Via Instapundit, I saw this rather interesting article on New West about California and its presence as a bellwether state:

California is a trendsetter state. Much like the weather, every Californian fad eventually makes its way over the Sierras and diffuses into the intermountain West. That’s wonderful, and it’s frightening, because there are some pretty disturbing things going on in the Golden State right now.

The writer then proceeds to list a bunch of initiatives that originate from the Bay Area, such as:

- Berkeley’s Measure G, detailing an 80% reduction in the carbon footprint for the city and mandating the use of green materials, among other things.
- San Francisco bans smoking in some outdoor locations.
- SF also regulates psychics.

And so on. Read the article to get the full list.

What’s fascinating about this to me is that almost all of the wackier examples come from the Bay Area. This intrigues me for two reasons: First, a majority of the people that move into Reno these days (my home) comes from the Bay Area. It’s just simple geography. Second, the Bay Area does a lot of wacky things that isn’t necessarily tried in other parts of California, much less the rest of the country. For example, is Los Angeles going to start regulating psychics? Doubtful. Is anywhere else going to mandate an 80% reduction in their carbon footprint? Heck no - especially if Berkeley blinks. Rent control? Outside of very large urban areas (parts of Los Angeles, Bay Area, New York), you’re not seeing it - I’ll tell you right now, there is absolutely zero rent control in Nevada, at least as far as I can tell, and I used to live near Las Vegas.

However, Californication is very real. Nevada, for example, used to be California’s smoking section, at least until Nevada passed the Clean Indoor Air Act, which was a voter-sponsored initiative. Nevada also recently raised its minimum wage, something which San Francisco did recently as well, though to a much higher rate.

EDIT: I’m really getting annoyed with Blogger. I had about another half of a post here that didn’t publish, which is incredibly annoying to say the least. So, let’s see if I remember where I was going with this…

From where I’m sitting, it appears that most places just cherry-pick from California (anti-smoking laws, auto pollution controls, etc.). For example, are you going to see anyone regulating psychics anytime soon? No. Is any city outside of California going to mandate an 80% decrease in their carbon footprint? No, though I do think some cities might look at that idea and decide to do either a flat cap or perhaps a very mild decrease in their carbon footprint.

So, of the ideas percolating in California at the moment, which ones are going to spread to the rest of the country?

FOXNews throws down this wonderful gem:

Some Hispanic leaders lashed out Friday at California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s advice that immigrants should “turn off the Spanish television set” to better learn how to speak English.

The best line?

A Hispanic advocacy group said Schwarzenegger’s comments show his “ignorance on immigration issues.”

Uh… where’s Schwarzenegger from? Austria? What state is that in, again? Texas, apparently - it would seem Arnold came from a rather obscure side street. That would explain Arnold’s ignorance - everyone knows that Texans know nothing about immigration. I mean, it’s not like Texas’ entrance to the US wasn’t caused by illegal immigration or anything.

So, apparently, even if you attempt to be hyperactively ignorant of Arnold’s background, you still find yourself wondering what the Hispanic advocacy group was smoking. Fascinating, that.

On an entirely unrelated note, Apple released Safari, the default web browser on Macs, for Windows. I’ve been using the Windows version for the past few days and just wanted to give my thoughts, profound as they might be (but probably aren’t):

1. Safari does not blend in with the rest of Windows. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is a matter of interpretation, but it certainly is unnerving.
2. Safari is rather quick. That’s pretty cool, actually.
3. Unlike the version on my old Mac, this version of Safari doesn’t immediately implode when visiting Myspace. That’s rather nice, actually.
4. Safari does not enjoy installing, much less running, under WINE, which means that using it on my Ubuntu box is out. *sigh*
5. There are certain pages that don’t work the way they should. For example, the administrative pages for Fortinet routers doesn’t work under Safari, apparently - this is probably due to Safari’s somewhat unorthodox Javascript handling. I’m hoping that additional exposure to Windows will help mitigate this somewhat and convince Apple to spend a little more effort on fixing that.

All in all, it’s not a bad browser. It definitely seems better than IE 7 - it’s a lot faster, if nothing else. I don’t think it’s better than Firefox on Windows, though, but it’s still quite serviceable. In fact, I’ve been using Safari as my default browser at work for the past couple of days with few ill effects.

For those of you that are unaware, I live in Reno, Nevada. One of my state senators is none other than the Senate Majority Leader, one Senator Harry Reid. In fact, he spoke at my high school many years ago. It was somewhat fascinating at the time. Unfortunately, he’s recently done a wonderful job of making a rather poor name of himself. His approval rating in the US is a whopping 19%. Dennis Miller is making fun of him. He announced that the Iraq war is lost in April, right around the time that General Petraus was about to begin the surge. This doesn’t include the various corruption scandals that his name seems to get attached to like glue, including fishy land dealings.

