The Problem With “Green” Jobs

Say it with me:

You can’t get something for nothing.

It doesn’t matter what that something is - you can’t get it without some effort, without some cost.  It’s impossible.  This brings me to the fiction that government can “create jobs”, especially “green” jobs.

News organizations have been hyping the possibility that Nevada can “create green jobs” for months now.  The Las Vegas Sun had an article in September that said:

A new report from the Center for American Progress says $100 billion in green investment could create 2 million jobs in the U.S., including 15,000 in Nevada.

“In a time when people are hurting, 15,000 jobs seems like a good idea,” said Scot Rutledge of the Nevada Conservation League.

The $100 billion “green economic recovery program” [Remember when that was a lot of money? - DC]- about the size of the recent federal stimulus package - could be paid for by auctioning the right to emit the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, according to the center.

The report says $865 million of that $100 billion would be invested in Nevada. That figure is based on contribution to gross domestic product and population. When natural renewable energy resources and existing favorable state policy toward renewables are factored in, environmentalist said, the investment here is likely to be much higher.

Meanwhile, our legislators talk of using our share of the “bailout money” to create “green jobs”:

Saying the future of Nevada’s economy depends on building a thriving renewable energy industry, Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas, introduced legislation to use Nevada’s share of the economic stimulus package to create a “green jobs” training program.

Horsford’s bill, SB 152, would fund both the programs to train the workers and the weatherization projects to put them to work making schools and other government buildings more energy efficient.

Naturally, some business leaders are for it, too:

Business leaders involved in green energy projects met in Reno Thursday to express their happiness with the new stimulus law.

If you’re tired of hearing about green energy and not seeing much of it, they’re right there with you. “We’re trying to push things forward; we’re trying to make things actually happen in a very rapid fashion to build a green economy here in Nevada.”

Rich Hamilton and his company, Great Basin Wind are the ones behind the planned Virginia City wind farm. The much talked-about project is slated to be finished late next year with up to 71 turbines cranking out 200-megawatts enough to power about 60,000 homes.

His company can afford to invest in the project thanks in part to tax incentives offered by the federal government. The stimulus extends those: “We are providing many tax incentives for the private sector to build renewable energy projects.”

It all sounds so good, doesn’t it?  It sounds so pretty - we give some companies some money, they build some windmills, and we all go home happy, with new jobs in construction and maintenance of this stuff carrying us through an otherwise turbulent and messy economy.

There’s just one problem, though, isn’t there?  Where is the money coming from?

That question is at the very core of why government “created” jobs are a myth.  Government creates very little of actual value, meaning that there is very little that government creates that people happily and gladly fork over money for.  By and large, government is funded by taxes, which is the act taking money from someone now, or loans, which is simply promising to take money from someone else later.  Of course, in order to take money from someone, there has to be money to take to begin with.  The way government creates jobs, meanwhile, is by taking the money that it took from someone in the form of taxes or loans and redistributing it to someone else that it thinks will spend the money more wisely.  Again, though, in order for the government to have any money to take to begin with, there has to be some money to take - consequently, the government will either be taking money from someone that’s already providing jobs (businesses and/or their owners) or from someone that already has a job (everyone else).  So, at best, one of two things is happening:

1. The government is transferring money from one business that’s successfully creating jobs, hindering their ability to provide jobs themselves, or…
2. The government is transferring money from you, making your wages worth just a little bit less, with the hope that there are enough people like you to take money from and give to someone else so they can be put to work.

Let’s play with the first option since it’s the simplest to grasp, and fold the second option into it.  Under the absolute best of circumstances, assuming various physical rules don’t apply, since it’s physically impossible for government to create anything of value or wealth, the best that can be hoped for is that government will transfer jobs from one business to another, “better” business, at a 1-to-1 ratio, total wages-wise.  In other words, we hope that, if the government takes $100,000 from one business, it’s able to create $100,000 worth of jobs in another business.  There’s no way for government to add to that $100,000 without taking it from someone else, so there’s no way to multiply this.

Trouble is, this fictional fantasy land doesn’t exist.

