Only 28% of participants thought their fees were less than 2%.

That group is the closest to reality. On average fees and expenses range between 1 to 2 percent, depending on the size of the plan (how many employees are covered) and the employees’ allocation choices (index funds versus actively managed funds), says LIMRA.

First, this is bizarre, as the indictment here of private fund management seems to be that people are *gasp* paying fees that are much lower than they think they are.   Also, it may well be that these people are not mistaken, but just using a different mental definition for fee percentage.  After all, why is total assets necessarily the best denominator for this calculation?  Obviously the fund industry likes it that way because it gives the lowest number, but it could be that people are thinking about annual fees as a percentage of the annual income.  Thus a fee of 1-2% of assets could well be 25% of annual income.  Hell, since I invest for income growth, I could argue that this is a MORE rational way to think about fees.  Obviously Drum and Yglesias are just captive mouthpieces of big Mutual Fund.

Second, and perhaps more importantly -- do you know what retirement fund has higher implicit fees and a lower lifetime total return than nearly any private fund in existence?   Social Security.  Read your statement you get and do the math.  You will find that the total you will likely get out will be less than you put in, even BEFORE present value effects, even if you have put money in for 30 years.  In other words, the internal rate of return on your and your employer's taxes is less than zero.

Ahh, but you say, that is because your Social Security taxes are going to subsidize people who don't work.  Fine, but then don't be surprised if there is strong support for a retirement system that does not pass the money through government hands.  Even getting a crappy rate of return from some hack investment manager is likely still better than putting your money in a government system where cash is skimmed off to feed whatever political constituency has the clout to grab it.

Postscript -- by the way, I leave aside the issue of whether it is a productive thing to tax-subsidize.  I am generally against tax preference for selected behaviors, even relatively popular  ones like savings.  But Yglesias wants to replace 401-K's with some kind of coerced government system (the note about fees above is to make the case that the average person cannot be trusted and that our masters need to do the savings for us).  Image one giant Calpers.  Ugh.

I am just floored that Conservatives, who very very recently argued that the act of one bad guy at Newtown should not be used to limit the rights of tens of millions of legal gun owners, are now arguing that the acts of two bad guys (Tsarnaev's) SHOULD be used to limit the rights of tens of millions of peaceful immigrants.

Megan McArdle has a lot more patience than I explaining to a writer at Crooked Timber why artists don't get special tax deductions that aren't available to anyone else.

But what I thought was amazing, was the fact that they seem to blame an overbearing and over-reaching IRS on .... markets and capitalism. I'll give one example of the general tone:

One of the days, I’ll get around to reading the copy of Sandel’s ‘What Money Can’t Buy; The Moral Limits of Markets’. It’s even made the exquisitely painful cut of being one of only two dozen books brought on our three-month sojourn on the south coast of England. When I do read Sandel, I hope to acquire a greater appreciation for exactly how market thinking has permeated and corrupted so many aspects of human life.

One surprising place a weirdly attenuated and manically zealous form of market thinking has popped up is in the Minnesota tax office. (via BoingBoing) They’re running a quite unhinged vendetta against Lynette Reini-Grandell and Venus DeMars, a married couple who make music, art, poetry and teach English. The taxman running their audit says Reini-Grandell and DeMars’ creative activities don’t make enough money, and haven’t for years, thus proving the artists are mere hobbyists who shouldn’t get a tax break. Either they should turn a consistent profit by now, or have given up already and gone back to being good little consumers.

Kevin Drum writes

On the right, both climate change and questions about global limits on oil production have exited the realm of empirical debate and become full-blown fronts in the culture wars. You're required to mock them regardless of whether it makes any sense. And it's weird as hell. I mean, why would you disparage development of renewable energy? If humans are the ultimate creators, why not create innovative new sources of renewable energy instead of digging up every last fluid ounce of oil on the planet?