Now this (courtesy of the Washington Post):

Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) charged that Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who took command in Iraq four months ago, “isn’t in touch with what’s going on in Baghdad.” He also indicated that he thinks Petraeus has not been sufficiently open in his testimony to Congress. Noting that Petraeus, who is now on his third tour of duty in Iraq, oversaw the training of Iraqi troops during his second stint there, Reid said: “He told us it was going great; as we’ve looked back, it didn’t go so well.”

Reid seemed most provoked by an article in yesterday’s edition of USA Today, which quoted the general as saying that he sees “astonishing signs of normalcy” in the Iraqi capital. “I’m talking about professional soccer leagues with real grass field stadiums, several amusement parks — big ones, markets that are very vibrant,” Petraeus told the newspaper.

The general’s comments came on the same day that the Pentagon released to Congress a quarterly report on security in Iraq. It said that the three-month-old U.S. counteroffensive in Baghdad has not curtailed overall violence in the country but has instead shifted it from inside the Iraqi capital to places around it.

So, let’s recap:

Reid is not in Baghdad. Gen. Petraus, I’m assuming, is, at least from time to time. Petraus mentions that things are actually starting to look good in Baghdad, which is actually consistent with the report released to Congress that says that, in Baghdad, violence is down. Reid says that Petraus is not in touch with Baghdad.

Maybe I’m being a little pedantic here, but it looks like Reid isn’t in touch with the report that’s upsetting him, much less Baghdad. Furthermore, the entire point of the surge was to get the violence out of Baghdad so Iraq would have a capital to govern from. I also have to imagine that fighting in the suburbs is a heck of a lot easier to do than fighting in the middle of an urban center, especially when it’s your side that actually cares about collateral damage. So, from where I’m sitting, I’d say that, though things definitely need improvement, they’re trending in the right direction. Besides, Petraus has been on the job for four months. It takes a little longer than that to fix five years worth of mistakes.

Over the weekend, I visited Pahrump, a desert town about an hour outside of Las Vegas, NV. I went to high school out there and an old friend of mine from school was visiting some family out there; since I hadn’t seen the friend in close to 10 years, I decided to trek down there myself to catch up.

Some random thoughts from the trip:

1. I didn’t know you could make jerky from salmon, but I have a package of salmon jerky now.
2. There are some interesting ghost towns out there that I wish I spent more time visiting when I lived down there. I finally visited Rhyolite, which is definitely one of the better preserved ghost towns in the country.
3. It’s really fascinating to see where some of the people I went to school with ended up. For example, quite a few of my friends never graduated high school, though most of them eventually received their GED. However, most of them aren’t doing too badly. One of them is now a cameraman for a TV station in Las Vegas, for example. The friend that I was trying to catch up with now manages a Staples in Indiana. Education is important, don’t get me wrong, but it’s rather impressive how far you can get without a formal education in this country with a little bit of effort.

That’s all for now. I’ll post something a little more substantial tomorrow.

I would’ve finished this post last night, but two things got in the way:

1. I had somewhere I had to be in short order.
2. The post was getting too long, so splitting it wasn’t a bad idea.

That said, if you haven’t read the first post, you can do so here.

Continuing on…

I’ll start by pointing out that, even with our current currency system, it’s quite possible for hostile countries to affect the value of our money. In fact, China has been buying T-Bills for years, which has caught some people’s attention. What I was getting at, however, was that, in a commodity-based or metal-based currency model, there’s no good way to get control of your currency when someone acquires enough of what your currency is based on. In fact, it was due to China indirectly buying a large amount of silver from Britain (what the Pound was based on at the time) that led to the Opium War. Coincidentally, this helps show that China has a long history of getting large trade balances on its side and picking up the wrath of the prevailing powers of the time in the process.

With that out of the way, it’s now time to explain what our current currency is based on - us! Simply put, our currency is based on the economic production of our country. If our economic production and our money supply increase at the same rate, our currency will retain value. However, pulling that off is rather tricky - there are numerous variables at play. So, what the federal government usually does is shoot for mild inflation - they do this by loaning money to banks at very favorable rates, which encourages banks to loan more money. If the government was unable to loan money due to a shortage of gold, banks wouldn’t be able to loan as much money, which would stunt growth since businesses wouldn’t be able to borrow money to increase capital.

So, why am I touching this? Because, though I’m libertarian-minded, I don’t agree with the entirety of the Libertarian Party platform. Take the following from the LP’s Family Budget section:

During those same years, the government has increased the money supply — producing inflation. Whether the inflation rate is 12% or 3%, the result is the same: groceries cost more; clothing costs more; your car costs more. You work harder every year for less purchasing power.