To start with, the laws of time still apply in our world, which means that, if government takes $100,000 from one entity to give to another entity, there will be a period of time during which the government will have that $100,000, during which time that money isn’t being put to productive use by anyone.  In short, it’s been effectively removed from the system until the government is ready to hand it out again.  This brings us to our next problem - presumably, somebody is getting paid to account for all of this.  Somebody is getting paid to collect the $100,000 check from one entity and somebody is getting paid to write a check to the other entity.  Suddenly, the government doesn’t have $100,000 to hand out anymore - at best, it might have $90,000, or maybe $95,000.  It really doesn’t matter how much money is left, though - the important thing to remember is that some of that money is now gone from either productive enterprise, never to return.  In other words, there’s friction in the system, which makes sense since, no matter what you move, whether it’s money or blocks of wood or whatever, there is always going to be friction.  Always.  We’re talking “laws of physics” here.

So, right off the bat, we took $100,000 that somebody could use to create jobs or, alternatively, use to buy products from companies that create jobs or just build up a nest egg so we don’t need to pay them unemployment when the unfortunate happens and, assuming there’s no graft, no corruption, no cross-purposes - heck, no human vice - we’re going to give less than that to some other company to create jobs that, presumably, it couldn’t afford to create on its own, which is why we have to give them money to begin with.  (Phew!)  Well, okay - maybe it’s not all bad, right?  I mean, government jobs are still jobs, so it’s not like the $100,000 disappeared - some of it just went to government jobs while the rest went to these other kinds of jobs that we want more of.  Sounds good… or does it?  Keep in mind that, when most people work, they create something of value, meaning they create something that somebody else not only wants but is willing to pay for.  If government created anything of real value, we wouldn’t need taxes - we’d just walk down to our government offices and hand them money voluntarily!  The reason this is important is because, generally speaking, if you want something, sooner or later you’re going to want more of it, and will happily pay for it.  So, if you’re a company producing something that somebody wants, people will voluntarily give you money, which you’ll use to hire more people (creating jobs!) to produce more of that something, whatever that might be.  Do this enough times and that $100,000 can become something far more than that.  If enough people do this, we all have more stuff that we want - more power, more cars, more amusement parks, whatever.  Government, however, doesn’t create anything.  Consequently, any money that’s taken out of the system by the government isn’t used to create anything at all, which means that we end up with less stuff that we want, whatever that might be.

So, to recap, instead of enjoying $100,000 worth of jobs, created by someone that clearly is producing something that somebody wants (otherwise they wouldn’t have $100,000 to take), we instead create maybe $90,000 worth of jobs, created by someone that clearly isn’t producing something that somebody wants, or isn’t able to produce it at a price point that people are willing to pay for, along with $10,000 worth of jobs that fails to produce anything.  Sounds great so far, doesn’t it?

But wait!, you say, what if that person creating $100,000 worth of jobs creates jobs that we don’t really want long term?  I mean, sure, they’re creating $100,000 worth of jobs now, but if they keep doing what they’re doing to create those jobs, we’ll be covered in soot and eaten by the oil grue in no time!  To be perfectly honest, there may be some truth to this.  The trouble here is that environmentalism and “green jobs”, as countless developing countries have proven time after time after time, is a luxury.  Believe it or not, it’s perfectly possible to live without clean air, clean water, or clean food.  Just ask anyone living in Southeast Asia right now, or ask someone who lived in back east or in Europe during the early 20th century.  It’s not pleasant, it’s not healthy, but it’s definitely survivable, and, for most people, if you give them a choice between having a job that gives them a fighting chance to pay for their own food and lodging and preventing them from having that job by inefficiently redistributing money to industries that make you feel warm and fuzzy, they’re going to go with taking that job, even if it’s in the puppy eating industry.  Heck, ask any inner city drug dealer - they already made their choice between “no job” and “job in a morally dubious field that destroys the community”.  If you think people don’t care about the environment now, wait until they can’t pay their sewer bill.

Look, there is a time and a place to invest in “green” technology.  Doing it under the guise of “creating jobs” when doing so requires taking money from industries that are scrambling to keep the jobs they already have is not it.  Tell your legislators to stop trying to “create” anything and just focus on staying out of the way of those that actually are creating goods that people are willing to pay for and creating jobs in the process.

Why Medicaid and Social Security Were Always Doomed

Pretend for a second that all retirement pensions were perfectly funded.  Pretend for a second that politicians didn’t raid Social Security and Medicaid funds for pet projects, or that business owners didn’t pretend that their employee’s group pensions were always going to generate 10%+ a year and fund accordingly.  Let’s pretend for a second that we put all of this money away, nice and thriftily, so that every single retired person on the planet had a fully funded pension with a fully funded social medical entitlement.  What would that look like?

The answer?  Much, much worse than it looks now.