I am sure it is perfectly true that there are Conservatives who knee-jerk oppose every government renewable energy and recycling and green jobs idea that comes along without reference to the science.  But you know what, there are plenty of Liberals who knee-jerk support all these same things, again without any understanding of the underlying science.  Mr. Drum, for example, only recently came around to opposing corn ethanol, despite the fact that the weight of the science was against ethanol being any kind of environmental positive years and years ago.  In fact, not until it was no longer cool and caring to support ethanol (a moment I would set at when Rolling Stone wrote a fabulous ethanol expose) did Drum finally turn against it.  Is this science, or social signalling?   How many folks still run around touting electric cars without understanding what the marginal fuels are in the electricity grid, or without understanding the true well-to-wheels efficiency?  How many folks still run around touting wind power without understanding the huge percentage of this power that must be backed up with hot backup power fueled by fossil fuels?

Why is his almost blind support of renewable energy without any reference to science or the specifics of the technologies involved any saner than blind opposition?  If anything, blind opposition at least has the numbers on their side, given past performance of investments in all sorts of wonder-solutions to future energy production.

The reason there is a disconnect is because statists like Drum equate supporting government subsidies and interventions with supporting renewables.  Few people, even Conservatives, oppose renewables per se.  This is a straw man.  What they oppose are subsidies and government mandates for renewables.  Drum says he has almost limitless confidence in  man's ability to innovate.  I agree -- but I, unlike he apparently, have limitless confidence in man's ability to innovate absent government coercion.  It was not a government program that replaced whale oil as an illuminant right when we were approaching peak whale, it was the genius of John D. Rockefeller.  As fossil fuels get short, prices rise, and people naturally innovate on substitutes.  If Drum believes that private individuals are missing an opportunity, rather than root for government coercion, he should go take up the challenge.  He can be the Rockefeller of renewable energy.

Postscript:  By the way, it is absurd and disingenuous to equate opposition to what have been a series of boneheaded government investments in questionable ventures and technologies with some sort of a-scientific hatred of fossil fuel alternatives.  I have written for a decade that I long for the day, and expect it to be here within 20 years, that sheets of solar cells are cranked from factories like carpet out of Dalton, Georgia.

When an election was in the offing and 60 Minutes was paying attention, Congress voted a couple of years ago to finally remove the exemption that protected Congress and its staff from insider trading laws that apply to everyone else.

Now that the election is over and no one is looking, Congress has reversed itself 

So... with very little fanfare, Congress quietly rolled back a big part of the law late last week. Specifically the part that required staffers to post disclosures about their financial transactions, so that the public could make sure there was no insider trading going on. Congress tried to cover up this fairly significant change because they, themselves, claimed that it would pose a "national risk" to have this information public. A national risk to their bank accounts.

It was such a national risk that Congress did the whole thing quietly, with no debate. The bill was introduced in the Senate on Thursday and quickly voted on late that night when no one was paying attention. Friday afternoon (the best time to sneak through news), the House picked it up byunanimous consent. The House ignored its own promise to give Congress three days to read a bill before holding a vote, because this kind of thing is too important to let anyone read the bill before Congress had to pass it.

Apple has tens of billions of dollars of cash.  So why is it considering a $10 billion bond issue?

Despite its huge cash stockpile, Apple plans to issue debt to help fund dividend payments and stock buybacks in part because much of its cash is overseas. Raising money in the debt market would help Apple avoid the big tax bill that would come from bringing the cash back to the U.S

The US is the only major company I know of that double taxes foreign income of its corporations.  Outside the US, the general principle is that a company pays taxes locally in the country in which income is earned, and then can repatriate that money freely.  Apple has already paid taxes on this money locally (granted, at relatively low rates, but country's corporate tax rates are lower than ours).  But it must pay something like 35% to repatriate that money to the US.  This is sort of a negative stimulus, a multi-billion dollar incentive for Apple to find some way to spend this money overseas rather than in the US.

I will reiterate my tax plan.  Eliminate the hugely distortive corporate income tax altogether.  Instead, tax all individual capital gains and dividends at regular income rates - no special low rates.  Corporate earnings are thus taxed when they flow through to individuals either as higher equity prices or as dividends.

