Coyote Blog

Time 2020-10-06 15:04:43

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If Your Are Reading This, You Are At Our Old, Defunct SiteIf you reach this blog directly, make sure you bookmark www.coyoteblog.com or coyoteblog.com and not some other variation (look up and see what is in the address bar right now). Old URLs containing typepad.com will no longer update. And URL s beginning with www.CoyoteBlog.com/coyote_blog will also not work anymore, though you should get an error page redirecting you to the correct address (old permalinks in this format will still work, just not the home page. That is the real trick of the typepad to wordpress migration, getting the permalinks around the Internet to remain valid).For those of you who read through feeds, you should be reading the feeds.feedburner.com/CoyoteBlog feed. If this is showing up in your feed, then you have the wrong feed address, and it will no longer update. The easiest way to get the new feed is to go to www.CoyoteBlog.com and click on the feed icon either in the address bar or in the right sidebar and get the correct feed.We are about 12 hours into the 24-48 hours that it will take our new site settings to totally migrate through the Internet. If you reach this blog directly, make sure you bookmark www.coyoteblog.com or coyoteblog.com and not some other variation (look up and see what is in the address bar right now). Old URLs containing typepad.com will no longer update. And URL s beginning with www.CoyoteBlog.com/coyote_blog will also not work anymore, though you should get an error page redirecting you to the correct address (old permalinks in this format will still work, just not the home page. That is the real trick of the typepad to wordpress migration, getting the permalinks around the Internet to remain valid).For those of you who read through feeds, you should be reading the feeds.feedburner.com/CoyoteBlog feed. Any other feed will no longer update. If you are not seeing posts this next week on your feed, go to www.CoyoteBlog.com and click on the feed icon either in the address bar or in the right sidebar and get the correct feed.Thanks for your patience. You will know if you have the new site -- it looks a lot different. Update: The comment threads on this and any newer post are not going to work. Don t try. The whole point is to get you off this site and onto the new and improved site.In a post on letting GM fail, I discussed what I called corporate DNA A corporation has physical plant (like factories) and workers ofvarious skill levels who have productive potential. These physical andhuman assets are overlaid with what we generally shortcut as management but which includes not just the actual humans currentlymanaging the company but the organization approach, the culture, themanagement processes, its systems, the traditions, its contracts, itsunions, the intellectual property, etc. etc. In fact, by calling allthis summed together management , we falsely create the impressionthat it can easily be changed out, by firing the overpaid bums andgetting new smarter guys. This is not the case - Just ask Ross Perot. You could fire the top 20 guys at GM and replace them all with theconsensus all-brilliant team and I still am not sure they could fixit. All these management factors, from the managers themselves toprocess to history to culture could better be called the corporateDNA. And DNA is very hard to change. ...Corporate DNA acts as a value multiplier. The best corporate DNAhas a multiplier greater than one, meaning that it increases the valueof the people and physical assets in the corporation....Every company that has ever grownrapidly has had a DNA that provided a multiplier greater than one...for a while.But things change. Sometimes that change is slow, like a creepingclimate change, or sometimes it is rapid, like the dinosaur-killingcomet. DNA that was robust no longer matches what the market needs, orsome other entity with better DNA comes along and out-competes you. When this happens, when a corporation becomes senescent, when its DNAis out of date, then its multiplier slips below one. The corporationis killing the value of its assets. Smart people are made stupid by abad organization and systems and culture. In the case of GM, hordes ofbrilliant engineers teamed with highly-skilled production workers andmodern robotic manufacturing plants are turning out cars no one wants,at prices no one wants to pay.This seems to match the take of many insiders. To John Shook, a former Toyota manager who worked at ajoint-venture plant run by the Japanese company and GM inFremont, California, that explains why the two automakers are insuch different shape today. When it comes to engineering andmanufacturing, Shook says, Toyota and GM are about equal. Wherethey differ is in their corporate cultures. “Toyota is built on trial and error, on admitting youdon’t know the future and that you have to experiment,” Shooksaid. “At GM, they say, ‘I’m senior management. There’s a rightanswer, and I’m supposed to know it.’ This makes it harder totry things.” The whole Bloomberg article this comes from is quite good. Its pretty clear that GM had every reason to anticipate the current mess 3-4 years ago, and basically fiddled while the cash burned. My strongest reaction from the article was, please let me have an epitaph better than this one:Wagoner, a 31-year GM veteran, was the embodiment of itsculture, an apostle of incremental change. Exciting as a Saturn,quotable as an owner’s manual....The auto bailout is dead, at least for now:A bailout-weary Congress killed a $14 billion package to aidstruggling U.S. automakers Thursday night after a partisan dispute overunion wage cuts derailed a last-ditch effort to revive the emergencyaid before year s end. Republicans, breaking sharply withPresident George W. Bush as his term draws to a close, refused to backfederal aid for Detroit s beleaguered Big Three without a guaranteethat the United Auto Workers would agree by the end of next year towage cuts to bring their pay into line with U.S. plants of Japanesecarmakers. The UAW refused to do so before its current contract withthe automakers expires in 2011.Good. Chapter 11 was made for this kind of situation, and folks will quickly come to understand that productive assets don t go *poof* in a bankruptcy (though equity values can).By the way, you will note that Senate Republicans did not suddenly become economic libertarians. Their objection seems to be that the bill does not micro-manage the auto industry they same way they would want to micro-manage the auto industry. You can see in these political battles that Congress brings its usual identity politics to these decisions: Republicans want to hammer the unions, Democrats want to hammer executive pay. Which is why these restructuring discussions don t belong in Congress.Via TJIC, who had a much better title, poor credit risks remain poor credit risks, even after you give them a free pony Recent data suggests that many borrowers who received help withmortgage modifications earlier this year tended to re-default on theirpayments, a top U.S. banking regulator said on Monday. “The results, I confess, were somewhat surprising, and not ina good way,” said John Dugan, head of the U.S. Office of theComptroller of the Currency, in prepared remarks for a U.S. housingforum. “Put simply, it shows that over half of mortgage modifications seemed not to be working after six months,” he said.You can absolutely, without a doubt, add the Big 3 to the list of folks who will be facing default once again just months after getting their first dollop of federal money.Criminalizing everything:License-plate frames that celebrate your favorite college or sportsteam become illegal next month if the frame obscures the state s name.Starting Jan. 1, police can stop you if Arizona isn t clearlyvisible at the top of the plate. Violators will be fined an average of$135, plus court fees, depending on the city where the violation isdiscovered.Wow, while the police are chasing after that guy with a joint, lets make sure we also have the boys in blue vigilant for this. And I am sure this new law will be enforced as equally and fairly as all the others and these guys will be he first to get tickets:On Tuesday, half the 26 vehicles in the Arizona Senate parking lot bore frames obscuring the word Arizona. Yeah, right. This is just another probably cause for Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his boys to pull over every person with brown skin they run into.I run this blog mainly for my own enjoyment, so I mostly am just designing the new Wordpress version whatever the hell way I want it.But, I am split on the issue of fixed vs. variable width. This blog currently is variable width. Text expands and contracts to fill the screen width. The pro of variable width is that it allows people with wider monitors to actually take advantage of the real estate they invested in. The con is the site almost never looks as aesthetically nice as a fixed width site, where everything is a bit more in control (example here of fixed width).Any preferences out there? Please comment.I don t think I have ever gotten as much mail from as many different readers as I have received on the auto bailout. Readers seem fairly unified in their outrage and horror at the prospect.Via insty:Nancy Pelosi calls the deal a barber shop, where everybody will take a haircut. There is already an available process for operating companies that cannot meet their obligations where all the parties take a haircut: Its called chapter 11. We have about a zillion man-years of experience with it, in companies great and small. And it does not take idiotic Senators flashing billions of our tax money to mediate it. The auto industry is tremendously magnetic for wannabee technocrats in Congress, in large part because in perhaps no other industry is there a bigger gap between what the average American wants to buy and what the country s intelligentsia things they should buy. But US automakers are failing because they have not been very responsive to customers; they have grown fat and complacent, feeling protected by their monopoly power position; they have consistently failed over decades-long periods to make tough decisions vis-a-vis labor and costs; and they have refused to make real prioritization decisions (GM brand strategy is a good example). It is therefore hilarious that Congress thinks it can do better, because wouldn t these same traits be high on the list of failings of the Federal Government itself?And this is funny, if you have not seen it yet.I posted some data this morning showing the current jobs report rankednot on absolute job losses but as a percentage of the total workforce. I have now pulled the whole data set from the BLS, which goes back toabout 1939, and this is what the entire monthly series looks like ofemployment changes as a percentage of total employment (the purple lineis a 3-month moving average). Folksfamiliar with this data base may know of reasons the data has becomeless volatile (perhaps improved seasonal adjustments?) butnever-the-less, I have a hard time reconciling this with the popularleftish notion that the decline of traditional American manufacturers(e.g. autos) and unions have led to increasing risk and job/incomevolatility. I played around with a couple of ways to summarize thetrends. Here is the number of substantially negative (monthly lossesgreater than 0.25% of the workforce) jobs reports per decade: Andhere is a metric of the volatility of the jobs number. Since mostfolks don't really buy the classic economic argument that "risk"equates to volatility up or down, but feel that risk is only to thedownside, I have looked at what is sometimes called the downsidestandard deviation of the jobs change numbers, in which all monthlydata greater than zero are set to zero, and then a normal standarddeviation is taken on the data. I am switching over domain registrars as the first step in the porcupine mating ritual that will eventually lead to a migration of this blog to Wordpress. There may be short downtimes of the site or of the email associated with this blog as I futz around with nameservers and cnames and such. But since I am unable right now to publish any content on typepad that includes a graph or drawing, I am willing to bear some problems to get on a new platform.Something is wrong in the Typepad editor such that trying to include images is causing the system to hang. This is the third or fourth time I have had to stop posting until Typepad cleans this up, all since Typepad introduced its new editor which is really driving me crazy. As soon as I can get the site to migrate correctly with all links intact to Wordpress, I am moving off Typepad.A: Start with 10 million current jobs.Kenneth Green argues that Obama s claim that obsoleting current infrastructure and requiring its replacement with new, greener infrastucture creates jobs is just the broken windows fallacy (where have you heard anyone else say that?)If Obama s energy promises rely on questionablescience, they rely on even more questionable economics. We are tobelieve that replacing conventional energy sources (especially coal)with renewables (especially wind) will create 5 million new greenjobs. The hope is that armies of workers will be enlisted to buildtens of thousands of windmills; to manufacture and deploy solar-powerinstallations; to harvest, transport, and process huge amounts ofbiofuel feedstock; and to string the power lines that will allow theU.S. power grid to incorporate a major expansion of intermittent energy.Unfortunately, the idea of government jobcreation is a classic example of the broken window fallacy, which wasexplained by French economist Frédéric Bastiat way back in 1850. It isdiscouraging to think that nearly 160 years later, politicians still donot understand Bastiat s basic economic insight....Now consider Obama s green jobs plan, whichincludes regulations, subsidies, and renewable-power mandates. The broken windows in this case would be lost jobs and lost capital inthe coal, oil, gas, nuclear, and automobile industries. Currently,these industries directly employ more than 1 million people.Conventional power plants would be closed, and massive amounts ofenergy infrastructure would be dismantled. After breaking thesewindows, the Obama plan would then create new jobs in the renewableenergy sector. The costs of replacing those windows would ultimately bepassed on to taxpayers and energy consumers.Our new era in race relations begins this week with the Federal government sending me a nasty-gram that I have not yet proven to the government that I know the race of every one of my employees. The EEO-1, a quite distasteful annual requirement from the feds, is a report we must file showing the number of people we have employed of various races and ethnicities. Rest assured, readers, I have, after naively believing that race was irrelevant in evaluating my employees, now educated myself as to the race and gender of all my employees and reported this understanding to the government.This was sent to me by a reader: Much as looking at percentage moves in the Dow is much more meaningful than looking at nominal points moves (500 points means a lot less when the average is at 10,000 than when it is at 1,000), it is useful to look at the recent jobs report in the same way. While 553,000 lost jobs is certainly a lot, it is only the 41st worst loss since WWII when looked at as a percentage of the workforce (and it would be much further down the list if we had similar metrics back into the 1930 s and 1920 s). Via Bespoke Investment Group: This tends to confirm the statement I made last week, that this recession is likely worse than anything a 20-something Obama supporter can remember, but is not yet even close to some of the problem years of the 1970 s, much less the 1930 s.By the way, it is interesting to see all those 1950 s dates in there but no dates in the last 25 years, given there are many who have been writing about the current economy being so much riskier for workers than the 1950 s.This was sent to me by a loyal reader, with the email subject Be very afraid WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank,D-Mass., predicted that 2009 will be the best year for publicpolicy since theNew Deal. Speaking before the Consumer Federation of America Thursday, Frank saidCongress would pass a regulatory overhaul comparable to the antitrust laws ofthe late 19th century and the creation of the Securities and ExchangeCommissionin 1934. Democrats will tighten consumer protections for credit cards, put verytoughrules in to govern subprime lending and give appropriateliability to theinstitutions that securitize mortgage loans, he said. Frank said the economic crisis has run counter to the philosophy firstespoused by President Ronald Reagan that government is part of theproblem. Hesaid the goal would be to diminish excessive risk-taking within the context ofinvestor and consumer protections. This has not become an anti-capitalist society, Frank said. I think we canmake the argument, as the New Deal did, that in fact we are being verypro-market. Frank said that securitization - used to repackage mortgage loans andsellthem to investors as bonds - has good aspects when done right butcan alsolead to abuses. Frank predicted that legislation to tighten consumer protections in thecreditcard market and to crack down on mortgage lending abuses would become law. Healso said bank regulators would adopt a code of unfair and deceptive practices.No mention from Frank of the constant work he did over the last 10 years to prevent many similar such regulations from being imposed on Fannie and Freddie.MaxedOutMamma (an economist somewhere but she seems to only drop tantalizing clues as to where she plies her trade) is concerned:I was troubled by how manypeople seemed to feel the economy wasn t in deep trouble. Profoundskepticism and the belief that this is all media/political highjinksseem almost to be the consensus.I guess you may have to put me in the majority. I certainly don t doubt that we are headed for a recession. And it would not surprise me if this is the worst recession that most 20-something Obama voters have experienced, though that is not saying much. But I am not sure we are even facing the Seventies in this one and we certainly are not facing the 1930s.Here is the problem that we more casual consumers of economic news must struggle with -- the media has fairly accurately predicted 20 of the last 3 economic downturns. Everywhere you turn, you see analogies to the Great Depression, a period of time where unemployment topped 25%. Given the media s track record and the nearly breathless panic about the looming economic disaster, any sane person has to put a divide-by-X filter on economic news. It is certainly possible that I and other are using too large of an X as a correction factor, but is that my fault, or the fault of the purveyors of information who can t tell any story straight.By the way, for us Polyannas, here are several interesting posts from Mark PerryHousing affodability highest since 2002Loan delinquency rates at historical lows (except mortgages, but mortgage delinquency rates still below 1991)Real estate bubble limited to less than 10 states (and really only four)Apparently, there is a debate on the Left as to whether the 0.01% change in the world s atmospheric composition over the past century is sufficient justification for implementing fascist rule in the US. David Roberts argues yes. Kevin Drum, to his credit, argues no.A month or two back, I was participating in the California Regional Council of Rural Counties annual meeting. At this conference, I was there to have a sort of informal debate on climate change with Joe Nation, a former California State legislator and currently a private consultant on climate issues.To some extent my role was frustrating for the audience, because they were already stuck with complying with California s AB32 (a sort of state CO2 cap and trade system) and arguing that such legislation was pointless only served to upset them (my presentation, both in powerpoint and video is here). By the way, we often lump government together, but I can tell you that while the governor and the legislature of California may be 100% behind CO2 alarmism, the county commissioners were very sympathetic to the skeptic position.Anyway, towards the end of my presentation I made a plea for a carbon tax over cap-and-trade, and said in fact that California s AB32 was living proof of my argument. The California Air Resources Board (CARB), which is tasked with implementing the plan, has already added hundreds of people to its staff and worked for over two years, is still no where near finished with rule-making. The complexity, and the battling political constituencies, is simply mind-boggling. It is already clear that the result is going to be a Byzantine, Rube Goldberg structure of detailed industry-specific reporting and permitting rules. Nearly 100% of CARB s time is taken up today with various groups running to them begging for some sort of special treatment (think carbon bailout and you will get the idea). No one thinks the process is fair or rational.Under cap-and-trade, every single industry will report greenhouse gasses, have industry and firm-specific limits, myriads of permits, etc. For example, we had detailed discussions that day of how cattle flatulence will be treated and measured. The alternative is a carbon tax, which is dead simple. There is one single rate to set - the tax per weight of carbon in fuel. Fuels with more carbon per BTU, like coal, thereby get higher taxes. The system works like a sales tax, and could be administered by the BOE (who runs the California sales tax system) in its sleep. The cap-and-trade system is far more expensive than a carbon tax. By the basic laws of supply and demand, both systems have to raise the cost of burning certain fuels by about the same amount to get about the same reduction in use. But the cap-and-trade system brings a huge overhead burden, both in government bureaucracy as well as compliance costs, that make it far, far more expensive for the same amount of benefit. Until he started sitting on the boards of companies who depend on these inefficiencies in the cap and trade system to make money, Al Gore advocated a straight carbon tax over cap-and-trade.But we had an opportunity that day. Because the man who claims to be the author of AB32 is none other than Joe Nation, who was right there in the room. So we asked him why he took this approach. Here is what he said, really a civics lesson in one sentence:I tried pass a carbon tax first, but there was absolutely no support for it among legislators [the same ones who overwhelmingly supported AB32]If you can understand why this is, you can understand a lot about government. Because all these concerns that you and I might have about crafting rational public policy are not important to legislators. Here is how they think about it:Private implementation and compliance costs are meaningless to legislators. There is no public measurement or accountability for these costs, and most of these costs fall on businesses, who can be ignored as unsympathetic in political discourse. I operate in Mono County, California, and they put out a new set of reporting requirements driven, they said, by the needs to save a few hours a year of their auditors time. But compliance with these new rules costs our company 10-20 hours, at least, a year. And we are just one of many, many companies reporting. I complained that it was crazy for them to ask taxpayers to spend hundreds of hours of labor to save them just a few, but they could not have cared less.For legislators, particularly in California, creating large new bureaucracies is good. It creates a patronage relationship between the legislators and these new government employees that is almost quasi-feudal. Public employees are an enormous source of support for incumbent politicians, and these bureaucracies also offer future employment opportunities for legislators once they leave office (nice article here).First, last, and always, the vast majority of politicians are gutless. That means if they can pass the same tax in a way that is more hidden (ie cap-and-trade vs. carbon tax) they will prefer this approach, even if it means the tax is substantially less efficient. In the case of cap-and-trade, since costs are hidden and spread around like peanut butter rather than easily identifiable, they can pretend the costs don t exist and, if someone starts worrying about rising electricity costs that result, simply blame the rising costs on the evil power/oil/coal/etc companies. Obama has brilliantly taken this one step further, by outrageously claiming, in the broken windows fallacy of all time, that cap-and-trade will actually boost the economy through green job creation.A carbon tax gives politicians very little room to extract personal value from the electorate. Really, there is only one number for everyone to argue over. But cap-and-trade is a Disneyland for