In order to understand why, it’s important to understand what money is.  Money, by itself, no matter what form it takes, has almost no intrinsic value.  It doesn’t matter if it’s gold, silver, wampum, or “fiat” money.  By themselves, each of these monetary objects are about as useless.  Can you grow food on a gold coin?  No.  Can you build a house on a gold coin?  Not unless it’s freakishly huge.  Can you build a house out of gold coins?  Probably not - it’s rather malleable, so it’ll probably collapse under its own weight.  To be honest, gold excels at being an electrical conductor and, frankly, not much else.  The same could be said for silver, though it’s actually hard enough to make easily tarnishable utensils out of; its worth as a weapon against the undead is, at present, somewhat limited.  Wampum… well, you can make belts out of it, I guess.  Paper money can be used for most of the same things that every other kind of paper can be used for, though, in my experience, it’s not particularly absorbent, so that limits its usefulness somewhat.  The reason any of this stuff has value in the first place is because it’s common enough where everybody can get some, scarce enough where everybody can’t get a truckload whenever they want, it’s useless enough where we don’t want to use it for something else, and money is a heck of a lot more convenient than bartering.

Unfortunately, it’s that last bit that kills entitlements.  See, we’re still bartering - we’re just bartering with something that we all want, instead of trying to barter with various disparate goods of varying worth.  In order to barter, though, there has to be something to barter.  If you don’t have land and I don’t have land, it doesn’t matter how much money or cows or whatever either of us have - we can’t trade for land with each other.  If you don’t have wood and I don’t have wood, it doesn’t matter what either of us have - neither of us can trade for a log cabin.  Similarly, if we suddenly have a bunch of people needing medical care and fewer people able to provide it, it doesn’t matter how much money we have set aside or how responsible we were forty years ago - there’s only so much medical care to barter for in the here and now and there is nothing we can do to change that.  Worse yet, if we suddenly have a bunch of people that aren’t working and aren’t providing anything but money to trade, it doesn’t matter how much money they have - there’s less stuff to barter for, so either they’re not going to be able to buy as much stuff or we’re not going to be able to buy as much stuff.  The amount of stuff is finite.  No amount of money ever changes that.

This brings us to why fully funded pensions, Social Security, and Medicaid would be diastrous to everyone under the age of, say, 55.  If our politicians were prudent, the elderly would have enough money to purchase a disproportionate share of every single good that we consume and would be able to do so from when they were 55 until they were dead, on average, about twenty years later, all without having to add a single thing to barter with other than money.  The result would effectively be “stagflation” - a steadily increasing money supply released by every retiree burning through their pensions while the labor pool and the economy shrinks.  This would erode the value of the pensions while simultaneously pricing the producers out of the economy.  If you think going to the doctor is expensive now, imagine how expensive it would be if the biggest consumers of medical care could pay twice as much.

Fortunately, in a “blind squirrel finds a nut” fashion, our politicians and corporate leaders have lucked out.  Thanks to nearly criminal mismanagement of pensions and a ridiculously expansionist monetary policy, it’s much more difficult for the elderly to hoard enough money to disproportionately consume the products of our economy without providing anything in return.  By inflating the money supply, we ensure that those that produce get their fair share - after all, they’re the ones receiving new money, not the pensioners.  Meanwhile, by kneecapping elderly pensions, we ensure they don’t hoard enough money to jack the price of medical care, leisure, and housing any higher than they already have.  Best of all, by the combination of these effects, we encourage the elderly to continue producing and adding to the economy long after they would like to; instead of retiring at 55 or even 65 like they thought, they’re instead going to have to contribute well into their 70s to make ends meet, in much the same way that their grandparents had to work nearly to their grave.

So, if you’re under the age of 55 and can afford anything, thank a spineless politician or a greedy capitalist!  Without them, your grandparents would have priced you out of existence a long time ago.

Doubling Down

I wasn’t feeling particularly verbose yesterday and I’m not feeling particularly verbose today, so this is going to be short and sweet.