The savings and benefits would be huge --

• an order of magnitude less room for special interst lobbying
• the elimination of crony tax breaks for favored industries
• the elimination of the tax preference for debt  (this is the other game Apple is playing - take on tax-favored debt to boost your stock price)
• the elimination of all sorts of bizarre and unnatural corporate tax schemes and vehicles
• the elimination of all that corporate legal tax expense
• the elimination of two sets of books for every company (every major corporation has two sets of books, one for investors and one for the IRS, differing in many ways including depreciation methodology)

You may have noticed that I have not blogged a lot on climate of late.  This is mainly because nothing substantial has really changed in four years or so.  The skeptic argument has not changed and really has not been refuted.  In fact, published estimates for climate sensivity continue to move down towards my estimates.

But I could not resist linking to this

Several House Democrats are calling on Congress to recognize that climate change is hurting women more than men, and could even drive poor women to "transactional sex" for survival.

From a reader, comes this story of St. Louis so far refusing to grant a license to a woman who wants to operate a clothing sales truck (in a parallel to the growing food truck business).  What is the official explanation for denying her a license?  These government folks are refreshingly honest, not even bothering with the BS about consumer protection and jumping right to the real reason - incumbent businesses don't want new forms of competition.

NewsChannel 5 received this written explanation from Maggie Crane, the communications director for Mayor Francis Slay:

"We like the idea of fashion trucks a lot, but we still need to find out if there is a way to license mobile boutiques that does not put brick and mortar stores, who have already made substantial investments in their neighborhoods, at a disadvantage. We will also need to identify neighborhoods that will welcome them.

"We went through that process with food trucks a few years ago. Food trucks, for example, must abide by an enforceable set of rules outlining everything from safety regulations to where and for how long they can park.

"Our prediction is that the region's first legal fashion trucks will be here in the City. But, for now, they are pirates."

Note by this same logic Amazon should have been banned by St. Louis, as certainly bookstores in St. Louis had made substantial investments in their neighborhoods.  In fact, one of my favorite book stores used to be in Clayton, near St. Louis, though I fear it has died  (anyone know, I can't remember the name, was a large independent).  In fact, that is an advantage of the Internet I had never considered -- it allows new businesses to challenge old ones without harassment by local licensing and zoning authorities.

I just heard a radio commercial today urging listeners to learn how to flip houses to great profit with absolutely no capital or down payment required.  What a great idea.

My new Forbes column is up, and discusses the incredible similarity, in my experience, between gun and abortion advocates.  I find this particularly interesting because, in many cases, the occupants of each camp hate each other.

The most important common trait they share is that they both tend to feel (and act) like they are standing on shifting sands.  They both feel that their Constitutional rights (for guns as written in the 2nd Amendment, and for abortion as clarified in Roe v. Wade) are under constant attack by a powerful and vocal minority.  They share almost the exact same sense of paranoia (I don’t mean any negative connotation to that word — as a libertarian, I am paranoid about a lot of things).  As a result, they feel the need to hold the line against every regulation or incursion, no matter how seemingly reasonable, fearing the narrow edge of the wedge that will eventually threaten their core rights.  They know in their hearts that the true intent of regulators is to work towards outright bans, so even seemingly “reasonable” and narrow limits are treated as a Trojan Horse and opposed with an energy and vehemence that seems over-the-top to people outside of the debate or on the opposing side.

John Ross discusses the absurd tax exemption enjoyed by major sports leagues like the NFL

I was particularly struck by this

as a tax-exempt entity, [the NFL] doesn’t pay taxes on the income that it earns. The NFL has managed to keep its income earnings a little on a low side by paying its top executives corporate-level salaries—eight NFL execs took home compensation of $51.5 million in 2010. The teams get to write off their NFL membership dues, roughly $6 million per team, for the privilege of belonging to this unusual trade association, and that money is put into a stadium fund that provides interest-free loans to teams so long as they get taxpayer financing on stadium construction and improvement costs.

So NFL teams pay dues to the NFL, and get to write the cost of those dues off on their taxes.  But the NFL pays not taxes on the dues it receives   It then puts these dues in a fund that the teams can use, but ONLY if they go out and extort further taxpayer gifts for their stadiums.  Ugh.