lobbyists. There can be special exemptions, industry specific caps, firm-specific caps, geography-specific caps. Once everyone sees the first few guys giving campaign donations and parading into CARB for special treatment, everyone feels like they have to in order to avoid being the one guy left out. My guess is that cap-and-trade will spawn more lobbying than any other legislation in US history. And politicians, no matter what their public stance, love lobbying, because everyone who comes to ask them for something knows there has to be a quid pro quo.Update: A number of related thoughts and posts here, at Reason.Pretty funny. Even funnier when you consider it is probably the most dead-on analysis of terrorism you will see in the MSM this week.Person Who Will Lose a Lot of Money in GM Bankrupcy Says that GM Bankrupcy Would Be BadVia the AZ Republic:Fritz Henderson, president and chief operating officer of GM, said thatchoosing the bankruptcy route would further erode consumer confidencein the automaker and we want them to be confident in their ability tobuy our cars and trucks. In order to save the value of their executive stock portfolios, which are a large part of their compensation, auto executives are promoting the line now that consumers will for some reason stop buying GM cars if the company is operating under Chapter 11 protection.The auto-makers real strategy is to get some kind of money, almost any amount will do, from the government ASAP. It really doesn t matter how much, because with their cash burn rate almost any amount Congress gives them right now will not last much more than 6 months, and certainly will not be enough to reach recovery (their requests go up by a few billion each time they appear in front of Congress). Automakers are facing potentially several years of recession, and any real restructuring would take 5 years or more (and even that is doubtful since the industry has had 30 years of notice on these issues and have not done anything). But if they get some cash, then there will be a psychological pull for Congress to put in more. They will say -- well, you ve already put in $5 billion. If you don t put in another X billion, that first 5 will have been wasted (few people understand that sunk costs are sunk and Congress is no exception). This is how expensive transit projects are funded.The position that customers will stop buying the product due to some loss of confidence in chapter 11 doesn t hold up. Most every airline traveler has flown on an airline operating under chapter 11 in the last 10 years or so, and if I can have enough confidence that an aircraft is being adequately maintained in bankruptcy, I can probably muster the courage to buy a car. I presume the issue here is downstream warranty support. But this is about the last thing that would ever be slashed in a chapter 11. For God sakes, airlines have never even substantially disavowed frequent flier miles in a bankruptcy, surely a much more obvious target than warranty repairs. I would argue that it is uncertainty that is driving any loss of confidence (in fact, sales have plummeted already, ahead of any chapter 11). A chapter 11 filing would actually increase certainty, as those running the receivership could quickly communicate principles to be followed in the bankruptcy, such as protection of warranties. Right now, people have a perception that in a bankruptcy, GM would go *poof*. Once it actually files a chapter 11, the media and executives would switch modes from fanning panic to actually explaining how receivership works. In fact, if there is any fear on the issue of long-term warranty support, it is being created by executives like Henderson who are fanning the flames of fear in a brinkmanship game to try to avoid chapter 11. If he were really worried about this loss of confidence, he and other auto executives would be out there assuring people that their cars and servicing and dealers will also survive a chapter 11 filing. But he is not. This is totally disingenuous. More on why GM should be allowed to fail here and here.I blame the English and all of us in the media for the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan. If we had just stuck with New Amsterdam rather than having the name forcibly changed to New York by Anglo chauvinists, the WTC would never have been attacked. We all conspired in this tragedy by continuing to call it New York. Crazy? I would have thought so, but apparently this logic is quite in voguePostscript: I find it moderately hilarious to see folks on the left defending names imposed by western colonialists over indigenous names. But if it makes us Westerners to blame for terrorism, I guess it s in a good cause.Kevin Drum and I disagree about many things. I read his blog specifically to find things to refute. But it turns out we had the exact same two reactions to Quantum of Solace:Now, I also happen to think Quantum of Solace wasn t a verygood movie. The pace was so frenetic — chase, fight, chase, fight,chase, fight — that there was hardly any story that seemed worthfollowing, and what story there was just wasn t very interesting.(Cornering the water supply of Bolivia? Seriously? And you thought thelater Roger Moore movies were ridiculous?)My reactions were here and here.... then it would be much easier to reduce CO2 production, because we could just shut down stupid-inefficient boneheaded and outdated Soviet-era industry, like Poland has:Polish Prime Minister reminded that the economy of Poland, who has cutcarbon emissions by about 30 percent since 1988, relies on coal for upto 90 percent of its energy needs. This, he argued, entitles Poland toencourage other countries, for whom climate protection is a hard nut tocrack.Amount of Polish CO2 reduction that would not have happened anyway in the course of modernizing their economy and is instead due to focus on CO2: Zero. More on how the vast majority of European progress towards Kyoto goals is due to the shutdown of Soviet industry, and how this is the primary reason the 1990 benchmark date was chosen, here.I have finally been able to publish a video of my presentation at the climate debate held by the Regional Council of Rural Counties last September. The entire video is about an hour long. As usual, I am offering several ways to view it. First, it has been posted on YouTube but had to be broken into seven parts. The playlist of all seven parts is below:The playlist link is here: RCRC Climate Debate (Skeptic s Side)Unfortunately, YouTube crushes the resolution so many of the charts are hard to read. You can download the full resolution windows media version (about 96MB) as long as my bandwidth holds out by right-clicking and downloading form this link: Download RCRC Climate Debate (wmv)Also, you can stream higher resolution version of this film (and all my other climate films) at this site. The resolution is not as good as the downloadable version but is much better than YouTube. Again, bandwidth pending.Finally, you can download the actual powerpoint presentation shown in this video here or you can view the presentation online here.In the future, all of my videos and presentations will be available via the links just under the banner at Climate Skeptic.I m thinking of the three major consumer purchases thatare probably at the base of the hierarchy of needs: Fuel, food, andshelter. Its interesting how very different the media and publicperception is of price changes in these areas. The reaction to fuel price increases is easy to predict - they arealways portrayed as bad. Rising prices hurt everyone, producers areevil, and speculators who make bets on rising prices are even more evil.The reaction to rising food prices is more mixed. That s because wehave come to the collective decision that producers of food aresympathetic figures whereas producers of oil are unsympathetic. Somedia laments about rising food prices are often tempered by good newsstories about rising farm profitability.And then there is shelter. For this category of consumer expenditure,everything is flipped on its head. Rising prices are good, and fallingprices are bad. One might argue that housing is different, becauseconsumers often take an equity position in shelter that they do nottake in food or fuel. But all this means is that home buyers arespeculating on the price of shelter, going long on bets that priceswill rise. They could easily just rent, and pay for their sheltermonth-to-month like they pay for their food or fuel, but many consumersbet on rising rents and shelter prices by buying shelter futures (iepurchasing a home). In a real sense, home buyers are all speculators (using margin accounts at that!),but this is one case where we encourage speculation, and even have taxsubsidies for it. If the reader finds this a funny way to think of home ownership, hereis a thought experiment. Let s say at the age of 30 I wanted to takean equity stake in my current and future fuel needs. I take out a loanto buy enough Exxon stock such that the annual dividends will cover my fuelpurchases for the year. If fuel prices go up, the dividends likely go upas well, so I am sheltered from the vicissitudes of worrying about mymonthly fuel bill, and all I have to do is pay off a regular andpredictable mortgage on my Exxon stock. In 30 years, when the note ispaid off, likely I have a big capital gain in my Exxon stock, which Icould cash in at retirement if I want to downsize to less driving andfuel use. Or I can pass it on to my kids.The only difference I can come up with, economically, between thisexample and how we do housing is that in my example, consumer capitalis invested in productive enterprises rather than dead real estate.LOL, via Phil Miller:Please join me in support for poor, beleaguered gas station owners, thevictims of unconscionable price gouging by ruthless consumers who aretaking advantage of market conditions to reduce their demand forgasoline, driving down the price by nearly $2 per gallon over the last four months. Fortunately, governments are swinging into action. Georgia governor Sonny Perdue issued this statement:“The financial crisis has disrupted the consumption of gasoline, whichwill have an effect on prices. However, we expect the prices thatGeorgian gasoline station owners receive at the pump to be in line withchanges in consumers’ incomes and the prices of substitutes andcomplements. We will not tolerate consumers taking advantage ofGeorgian business owners during a time of emergency.”If it s almost December, it must be time for the Trans-Siberian Orchestra tour. My son describes them as the rock electronic Christmas band, and that is as fair a label as any. Many tend to compare TSO to Mannheim Steamroller, the other band that has created a niche for themselves with modern takes on Christmas music, but TSO tends to skew more towards heavy rock than Mannheim Steamroller. I think TSO is similar in many ways to Emerson Lake and Palmer, both with their tendency to cover classical songs as well as their flirtations with pretentiousness in some of their productions. For those unfamiliar with TSO, probably their most famous work of late was Wizards in Winter, parts of whose music video I think was included in a beer commercial last year.My son and I got tickets to the concert because we had a couple of TSO albums (we tend to like the instrumentals and think less of the vocals). What we had not realized is that TSO has quite a cult following. Most of the folks around us in the audience had been to 3,4,5 or more of their shows. Many go every year, in a ritual similar to how other folks might go to the Nutcracker every year.There is no doubt that TSO delivers value to its fans. We saw their second show of the day (!) and they played for a full three hours. Members of the band at different points went all through the audience, down aisles and up stairs while playing some of the final tunes -- far more intimate contact than you will get in most other bands. The key band members all were present after the show in the lobby for a meet and greet with their fans. OK, so what about the show? Well, I was a little disappointed. To be fair, their leader had a knee injury which forced him to play sitting down, and this tended to reduce some of the band s energy. The music was generally good to very good. The keyboard solos and the high-energy songs at the end were terrific. The problems were twofold. First, the opening half of the show was stitched together with a narration that was just painful. The poetry was Touched by an Angel meets Dr. Seuss. It was a Night Before Christmas crossed with LA noir. It just did not work for me, and I know it was weak because my 14-year-old son was laughing at it. We both thought we were watching Spinal Tap 2.The other problem is one that TSO fans will call me out for, but the light show through all the songs was just too much. Don t get me wrong, I have never, ever seen anything to rival the floor show here - 6 trillion lights on the fastest-changing programming I have ever seen, zillions of lasers, flames, more flames, a ten-minute snow storm, band members descending from the sky, band members ascending to the sky, etc. etc. You can get an idea of about 1% of it with this video but any digital camera image of the show is worthless because the ccd can t possibly keep up. Seriously, this video grossly understates the full effect.The problem was that my eyes could not keep up either. I have walked away from concerts thinking I had a perforated ear drum, but never before thinking I had a burned-out optic nerve. My son said he needed to wear eye-plugs. 90% of the effects would have been OK had it not been for the direct audience facing lights at about 6 trillion candle power they kept insisting on flashing in my face. Anyway, we both are quite experienced with loud, heavy metal concerts and we both walked away with a headache from this one.Anyway, it was interesting and I am glad I went. And I may even go back next year, but I will be prepared - I am bringing my RayBans next time.I have gotten a lot of email on my posts about allowing GM to die. Here are a few thoughts:No matter what our mutual preferences, GM is not actually going to die. It will go in to chapter 11 and reorganize, and, as that law intends, will continue to operate through that reorganization. While Lehman and Enron liquidated, they were really special cases having more to do with financial than operating assets. In the last 20 years, Texaco, PG E, Worldcom, Delta, and UAL have all passed through chapter 11, and all operated their businesses through bankruptcy. In fact, all of Enron s pipelines and other operating assets are running A-OK right now, just under new ownership. Do you remember all those news stories about massive natural gas shortages because Enron s pipelines all stopped operating when it declared bankruptcy? Yeah, neither did I.You are welcome to write me about how I suck because your job at GM (or retirement, or health care, or all of the above) is important to you if that helps you psychologically to manage a terrible and stressful time. But, to cause me to back off my opinion about GM and the bailout, you need to tell me why your job is more important than someone else s job. Because, unlike private enterprise, the government does not create wealth, but can only move it around (with a leaky bucket, at that). GM has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, so having the government invest money to save your job will likely cost 1 job somewhere else. Just because we don t, and may never know, who that specific person is does not make this an ethical choice. I too, all things being equal, value having a healthy auto industry in the US (which in fact we still have -- it just happens the headquarters of many of the companies that run the plants are over in Japan). However, if you wish to argue that the bailout is necessary to save a US auto industry, you in fact need to argue that the current set of managers/contracts/systems/performance measures/organization/etc. of GM are better able to manage the employees and assets of GM than a different owner with different managers and approaches. Because having GM fail does not make the assets or trained people disappear, it merely makes it more likely they will be managed by a different entity. So all a bailout does is save the GM entity that manages these assets and people.Technocrats love to pick winners. Leftish technocrats, in particular, love to believe that the complex operations of the entire economy choose technologies that are inferior to those the technocrat would have imposed on the economy had she been in charge. But here is what happens when they try, in a cautionary tail that is particularly relevant given the number of specific technologies Barrack Obama has said he would promote (e.g. a million plug-in hybrids by 2015) (via Tom Nelson)The federal government has invested billions of dollars over the past16 years, building a fleet of 112,000 alternative-fuel vehicles toserve as a model for a national movement away from fossil fuels.But the costly effort to put more workers into vehicles powered byethanol and other fuel alternatives has been fraught with problems,many of them caused by buying vehicles before fuel stations were inplace to support them, a Washington Post analysis of federal records shows. I call it the Field of Dreams plan. If you buy them, they will come, said Wayne Corey, vehicle operations manager with the U.S. Postal Service. It hasn t happened. Under a mandate from Congress, federal agencies have graduallyincreased their fleets of alternative-fuel vehicles, a majority of them flex-fuel, capable of running on either gasoline or ethanol-based E85fuel. But many of the vehicles were sent to locations hundreds of milesfrom any alternative fueling sites, the analysis shows.As a result, more than 92 percent of the fuel used in thegovernment s alternative-fuel fleet continues to be standard gasoline.A 2005 law -- meant to align the vehicles with alternative-fuelstations -- now requires agencies to seek waivers when a vehicle ismore than five miles or 15 minutes from an ethanol pump.The latest generations of alternative vehicles have compounded theproblem. Often, the vehicles come only with larger engines than theones they replaced in the fleet. Consequently, the federal program --known as EPAct -- has sometimes increased gasoline consumption andemission rates, the opposite of what was intended....The Postal Service illustrates the problem. It estimates that its 37,000newer alternative-fuel delivery vans, which can run on high-gradeethanol, consumed 1.5 million additional gallons of gasoline lastfiscal year because of the larger engines. The article does not even mention that E85 ethanol made mostly from corn does absolutely nothing to reduce total CO2 production (it just shifts it around, due to the amount of energy required to grow corn and convert it to ethanol) while raising food prices.California did something like this years ago, putting the force of subsidies and state law behind zero-emission vehicles. This wasted a lot of money on electric and hydrogen vehicles that were not yet technologically mature enough to prosper, while missing out on low (but now zero) emissions approaches that could have had much more impact because they were technologically ready (e.g. CNG for fleet vehicles).Y all know where I stand on the dangers of CO2. But if we really have to do something , then the only efficient way to do it is with a carbon tax. But politicians hate this idea, because they don t want to be associated with a tax. But the fact is, that every other action they are proposing is a tax of some sort too, but just hidden and likely less efficient. There is no magic free lunch that Barrack Obama and his folks can think of and impose, no matter how smart they are. In fact, to some extent, smarts are a hindrance, because it tempts people into the hubris of thinking that they are smart enough to pick winners.Postscript: If you are reading this and thinking well, if I were in charge, I would not be that stupid and I could make it work then you don t get it. 1) No one can make it work, for the same reasons the Soviets could not plan their economy from the top -- its just too complex. At best, policy-makers are choosing between a handful of alternatives to back. In contrast, every individual has a slate of opportunities to reduce his/her CO2 production at the least cost, and when you add up all these individual portfolios, that means there are hundreds of millions of individual opportunities that must get prioritized. That is what pricing signals do, but government bureaucrats cannot. 2) The morons and knaves ALWAYS take over. Even if you are brilliant and well-motivated, your successor likely will not be. For years, folks have generally been comfortable with the outsized role of the Federal Reserve because they thought Greenspan (and Volker before him) ran it brilliantly. Well, there are arguments to be made about this, but even if we accept this judgment, what happens when the next guy is in charge and is not brilliant?Postscript #2: If you want a specific example, let s take plug-in hybrids. How can anyone be against these? I personally like the concept of cars being driven by electric traction motors (I like the performance profile of them) and would love a good plug-in hybrid. But what happens when we find out that many of these cars were bought in coal-burning areas where electricity is particularly cheap, and discover coal-fired electricity pollutes more than an internal combustion engine? Or when we use a cap and trade system to cut back on coal fired plants, and find that the huge number of plug-in hybrids are exacerbating brown-outs and electricity shortages? Or we find that the billions of dollars of capital diverted by the government to expanding plug-in hybrids could have easily yielded far more CO2 reduciton had it been applied in another area? That is why a carbon tax is the only way to go (if we are going to do anything) because it allows individuals to make capital expenditure decisions to reduce CO2 based on their vastly higher knowlege of the opportunities and the pricing signal of the tax.Apparently for some reason having to do with screw-ups and protests in contracting, the State of Arizona is not going to publish a Visitor s Guide. I run a decent-sized business in Arizona, and have never paid much attention to these guides. Every state and city and town and county and school district seems to put out some kind of visitors guide, and I could go bankrupt paying for ads in all the ones who hit me with marketing calls. Customers have a jillion ways to find out about our business, either from Internet searches or private guidebooks and directories. Heck, when I travel, I usually hit places like TripAdvisor and then run down to Borders to pick up whatever Fodor s guide covers my destination. I have never even thought about calling the government and asking them to send me a visitors guide, but perhaps some of y all have.Anyway, what do I know? I am just a little small business trying to run a few campgrounds. Just because I can handle my own marketing needs doesn t mean that billion dollar multinational hotel chains are capable of doing so without the government:Greg Hanss, director of sales and marketing for the newInterContinental Montelucia Resort and Spa in Paradise Valley, couldn tbelieve it. For me, the fact that we don t have a state visitors guidein what is the most challenging economic time of our tourism lives isreally disappointing. Pathetic. It is interesting to see that, for every 20-something anxiously awaiting the government s takeover of healthcare because they are really bummed about all the work it takes to find the right health care plan, there is a corporation waiting for the US govenrment to do its work for them.My company has over 20 URL s for various recreation facilities we manage. I do all the design and maintenance of these myself, generally using a shared core design with some color and content changes. Since this is just a side job for me, I often put it off and unfortunately things get dated fast.For a while now I have been wanting to experiment with a content management system to ease the maintenance of multiple web sites. So over the past couple of weeks, I have played around with various CMS s. I was intrigued for a while by ExpressionEngine, but the fact it was not public domain (ie it charges per site licenses that would be prohibitive for me) finally killed the deal. I also looked at Joomla and Drupal. Eventually, I settled on what many will consider an odd choice: Wordpress. Yeah, I know, its a blogging engine. I know quite well, because I am in the process of converting both my blogs from Typepad to Wordpress. I chose Wordpress for a few reasons:I understand the blogging paradigm, and so I have a good sense for how the content will be handled, and the limitations.I am, having messed around with my blogs, comfortable with the Wordpress templating system. Though certainly more limited than ExpressionEngine, it does what I need to do. I am moderately facile in CSS and PHP, the two real requirements to make a good template.Most of my sites are simple. The only two API s I really need to plug in to are Google Maps and Flickr, and I have tested and am comfortable with the available Wordpress plugins for these.I want to begin, carefully, to let some of my employees be able to add and edit some content (e.g. changing store hours). I think the wordpress interface is pretty accessible to some folks who may be new to online content and gives me the amount of control I need as an editor. For a noob content contributor, Wordpress is far more accessible than other CMS s.With a static site, I have an advantage over a blog in that I can turn on full site caching to speed up the site (via WP-super-cache). I also added an SEO plugin to make my permalinks and pages more SEO friendly, something I don t care that much about on my blog.I think that the first site came out pretty well, and I don t think its obvious that it is built on a blogging engine (site here, for our Arizona snow play area). The biggest internal debate I had was whether to go with fixed or variable widths. I actually went the opposite way of most modern programmers, moving from variable to fixed rather than vice versa. Most of my customers, as shown by my server logs, have slow and dated computers and monitors, so I think fixed width makes sense. Yeah, I know that no one will ever consider me a l33t h4x0r for using Wordpress, or even for using a CMS at all, but I was absolutely thrilled how fast the second site is going up now that I have built all the templates and functions I need. More reports to come (and hopefully this site will soon be on Wordpress, but I am not holding my breath. Still having trouble with brinking over the permalinks so they all work right).Wikipedia is virtually useless as a source for anything controversial, such as global warming. However, it is absolutely fabulous as a dictionary of pop culture. Where else can you find 5500 words on h4x0r l33t speech?My wife and I went to see the opening of Dale Chihuly's new exhibit at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. Chihuly is, if not the leading, certainly the most famous modern glass artist (he is perhaps best known for the lobby at the Bellagio, though this is far from my favorite work). He has done garden exhibits before, but the shapes and colors were perfect for the desert landscape. I don't have pictures yet from Arizona (we saw the exhibit at night), but here are some examples of his work: And from a garden show in New York: Information on the exhibit is here. Highly recommended for anyone visiting Phoenix this winter. I think one of the reasons my wife and I like his work is that his work is in some way reminiscent of the handbags she designs.This was a bit of history I never knew: "Wall Street bomb." Aftermath of the explosion that killed dozens ofpeople in New York's financial district on September 16, 1920, when ahorse wagon loaded with dynamite and iron sash weights blew up in frontof the J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street. The attack, which wasattributed to Italian anarchists, was never solved. 