I think I’ve figured out the bailout, runaway pension plans, and the idea of a “recession-proof tax”.  We, as a nation, gambled.  We won some hands - quite a few hands, actually - but then the table turned on us.  Now we’re down a few trillion.  So, what does any gambling addict do?  That’s right - they double down.  They try to “win it back”.  Never mind that the table turned on us.  Never mind that the dealer is glaring at us.  Never mind that the cocktail waitresses stopped asking if we wanted more to drink hours ago.  Never mind that we’re well past the point where we bet our rent money and lost.  We have to get it back, damn it, otherwise we can’t pay the rent, we can’t pay our bills, we can’t buy food… in short, we’ll be broke!  Never mind that we already are broke - we just haven’t admitted it to ourselves yet.  So, we borrow.  We call our friends and ask for money.  After they cut us off, though, we have to find someone else willing to lend us money.  So, we hit the credit cards, we hit the banks, we mortgage and pawn anything we have of value.  We throw more money in the pot and hope we start winning some hands again.

We’re not winning any more hands - at least, not if we keep playing like this.  Even if we win out for a while, we’re going to have a real difficult time paying everyone back, and, believe me, we’re not winning out.  The good news is that the free market is like a casino where the odds are reversed - if we play smart, odds are (if only slightly) that we’ll win, at least in the long term.  However, just like a real casino, if we continue to make stupid decisions, we will lose.  Bailing out failing companies with tax money is like doubling down on a 16 when the dealer is showing an Ace - yeah, you might get lucky from time to time, but you probably won’t.  It’s just not a hand you were meant to win, and trying to play to win with a hand like that will only make a bad situation much, much worse.

On Sheep, Sheepdogs, and Wolves

While listening to Colin Cowherd on my way to work this morning, he began to discuss this time that he was mugged in Fresno.  One of the listeners that called to comment about this story was a “criminal justice major”, who proceeded to launch into a “There are three kinds of people” monologue.

For those of you unfamiliar with the “three kinds of people”, the basic gist is that there are “sheep”, “sheepdogs”, and “wolves”.  Wolves are the bad guys - they want to eat the sheep.  Sheepdogs, meanwhile, protect the sheep from the wolves.  Trouble is, sheepdogs look a lot, and behave a lot, like wolves - they’re both dogs, they’re both aggressive, and, to a sheep, they’re both scary.  The result is that sheepdogs are never really appreciated by sheep - in fact, more often than not, the sheep will try to control the sheepdogs by putting limits on them to make them less scary.  Unfortunately, this has the side-effect of making it more difficult for the sheepdogs to protect the sheep from the wolves.  Following this analogy, the “wolves” are criminals, terrorists, and the like; “sheepdogs” are cops, the military, and others that put their lives on the line for us; “sheep”, meanwhile, is everybody else.

This analogy is one that I have seen and heard numerous times, usually uttered by Internet tough guys and mall ninjas.  There is some truth to it, of course - there are many people that really can’t tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys.  People experiencing such confusion will say things like “insulting the mothers and sisters of prisoners is torture“, or that, if we just send all of our troops home and adopt an isolationist foreign policy, nobody will ever want to bother us again, despite years of evidence to the contrary.  Meanwhile, like most things in life, if we look too deeply at the methods involved to protect us, many people will take offense.  In much the same way that letting food grow in cow dung is surprisingly healthy but a little gross if you think about it long enough, killing bad guys is a surprisingly effective, if morally “questionable”, way of dealing with people that would just as soon kill you.

Even so, the troubles with this metaphor are numerous and manifold, most of which being directly related with the conclusions that people that throw this metaphor around try to draw from it.  By and large, someone coming up with this metaphor wants you to believe the following:

1. Being a “sheep”, “sheepdog”, or “wolf” is innate and not something that can be conditioned.
2. “Sheep” should listen to “sheepdogs” and let them do whatever they feel they need to do to protect the “flock” from the “wolves”.

The first conclusion is absolutely ridiculous.  A person’s response to crisis is largely determined by their experience and training regarding that crisis.  If somebody points a gun at me, for example, since I have no training or experience in such manners, it’s absolutely true that I will undoubtedly behave very “sheeplike”.  Conversely, if somebody points a gun at, say, a Marine, they will respond differently.  Those that overuse this metaphor will claim that’s because the Marine is a “sheepdog”.  What they don’t realize is that the entire reason the Marine could behave like a “sheepdog” in the first place is because the Marine was trained in how to respond to the situation.  The Marine actually has some familiarity and experience with having weapons pointed at him, whereas I do not.  Conversely, if a Marine was faceed with a crisis that I actually have training and experience with (say, a broken server), the Marine may behave very “sheeplike”, whereas I’ll be able to calmly and cooly deal with the situation.  Why?  Because, unlike the Marine, I actually have training and experience with this situation.