The solution, from the LP’s perspective, is to eliminate inflation. However, doing so would cause the millions of Americans on credit cards extreme hardship - banks, to maintain profits, would increase interest rates, causing undue hardship on American people. One way that some in the LP would like to fix inflation is by bringing back the gold standard. Unfortunately, bringing back the gold standard would cause extreme deflation (gold is currently selling for $668.90/ounce, so basing the dollar on gold would require fewer dollars on the market), which, as the article notes, would cause severe hardship - since the price of everything would go down, profits would go down, people would lose jobs, and anyone that’s borrowing money would be in dire straights.

I have other issues with the Libertarian Party’s platform as well… stay tuned.

This post is inspired by the following article on TCS Daily titled “What Roosevelt Didn’t Know”. The crux of the article is about how policy makers and economists reacted to the Great Depression in the early 1930s and how, if they had the same access to economic indicators that we have today, they would have behaved very differently. One section, however, that really caught my attention was the following:

The Meaning and Effects of Deflation

Inflation is a general decline in the purchasing power of money. Deflation is a general increase in the purchasing power of money.

It is easy to confuse general inflation or deflation with a change in the relative prices of goods. Thus, a spike in gasoline prices might be mis-labeled as inflation, while a drop in the price of wheat might be mis-labeled as deflation. A genuine inflation involves rising prices in most goods and services.

Inflations tend to be good for borrowers and bad for lenders — at least at first. In the early 1970’s, mortgage rates of 8 percent looked pretty steep to homebuyers. However, inflation accelerated later in the decade, and mortgage borrowers did really well, paying back their loans in much-cheaper dollars. Lenders, on the other hand, were crushed, with many going out of business between 1978 and 1982.

Conversely, deflations tend to be bad for borrowers. The farmer who borrows today to plant a crop for harvesting in six months cannot repay the loan if prices fall during the meantime.

Lenders can protect themselves from inflation, but borrowers cannot protect themselves from deflation. When lenders see inflation taking place, they can charge higher interest rates, and they can make loans for shorter periods of time. When borrowers see deflation taking place, they do not have the ability to demand appropriately low interest rates, because the appropriate interest rate might be less than zero. Lenders will hold onto money rather than lend it at negative interest rates.

Irving Fisher understood this. Even today, among economists, the relationship between inflation and interest rates is known as the Fisher effect.

So, what does this have to do with metal standards and why do I feel compelled to touch on this issue? Before I answer that question, let’s clear up something:

What is a metal standard?

Some of you may already know this - a metal standard is when you base your currency on metals, usually gold or silver. Back in the day, this meant that you could take a dollar (or pound, franc, mark, whatever) and get a predefined measure of gold or silver from a bank; the British Pound got its name because 1 British Pound used to be worth precisely 1 pound of silver. There are some benefits to a metallic standard:

- Conversions between metallic standard currencies is relatively easy; simply convert between currency A to the mineral it’s backed on, then convert from that metal to the equivalent worth of currency B, which is also based on the same metal.
- A government cannot simply print more money, thus preventing extreme inflation. Since the currency is based on a particular tangible product, the government can only print enough currency to buy the amount of that tangible product that the government has.
- It’s easy for people to understand and relate to. People trust gold a lot more than they trust the government, and they understand that gold has value because it’s gold. Why is a dollar worth something? It’s just a colorful piece of paper, right?

However, there are some big problems with metallic standards. The big two are:

1. A currency based on a metallic standard is basing its worth not on the value of the economy in which it’s used, but instead on the value of a metal which may or may not be produced in that economy.
2. A government cannot simply print more money.

To fully understand these two issues, let’s pretend the United States decided, for whatever reason, to base the dollar on oil. Oil has a tangible value - there’s a finite amount of it, it has economic worth (we use it for fuel), it’s portable (I wouldn’t want any in my pocket, mind you), and everyone understands oil. However, as everyone knows, the value of oil can go up or down, often at the whim of countries quite hostile to the United States. Consequently, if the United States decided to enact an oil standard, the dollar would be at the whim of regimes with hostile intent that could inflate or devalue the dollar (by increasing or decreasing the supply of oil, respectively), which could severely disrupt the economy, and there would be nothing the United States government could do about it. If a hostile country started buying all of our currency to increase the value of the dollar, thus making our exports cost more overseas, could we print more money to counteract that, thus stabilizing prices? No - the amount of dollars we produce would be fixed to the amount of oil those dollars are worth. The only way we could print more dollars would be if we produced more oil, which would not be economically feasible if the cost of producing that unit of oil on which the dollar was based was greater than $1.

More on this tomorrow.