5x7 glass negative,George Grantham Bain Collection.This is from Shorpy.com, a blog that has daily posts with really nice photography from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The photo above is actually just a thumbnail - go to the original post and click on the full size image. All of their photos are posted in huge, high-resolution scans.Kevin Drum is off his meds, and is generating a lot of good fodder for me today. I made a couple of small edits in the name of intellectual honesty:The news keeps getting better and better. The House Democratic caucus just voted 137-122to replace John Dingell (D–General Motors) as chair of the Energy andCommerce Committee. The new chair will be Henry Waxman, who caresdeeply about [0.01% changes in atmospheric composition] and will be a huge ally in the fight to getserious[ly high fuel and electricity prices] next year. This is change we canbelieve in.I am willing to put my disagreement with a lot of the world on whether on not global warming is dangerous into the reasonable people can disagree category. But it just strikes me as outright insanity to try to push forward and pretend that anything that makes a meaningful dent in CO2, and so which has to make a meaningful dent in fuel and electricity consumption, will require either massive shortages or much higher prices. Even a third-way plan that says we will evade this trade-off with new technologies (whatever the hell those are) faces the massive dead-weight-loss of having to obsolete perfectly good power generation or transportation infrastructure and replace it wholesale with trillions of dollars of new stuff. If we found out tomorrow that exposed brick caused global warming, and all of our houses had to be knocked down and rebuilt, would anyone really think we were all richer for that?The amazing thing to me is that the left has all gotten on the this will be a net positive for the economy, 5 million jobs, blah blah message. This is nuts. This is the broken windows fallacy on Barry Bonds entire steroid inventory. Folks often respond to me, but we will gain because we will reduce the cost of global warming. But reasonable, non-loony folks don t really honestly think we are incurring any costs right now from global warming. There is an argument that they might exist 50 years from now and that they might be high enough to get started on now, but for the next 10 years or more, there is just cost, no benefit.Kevin Drum is glad the Democrats are ready to body-slam the health insurance companies, and is rooting them on:It means the health insurance industry is scared that we might actuallydo something in 2009 and they want to be seen as something other thancompletely obstructionist. That means only one thing: they ve shownfear, and now it s time to bore in for the kill and gut them liketrouts. Let s get to it.Because everyone knows that most of the costs of healthcare reform can be paid for by ripping the excess profits out of the health insurance business like a liver from a fish. Just to remind everyone, these are net profit margins reported by Google Finance for 3Q2008 of the largest health care providers and insurers:Cigna: 3.50%United Health Group: 4.56%Aetna: 3.64%WellCare: 4.08%Amerigroup: 3.51%Humana 2.56%WellPoint: 5.49%Yeah, I know it is not a done deal, but the rumors are that our governor Janet Napolitano will be Obama s choice for Homeland Security.On its face, this both makes a ton of sense, and simultaneously is odd. It makes sense because Napolitano is one of those rising Democratic stars who get special love in part for not being white males. It is odd because pulling her up to Washington would, by law, pass the governorship for the next two years to the Republicans (the Secretary of State completes the term, and she is a Republican). It also strikes me as odd because I think Homeland Security would be an absolutely awful platform for launching a run for higher office. That job has no upside - it is all downside.But the final reason in the end that this may make sense can be seen in this table below from Paul Kedrosky on projected state budget deficits as a percentage of state revenues: Arizona is almost in as bad of shape as California, and California is a disaster area. So the financial chickens are about to come to roost here in Arizona for the drunken spending spree the state has been on, presided over by Napolitano. To preserve her from going to the Gray Davis Memorial Retirement Home for Failed Governors, Obama is likely to beam her up to Washington.My kids middle school has a tradition among 5th and 6th graders that once a year each student creates a science model out of food. The kids love it, because they get to eat them after each presentation. But all we parents know how stressful science fair projects can be. Trying to create a meaningful science display from only edible materials is really a pain. We pretty much nuked the kitchen this Sunday and spent all day with this. But it s the last one! And it came out pretty well -- this is my daughter s physics of the circus. PS - TGFF - Thank God For Fondant, a material used in making fancy cakes that you can think of as edible clay. The materials here are graham cracker, Hershey bar, and sugar wafer stands, gum drop and lemon ball audience, frosted vanilla cake for the platforms, pretzels for the posts, licorice for the ropes, donuts for the cannon and the hoop, and fondant for the animals and people. And two full pounds of royal icing to glue everything together.PSS - One of the things you discover about food is that despite the incredible amount of quality control on its composition and taste, there is not much quality control on its construction properties. Pretzel rods that always seemed straight enough turn out to be, when you come to actually build something from them, more warped than picked-over Home Depot lumber. Ditto graham crackers. Mini donut sizes vary tremendously. Licorice tensile strength that always seemed fine turns out to be woefully inadequate. And don t even get me started on gumdrop repeatability.Here is the hard truth for those of us who believe that, since CO2 has had little effect on global temperatures to date, expensive abatement plans will similarly have little if any measurable effect: They are coming anyway. It is actually probable that the Republicans could combine with heavy industrial states like Michigan in the Senate to block dramatic new legislation. But President Obama already has the legal and legislative authority to enact sweeping and expensive CO2 mandates without going back to Congress. So with that depressing thought, here is a bit of good news: The media may well come over to the skeptics side soon, at least partially. Here is why: The media is extraordinarily loath to really challenge policy proposals in advance that are popular with the center-left. They are even less likely to challenge said proposals when they touch on a story of doom. There is nothing the media enjoys more than piling on a good public scare. But history has shown that the media will turn on these proposals once they are implemented, and sometimes quite soon after. Remember ethanol subsidies? The press were behind this crap all the way, until Congress passed enhanced subsidies a while back, and then the press suddenly starting discovering the effect on rising food prices, the environmental problems with land use, the ugliness of some of the subsidy politics, the fact that few scientists think corn ethanol will actually reduce CO2, etc. Yeah, I know, all of this was entirely predictable (and predicted by many of us) in advance. But this just seems to be how the media works.Because the only thing the media loves more than fear-mongering a crisis that is 20-years away is fear-mongering one that is visibly upon us. The press freaked at the California energy crisis a few years ago, peppering the public with stories of rising prices and rolling blackouts. And what has happened since then? Electricity demand has risen, no one can build electrical capacity, wind and solar are a joke, and Obama is only going to make it harder and more expensive to produce enough power (I think Obama s exact words were bankrupt the coal industry. ) The Town of South Attleboro, MA sent out wildly threatening past due letters for folks with balances as low as 1-cent (thereby investing at least 42 cents to get one back). In response to charges that this was stupid, City Collector Debora Marcoccio responded:A computer automatically printed the letters for any account with abalance remaining, and they were not reviewed by staff before beingsent out, Marcoccio said. It would be fiscally irresponsible for me to have staff weedthrough the bills and pull out any below a certain amount, Marcocciosaid. And what would that amount be? What, are we living in the 19th century with clerks in a musty room preparing bills by hand? This fix probably requires one whole entire line of program code in the billing system to fix. I could probably teach myself to code whatever language the payroll system is written in (my guess is COBOL, which, god help me, I already know) in less time than this woman has spent fielding complaints and media inquiries. Compare this to what TJIC has to do just to get the mail out.And don t you love people who don t even have enough spine to make a simple decision about the cutoff for minimum bill size. I have found this is one of those things the government is really, really bad at -- making decisions under uncertainty (which covers about all decisions, except routine ones embodied in SOP). Government has no incentives, in general, for productivity, or production, or customer satisfaction. The only time government employees get feedback at all is when they get negative feedback from having someone yell at them for making a decision that some higher-up didn t like.. So if a decision is not justifiable either by past precedent/SOP or explicitly by the rules, it is not made.By the way, I had a personal programming milestone last night. I finally built a website without using a WYSIWIG editor that formatted the way I wanted it to all in CSS without a single table. I predict that now that I have finally gotten a decent handle on CSS, which mainly consists of learning all the workarounds for when it doesn t work as you would expect, that someone is about to introduce a whole new system for formatting web pages.Update: Chart below is not correct. It s enough in error that I have deleted it. Author explains here.William Biggs has a bunch of charts showing historic federal outlays, but below is his chart for year-over-year changes in federal outlays per capita, adjusted for inflation:CHART DELETED I added some updates to my negative review of the new Bond film. I said:I feel I need to clarify one thing. I am a huge fan of the old Bondmovies. Goldfinger, Thunderball, Diamonds are Forever, Goldeneye --all great. Despite my comments above, I even like most of the RogerMoore films, though you have to take a different approach to them. Butthe formula was tired. The Survivor formula was hugely popular atfirst, but in season 9 or 10 or whatever, it s just done. You eitherare repeating the same tired cliches, because you feel locked into aformula by your fans who will get pissed (as they did with CasinoRoyale) when you violate any minute detail the Formula, or you fall into the trap oftrying to top yourself with goofier and goofier plots. I actuallythought the series was dead around about View to a Kill, but PierceBrosnan really brought new life to the series for a while.Oh, and I wanted to really make fun of the plot in the new movie, because it really is a great WTF moment, but I didn t want to include a spoiler, since there is some mis-direction in the movie. However, the spoilers have already come out in the comments, so if you are interested, I reveal the incredible world-shaking evil plot around comment #6 here. I saw a trailer for the upcoming Star Trek movie, which could essentially be called young Spock and Kirk. It could be good. Talk about a franchise, though, that has been milked to death. A new take would be refreshing. We ll see. Never forget Battlestar Galactica - from the ultimate in goofiness came one of the better science fiction series to hit television.The note above reminds me of an idea I have for a movie that I think would be a no-brainer. The Star Wars clone wars stuff has pretty much lost me (actually the dialog in episodes 1-3 pretty much lost me). But I always thought a young Han and Chewie movie - how they met, various pirate adventures, young Lando, etc. would be almost a layup to make succesful. I am increasingly convinced that that the Star Wars movies were good almost in direct proportion to how much Han Solo was on the screen (well, maybe pre-dryfreeze Han Solo -- after he was unfrozen, he was a little goody-two-shoes for my taste.)My COO reports that his dog Ranger was slashed pretty badly in brawl with a javelina near the family home. The dog is doing fine, and should be proud he defended his territory against the evil interloper.So why is the poor dog being humiliated? OK, he has to wear one of those funnel things that keep the dog from picking at his stitches. These are kind of embarrassing, but after being nearly emasculated in the field of battle, does he really need this indignity, courtesy of my friend s daughter? This article from Climate Resistance about the sustainability movement is terrific. I want to excerpt a relatively long chunk of it:It is our belief that Oxfam’s increasingly shallowcampaigns reflect the organisation’s difficulty in understandingdevelopment and poverty, and the relationship between them. In otherwords, it seems to have lost its purpose. This is a reflection of awider political phenomenon, of which the predominance ofenvironmentalism is a symptom. We seem to have forgotten why we wanteddevelopment in the first place. It is as if the lifestyles depicted inCecil’s painting were to be aspired to, were there just a little morerain. Development is a bad thing. It stops rain.If we were to add a city skyline into thebackground of Cecil’s painting it might ask a very different questionof its audience. Why are people living like that, with such abundancein such proximity? Of course, in reality, many miles separate the twowomen from any such city, but the question still stands; there isabundance in the world, and there is the potential for plenty more. YetOxfam have absorbed the idea from the environmental movement that thereisn’t abundance. This changes the relationship between development andpoverty from one in which development creates abundance intoone in which development creates poverty; it deprives people ofsubsistence. But really, the city (not) behind the two women couldorganise the infrastructure necessary to irrigate the parchedlandscape, the delivery of fertiliser, and a tractor. The field couldbe in full bloom, in spite of the weather. The two women could be wealthy.Oh no, says Oxfam. That’s not sustainable....The myth of sustainability is that it is sustainable. The truth isthat drought and famine have afflicted the rural poor throughouthistory – before climate change was ever used to explain the existenceof poverty. Limiting development to what ‘nature’ provides thereforemakes people vulnerable to her whims. Drought is ‘natural’. Famine is‘natural’. Disease is ‘natural’. They are all mechanisms which, in theecologist’s lexicon are nature’s own way of ensuring ‘sustainability’.They are checks and balances on the dominance of one species. To absorbwhat Hitler called ‘the iron logic of nature’ is to submit toinjustice, if famine, drought and disease characterise it. We can endpoverty, but not by restricting development. Yet that seems to beOxfam’s intention. That is why we criticise it.Hat tip: Tom Nelson.John Scalzi writes:I do get occasionally amused at being a poster child for Science Fiction’s Digital Futurewhen I live in a rural town of 1,800 people with agricultural fieldsdirectly to my east, south and west, and Amish buggies clopping downthe road on a daily basis. It’s, like, three cheers for cognitivedissonance.I responded in the comments:I would have had exactly the opposite reaction, that your situation is entirely representative. For 500 years, from the Italian Renaissance through the 20th century, intellectual thought moved forward mainly hand in hand with urbanization. I am not really an expert in describing the ins and outs of this, but there is clearly a density and network effect to intellectual advancement, and given past communication approaches, this required physical proximity. The promise of modern IT technology is that it may allow us to achieve this density without physical proximity.GM, as reported by Reason s Hit and Run, has actually already had something of a breakthrough in labor costs, at least for new employees:The current veteran UAW member at GM today has anaverage base wage of $28.12 an hour, but the cost of benefits,including pension and future retiree health care costs, nearly triplesthe cost to GM to $78.21, according to the Center for AutomotiveResearch.By comparison, new hires will be paid between $14 and$16.23 an hour. And even as they start to accumulate raises tied toseniority, the far less lucrative benefit package will limit GM s costfor those employees to $25.65 an hour.So this puts GM in the position of shoving experienced employees out the door as fast as they can, to make way for lower cost employees hired under this new deal. Apparently GM also has more flexibility to manage costs in a downturn. Good news, assuming they can accelerate a 20 year demographic transition to about 6 months, avoid giving away too much to these newer workers when times are good again, and arrest market share declines with better cars. Oh, and I presume the UAW has not abandoned seniority, which means that in recession-driven layoffs over the next year, GM must being by laying off these much cheaper younger workers. Layoffs will actually mix their labor cost upwards.I still don t want to bail them out. Like numerous other industries, from steel to airlines, there is no reason GM shouldn t have to pass through Chapter 11 on the road to recovery. However, the argument that GM is turning a corner if we just give them a little help seems to be persuasive with many folks around me, so much so I am tempted to buy some GM stock as a way to go long on my prediction of the creeping corporate state.Update: On the other hand, this is a sign that GM may be scraping the bottom of the barrel for cash:Cash-strapped General Motors Corp. said Monday it will delay reimbursing its dealers for rebates and other sales incentives, an indication that the company is starting to have cash-flow problems....Erich Merkle, lead auto analyst at the consulting firm Crowe Horwath LLP, said GM wouldn t delay payments if it had enough cash. I don t even think they ve got 60 days, Merkle said. Their cashposition is probably getting pretty weak right now, and it s cuttinginto those minimum reserves that they need on hand. In the third quarter of this year, GM s operations burned through $7.5 billion in cash, offset somewhat by asset sales and financing activities. But this is really a pre-recession burn rate. What will the burn rate be over the next 6 months? There is an argument to be made that $25 billion is not going to last even a year, particularly given the dynamic that layoffs will hit mostly the lower-cost workers, and a Democratic Congress and Administration that is handing over the money may well restrict GM s freedom of movement on layoffs anyway. I can see the Obama administration now -- don t lay them off, lets put them all in a factory making green energy, uh, stuff.The Seattle Times has done a ton of work on earmarks, and has a report here. Nothing here will be much of a surprise for earmark critics. This was probably my favorite bit:Last year, Congress promised to shed light on the secretive process.But the lists of earmarks are still buried in obscure documents thatare difficult to find and search. Until Congress put them online acouple of weeks ago, the House disclosure letters, linking lawmakers tocompanies, were thick volumes of paper kept in a cabinet in the officesof the House Appropriations Committee.When a reporter for the Congressional Quarterly pointed out howdifficult it remains to pull all the information together, Rep. JohnMurtha, D-Pa., chairman of the committee that drafts the defense bill,had a quick answer: Tough shit. Murtha, for those who don t know, consistently leads the earmarking numbers, and came in #1 among Congressmen in reaping campaign donations from earmark recipients, bringing in over $1.6 million. They have a database here where you can look up your Congressman (mine, John Shadegg, was one of the few with zero). My sense is that this database is only from the military appropriation and that there are many more earmarks hidden out there in other bills, but it is a good start. (hat tip Hit and Run)The new, but not surprising, information for me was how Congress easily sidesteps the new disclosure rules. After months of investigating the $459 billion 2008 defense bill, The Times found:• The hidden $3.5 billion included 155 earmarks, among them the mostcostly in the bill. Congress disclosed 2,043 earmarks worth $5 billion.• The House broke the new rules at least 110 times by failing todisclose who was getting earmarks, making it difficult for the publicto judge whether the money is being spent wisely.• In at least 175 cases, senators did not list themselves in Senaterecords as earmark sponsors, appearing more fiscally responsible. Butthey told a different story to constituents back home in news releases,claiming credit for the earmarks and any new jobs.The Times includes several irritating but entertaining stories of rent-seeking. Take Cyberlux, for example. What do you do when your company has sunk $50 million into a new product, has a $18 million a year burn rate, and only has $300,000 is revenues for the first six months of the year? Why, you call your Congressman and generate revenues via earmarks, with a quick thank you in the form of company-sponsored fundraising for said representative.And this certainly is a feel-good story for those rooting for the government to re-engineer the American auto industry:Latrobe Specialty Steel of Latrobe, 40 miles east of Pittsburgh, makes specialty steel for aircraft parts.In 2006, its parent company, Timken, spent $2.9 million lobbyingCongress on various issues and persuaded lawmakers to ban the DefenseDepartment from buying any products using foreign-made specialty steel.As the sole U.S. producer of certain kinds of specialty steel, Latrobesaw its orders climb. Timken then sold Latrobe to a group of investorsin a $250 million deal.But the buy-American restrictions for specialty steel caused seriousproblems for the Air Force, creating a 17-month lag in getting spareparts for aircraft used in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.In May 2007, Latrobe said it needed to expand but complained of highelectric bills and publicly threatened to build a new plant in Virginiaor West Virginia instead. Pennsylvania offered grants and tax creditsto the company worth $1.2 million.In Congress, lawmakers were quietly lining up a much sweeter package.In the defense bill passed in December, someone had insertedlanguage that ultimately directed $18.4 million for domestic expansionof essential vacuum induction melting furnace capacity and vacuum arcremelting furnace capacity. Latrobe Specialty Steel is the only domestic producer of that steel, Army Lt. Gen. William Mortensen said at a hearing.A month after the bill passed, Latrobe began a $62 million expansion in its home state.No one in Congress has admitted sponsoring the Latrobe earmark.One congressman s fingerprints, however, weren t so easy to conceal.Latrobe sits in the congressional district of Rep. John Murtha, aDemocrat who chairs the subcommittee that drafts the defense bill andwields the most power over defense earmarks.Latrobe s officials have given $5,000 to Murtha s re-election fund in the past two years.Also, Murtha had talked about giving taxpayer dollars to Latrobe. We re trying to get together to see how we can work out an increasedcapacity for that particular company, Murtha said at a subcommitteehearing in April 2007. I ve talked to that producer. And what I d liketo see is them put some money in, us put some money in, and reduce thetime it takes to get those spare parts out. ...The company would not comment on any discussions it had with Murtha.A spokeswoman defended getting the grant, saying it had beencompetitively bid. Even so, she acknowledged that Latrobe is the soleU.S. producer of certain specialty steels, a requirement for gettingthe money.Via the Liberty Papers:U.S. states have not lived up to their commitment to devote a majorportion of their huge legal settlement with the tobacco industry adecade ago on anti-smoking efforts, health advocacy groups said onTuesday.In the 10 years since the landmark deal, the states have received$79.2 billion of the settlement and another $124.3 billion from tobaccotaxes, but have spent only about 3 percent of it — $6.5 billion — on tobacco prevention and cessation programs, the groups said in a report.Gee, I really thought the settlement was about health care and tobacco education, and now I find out it was just a crass money grab? Who could have ever predicted that?Those who have read my novel will recognize the sarcasm.I have no problem if women want to spend four years at college studying (at their own expense) the role of indigenous women in the postmodernist Marxist movement of 1960 s Paraguay, or whatever. However, I do have a problem when these same folks later complain that their income is below average or they are under-represented in the board room. Just peruse the top and bottom of this list at Carpe Diem. College degrees most dominated by women include library science, consumer science, social science, education, language, psychology, and gender studies. Top college degrees most dominated by men include construction trades, engineering tech, transportation, military technologies, engineering and computer science. Sorry, but I cannot imagine any possible restructuring of society and the economy where the first list is more valuable and has higher income potential than the second list. David Yermack has an awesome essay in the WSJ this weekend, encouraging Congress to just say no to spending $25-$50 billion bailing out Ford and GM. Why? Well, beyond the obvious moral hazard, these companies are value destruction machines of epic proportions.Over the past decade, the capital destruction by GM has beenbreathtaking, on a greater scale than documented by Mr. Jensen for the1980s. GM has invested $310 billion in its business between 1998 and2007. The total depreciation of GM s physical plant during this periodwas $128 billion, meaning that a net $182 billion of society s capitalhas been pumped into GM over the past decade -- a waste of about $1.5billion per month of national savings. The story at Ford has not beenas adverse but is still disheartening, as Ford has invested $155billion and consumed $8 billion net of depreciation since 1998.As a society, we have very little to show for this $465 billion. Atthe end of 1998, GM s market capitalization was $46 billion and Ford swas $71 billion. Today both firms have negligible value, with shareprices in the low single digits. Both are facing imminent bankruptcyand delisting from the major stock exchanges. Along with management,the companies unions and even their regulators in Washington may havetheir own culpability, a topic that merits its own separate discussion.Yet one can only imagine how the $465 billion could have been usedbetter -- for instance, GM and Ford could have closed their ownfacilities and acquired all of the shares of Honda, Toyota, Nissan andVolkswagen.I am not sure this chart from Mark Perry requires much comment, except to say the contrast on the same metric for the children of members of Congress would be even more stark. The AntiPlanner has an update on the New London, CT development that spawned the notorious Kelo case. In short, they tore Ms. Kelo s house down against her will, and then the whole development deal fell through. The city now has a nice vacant lot.The homes of Susette Kelo and her neighbors have all been torn downor removed. But, except for the remodeling of one government buildinginto another government building, virtually no new development had taken place in the Fort Trumbull district by May, 2008. Having spent at least $78 million on the Fort Trumbull project, thecity had awarded development rights to a company named CorcoranJennison, which planned to build a hotel, an office complex, and morethan 100 upscale housing units. The developer had until November, 2007,to obtain financing. When that deadline lapsed, it received an extension to May 29, 2008. In desperation, the developer sought an FHA loan of $11.5 million. When that didn’t work and May 29 came and went, New London revoked the agreement. First, I want to preface that I absolutely loved Casino Royale. I had expected not to like it, being skeptical of Daniel Craig and the apparently trendy substitution of Texas Hold em for Baccarat. But the movie was fabulous, easily the best Bond ever, and a long-overdue retooling of the franchise. In comparison, the campy Roger Moore 70 s Bond movies are almost embarassing.All that said, I was disapointed in Quantum of Solace. The movie was entertaining and worth the price of admission, but two aspects really hurt the movie for me:The directors have adopted the currently popular edgy filming style of action sequences which involve lightning quick cuts and jerky camera pans (used in the Bourne movies, for example). The style really increases the confusion of the moment, and has its place in creating tension and giving a first person feel to the action, but it gets tiring and confusing after a time. Compare the opening chase sequences in this movie to the absolutely fabulous chase scene through the construction site near the beginning of Casino Royale. I thought the Casino Royale sequence was much a better, but I must admit I am a big fan of long tracking shots over quick cuts, so I guess your mileage may very. There was one shot I thought really cool in the new movie. Bond and mystery villain #3 or 4 fall through a glass ceiling, and you fall with them POV-style. The movie seems to be a return to the WTF-style plot of a lot of modern action movies, especially sequels, that put one-upping the action sequences of the previous movie over having a coherant plot. I don t mind twists and turns, but in the end, all the motivations have to make sense. I mean, how many mystery guys can Bond chase, kill, and then say, well, I guess we ll never figure out who that guy was. The early parts were like the Seinfeld version of action movies -- they are not about anything, they are just chase scenes. And, I still don t understand why the bad guys in QoS are doing what they are doing. Its another one of those spend a billion dollars in a vast conspiracy to make $100 million Bond villain plans. In contrast, Casino Royale was anchored to what I think was the best Ian Fleming book, and it stuck close to the book. Even when it deviated, for example with the shift from bacarrat to Texas Hold em, it actually improved the plot, as it shifted to a game that at least involves some skill.Update: I feel I need to clarify one thing. I am a huge fan of the old Bond movies. Goldfinger, Thunderball, Diamonds are Forever, Goldeneye -- all great. Despite my comments above, I even like most of the Roger Moore films, though you have to take a different approach to them. But the formula was tired. The Survivor formula was hugely popular at first, but in season 9 or 10 or whatever, it s just done. You either are repeating the same tired cliches, because you feel locked into a formula by your fans who will get pissed (as they did with Casino Royale) when you violate the formula, or you fall into the trap of trying to top yourself with goofier and goofier plots. I actually thought the series was dead around about View to a Kill, but Pierce Brosnan really brought new life to the series for a while. Update #2: Tigerhawk has similar thoughtsDarin Morely sent me this. Woe be it to the upstart competitor with a new business model who challenges an incumbent with political connections. This goes double when the incumbent is the government itself:One of the great things about the web, obviously, is that it allows formuch more efficient communication that opens up new and usefulofferings. For example: the web offers the ability to find other peopletraveling to the same general place you re heading and to set up aconvenient carpool. It s good for the environment. It s good fortraffic. It just makes a lot of sense. Unless, of course, you re a buscompany and you re so afraid that people will use such a system ratherthan paying to take the bus. That s what happened up in Ontario, asearlier this year we wrote about a bus company that was trying to shut down PickupPal, an online carpooling service, for being an unregulated transportation company. TechCrunch points us to the news that the Ontario transportation board has sided with the bus company and fined PickupPal.It s also established a bunch of draconian rules that any user inOntario must follow if it uses the service -- including no crossing ofmunicipal boundaries -- meaning the service is only good within anyparticular city s limits.All of us in the states need to be prepared for more of this corporate economy thing in the US. I saw last night on Sunday Night Football that NBC is really going hard on some green initiative, including having a green peacock. GE (parent company of NBC) is a smart company and sees the writing on the wall. It understands the new administration and Congress seem hell-bent on moving us to a more European model. In that model, there are 10-20 corporations per country that insinuate themselves into government and get the opportunity to help run the country to their own benefit. GE wants to be one of these chosen few. The push is going on not just at NBC, but in light bulbs (betting on Congressional action to provide regulatory support for a new type of bulb they have invented) and in power systems (who are making large bets on wind that will not pay off without a government subsidy program).In the near term, GE may need a bailout in its financial arm. GE must have seen that GM made a huge public push for its Chevy Volt over the last 6 months, spending hundreds of million in advertising on a car that does not exist yet. Why would a company near bankrupcy do this? We now know the advertising was aimed at Congress and the Administration, not consumers, trying to burnish their green image to give Democrats enough political cover to vote for the bailout their UAW supporters so desperately need (any chapter 11 would likely result in enormous restructurings of union contracts).In a post earlier today on the mortgage market meltdown, I wrote:And that is what the argument usually boils down to - someone smartshould have been watching them. But lots of smart people were watchingall the time. You can see one such person featured in Lewis sarticle. Guys run all over Wall Street looking every day for somesingle digit basis point spread they can make money off of. But untoldwealth was just sitting there for someone who was willing to callbullshit on the whole CDO/CDS pyramid game. These guys playing thisgame were searching for people to bet against them. Anddespite this, despite untold wealth as an incentive, and companieslooking for folks to take the other side of their transactions, only ahandful saw the opportunity. Thousands of people steeped in theindustry with near-perfect incentives to identify these issues ... didnot. What, then, were our hopes of having some incremental governmentbureaucrats do so? Usually, after this kind of crisis, there are linesof pundits and writers ready to suggest, with perfect hindsight, newregulations to avert the prior crisis. But, tellingly, I have heardvery few suggestions. So in this context, I found these comments by leftish Kevin Drum, certainly no knee-jerk advocate of free markets, quite interesting:No argument on the greed and ideology front, but I m curious: wasthere really anyone who made the right call on all this at a policylevel? There were, of course, plenty of people who recognized thehousing bubble for the idiocy that it was (Alan Greenspan notably notone of them), but were there any major voices making specific policyproposals to slow down the bubble? Or rein in the mortgage market? Orregulate the CDO/CDS market in a way that would have prevented some ofthe damage? I m talking specifics here, not just general observationsthat the FIRE sector was out of control. Arguments about interest ratesbeing too low count, if they were made for the right reason, but I minterested mainly in more detailed recommendations.I don t have any big point to make here. I m genuinely curious. There weremany moments in the past few years when perhaps something could havebeen done, but what? And who was proposing serious measures that wouldhave helped? Any major Dems? Economic pundits? Wall Street mucky mucks?Who were the unsung heroes? Help me out here.I got another boiler room broker call today, so I guess the recent downturn has not flushed out all the cockroaches. A while back I discussed the frequent calls I get from boiler room stock promoters. The approach they use with me is this:So the other day, I accidentally let one of them go further than Iusually allow. He said he was from Olympia Asset Management. (Thereis an Olympia Asset Managementweb page, but I don t know if it is the same company and the web pagehas not been updated for several years.) I let him run for a bitbecause a friend of mine runs a very well-respected financial planningfirm with a different name but also with Olympia in the title, and fora moment I thought it might have been one of his folks.Anyway, he proceeds to try to convince me that we have talked beforeand discussed a certain security. Remember me, we talked six monthsago about ____ . Of course, I had never heard of the guy. At thispoint I usually hang up, because I have heard this crap before -- it isa common pitch. Its pretty clear to me now that this is what he is doing:Trying to imply that we have some kind of relationship we actually don t have. Or worse...Trying to convince me that he touted stock A six months ago, so nowhe can tell me stock A has gone up in price. Many reputable brokersbuilt their reputation by cold calling people and saying: Watch these3 stocks and see how they do and I will call you back in 6 months. That way, you can evaluate their stock picking without risk. Themodern sleazy approach is to pick a stock that has gone up a lot in thelast 6 months, and then call some harried business person and pretend you called them with that pick 6 months ago, hoping that they will give you the benefit of the doubt.The call just went downhill from there. I hung up after his discussion of throwing Molotov cocktails into the cars of people he doesn t like. That was right after I asked him if Tony Soprano was standing beside him listening in on the call.Anyway, beware. The guy today called me and asked me if I remembered him calling 6 months ago predicting the downturn in the mortgage market and the crash of the financial stocks. You are not crazy - no matter how certain the guy seems, you really did not talk to him 6 months ago.By the way, I am not the only one getting this pitch. Ed Moed got the same pitch from the same script from the same company. Many of his commenters share similar experiences.Update: Wow, they sure do like Mitt Romney over at Olympia Asset Management. I m sure there was no arm-twisting here, when every single employee of the company seems to have given the max donation to the same candidate, with no breaking of ranks.Update #2: Mike Murphy, CEO of Olympia Asset Management, was a member of the [Hoffstra s] elite football team. Wow. Remember that time Hoffstra ripped through all those SEC teams? Yeah, neither do I. Anyway, this achievement does not hold a candle to the fact that I was once captain of Princeton Tower Club s elite intramural coed field hockey team.Google s got a new little widget one can embed in a custom 404 error page that looks like this. Its cool because in addition to a search box, it claims to be able to provide the user the closest matching page in cases of typos. I am playing around with it for several of my sites, though I don t think it is an option for the blogs -- I am pretty sure there is no way to implement a custom 404 page on a typepad search. By the way, the Google dashboard / webmaster tools site is pretty helpful, particularly if you are really interested in where and how your search traffic is coming in. I implemented a new sitemap for each of my blogs and uploaded them to google via the webmaster tools site and saw an immediate increase in search hits.I have criticized the new Typepad editor several times in the last several weeks, and I stand by those criticisms. It is just daffy to have a spell check without a skip all or add to dictionary option, for example.But Typepad has really come through for me in the last several days. Their customer service folks helped me modify some of my archive templates so that they include even my oldest posts, and the archives now have a new navigation structure. Also, I would add that for all the problems I have had with the editor, the new publishing platform I am on is much faster, and at least once has been able to help me recover unsaved material I was writing, always a pet peeve of mine when using an online editor. The technocratic compulsion is very seductive to a lot of people (including, I think, our President-elect). I can t tell you how often I hear if we just had one smart person to clean up the mess... But it never works. Just think about this auto czar idea being trial-ballooned this week. Even if you could find someone brilliant enough to perfectly discern and synthesize the diverse buying interests of a hundred million consumers, he can never have the right incentives sitting in that government job. Pretty soon he has group A insisting that he needs to mandate more fuel economy and group B that he needs to protect union jobs and group C that he needs to save jobs in Michigan in preference to Ohio and group D advocating for Ohio over Michigan and... you get the point. All rolled up with the incentive problem that if he actually solves the problem at hand, he will be out of a job, so you can bet the problem is never fully solved.My wife read the Michael Lewis article and comes back to me and says I can t imagine how you can read that and still oppose government intervention and increased regulation. I said, why? Sure, people screwed up and did stupid stuff, but no defender of capitalism promises that won t happen. Besides, what regulation would you propose? I don t know, but someone smart should have been watching them. And that is what the argument usually boils down to - someone smart should have been watching them. But lots of smart people were watching all the time. You can see one such person featured in Lewis s article. Guys run all over Wall Street looking every day for some single digit basis point spread they can make money off of. But untold wealth was just sitting there for someone who was willing to call bullshit on the whole CDO/CDS pyramid game. These guys playing this game were searching for people to bet against them. And despite this, despite untold wealth as an incentive, and companies looking for folks to take the other side of their transactions, only a handful saw the opportunity. Thousands of people steeped in the industry with near-perfect incentives to identify these issues ... did not. What, then, were our hopes of having some incremental government bureaucrats do so? Usually, after this kind of crisis, there are lines of pundits and writers ready to suggest, with perfect hindsight, new regulations to avert the prior crisis. But, tellingly, I have heard very few suggestions. Back in the 1980 s, everyone was freaked out about junk bond-financed hostile takeovers, greenmail, leveraged buyouts and the like. Since, while this activity has not disappeared, the wackiest of this behavior has really died down. Do you remember that act of Congress and subsequent regulation that really curtailed this behavior? Yeah, neither do I. The fact is that, if they are allowed -- and if they are not shielded by taxpayer-funded bailouts from the consequences of their actions -- individuals learn from their excesses. Or they go bankrupt.Step 1: Really, really screw up your industry beyond all hope of repair, while paying yourself a nice salary to do soStep 2: Claim to the world that your industry is unique and different, and failure of your company and/or industry will cause a chain reaction that will bring down the whole economy and cost the country many multiples of the bailout price tagAdvocates for the nation s automakers are warning that the collapse ofthe Big Three - or even just General Motors - could set off acatastrophic chain reaction in the economy, eliminating up to 3 millionjobs and depriving governments of more than $150 billion in tax revenue.Step 2 is obviously pulled off easier if either a) representatives from your industry run the Treasury department or b) the new President owes your unions big time for his recent victory in a critical state. For those of you just trying to keep you small business afloat, don t try this at home. No bailout will ever be forthcoming if you don t have the power to move electoral votes, but you should expect to pay for other people s bailouts.Postscript: This is funny:Automakers say bankruptcy protection is not an option because peoplewould be reluctant to make long-term car and truck purchases fromcompanies that might not last the life of their vehicles.I think if people still buy tickets on airlines that are operating out of chapter 11 (an item that has zero value if the company folds) then people will still buy cars. This is so totally lame it is tremendously irritating. As usual, Michael Lewis is a great and informative read, trying to unravel the whole subprime mortgage / CDS / CDO bundle somewhat for laymen. The article does not excerpt well, but I would summarize it in saying he identified four mistakes by the financial world. The first two I would describe as real problems but not really new mistakes -- something similar could have been said about S L s in the 1980 s. These are:A lot of subprime loans were issued to people with no freaking hope of repaying them, in an incredible general lowering of underwriting standards. (we all should remember, though, the government and the media was trumpeting this as good news -- increase in home ownership rates, blah blah blah).People who bought these securities grossly underestimated the default risks, particularly in the crappiest