I’m just throwing this out here for kicks.

The Baby Name Wizard - It has a chart of the top baby names since 1880. Definitely worthwhile.
someecards - For when you need to say the right thing during those special occasions.

I’ll write about something more serious tomorrow. Also, I’m probably going to have some fun with my tags before I end this tonight - it finally dawned on me that tags are used to organize my posts in my blog, not to make them search bait. Heh.

EDIT: I’ve cleaned up my labels somewhat - you’ll find a list of them on the left. This should, in theory, simplify the ability for people to parse this blog in the future. Unfortunately, I haven’t entirely decided how to use the labels; I’m leaning towards “very generalized topics” with the post titles themselves being more descriptive, but actually doing that is going to require a bit of fine-tuning, I’m thinking. Stay tuned.

One last thing - I attempted to make a banner for the title of this thing. Alas, I have absolutely zero skills with Gimp and next to no visual art skills (clearly). If anyone actually has some skill, they’re more than welcome to clean that mess up a bit.

May… wow. I don’t even know where to begin with what was wrong with that month.

I basically took the entire month off from just about everything. I quit Utopia by disappearing from it entirely. To understand why, it’s important to have a little background on what it is, why I was playing it, and why I felt it was necessary to quit.

Utopia is an online largely text-based strategy/role-playing game. The concept is that you have a province that you manage which is a part of a kingdom of other provinces run by other people. These kingdoms, in turn, fight each other, ally with each other, and otherwise interact with each other. I liked Utopia for the strategy - you had to know some math to really understand the mechanics of the game, there was a lot of game strategy involved in winning wars between kingdoms, and it was just a good way to kill some time.

I originally got back into it late last year during a lull at work - I needed something to kill time at work and at home when I had nothing better to do, and I had a lot of spare time on my hands at that point. Brian (my son) had just left my house to stay with his mom and I needed a good excuse to have some quiet time at home, among other things, and Utopia definitely fit the bill.

There are, however, some fundamental problems with Utopia:

1. You have to log in at least once a day to stay “active”. Failing to do so will, after a while, get you marked “inactive”, which will lead to your kingdom razing your province to the ground to make way for an “active” province.
2. When you’re not logged in, it’s generally good form to be available by IM at just about all possible hours of the day so that, if someone in your kingdom needs your help with something, you can provide it.
3. There are plenty of opportunities to lose time on Utopia, including alliances, becoming monarch of the kingdom, etc.

At first, these issues weren’t big problems. #1 was tricky since I go out of town every month, but I found ways around that - sometimes I would go into “vacation mode”, which puts your province in an inactive state for a few days, or I just wouldn’t log in and apologize to the monarch afterwards. #2 was somewhat challenging, but once I realized I could IM at work, that problem was solved. #3, well, I saw that as a feature, not a bug - the entire idea was to kill time, after all.

Then, a few things started to go wrong…

I became monarch of my kingdom. That alone kills way too much time - now you go from logging in once a day to logging in at least three times a day. Suddenly, vacation mode wasn’t really an option - I was the one in charge, so I couldn’t take vacations. I found myself specifically looking for motel rooms with wireless internet access so I could play a stupid game. Then came my alliance duties… I very quickly found myself spending 50% of my awake time logging into Utopia, logging into the alliance forums, answering IMs, visiting Utopia-themed IRC channels, and then wondering why I didn’t have enough time at work to get anything done and why my girlfriend was getting ticked that I was ignoring her. Worst yet, I somehow wasn’t spending enough time to be “active”. There was always something to do - some province that needed strat help, some kingdom that was bugging us, some alliance matter to attend to, and if I didn’t take care of it within 6-8 hours, it was because I “wasn’t active enough”.

Then came May.

By the time May rolled around, I accrued at least four days of after hours work. I did a lot of “off-the-clock” stuff to make up for the time I was supposed to be spending at work actually doing something and instead was playing Utopia and IMing strangers in Europe. Simply put, I was burning the candle at just about every end imaginable and was getting rather stressed out from it.

One day, something happened. I spent the entire day away from Utopia because work was consuming all of my attention, followed by some social activities… and felt great. So, I spent another day away from it - left my IM clients off, avoided IRC… and felt great.

This brings me to why I was away from my blog in May. I spent the month decompressing and focusing on what was important, which was most certainly not work and absolutely not some teenagers with far too much spare time trying to drain my time and energy away on a game with steadily dwindling participation numbers. Now, I’m focusing on getting some stuff accomplished, including getting some work done and doing things that I enjoy… like blogging. I enjoy ranting and raving out here. It’s fun.

In the meantime, I’m going to clean up some links, add some new ones on the left, and just generally get this house in order here. Expect more soon.