tranches (securitized packages of loans are resold in tiers, with a AAA tranche getting first call on any payouts, and the tail end BBB tier getting high interest rates but who takes the first principal losses if the loans default).But Lewis highlights two mistakes that are in some sense brand new. These mistakes were effectively vast increases in leverage that acted as a multiplier for the subprime problem, while simultaneously spreading the problem into the hands of AAA investors who accepted the higher returns without paying too much attention to how they were obtainedSomeone started scooping up the BBB tranches from various securities packages, bundled these together, and somehow got a ratings agency to declare that the top 60% tranche of these repackaged dog turds were AAA. Credit default swaps, originally insurance policies on loan portfolios, turned into a sort of futures market on subprime mortgage packages. But, unlike futures markets, say in oil, where the futures trading volume are generally well under the total volumes of the underlying commodity flowing around the world, CDS values grew to as much as 100x the underlying commodity volume (in this case subprime mortgage securities). CDS s went from a risk-management tool to a naked side-bet.This is interesting stuff, and it was really only reading this piece that I think I started to understand #4 above (though if readers think I am describing this wrong, let me know). All of this leads me to a few thoughts:Nothing about this convinces me any of these firms need to be saved or bailed out. Let them die. Maybe the guys who rebuild the industry in their place will be smarter and more careful. The country is going to face a recession whether Wall Street is bailed out or not -- too much (paper) value disappeared from consumer s net worths (or their perceptions of their net worth) for that not to be the case. I lived through Texas in the 1980s when the S L industry went bust almost to the last institution. Nearly every one of the top 10 banks in the state went into FDIC recievership. I have seen people observe that this is an indictment of capitalism because so many people made such bad mistakes. Sure. No one said capitalism is a gaurantee against stupidity, or even fraud. The difference is that the consequences of said stupidity and fraud have to be less in a free market system than if the same people had the power of cersion via government. In a free market, these guys will fail and be wiped out and get washed away. The people who they drag down may consider themselves to be innocent, but they participated of their own free will -- if they did not understand what they were doing, that is their problem. In a statist system, you still have mistakes like this, but they are infinitely more catastrophic, as the stakes in play are often higher. And the people who made the mistakes are never punished financially, because they are in charge of the machinery of state (or friends of those in charge). They make damn sure the power of the state is used to make everyone else pay for their mistake, kind of like ... this $700 billion bailout.Lewis seems to have a hypothesis that the main system change that allowed all this to happen was the shift in ownership structure from partnerships to publicly-held corporations. And certainly you do get some added agency risks with this, though I find this explanation a bit shallow. I do think that folks with money are going to approach Wall Street experts and rating agencies with a lot more skepticism for a long time, and that can t be a bad thing.The opportunity really exists for someone smart to start a brand new rating agency from scratch. The only reason the current ones won t get wept away is simply that there are not many alternatives right now. Warren Buffett should partner with someone well-connected with the new administration (Maybe Larry Summers, since there is no way he will survive a confirmation hearing with his men-are-from-large-standard-deviations-women-are-from-narrow-distributions baggage.)Lewis is unfair in depicting all the mortgage lenders as predatory. I am sure some were cheats, but remember that as far as Congress, the Administration, the Federal Government, and the media were concerned, these lenders making subprime loans were doing God s work -- they were expanding home ownership and bringing the dream of owning a home to poor people historically redlined, blah blah blah. It is only with hindsight that we demonize them for doing the wrong thing -- at the time, absolutely everyone on in the country was pushing them to do exactly what they did. This is also why Democrats struggle to suggest a resposive regulatory package to this whole mess, as any real reform would have to address minimum underwriting standards, which in turn would have the direct effect of limiting lending to the poor, an outcome with which no Democrat wants to be associated.Update: Just to be clear, as I have said before, this is about half of what happened. There are really two stories, and usually authors focus on one or the other. Story 1 is the steps taken by the Federal Government (Fannie, Freddie, Community Reinvestment Act, mortgage interest deduction, low interest rates) that fueled the housing bubble and the expansion of credit to questionable borrowers. It is described here, among other places. Story 2 is the one above, how private firms decided not only to purchase these questionable loans made on bubble-inflated assets, but to leverage these assets up to staggering levels. Activists are always making exaggerated statements on current problems and extrapolate these into forecasts of doom. One thing activists really, really hate is when people come back later and hold them accountable for these forecasts. You can see it as NASA officials squirm and fire off condescension at skeptics who have the temerity to actually check their global warming forecasts against actual temperatures.If I had a newspaper, I d have a special regular feature where I dig back 10-20 years in my archives to find such forecasts of doom and check them against reality (actually, if I had a paper, I would not allow activist s press releases to show up virtually unedited as news stories, but that is another matter). Heck, I could have a regular feature just reality-checking old Paul Ehrlich forecasts.Well, I don t have a newspaper, but I do have a blog, and this is a new feature I am working on. I am still trying to play with various search engines and news libraries (such as the NY Times) to see if I can come up with some kind of query format that efficiently digs up such predictions that are at least 10 years old. I am still a little stumped on this, but I am working on it.But, as a sort of beta-test of the feature, one such comparison fell into my lap today. I remember my feminist wife reading a book published in 1994 called Failing at Fairness. This work was a big, big deal at the time. Media such as the NY Times fawned on it. I will let a 1994 review on the Society for Women Engineers site summarize the book:Failing at Fairness: How American Schools Cheat Girls eloquently describes theresults of years ofresearch into sexism in schools. The study began as an examinationof gender bias in textbooks, and evolved into a decade of painstakingclassroom observation uncovering a hidden curriculum in classroominteraction. Authors Myra and David Sadker present a compellingtale of gender bias in education at all levels.Taken at face value, the book more than proves the point of the subtitle:our schools cheat girls out of an education equal to that received by boys.The authors do an excellent job of pointing out some of the more subtleways of favoring boys over girls. However, so many descriptions ofincidents of sexism -- blatant, subtle, by old teachers, young teachers,male teachers, female teachers, and even by one of the Sadkers own trained researchers -- are included that it can seem like overkill attimes. In addition, the wealth of statistics can be overwhelming, and yes,even slightly depressing.One of the more horrifying aspects of Failing at Fairness is the discussionabout standardized tests, their historical deliberate design as culturally biased for exclusionary purposes, and the dive in the scores received by girlsas they progress through their education.Current standardized test administrators claim to be more sensitiveto cultural prejudices in today s tests, although minority students stillscore less than white students (at least on the SAT). Also, the bookstates quite plainly, Regardless of ethnic or racial background, allAmerican girls share a common bond: a gender gap in test performance thatleaves them behind the boys. The prevailing opinion of the discussion groupis that the tests are still exclusionary; they are not measuring achievement,but are rather reflecting the way students are taught. I don t doubt that they found their share of anecdotal issues. I am sure I could find them today. But their overall premise that girls were getting hosed by primary education and that standardized tests were structured to exclude girls from college education made no sense even at the time the book was published: The chart is from Mark Perry, and he shows a similar picture for bachelor s degrees, where women blew past men in 1981, and in PHDs, where women passed men in 2006. People would laugh at this book today, as most discussion is about under-performance of boys.I don t know the authors, but I would interpret this as the classic inability of activists to declare victory. I am fairly certain that their hypothesis was far more correct in 1969 than in 1994. But society really went through a step-change in the 1970s vis a vis attitudes about females. The previous generation of women s activists did great work to make these issues plain and help lead change in societal attitudes. But activists have a really hard time declaring victory. From a quite personal standpoint, declaring victory as an activist is exactly the same as walking into your boss and telling him that the company really doesn t need your job position. Money, prestige, academic advancement, and attention, and (self-esteem, for certain types of people) are all tied to there being a major problem. If there is no longer a big problem, then all this stuff goes away.I post most of my more detailed climate work over at my other blog. But I wanted to repost here something I wrote in response to a number of request for a brief version of what is driving global temperatures. My sense is that medium tolong scale 20th century temperature trends can be explained mostlythrough three drivers:1. A cyclical variation driven by multi-decade oceanic cycles like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO):2. Changes in solar output, either directly asincreased heating or indirectly via a variety of theories on thingslike cosmic rays and cloud formation:3. A long term trend of up to +0.05C per decade that may include a CO2-warming component. I am willing to posit a CO2 impact net of feedbacks of perhaps 0.5-1.0C over the next century. This may appear low, but is the only scale of number reasonably supported by history. Any higher number would result in temperatures way too highhistorically. And even assuming a number this high runs into thefollowing problem: There was probably a trend of about this magnitudeemerging from the little ice age 200+ years ago and extending into the20th century. You can see it in the glacier numbers below: (source)Those that want to assign the temperature trend, once thesun and the PDO are removed, post-1950 to CO2, need to explain whateffect was causing the nearly exact same trend from 1800-1950, and whythat trend conveniently switched off at the exact moment man s CO2takes over. In the context of the glacier chart, what was causing theglaciers to retreat in 1880, and why is that effect not the one at worktoday? With evidence that the PDO has reversed to its cool phase and that the sun may be shifting into low gear, I think it is reasonable to posit warming no more than 0.5-1.0C over the next century. For those who have not seen it, Roy Spencer has a new paper on the PDO, clouds and temperature history. My video on why climate models overstate future warming through absurd assumptions of high positive feedbacks is here.Don Boudreax shares this leftish view of the auto bailout from Pat Garofalo:More importantly though - as Pelosi and Reid said - “federal aid shouldcome with ’strong conditions,’ such as requirements that car makersbuild more fuel-efficient vehicles.” Bill Scher at OurFuture writes,“With the auto industry in dire straits, we taxpayers have maximumleverage to demand the cars necessary to help lower energy costs, cut carbon emissions and reduce our dependency on foreign oil.”So, uh, only when the government gets involved do consumers have any leverage with producers in terms of what products they produce? Hello? I m sure Circuit City execs will be relieved to hear this.In free markets, consumers have all the leverage in determining perhaps not what gets produced, but at least what gets sold in any marketplace. Producers who are unable to match what they produce to what consumers buy eventually go bankrupt. In fact, it is this process of consumers exercising their leverage with GM that Congress is attempting to interrupt with a bailout. Consumers are telling GM loud and clear that GM is not making the cars at the price points they want. Unable to do so, GM will likely fail. This failure will result either in 1) GM, under bankruptcy protection, shedding any number of constraints that are preventing it from making what the consumers want or 2) GM liquidating its production assets to other owner/management groups who can do a better job with them.This quote is a great example of the technocratic bent many leading Democrats bring to economics. What these guys are asking for is not leverage for consumers, but leverage for a few Democratic technocrats to makeover the auto industry the way they want it. People like Nancy Pelosi who would never in a million years be given the keys to a manufacturing corporation by a sane ownership group can effectively grab that jobs via the leverage her seat in Congress gives her.Postscript: Garofalo adds:Podesta added that “the auto industry directly employs about 250,000 peopleand if you think about the ripple effects, they are the backbone of ourmanufacturing economy.” Indeed, according to estimates, one in 12 U.S. jobs is tied to car manufacturing, and a bailout of the industry could help boost the U.S.’s ailing manufacturing sector.A couple of points. First, a GM bankruptcy is hugely, enormously unlikely to mean the whole company is just shut down. If you have flown in the last 10 years, unless you have favored only Southwest Airlines, you probably have traveled on a carrier in chapter 11. That s what chapter 11 is - a breathing space while the company continues to operate but is able to restructure its liabilities. Personally, I would love to see the company go chapter 7 and have a new wave of innovative people take over the assets and see what they could do with them. But it is not going to happen. GM may shed jobs over the next year, but they are going to do so anyway in the teeth of a recession, not because they went bankrupt.Podesta must know that the issue in a bankruptcy will not be jobs, but labor contracts (airlines have practically patented the chapter 11 vehicle for renegotiating union contracts). Most GM manufacturing employees would probably keep their jobs through a bankruptcy, but they may well lose their contract that says they get paid $75.86 an hour with 34.5 days a year of paid leave. Garofalo and Podesta are shilling for the union over wage bargaining, not jobs.The other observation I want to make is to ask why the loss of these 250,000 jobs is going to be so much worse than the loss of 500,000 jobs over the last several years. I know parts of Michigan suffered, but Podesta is claiming knock-on effects for the whole country. So where were they?This is a reprise of a much older post, but it struck me as fairly timely.I had a conversation the other day with a person I can best describe as a well-meaning technocrat. Though I am not sure he would put it this baldly, he tends to support a government by smart people imposing superior solutions on the sub-optimizing masses. He was lamenting that allowing a company like GM to die is dumb, and that a little bit of intelligent management would save all those GM jobs and assets. Though we did not discuss specifics, I presume in his model the government would have some role in this new intelligent design (I guess like it had in Amtrak?)There are lots of sophisticated academic models for the corporation. I have even studied a few. Here is my simple one: A corporation has physical plant (like factories) and workers of various skill levels who have productive potential. These physical and human assets are overlaid with what we generally shortcut as management but which includes not just the actual humans currently managing the company but the organization approach, the culture, the management processes, its systems, the traditions, its contracts, its unions, the intellectual property, etc. etc. In fact, by calling all this summed together management , we falsely create the impression that it can easily be changed out, by firing the overpaid bums and getting new smarter guys. This is not the case - Just ask Ross Perot. You could fire the top 20 guys at GM and replace them all with the consensus all-brilliant team and I still am not sure they could fix it. All these management factors, from the managers themselves to process to history to culture could better be called the corporate DNA*. And DNA is very hard to change. Walmart may be freaking brilliant at what they do, but demand that they change tomorrow to an upscale retailer marketing fashion products to teenage girls, and I don t think they would ever get there. Its just too much change in the DNA. Yeah, you could hire some ex Merry-go-round** executives, but you still have a culture aimed at big box low prices, a logistics system and infrastructure aimed at doing same, absolutely no history or knowledge of fashion, etc. etc. I would bet you any amount of money I could get to the GAP faster starting from scratch than starting from Walmart. For example, many folks (like me) greatly prefer Target over Walmart because Target is a slightly nicer, more relaxing place to shop. And even this small difference may ultimately confound Walmart. Even this very incremental need to add some aesthetics to their experience may overtax their DNA.Corporate DNA acts as a value multiplier. The best corporate DNA has a multiplier greater than one, meaning that it increases the value of the people and physical assets in the corporation. When I was at a company called Emerson Electric (an industrial conglomerate, not the consumer electronics guys) they were famous in the business world for having a corporate DNA that added value to certain types of industrial companies through cost reduction and intelligent investment. Emerson s management, though, was always aware of the limits of their DNA, and paid careful attention to where their DNA would have a multiplier effect and where it would not. Every company that has ever grown rapidly has had a DNA that provided a multiplier greater than one... for a while.But things change. Sometimes that change is slow, like a creeping climate change, or sometimes it is rapid, like the dinosaur-killing comet. DNA that was robust no longer matches what the market needs, or some other entity with better DNA comes along and out-competes you. When this happens, when a corporation becomes senescent, when its DNA is out of date, then its multiplier slips below one. The corporation is killing the value of its assets. Smart people are made stupid by a bad organization and systems and culture. In the case of GM, hordes of brilliant engineers teamed with highly-skilled production workers and modern robotic manufacturing plants are turning out cars no one wants, at prices no one wants to pay.Changing your DNA is tough. It is sometimes possible, with the right managers and a crisis mentality, to evolve DNA over a period of 20-30 years. One could argue that GE did this, avoiding becoming an old-industry dinosaur. GM has had a 30 year window (dating from the mid-seventies oil price rise and influx of imported cars) to make a change, and it has not been enough. GM s DNA was programmed to make big, ugly (IMO) cars, and that is what it has continued to do. If its leaders were not able or willing to change its DNA over the last 30 years, no one, no matter how brilliant, is going to do it in the next 2-3.So what if GM dies? Letting the GM s of the world die is one of the best possible things we can do for our economy and the wealth of our nation. Assuming GM s DNA has a less than one multiplier, then releasing GM s assets from GM s control actually increases value. Talented engineers, after some admittedly painful personal dislocation, find jobs designing things people want and value. Their output has more value, which in the long run helps everyone, including themselves.The alternative to not letting GM die is, well, Europe (and Japan). A LOT of Europe s productive assets are locked up in a few very large corporations with close ties to the state which are not allowed to fail, which are subsidized, protected from competition, etc. In conjunction with European laws that limit labor mobility, protecting corporate dinosaurs has locked all of Europe s most productive human and physical assets into organizations with DNA multipliers less than one. I don t know if GM will fail (but a lot of other people have opinions) but if it does, I am confident that the end result will be positive for America.* Those who accuse me of being more influenced by Neal Stephenson s Snow Crash than Harvard Business School may be correct.** Gratuitous reference aimed at forty-somethings who used to hang out at the mall. In my town, Merry-go-round was the place teenage girls went if they wanted to dress like, uh, teenage girls. I am pretty sure the store went bust a while back.Congressional Democrats announced today that they had agreed to a bailout plan for Republicans after last week s devastating election results. While exact details are unavailable, sources tell us that the Republicans will be given 4 seats in the Senate and 15 in the House. Nancy Pelosi said in a statement today: We ve established pretty clearly over the last several months that failed strategies and management should not necessarily have to result in losses in market share, particularly for well-connected Washington insiders. Asked for comment, Democratic strategist James Carville was giddy. This is brilliant. It really doesn t give up anything of substance to the Republicans. But it will sap the energy from the Republican Party for making any substantial changes, and make it more likely they will continue the failed strategies that led to this most recent loss. After their recent failures, the Republicans were on the verge of being forced to reinvent their whole organization. This bailout should reduce the likelihood of that substantially. When asked if bailouts of AIG, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Bear Stearns wouldn t similarly reduce the urgency to change failed approaches, Carville answered no comment. A while back, when I discussed the stagnating wage myth, I observed that folks spreading this meme were careful to show figures only for cash wages, and not for total compensation. In the period from 2000-2006, which is the typical period critics focus on (in part because it implies blame on the Bush administration, and in part because it lets them measure economic peak to trough) there has been a substantial shift in compensation mix from cash to non-cash benefits, including health care and paid time off. Ignoring these components is particularly disingenuous given that many of these same critics have been long-time supporters of more paid time off and better company-funded health care.As an example, this data (courtesy of Mark Perry) on the Big 3 automakers contracts is telling. In 2000 (table page 3) it shows cash wages per hour worked at $22.71 and total comp at $43.57. In 2006, the most recent year of data, it shows cash wages per hour worked at $29.15 and total comp at $75.86. So, while cash wages per hour have increased about 4.25% compounded each year, total compensation has increased more than twice as fast, at 9.7% a year. That latter increase is due both to a rapid rise in health care expenditures for employees as well as an increase in paid day off to 34.5 a year. (by the way, if you are wondering why the UAW is fighting so hard for a government bailout, look no further than jobs with $75.86 an hour total comp. and seven weeks a year of paid days off.)Last week I quoted from the Obama transition site:The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order tomeet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expandnational service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and willcreate a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools,as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps.Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developinga plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school andhigh school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.Now, it says this:Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by setting agoal that all middle school and high school students do 50 hours ofcommunity service a year and by developing a plan so that all collegestudents who conduct 100 hours of community service receive a universaland fully refundable tax credit ensuring that the first $4,000 of theircollege education is completely free. Ben Smith and others argue that Obama never said it was mandatory. Fortunately, I got a screen shot of the require language before the Obama department of Truth got to the page (click for full size): Thanks to Walter Olson for bringing the swap to my attention.Postscript: 100 hours for $4000 is a pretty good deal. Not many private sector employers offering $40 an hour to recent high school grads. Everyone out there OK with the government paying the equivalent of $80,000 a year salaries to 18-year-olds for sorting food at the food bank?Refresher: It seems that some basic definitions are in order. If one is required to work at a certain task, he is not a volunteer. If one is paid $4000 for 100 hours of labor, he is not a volunteer. A volunteer is someone who works of his or her own free will without monetary compensation, solely for the satisfaction of helping out.Well, we have upheld the ban on payday loans here in Arizona. The payday-loan industry, which flourished this past decade onArizonans almost-insatiable need for quick, short-term loansregardless of their high interest rates, may have to close down inArizona unless state lawmakers can be persuaded to ignore voters wishes.Voters last week overwhelmingly rejected Proposition 200, a ballotinitiative financed and written by the loan companies to allow them tocontinue charging high interest rates on small loans. That decisionplaced Arizona among a growing number of states that have effectivelyshut down the payday lenders. So, payday loans from company A to person B are really popular with both A B, and the industry has flourished. But persons C, who don t participate in this market, have decided that, for their own good, A B need to stop engaging in this behavior. One such third party explains it this way:Sen. Debbie McCune Davis, D-Phoenix, opposed Prop. 200 and hassteadfastly fought payday lenders. She sees no need to let paydaylenders continue to charge higher interest rates than other lenders.Her and voter s actions have effectively limited payday loan companies to charging total interest and fees equivalent to no more than 36% annual interest. OK, you say, this seems like a really high rate. That should be enough, right? Well, the problem comes with fixed costs and loan size. Lets look at an example.A typical payday loan size and term is about $400 for 18 days (pdf). A typical fee for such a loan is $50, which includes both fixed costs and interest. Wow, annualized that is 250%. Usurious! So would you personally go out and get a payday loan? No way! And that is why voters vote to ban them - they are not good for me personally, so they must not be good for anyone else.But here is the problem. How do you maintain a storefront and trained people and all the documentation and collection apparatus for less than $50? The same loan at 36% would allow a fee of only $7.20. That barely even covers paying someone to originate the loan at the counter, much less pay interest and a risk premium. Try going to the bank and getting a home loan or some other type of loan for only a $50 fee. Granted those loans are more complicated, but in turn you will likely get charged hundred and probably thousands of dollars in fees. There is a large fixed cost component to the act of lending which we tend to ignore on larger loans, but is there none-the-less. In fact, just try to go to a bank and get a loan for $400 at all. They don t make them, outside of the credit card industry, which solves this problem in part through economies of scale and in part through cost-shifting costs to merchants, options not really available to payday loan companies.And so far, we are only talking about fixed costs, not the underwriting risk of extending loans to about any person who wanders in the door and can sign his/her name. Anyone remember sub-prime mortgages? Maybe there is a justification for large risk premiums, after all, on loans to under-qualified borrowers. Particularly when you consider that most payday loan customers could not qualify even for a sub-prime mortgage.The best equivalent to a payday loan offered by banks is overdraft protection, where the bank will go ahead and pay out on checks where there are insufficient funds, though they will charge a $20-$30 fee per check paid. As you can see, these fees are very similar in magnitude to those charged by payday loan companies, particularly when you consider that these fees are generally charged on checks that average about $150. Also, folks who get one overdraft fee usually get several in a row. People are willing to pay these fees because they are in fact lower than the fees of actually having a check bounce, which can incur similar fees from merchants as well as hurting one s credit. So, you just had to write three checks to get the power and water and telephone turned on, and you are pretty sure the money is not there in your checking account. You are facing $80 in bounced-check (NSF) fees or overdraft fees. Now might you consider a $400 loan for a $50 fee? Well, probably the answer is still no, you would put it on your credit cards. But everyone doesn t have credit cards, or doesn t qualify for them, or don t have a lifestyle that allows for them. Where do they go, short of Tony Soprano?Update: A reader sent me a link to this report, comparing payday loan rates to overdraft protection, and finding them of similar magnitude. The author calculates an average $28.61 overdraft fee on an average $155 bounced check yields an APR of 478%. There is a fixed cost to lending, and small very short term loans cost a lot of money, no matter how you get them.I will remind folks not to be fooled by 18% or 23% rates on credit cards and set that as the market rate for small loans. First, this misses annual fees for the cards. But more importantly, it misses merchant fees. Merchants pay between 2.5% and 3.5% of everything you charge to the credit card companies. This helps to subsidize rates and, particularly, subsidize the fixed costs of small lending transactions.From Jim Moran of Virginia:We have been guided by a Republican administration who believes in thesimplistic notion that people who have wealth are entitled to keep itand they have an antipathy towards redistributing wealth and they may be able to sustain it for a while but it doesn’t work in the long run.Remember, though, calling them socialists is racist. Video here.Channel surfing last night, I ran into the Running Man, an unfortunate movie adaption of a pretty good Steven King (as Richard Bachman) book. For those who have seen one and not the other, they have little in common with each other. What I hadn t realized before was just how bizarre the casting for this movie was -- Richard Dawson, the cheesy game show host as a ... cheesy game show host. Jim Brown, Dweezil Zappa and Mick Fleetwood? The latter, by the way, as himself but in the future. Whatever.But the best part is that the movie has two United States governors in substantial roles -- Arnold Schwarzenegger (California) in the title role and Jesse Ventura (Minnesota) as one of the stalkers trying to kill Arnold. Is this a great country or what?Do ya ll know any others? I know Sonny Bono did a Love Boat guest appearance, so there must have been two Congressmen in one TV episode (with Fred Grandy of Iowa). There may be a Fred Thompson +1 out there I can t think of. And of course there were probably some Ronald Reagan matchups, but that is before my time.Update: Rob reminds me that the Ventura-Schwarzenegger team can also be found in Predator. As mentioned in the updates to this earlier post, the Obama transition web site has, at least temporarily, purged out all the real content they had up about specific programs and legislative goals. So, as a public service, I will help fill this information gap by re-posting an article I wrote about 9 months ago on the Patriot Employer Act sponsored by Barrack Obama and likely a kernel for early 2009 legislative action:Posted 2/13/2008: It turns out, according to Barrack Obama, (who hales from the partythat doesn t believe in questioning anyone s patriotism) that I am nota Patriot Employer. This is from the text of Senate Bill S. 1945of which he is a co-sponsor (My snark is interspersed in italics): Patriot Employers are to be given tax breaks over unpatriotic employers(I presume this means that their tax rates will be raised less in anObama presidency than those of other folks) with patriot employers defined as such:(b) Patriot Employer- For purposes of subsection (a), the term`Patriot employer means, with respect to any taxable year, anytaxpayer which-- `(1) maintains its headquarters in the United States if the taxpayer has ever been headquartered in the United States,OK, I guess I can comply with this. Though I am not sure thebest way to begin an Obama kindler gentler foreign policy is to tellthe nations of the world that we will be taxing their company s incomein the US at a higher rate than our own companies. `(2) pays at least 60 percent of each employee s health care premiums,So the #1 determinant of patriotism is not commitment toindividual rights but paying 60% of employee health care costs. Iguess I am so unpatrioticAnd, just from a practical standpoint,90% of my employees are seasonal, hired for about 4 months of theyear. To be patriotic, I have to pay their health care costs all yearlong? Also, since most of my employees are retired, they are onMedicare or an employee retirement medical plan. If they pay $0 inpremiums and I pay $0 of that, do I get credit for 60%? Maybe thegovernment can mandate a solution for zero divided by zero, like theydid for the value of pi years ago `(3) has in effect, and operates in accordance with, a policy requiring neutrality in employee organizing drives,I presume neutrality means that in a hypothetical union drive, Ido not express my opinion (and likely opposition) to said unionizationdrive? I am told that this also entails allowing card checks ratherthan hidden ballot voting. In other words, patriotism is being definedhere as 1) giving up your free speech rights and 2) opposing hiddenballot voting. Uh, right. Besides, if a union organized our company,as unlikely as that would be, I would probably have to do a Franciscod Anconia on the place. `(4) if such taxpayer employs at least 50 employees on average during the taxable year-- `(A) maintains or increases the number of full-timeworkers in the United States relative to the number of full-timeworkers outside of the United States,In other words, we don t want American companies growingoverseas. This could also be called the give up international marketshare act. This implies that it is unpatriotic for US-based Exxon toexplore for oil in Asia and that it is more patriotic to let theChinese national oil company do it. This implies that it is morepatriotic for Coke to lose market share in Germany than to gain it. This means that it is more patriotic for Mattel to buy its toys inChina from Chinese companies rather than run the factories themselves(and thereby be accountable themselves for product quality and workingconditions).This is beyond stupid. We LIKE to see US companies doing welloverseas. If we have to import our raw materials, we feel morecomfortable if it is US companies doing the extraction. Don t we? Inthe name of patriotism, do we really want to root for our domesticcompanies to fail in international markets? `(B) compensates each employee of the taxpayer atan hourly rate (or equivalent thereof) not less than an amount equal tothe Federal poverty level for a family of three for the calendar yearin which the taxable year begins divided by 2,080,90% of my workers are retired. They work for me to supplementtheir income, to live our in nature, and to stay busy. They need me topay them based on the poverty line for a family of three, why? I willtell you right now that if I had to raise wages this much, most of myemployees would quit. Many of them force me to give them fewer hoursso they can stay under the social security limits for income. I discussed what rising minimum wages often force me to do here,but just as an illustration, a $1 an hour across the board wageincrease would easily wipe out all the money I make in a year and putme into a loss position. In which case the lowered tax rate would notdo me much good anyway. `(I) requires the employer to makenonelective contributions of at least 5 percent of compensation foreach employee who is not a highly compensated employee, or `(II) requires the employer to makematching contributions of 100 percent of the elective contributions ofeach employee who is not a highly compensated employee to the extentsuch contributions do not exceed the percentage specified by the plan(not less than 5 percent) of the employee s compensation, or `(ii) a defined benefit plan which for any planyear requires the employer to make contributions on behalf of eachemployee who is not a highly compensated employee in an amount whichwill provide an accrued benefit under the plan for the plan year whichis not less than 5 percent of the employee s compensation, andUh, I am not sure why it is unpatriotic for an employee to savefor themselves, but I think 401k plans are a nice benefit. I wouldcertainly offer one except for one tiny fact - ALL MY EMPLOYEES AREALREADY RETIRED!! They are over 65. They are drawing down on theirretirement, not contributing to it.This is at the heart of the problem with all US labor law. Folks up in Illinois write laws with a picture of a steel mill in mind,and forget that employment and employees have infinite variations incircumstances and goals. So I am unpatriotic, huh. But if forcing companies tocontribute to emplee retirement plans is patriotic, why is hiring folksonce they are retired to give them extra income in retirementunpatriotic? In fact, maybe I could argue that 100% of the wages I paygo to retirement spending `(D) provides full differential salary andinsurance benefits for all National Guard and Reserve employees who arecalled for active duty, andIn other words, we of the government are not going to payour employees (ie reservists on active duty) what they are worth andare not going to give them benefits, so to be patriotic you need to doit for us. We in Congress are not really very patriotic and don tsupport the troops, so you need to do it for us.All kidding aside, I would do this in my company if it wasapplicable, but I really resent being piously told to do so by severalSenators who don t really model this behavior themselves. `(5) if such taxpayer employs less than 50 employees on average during the taxable year, either--...blah, blah. Basically the same stuff repeated, though slightly less onerous.Since when did patriotism equate to rolling over to the latest AFL-CIO wish list? I am having a blast at the Change.gov transition site for Obama, now that I have satisfied myself it is not a fake. Those who doubt that Obama has super-human powers should read this, from the Obama site:The Obama-Biden plan provides affordable, accessible health care forall Americans, builds on the existing health care system, and usesexisting providers, doctors and plans to implement the plan. Under theObama-Biden plan, patients will be able to make health care decisionswith their doctors, instead of being blocked by insurance companybureaucrats.Under the plan, if you like your current health insurance, nothingchanges, except your costs will go down by as much as $2,500 per year.If you don’t have health insurance, you will have a choice of new, affordable health insurance options.Wow - so now you can go out purchase any care you want - any tests, any procedures, whatever - and no one is going to tell you no. Everything is paid for. You have a blank check to go spend. And, by granting you an infinite supply of care, your cost is going to go down. Obama is really superman, because no one else in history has figured out how to invert the supply curve or make 2x cost less than x.You see, it s all about insurers margins. If we can just cut down on those fat margins, everyone can have full health care and a pony for less money. You doctors who are worried about health care, you will have it better too:Prevent insurers from overcharging doctors for their malpracticeinsurance and invest in proven strategies to reduce preventable medicalerrors.All these years you thought malpractice insurance costs were high because of huge malpractice court settlements that usually bore little relationship to true malpractice, well, you were wrong. Its because of the insurers and their margins. We don t have to reform malpractice tort law (which is just as well since tort lawyers were so generous with donations to our campaign), we just have to get insurers to stop overcharging doctors.To give you an idea of the absolutely huge amount of savings that can be extracted by just pounding on the insurers to give more coverage for less money, let s take a look at those outsized margins they are making. These are net profit margins reported by Google Finance for 3Q2008 of the largest health care providers and insurers:Cigna: 3.50%United Health Group: 4.56%Aetna: 3.64%WellCare: 4.08%Amerigroup: 3.51%Humana 2.56%WellPoint: 5.49%Freaking robber barons! Look at those outsized margins. No wonder we have a health care crisis. By cutting these guys margins in half, Obama expects to reduce the price of health care by 1-2%, which should be more than enough to pay for large increases in services and 30-50% price cuts.Update: Oh, its magic. That explains it.Update #2: OK, the page has come down, as have most all the pages that had any kind of policy detail or promises in them. I wish I had screen shots, but I can say everything above was cut and pasted directly form the web site. Could I make that stuff up? Too bad, there probably were another 10 blog posts in there somewhere. Update: Over the weekend, without comment, the Obama team pulled down the language below and put up new, vaguer language without the required. Discussion and a screen shot of the original is here.How do you tax people with who have no money? Why, you take their labor by force. It worked when we dragged Africans over here against their will in the 19th century, and it can work today. From the Obama transition site:The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order tomeet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expandnational service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and willcreate a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools,as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps.Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developinga plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school andhigh school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.So what was that about no tax increase for people making under $250,000? Because my guess is that most high school and college kids made close to zero, but here is Obama seeking to expropriate 50-100 hours of their labor. Sure looks like a tax to me. By law, high school kids, by DOL rules, can work up to 1200 hours per year. For kid that works every hour she can, this is about a 4% tax. Kids that work less pay a higher effective tax rate, up to infinite for kids not working at all (hey, this tax is even regressive). Also, richer kids trying to get into top colleges will be the least affected, as they are already volunteering at a level close to this, so most of the burden of this tax will fall on the poor.I remember when I was slammed by Obama supporters during the election when I said that his call for universal community service meant that he was going to mandate it. Carefully avoiding being clearer about what he meant before the election, Obama sure has not wasted any time making sure everyone understands he is talking about government coercion here, not volunteerism.PS- I thought this site was fake, because it was amazing to me to see Obama s intentions stated so baldly after he so strenuously avoided clarifying his position during the election. But the Huffpo and other sites link to this site as if it is real, so I will treat it as such.PPS - Here is Obama s pledge on taxes from the same site:Middle class families will see their taxes cut – and no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase.The typical middle class family will receive well over $1,000 in taxrelief under the Obama plan, and will pay tax rates that are 20% lowerthan they faced under President Reagan. According to the Tax PolicyCenter, the Obama plan provides three times as much tax relief formiddle class families as the McCain plan.OK, we are not going to take more money, we are just going to take your labor directly.Update: Radley Balko adds the chilling speech implications of such a program:So who gets to decide what constitutes community service ? Whogets to decide which causes and organizations will be credit-worthy,and which ones won t?Something tells me that you d be morelikely to get one of Obama s vouchers by going door to door for one ofACORN s living wage campaigns than, say, volunteering for a libertariannonprofit organization that advocates against things likegovernment-mandated community service. Obama supporters will say, no problem, we trust Obama. Hmm. The folks who wrote our Constitution designed our government assuming all politicians would be knaves. Writing laws that depend on the good intentions, fairness, correct incentives, and intellectual capacity of the government folks who run it are doomed to failure. Would Democrats have been happy to have GWB deciding what community service their kids were forced to endure? I doubt it. Well, we don t live in an autarky, and sooner or later GWB s party will be back and making exactly those decisions under such a program.For Those Who Doubted Me When I Said We Are Heading Towards A European-Style Corporate StateI predicted it here. Now see it here:House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday that Congress is considering bailing out Detroit’s Big Three automakers. Wemay need to make a statement of confidence in our auto industry, Pelosi told NPR this afternoon. We’re not saving those companies,we’re saving an industry. We’re saving an industrial technological andmanufacturing base... It’s about jobs in America. Pelosi held ameeting Monday with Democratic leaders to consider a request fromDetroit’s Big Three automakers for another $25 billion in bridgefinancing to help them survive a huge downturn in auto industry.I wrote why its better to let GM fail.So what if GM dies? Letting the GM s of the world die is one of thebest possible things we can do for our economy and the wealth of ournation. Assuming GM s DNA has a less than one multiplier, thenreleasing GM s assets from GM s control actually increases value. Talented engineers, after some admittedly painful personal dislocation,find jobs designing things people want and value. Their output hasmore value, which in the long run helps everyone, including themselves.The alternative to not letting GM die is, well, Europe (and Japan). A LOT of Europe s productive assets are locked up in a few very largecorporations with close ties to the state which are not allowed tofail, which are subsidized, protected from competition, etc. Inconjunction with European laws that limit labor mobility, protectingcorporate dinosaurs has locked all of Europe s most productive humanand physical assets into organizations with DNA multipliers less thanone. I worked for several years for AlliedSignal engines, now Honeywell, here in Phoenix. At our main engine plant here, we endured a couple of union organizing campaigns that both fell just shy of winning a position for the union. A reasonable manager might expect that under the Democrat s proposed card-check system which replaces anonymous votes with open petitions, that enough hijinx could be brought to bear to put the union over the top. I don t now if this is what they have in mind, but...Phoenix-based Honeywell Aerospace plans to move 700 manufacturing jobs from Phoenix to Mexico and the Czech Republic. Employees were notified Thursday of the cuts, which will begin inthe second quarter of 2009 and continue for three years. Most of thejob cuts are expected in the first year. Workers who asked not to be identified said the news caught employees completely off-guard.The affected jobs are at Honeywell s 34th Street facility at Sky HarborInternational Airport, where the company and its predecessors AlliedSignal and Garrett have built jet engines for almost 60 years.I think the timing just a day after election results in, and the level of surprise, are telling. Time to get this done now, before the owners have to go cap in hand to their employees to ask permission to run their business as they see fit. I thought this last bit they added brings a nice irony to the situation:The announcement came two days after Barack Obama,who has promised to take a hard line with companies that movemanufacturing jobs overseas, was elected the 44th U.S. president.Whatever that means, but it does give yet another reason to get out fast.It s fascinating that our local paper, after months of positive Obama coverage, manages to express its first printed criticism of Obama on ... the day after the election.With President-elect Barack Obama promising tougher governmentregulations on some sectors, including the financial markets, a handfulof business leaders expressed concern Wednesday. The key thing is to not choke us to death with regulation, saidIoanna Morfessis, an economic-development consultant and GreaterPhoenix Economic Council founding member. With the faltering of the financial markets and a massive federalbailout this fall, Obama and congressional Democrats, who expandedtheir majorities with an upset electorate, have called for more federaloversight on Wall Street. Obama also has called for more regulation inthe energy and health-care sectors, and Democrats could more strictlyenforce environmental rules....Morfessis said before lunch Wednesday, she received phone calls from 11entrepreneurs concerned there would be a higher premium for takingrisks or entering new markets. Incredibly, it looks like Proposition 1A in California is going to pass. This act authorizes a $9 billion dollar bond issue to start a high-speed rail passenger line from the Bay Area to the LA Area. Why do I say start. Because even the line s supporters put the minimum cost at $40 billion, so the taxpayers have authorized 22% of the line. And this is by supporters numbers. By my numbers they have likely authorized less than 10% of the line. I wonder if voters knew they were authorizing either a) $40-$100 billion, in effect, rather than $9 billion; or b) a $9 billion white elephant of a rail line that ends up incomplete and going nowhere or c) something that is not really high speed rail and therefore not different from Amtrak service that already exists. (What are you talking about Coyote, government transit people would never begin a project without full funding and leave an orphaned white elephant in place.)The state that makes up a huge percentage of the current mortgage andforeclosure problem seems to not have learned its lesson aboutborrowing.I am generally an optimistic guy, but I wonder if we have gotten to the point where there is a large subset of the population for whom voting is solely for the purposes of boosting self-esteem. I feel good when I support public transit, so I vote for Prop 1A, despite the fact there is no possible way it will ever deliver any public transit.TJIC has the silver lining nailed for libertarians:Let us not forget the good news from the election: one statist, speech limiting, freedom-agnostic candidate lost.I m kind of ambivalent this morning - I knew in advance that freedom was going to lose again in this election, no matter what the outcome.If I am depressed this morning, it is more about propositions and side issues than about the President and Congress. Had this been a leftward shift in the county, I could have been satisfied that at least losses in freedom in one area might be substituted by gains in others (though for me personally, changes in economic freedom tend to have far more direct and immediate impact than changes in social freedoms). But the only pattern I could see yesterday was not leftward but government-ward. In the same states where Democratic candidates won with economic interventionist messages, Constitutional bans on gay marriage also won by sizable majorities. In Arizona, gay marriage was banned, an initiative to limit future tax increases was defeated, an initiative to protect health care choice was defeated, an initiative to soften last year s anti-immigrant legislation was defeated, and a payday loan ban was confirmed. The voting in some way defies a traditional left-right explanation and is only consistent in that it was almost all the reverse of the libertarian position. And to make the results even more irrational, nearly the biggest defeat of any ballot initiative in Arizona was for a pay increase for state legislators -- the voters seem to like government but don t trust or respect the individuals employed there.After the last Bush election, a number of leftish folks claimed they were moving to Canada or France or wherever. But that s the problem for libertarians in this country -- there is not place to run. Those who want to run away to a country with a more controlling government have 180 or so choices. Those of us who seek more freedom have approximately none. Update: This slight paraphrase from the movie Zoolander encapsulates my thought on this election:They re the same! Doesn t anybody notice this? I feel like I m taking crazy pills! I am actually less frightened by the candidates than by people who seem to get so excited by one or the other of them.I have voted in a lot of different states, but the way we do it here in my current district seems to work well. I got my ID checked against the voting record -- the lady may an explicit check to make sure the addresses matched. Then I got a paper ballot and a black magic marker. Next to each name is an arrow pointing to the name with a gap in it. One fills in and completes the arrow pointing to the candidate one is voting for. Then, when done, the voter takes the ballot to a machine that looks like a big shredder. She/he feeds the ballot into the slot, and the ballot is automatically read and counted right there. There is a LED readout on the front with a total ballot count that increments by one if the ballot is read correctly, providing a psychologically satisfying feeling that one s vote has been counted. At the end of the day no further counting is required, and I presume they pull the vote counts out electronically or with some kind of summary report. The ballots stay in a locked vault in the scanner and provide a paper trail if the count has to be checked later. By the way, no line at all. Glad I didn t wait 2+ hours last weekend to vote early in order to avoid the lines. One has to wonder at the decision-making ability of folks who waited hours to vote early to avoid lines that couldn t possibly be any longer on election day. Good to see such folks out voting ;=)At least in economic policy, progressives like Barrack Obama are deeply conservative. They want industries, jobs, real earnings, and class positions to be stable and predictable. No one ever believes me when I say this, but look at the policies. Trade protectionism protects current industry incumbents and workers, at the cost of poorer future performance due to lack of competition. Unions attempt to lock in current jobs through numerous controls on work rules, slow or stop changes in technology and work processes that have the effect of eventually castrating the company (think GM). Socialized medicine tries to lock in the current standard of care for everyone, while reducing the possibility of future improvements. Redistribution attempts to lock in the current standard of living for everyone while reducing the possibility of future improvements. I discussed this more European model last week.I like how Shannon Love summarized it in the context of Obama:Obama has no concept of business as a creative andexperimental endeavor. On some deep unconscious level, he assumes thatmaterial wealth is something akin to a natural phenomenon for which nogroup of humans can take credit. Therefore, he sees distribution as theonly serious economic issue and ignores how politics interferes withthe actual process of wealth creation.Though to be fair, I am not sure McCain or GWB understand this either. (or here in 2005)I always laughed at Democrats that tried to woo me to their party. NowI laugh at Republicans too. MoveOn may get mileage out of attackingBush, but he has done more for the left/liberal cause than Clinton. Clinton had NAFTA, welfare reform, and (moderated by an aggresiveRepublican Congress) fiscal sanity.Should I Vote? Yes, probably. Many libertarians refuse to vote. They refuse to be party to a choice between Coke-brand statism and Pepsi-brand statism. I sympathize, and respect their decision. You won t hear rants form me about the beauty of the right to vote. But I see two reasons for libertarians to vote. One is to find ways to register our existence, to try to communicate that just because we don t riot at WTO meetings doesn t mean that a great well of dissatisfaction does not exist among us. The second reason is ballot initiatives. While candidate A and B may be equally bad on the freedom scale, there is often a right answer for protecting freedom in the ballot initiatives, and they need your vote.President: Libertarian Party Guy. Yeah, I know his name is Bob Barr. I don t even care. I am casting the vote for the idea, not the guy, in hopes that the Republicans, as they rebuild themselves over the next 2 years, might notice there are some libertarians out there looking for a home. It would be nice to be as excited about a politician as some folks are about Obama, but really, they are excited by their own vision, not his. We really know little about him, but my sense is that his every instinct about government run counter to mine. McCain is hardly better, perhaps going Obama one further by matching him on tax increases and economic nuttiness but also throwing in a dollop of conservative restrictions on non-economic civil liberties. And I think many of us are exhausted by the prospect of another 4 years of foreign-policy-as-penis-extension that McCain promises.US Congress: John Shadegg. If it weren t for Jeff Flake and Ron Paul, I would say Shadegg is about the best we libertarians can hope for of a major party candidate. Not perfect (he was one of the ones who knuckled under on the second bailout vote) but pretty good.County Sheriff and City Attorney: Whoever is running against Joe Arpaio and Andrew Thomas. Seriously. I don t even know their names and I am voting for them. I am sick and tired of Arpaio s schtick (index of articles here). Anyone who can go on a crime sweep into the 99% all-anglo tony suburb of Fountain Hills and come out with arrestees who are 75% Hispanic is not even trying to be fair. Andrew Thomas has had Arpaio s back for years, fighting many (losing) civil rights cases for him and prosecuting his critics in the media. PROP. 100 Protect Our Homes: Yes. I am not sure this is even that relevant. Prevents the imposition of taxes or fees on the sale of real estate (e.g. no real estate sales tax). Not sure if this is even a threat, but I will usually vote to limit the power of government.PROP. 101 Medical Choice for Arizona: Yes. This proposition would effectively prevent state health care laws like that in Massachusetts that require medical coverage and mandate certain types of medical coverage. In Massachusetts, my current insurance plan (which I pay for and did a lot of research to uncover) is illegal (because it has a higher deductible that politicians want to allow).PROP. 102 Marriage: Big No. I don t expect to change anyone s mind on this, but I am not in the least threatened by civil marriages of gays, and in fact have a number of friends and family members who have taken advantage of the brief window of opportunity in California to get married to their partner. I am not sure how this can be a threat to me -- last I checked, my marriage is as strong today as it was before gay marriage was allowed. This issue is sort of the conservative equivalent of the left s obsession with income inequality. Conservatives tell folks (rightly) that they should be concerned with their own quality of life and not feel somehow worse if there are people who are wealthier. But, then they tell us all our marriages are going to be worse because somebody over there who we never will meet is going to marry someone of the same sex.PROP. 105 Majority Rules — Let the People Decide: Haven t Decided. This is a weird one. This would require propositions raising taxes to be passed only if the yes votes they receive equate to 50+% of the total registered voting population, not just of the people who voted that day. Basically, it makes it impossible to have tax increases in propositions, which I like. But it is a terrible precedent -- this is simply not how we count elections. In particular, the registered voter number is almost meaningless. Requiring a super-majority of those voting would be much better law. I may well vote yes, because I suspect the next 2 years are going to be a heyday of taxation, but I will sort of feel guilty about it.PROP. 200 Payday Loan Reform Act. Yes. Would un-ban payday loan companies in Arizona. I have always supported choice, even for the poor and unsophisticated. Payday loans are expensive, but as we have learned from subprime loans, maybe credit to borrowers with no income or assets should be expensive. More here.PROP. 201 Homeowner’s Bill of Rights. No. Created by a pissed off union in a fit of pique as an FU to homebuilders. Mandates decade-long warranties on homes, and offers a myriad of opportunities for trial lawyer hijinx. And what problem is it solving? PROP. 202 Stop Illegal Hiring Act. Yes, I think. Again, this is one of those confusingly worded initiates that like to use triple negatives. But I believe it is a softening of the Immigration / hiring law that I have long opposed. (related: E-Verify reviewed here) PROP. 300 State Legislators’ Salaries. No. Changed my mind on this. At first, I thought current salaries were unreasonably low. But now I think that they should all go out and get real jobs, and make the legislature part-time. Maybe they ll meet less often.This caught my eye today:Hostess Twinkies are becoming the latest product remade and repackaged into 100-calorie snack packsNo word on how small they will be. This had to be one of the great marketing blinding glimpses of the obvious:Hostess launched its 100 calorie cupcakes in 2007, but held off onmaking a version of the Twinkie because the product was a favoriteoverall, not just among those looking for low-cal optionsGet out of town. Who would have thought that Twinkies were not a favorite for those looking for low-cal options.I am happy to see that Barrack Obama is not entirely in reality-avoidance mode with his climate policy:You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad.Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know,natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever theindustry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. Thatwill cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.To folks with any kind of background in economics, this has to be the case. Reducing the total output of current power plants, and thereby obsoleting all that investment and squeezing supply, at least in the medium term until new capacity of other types can be built, can only lead to a) rationing through blackouts or b) higher prices to ration the shorter supply. The cost of option a is so high that price is going to have to be the rationing mechanism. Skyrocket is actually pretty close to what would happen to rates if Obama sticks by his plan of limiting greenhouse gasses to 1990 or earlier levels. (His explanation is actually pretty poor for the mechanism - pass-through of retrofit costs would likely be minor to the supply / demand balancing effect of shaving 20/30% off supply in a short period of time.I think a frank discussion of the dangers of a pollutant vs. the cost of abatement is a fair one. I personally think the threat of CO2 is wildly exaggerated, and the cost of doubling or tripling electricity costs will hurt Americans far worse than a few tenths of a degree of warming. But don t get too excited. Obama is still living in economic never-never land on other related issues:yes, there is going to be some increase in electricity rates on thefront end, but that over the long term, because of combinations of moreefficient energy usage, changing lightbulbs and more efficientappliance, but also technology improving how we can produce cleanenergy, the economy would benefit.Sorry, but this is way wrong. Obsoleting perfectly good infrastructure and wholesale replacing it with trillions of dollars of new infrastructure does not help the economy any more than if a massive earthquake had destroyed the plants. This is the broken windows fallacy on steroids. The only benefit from all this cost will be whatever climate benefit we accrue from the CO2 reduction. For there to be such a benefit, one must assume a) substantial future warming and b) that the current temperature happens to be the best possible temperature we could ever be at. But that, as they say, is a whole other blog.I am getting used to the new Typepad editor, but two issues still really cause me to question the sanity of the developers, particularly since this roll out has been going on since June:I cannot believe that a blogging engine -- not a generic text editor or HTML editor, but a purpose built blogging engine -- would eliminate the blockquote functionality from the editor. Have these guys ever, you know, actually read a blog or two? We bloggers live off block quotes.How long has the computing spelling checking been around? A couple of decades? About 10 minutes into that 20 year span, developers learned from users that in addition to a skip button, they probably needed a skip all button. Because if you write a 5000 word post on the banking crisis and use the Bernanke in that post 100 times, it is going to be real boring hitting skip 100 times in the spell check rather than skip all or even better add to dictionary. But, the rocket scientists at Typepad did indeed only put in a skip option, a bit like Ford building a car in which the windows won t roll down.The ethanol industry is struggling and a number of players are facing bankrupcy:The ethanol industry built tremendous production and transportationinfrastructure. It was a if we build it, they will come strategy. Then,the world fell apart. Prices for gas at the pump are back down wellbelow $3 instead of being headed toward $5 as they were in August.Verasunsays it will keep operating, but common shareholders have been crushedto death. The stock was at nearly $18 late last year. Now it is under$.40.The only quibble I have is in the first sentence. I would would have written the ethanol strategy as If we seek rents, they will come. Jack Tapper of ABC list all of the goodies promised by Obama in just one stump speech. The list is really staggering, even more so than the usual political BS. It is way to long to excerpt here. There are so many outrageous ones, its hard for me to even pick a favorite. But here are a few good ones: eliminate the oil we import from the Middle East in 10 years Uh, right. We are going to completely eliminate half the fuel coming into the economy in 10 years. lower premiums for those who already have health insurance;... end discrimination by insurance companies to the sick and those who need care the most Perfect. We are going to prevent insurance companies from dong any risk management, we are going to pile on even more must cover rules for all kinds of crap from acupuncture to mental health, and by doing so we are going to lower premiums.This may be my favorite, though: reopen old factories, old plants, to build solar panels, and wind turbines LOL. Barrack is going to open some of those old GM plants in Flint, Michigan and build solar panels. Seriously, is this a rhetorical flourish or does he really believe that factories are generic production facilities that can make anything, kind of like those little buildings you make in an RTS?Update: And if you think that voters just discount all this stuff, don t miss this video of Obama supporters talking about the free gas and house she is going to get.By the way, none of this will push me to vote for McCain. McCain promises all kinds of crazy stuff too, its just less compelling stuff to voters. He is not losing because he is promising less -- I think he is losing because Obama has a better grasp of what expensive shit people want to be promised than does McCain. There is a quote from Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor** that honestly reflects my opinion on the topic of leaving the US (Redford is Joe Turner, running away from the CIA, while Joubert is an assassin-for-hire):Turner: I d like to go back to New York.Joubert: You have not much future there. It will happen thisway. You may be walking. Maybe the first sunny day of the spring. And acar will slow beside you, and a door will open, and someone you know,maybe even trust, will get out of the car. And he will smile, abecoming smile. But he will leave open the door of the car and offer togive you a lift.Turner: You seem to understand it all so well. What would you suggest?Joubert: Personally, I prefer Europe.Turner: Europe?Joubert: Yes. Well, the fact is, what I do is not a bad occupation. Someone is always willing to pay.Turner: I would find it… tiring.Joubert: Oh, no — it s quite restful. It s… almost peaceful.No need to believe in either side, or any side. There is no cause.There s only yourself. The belief is in your own precision.Turner: I was born in the United States, Joubert. I miss it when I m away too long.Joubert: A pity.Turner: I don t think so.A great line, particularly in a movie steeped in cold war weariness. Anyway, I was listening to some rant on NPR about leaving the US if McCain won the election, and I asked myself if I had to leave the US, what would be my rank order of countries to which I might move. My list is highly influenced by language (at 46 I hardly feel like learning a new language) and by countries of which I am knowledgeable. Here is what I came up with:AustraliaBermudaCanadaSingaporethe NetherlandsSwitzerlandSpainGermany / AustriaCosta RicaHere are some notes on the list, as well as some explanations of countries left off:I have yet to meet an American who did not enjoy living in Australia (and many long to go back). I came within about 5 minutes of living in Bermuda about seven years ago. I have always liked the UK and have spent many summers there.Ireland might belong high on the list, but I have never been there and am not that familiar with it. But my sense is that if I really were to research it, Ireland would make the top 5. I could also probably have rattled off a number of other British island colonies, but kept it to Bermuda.Canada ... its like a whole other state (this is a line I uttered at business school once, echoing the then-current Texas ... its like a whole other country advertising campaign. It was not well-recieved by our northern neighbors. I still think a few Canadians are trying to hunt me down up thereBeen to Singapore a few times. An odd place, but certainly a liveable one. Last gasp of the English speaking choices on the list.Netherlands and Switzerland are both fairly capitalist-friendly nations with good support for a displaced English speaker. I have spent more time with the Dutch, so it is a bit higher, but Switzerland is freaking gorgeous.Spain is on the list mostly as a language play. Not a huge fan of the Spanish government, but I speak the language well enough to pick it up quickly. Good beaches, and the south coast has many of the appeals of Provence without the prices (and the French). A couple of years ago this probably would have been Argentina. I really loved Argentina when I was there, but I am scared a bit by the current political and economic climate.I like Austria, and Germany is OK. Not America but perfectly reasonable places to live.If I am really running not just form the US but the first world in general, I might pick Costa Rica. A pretty good government, particularly for Latin America, beautiful, and plenty of places to be secluded (and/or hide, if the need were to arise).I considered the Czech Republic. Prague seems to be the white-hot destination for American tourists, and they certainly know their beer. But I suspect that Eastern Europe has several more decades of work before the every day conveniences and creature comforts to which I have become accustomed in the US are prolific there. Scandinavia is too freaking cold. Maybe if I were single I might find some appealing reasons to reconsider...There may be some country like Monaco that would suit me perfectly but of which I am wholly unfamiliar.Readers are welcome to propose their own priorities in the comments.** Postscript: Three Days of the Condor is one of my favorites, for a couple of reasons. First, I always loved Faye Dunaway. Second, and more important, I like thrillers that have a more languid pace. I know that sounds weird to say, and if I were a film critic I might have the right words, but there is something about the music and the editing and the pacing that almost stands in contrast to the urgencies of the plot itself. Despite being on the run through the movie, Redford never actually runs. No car chases either. Sort of the antonym to the shaky rapid-cut camera action of, say, the Bourne movies. Other movies I would put in this same category are LA Confidential (maybe my favorite movie) and perhaps the newer version of the Thomas Crowne Affair. I might put Chinatown on this list too, but then since 3 of the 4 would include Dunaway, one might think my first rather than my second criteria was driving the list.By the way, even action movies could learn something from this. The first Indiana Jones movie was great in part because the action scenes were interspersed with quiet scenes. The audience gets to rest from time to time, and the action is highlighted by the contrast. You can even have some token character development. Later Indiana Jones movies fell into the trap of going for non-stop adrenalin.Apparently, even before the first train starts carrying passengers (sometime in December), Phoenix s new light rail system is already forcing bus fares up. (via a reader)Before the Valley s light-rail service ever begins, the cost to ride the train and city buses may be headed up.The issue of raising the Valley s regional fare policy has beenbrewing for several months as transit officials have struggled to coverrising gas pricesand other increased operation costs, said Greg Jordan, Tempe s transitadministrator. Transit and light-rail costs are covered by a half-centsales tax, which has fallen over the past year. The real issue is that transit agencies are generally given a fixed pot of money for operating subsidies (in this case the proceeds of a half-cent sales tax) and rail tends to take a hugely disproportionate share of that money, starving out less sexy but more practical and cost-effective bus systems. Even in the that wet dream of rail planners, Portland:In fact, 9.8 percent of Portland-area commuters took transitto work before the region build light rail. Today it is just 7.6percent. In a story repeated in numerous cities that have built raillines, rail cost overruns forced the city to raise bus fares and reducebus service. That’s a success?This is even more likely in Phoenix, where buses make far more financial sense than rail, given our very low densities, lack of a real downtown area, and numerous commuting routes. In fact, not only is it predictable, but I predicted it:Rail makes zero sense in a city like Phoenix. All this will do iscreate a financial black hole into which we shift all of our bus money,so the city will inevitably end up with a worse transportation system,not a better one. Cities that build light rail almost alwaysexperience a reduction in total transit use (even the great God ofplanners Portland) for just this reason - budgets are limited, so sincerail costs so much more per passenger, other transit is cut back. Butthe pictures of the train will look pretty in the visitor s guide.Yesterday I posted on the irony that in the name of change and dynamism, the Democrats are pushing for what basically is an inherently more conservative (little-c), less dynamic economic system that mirrors that of many continental European countries.Daniel, an American reader who does quite a bit of work in Europe, wrote me:1) The static nature of the Euro mentality assigns a high cost to ... people ... who try to break the mold. Cost of failure is relatively high. In Italy if your small business declares bankruptcy, you forfeit the right to vote.2) In Germany, workers are sorted at an early age into blue collar schools and professional schools . I know from my youth, if I had grown up in Germany instead of America, I probably would not be a consultant but more like a janitor (not that there is anything wrong with janitors...).3) Social services in Europe are hit and miss. In Germany, many people carry private insurance despite the availability of public insurance because of the lack of quality.4) (this may be a good thing) Italian school children go through a less harsh puberty than American kids. Society has drilled into them that it s not cool to be different, so there are less cliques. When I share my experiences in school with most Europeans they usually make some snide remark about how growing up in a battle zone (primary school) has caused the Iraq war.5) Highly skilled workers are in many cases no better paid than unskilled staff. In the south of Italy a senior programmer may make 2K euros per month. A secretary might make 1.5K a month. If it weren t for most Europeans fear of moving to new cities, there would be no programmers to hire.6) Speaking of being afraid to move, many Europeans find the thought of moving to a different city complete alien concept.7) Life in Euro is a much more comfortable than in America *if* you are European. If you are an immigrant, forget it. After two years of pitching companies in the South of Italy, I have never seen a black person be more than a street side vendor of trinkets. In Italy, there is an unsaid rule that you must be an Italian to ever be a professional.8) Don t get me started on France.9) It is illegal for a business to stay open more than it s quota in most European countries. It is illegal to operate a barber shop on Mondays.Recent circulation numbers showing continued, substantial declines of traditional newspapers give me an excuse to make a point I have wanted to make for some time. I am a frequent critic of newspapers. I think they have lost focus on the hard-hitting investigative journalism which used to be their highest and best calling, instead considering reiteration of an activist s press release sufficient to check the journalism box on some particular issue. When investigative reporting does occur, it almost always is focused to support the dominant or politically correct outcome, rather than to really challenge conventional wisdom. Media coverage of any technical issue involving science or statistics or economics is often awful, in large part because journalism is too often the default educational path of folks who want to avoid numbers. Any time I have been on the inside of some issue receiving coverage, I have generally been astounded by how little the print descriptions matched reality. Now that I am interviewed more as a source for articles, I never think my views are well-quoted (though that may be my fault for not talking in sound bites). And, like many, I get irritated that the media s arrogance and self-referential reporting seems to increase in direct proportion to their drop in circulation.All that being said, the world without healthy newspapers is a bad thing. First, we bloggers can blather on all day about being the new media, but with the exception of a few folks like Radley Balko, we re all editorial writers, not reporters (I consider my role at Climate-Skeptic.com to be more like journalism, but only because there is such a glaring hole on that topic in traditional media). I couldn t do what I do here, at least on this particular blog, without the New York Times and the Washington Post. I m a remora feeding on their scraps. I can t bring down the big fish by myself, I can only feed on the bits they miss.Second, and perhaps more important in this world of proposed reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, print media is the mode of speech best protected by the First Ammendment. This isn t the way it should be -- all speech should be equal -- but in reality goofy regulatory regimes for radio, TV, and even the Internet all offer the government leverage points for speech control they don t have with the print media. It s why half the dystopic sci fi novels out there have a world dominated by TV -- because that is where government has the most control of speech.So here s hoping you guys at the NY Times get your act together.A lot of folks, particularly on the left, look with some fondness at the political economy of continental Europe. They are attracted by high job security, short work weeks, long vacations, and a strong welfare system. They make the mistake of seeing in these traits a more promising society for the little guy, when in fact just the opposite is true.The European Corporate StateThe political economy of companies like Germany and France are actually incredibly elitist, dominated by perhaps a hundred guys (and I do mean guys) who run the country in a model only a few steps removed from Mussolini-style fascism or the Roosevelt s National Industrial Recovery Act. In these countries, perhaps 20 corporations, ten or fifteen large unions, and a group of powerful politicians and regulators run the economy.US workers sometimes make the mistake of seeing the political power of European unions and equating this power with being a more egalitarian environment for workers. But the European political economy is rule by the in-crowd over the out-crowd that exceeds any of the patronage relationships we complain about in this country. What we don t often see from our American perspective is the way the system is structured not to protect poor from the rich or the weak from the strong, but to protect incumbents (whether they be corporations or skilled workers) from competition. In the European labor markets, mobility is almost impossible. The union system is built to protect current high-skilled workers from competition from new workers, whether in the same country of from abroad. Large corporations that form part of the cozy governance of the country are protected from new competition, and are bailed out by the government when they hit the rocks. As a result, unemployment is structurally high in countries like France and Germany, hovering for decades between 8 and 12% -- levels we would freak out at here. Young and/or unskilled workers have a nearly impossible time breaking into the labor market, with entry to better jobs gated through apprenticeships and certifications that are kept intentionally scarce. Joe the plumber is an impossibility in Europe. Some Americans seem to secretly love the prospect of not easily being fired from their job, but they always ignore the flip side -- it is equally hard to ever be promoted, because that incompetent guy above you can t be fired either. Entrepreneurship in Europe is almost impossible -- the barriers just to organizing your own corporation legally are enormous. And, once organized, you will quickly find that you need a myriad of certifications and permissions to operate in your chosen field -- permissions like as not that are gated and controlled by the very people you wish to compete with. The entire political economy is arrayed in a patronage system to protect current businesses with their current workers.Here is a test, that works most places in the US except possibly in Manhattan. Ask yourself who are the wealthiest and/or most succesful people that you know. Then think about where they went to school. Sure, some of the more famous Fortune 25 CEOs went to name schools, but what about the majority of succesful people you meet in your life? If you are like me, most of them did not go to Ivy League or what one might call elite schools. They had normal state college educations. You will typically find a very different picture in Europe. While of course there are exceptions, it is much more likely that the wealthy people one meets were channeled through a defined set of elite schools.Corporations in Europe, particularly the cozy few who wield influence with the government, seldom fail and/or really gain or lose much market share. I always thought this a telling statistic: (Fortune 100 by year here)[Olaf Gersemann] points out that of the top 20 largest publicly traded companies inthe US in 1967, only 11 are even in the top 60 today, much less the top20. In contrast, he points out that of the 20 largest German companiesin 1967, today, thirty-five years and nearly two generations later, 19are still in the top 60 and 15 are still in the top 20.Its also an inherently anti-consumer society. The restrictions on foreign trade, entrepreneurship, and new competition all reduce consumer choice and substantially increase prices. EU anti-trust enforcement, for example, barely pretends any more to look out for consumer interests. Most of the regulators decisions are better explained by protection of entrenched and politically influential European competitors than it is by consumer power or choice. Progressives in this country often laud the lower income inequality numbers in Europe vs. the United States. The implication is that the poor in Europe are somehow better off. But in fact this is not true. Careful studies have shown that the poor are at least as well off in the US as in Europe, particularly when one corrects for the number of new immigrants in the US. (That s another difference, by the way -- Europe is virtually closed to immigration, at least as far seeking new integrated citizens is concerned). What drives income inequality is that our middle class is richer than Europe s middle class, and our wealthy have more income than Europe s wealthy. To this last point, I have always felt that comparisons of the wealthy in the US to those in Europe, and comparison of income inequality numbers, are a bit apples and oranges. The US is a country where access to most of the best perks is via money - they have a price. In Europe, access to most of the best perks can t be bought by money, they can only be accessed by those with the elite establishment club card. To some extent, the income numbers understate the difference between rich and poor in Europe for this reason.Next Stop: AmericaWe see many of the elements of the European economic system slipping into the US today. An increasing number of professions require certification by the government, with this certification often either controlled by the incumbents in the profession or with criteria that essentially require new entrants to compete in the same way incumbents do. We see the top companies with political influence, from Wall Street firms to banks to automobile manufacturers getting government assistance to stay in business or maintain their status. This, from the proposed GM bailout, is the European system personified:General Motors and Cerberus Capital Management have asked the U.S. government for roughly $10 billion in an unprecedented rescue package to support a merger between GM and Chrysler, two sources with direct knowledge of the talks said on Monday....one of the conditions of the merger would be that GM-Chrysler wouldspare as many jobs as possible in order to win broad political supportfor the government funding needed to complete the deal, people familiarwith the merger discussions said.This is the same political deal cut in Europe. Large powerful company is protected from failure by government. In turn, powerful company protects interest of powerful union. The only thing missing here, which I think is clearly on the agenda for the Obama administration, is a large protective tariff to shield this inefficient mess from competition. Left out of the equation are consumers, who get more expensive cars and suffer because GM is again given a hall pass from producing cars that people actually want to buy. Also left out are potential competitors, who don t get the government deal and who miss out on the chance to buy up GM assets and hire ex-GM employees out of bankruptcy and do a better job with them. This European system puts a premium on keeping productive assets in their current hands, rather than in the most productive hands:Corporate DNA acts as a value multiplier. The best corporate DNAhas a multiplier greater than one, meaning that it increases the valueof the people and physical assets in the corporation. When I was at acompany called Emerson Electric (an industrial conglomerate, not theconsumer electronics guys) they were famous in the business world forhaving a corporate DNA that added value to certain types of industrialcompanies through cost reduction and intelligent investment. Emerson smanagement, though, was always aware of the limits of their DNA, andpaid careful attention to where their DNA would have a multipliereffect and where it would not. Every company that has ever grownrapidly has had a DNA that provided a multiplier greater than one...for a while.But things change. Sometimes that change is slow, like a creepingclimate change, or sometimes it is rapid, like the dinosaur-killingcomet. DNA that was robust no longer matches what the market needs, orsome other entity with better DNA comes along and out-competes you. When this happens, when a corporation becomes senescent, when its DNAis out of date, then its multiplier slips below one. The corporationis killing the value of its assets. Smart people are made stupid by abad organization and systems and culture. In the case of GM, hordes ofbrilliant engineers teamed with highly-skilled production workers andmodern robotic manufacturing plants are turning out cars no one wants,at prices no one wants to pay.Changing your DNA is tough. It is sometimes possible, with theright managers and a crisis mentality, to evolve DNA over a period of20-30 years. One could argue that GE did this, avoiding becoming anold-industry dinosaur. GM has had a 30 year window (dating from themid-seventies oil price rise and influx of imported cars) to make achange, and it has not been enough. GM s DNA was programmed to makebig, ugly (IMO) cars, and that is what it has continued to do. If itsleaders were not able or willing to change its DNA over the last 30years, no one, no matter how brilliant, is going to do it in the next2-3.So what if GM dies? Letting the GM s of the world die is one of thebest possible things we can do for our economy and the wealth of ournation. Assuming GM s DNA has a less than one multiplier, thenreleasing GM s assets from GM s control actually increases value. Talented engineers, after some admittedly painful personal dislocation,find jobs designing things people want and value. Their output hasmore value, which in the long run helps everyone, including themselves.The alternative to not letting GM die is, well, Europe (and Japan). A LOT of Europe s productive assets are locked up in a few very largecorporations with close ties to the state which are not allowed tofail, which are subsidized, protected from competition, etc. Inconjunction with European laws that limit labor mobility, protectingcorporate dinosaurs has locked all of Europe s most productive humanand physical assets into organizations with DNA multipliers less thanone. Beyond the actual legislation, the other sign that the European model may be coming to the US is in attitudes. I think Michelle Obama is a great example of this. She and her husband checked all the elite boxes - Princeton undergrad, Harvard Law - but she is shocked that having punched her ticket into elite society, society didn t automatically deliver, as it might in, say, France. She s actually stunned that, had it not been for Barrack s succesful books, they might have had to give up their jobs as community organizers and at non-profits to actually earn enough to pay back their 6-figure school loans.Despite their Ivy League pedigrees and good salaries, Michelle Obamaoften says the fact that she and her husband are out of debt is due tosheer luck, because they could not have predicted that his two bookswould become bestsellers. It was like, Let s put all our money onred! she told a crowd at Ohio State University on Friday. It wasn ta financial plan! We were lucky! And it shouldn t have been based onluck, because we worked hard. **The Progressive IronyIn all this, I think there is an amazing irony. In a nutshell its this: The Change that Barrack Obama is selling to the electorate is in fact the creation of a government infrastructure to fight change. I have written before that progressives are actually inherently conservative. Ironically, though progressives want to posture as being dynamic , the fact is that capitalism is in fact too dynamic forthem. Industries rise and fall, jobs are won and lost, recessions giveway to booms. Progressives want comfort and certainty. They want tolock things down the way they are. They want to know that such and suchjob will be there tomorrow and next decade, and will always pay atleast X amount. That is why, in the end, progressives are allstatists, because, to paraphrase Hayek, only a government withtotalitarian powers can bring the order and certainty and control ofindividual decision-making that they crave....One morning, a rice farmer in southeast Asia might faces a choice. He can continue a life of brutal, back-breaking labor from dawn to duskfor what is essentially subsistence earnings. He can continue to see alarge number of his children die young from malnutrition and disease. He can continue a lifestyle so static, so devoid of opportunity foradvancement, that it is nearly identical to the life led by hisancestors in the same spot a thousand years ago.Or, he can go to the local Nike factory, work long hours (butcertainly no longer than he worked in the field) for low pay (butcertainly more than he was making subsistence farming) and take a shotat changing his life. And you know what, many men (and women) in hisposition choose the Nike factory. And progressives hate this. Theydistrust this choice. They distrust the change. And, at its heart,that is what the opposition to globalization is all about - a deepseated conservatism that distrusts the decision-making of individualsand fears change, change that ironically might finally pull people outof untold generations of utter poverty.Don t believe me? Below is from an email I received. The writer was outraged that I would have the temerity to say that the middle class in the US had it better than even the very rich in the 19th century.Sure, the average rural resident of a developing country earns more indollars today than before. But you re missing the big picture. Wealthis about so much more than just money, and status symbols. It is abouthealth, and well being, and contentedness, and happiness. The averagepeasant family in India in 1900 may havelived a spartan lifestyle by today s standards, but it probably couldrely on more land per family, crops uncontaminated by modern pesticidesand fertilizers, a stronger social network and village-based safetynet. These peasants were self-sufficient. That is no longer the case Progressives want to eliminate risk and lock in the current world. New technologies, new competitors, new business models all need to be carefully screened and gated by a government-labor-corporate elite. Entrepreneurship, risk, mobility, achievement all should be sacrificed to a defined and steady paycheck. In the name of dynamism, progressives, as well as many modern politicians, want to limit the dynamism of the American economy. In the name of egalitarianism, they wish to create a small political elite with immense power to manage everyone s life. In the name of progress, they wish to lock current patterns and incumbents in place.** Postscript: By the way, here is how I responded to Michelle Obama s education debt rantI don t know why I can t just move along from Michelle Obama s rant about the terrible cost of her Princeton / Harvard Law degree. Maybe its because I attended the same schools (different degrees) andmy reaction is just so different -- I had a fabulous experience andlive in awe that I had such a unique chance to attend these schools,while Michelle Obama seems to experience nothing but misery andresentment. Granted that I did not have to take on a ton of debt toget these degrees, but I have plenty of friends (and a wife) that did.This analogy comes to mind: Let s say Fred needs to buy a piece ofearth-moving equipment. He has the choice of the $20,000 front-endloader that is more than sufficient to most every day tasks, or the$200,000 behemoth, which might be useful if one were opening a stripmine or building a new Panama Canal but is an overkill for manyapplications. Fred may lust after the huge monster earth mover, but ifhe is going to buy it, he better damn well have a big, profitableapplication for it or he is going to go bankrupt trying to buy it.So Michelle Obama has a choice of the $20,000 state school undergradand law degree, which is perfectly serviceable for most applications,or the Princeton/Harvard $200,000 combo, which I can attest will, inthe right applications, move a hell of a lot of dirt. She chooses the$200,000 tool, and then later asks for sympathy because all she everdid with it was some backyard gardening and she wonders why she hastrouble paying all her debt. Duh. I think the problem here isperfectly obvious to most of us, but instead Obama seeks to blame herproblem on some structural flaw in the economy, rather than a poorchoice on her part in matching the tool to the job. In fact, today,she spends a lot of her time going to others who have bought similar$200,000 educations and urging them not to use those tools productively, just like she did not.

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