Ah - now, I know what you’re thinking.  A broken server is nothing compared to the risks that much of our military and our police forces (i.e. our “sheepdogs”) deal with on a daily basis.  This is absolutely correct, so let’s try another unfamiliar situation for our Marine - we’ll make him a fighter pilot.  If we take a Marine, one that is trained in ground combat and has received no pilot training, and throw him into, say, an F/A-18 or something similar and say, “Okay, defend our skies from the wolves!”, what is the Marine going to do?  Chances are, our hypothetical Marine will behave very “sheeplike”, as well he should - he has no training or familiarity with the situation.  If he’s able to start the plane - much less actually get it off the ground - before the enemy blows him up, it will be a small but pyrrhic victory.  Conversely, if we take a fighter pilot and throw him into, say, a serious firefight on the ground, he probably won’t exhibit much “sheepdog-like” bravery himself, which is probably for the best.  Frankly, if he tries to be “brave”, he’ll probably just end up putting himself and his unit in serious jeopardy since he lacks the training and experience necessary to know which risks are acceptable and which ones aren’t.  Keep in mind that neither the fighter pilot nor the Marine are shying away from putting their lives on the line - they’re just going to be more willing to do so in situations that they have training and experience in because, in those situations, they’ll have enough familiarity to work past the initial panicky flight-or-fight emotions that any of us would experience in their place.

The second conclusion, however, is the most dangerous one.  Another way of saying it is, “The ends justify the means,” which is one of the most dangerous philosophies to ever haunt man.  “The ends justify the means” is how we ended up with the PATRIOT Act, the Drug War, and countless other assaults against our civil liberties, all because somebody said that they were a “sheepdog” and, if we just listened to them and gave them just a little bit of our freedom, they’d protect us from the big, bad “wolves”.  Communism was an attempt by a group of so-called “sheepdogs” to protect the worker-”sheep” from the bourgeois “wolves” - all they had to do was simply do whatever the “sheepdogs” told them to do.  That worked well for everyone involved, now didn’t it?

With appropriate training and familiarity, people can and will act with bravery, decency and competency.  We do not need some self-appointed “sheepdog” on an ego trip telling us what to do, nor should we suffer fools who believe otherwise.

Correlation vs. Causation

When I first read yesterday’s post at Reno & Its Discontents, I had two immediate thoughts:

1. The correlation between Nevada’s taxes and the results we’re getting from our tax programs sure does line up nicely.
2. How strong is the correlation between tax spending and results?

To help everyone out, here’s the chart that she references, courtesy of the Las Vegas Sun:

You have to admit - it looks pretty damning, doesn’t it?  We spend in the 40s, we get results in the 40s in return.  Looks pretty straightforward.  However, life is rarely that simple; for example, crime rates are going to be higher in Nevada because they’re calculated on a per population basis, even though, at any given moment, the number of people in this state is going to be substantially higher than that, thanks to our burgeoning tourism industry.  Las Vegas alone gets 40 million visitors a year - statistically, it’s a given that at least a few of them are committing violent crimes.  Of course, I’m not the first person in the state to notice this:  The Nevada Taxpayer Guide crunched the numbers and determined that 1 in 5 people in Nevada throughout the year are tourists, which means that our per-capita numbers are going to be about 20% higher than they would be without the tourists.  So, for example, using the same FBI Uniform Crime Reports that the Las Vegas Sun is using, we find that the FBI calculates their crime numbers based on a reported population of 2,565,382.  If we adjust for tourists using the Nevada Taxpayer Guide number of 249.4 million visitor-days per year, however, we find that Nevada has a statistical population of 3,248,669, which places our tourist population-adjusted crime rates at:

• Violent Crime: 592.8 (per 100,000 residents) - Still above the national average, but it brings us up from 48th to 43th.
• Property Crime: 2,983.3 (per 100,000 residents) - Actually below the national average, and brings us up to 22nd.

Now, violent crime is still awfully high, but suddenly our property crime numbers look a little more tolerable.  That said, this isn’t really the angle I want to pursue.  Yes, some of the numbers for Nevada, like any other tourism-heavy state, are going to be a little skewed if calculated from a pure per-capita population basis.  How many of those suicides, for example, are Nevada residents?  The bigger question is this:  How tight is the correlation between tax revenues and program results? To answer this question, we first need to get some tax revenue numbers, which means hitting the same source that the Las Vegas Sun hit - the Tax Foundation.  According to their tax burden worksheet, the top 10 most taxed states are:

1. New Jersey
2. New York
3. Connecticut
4. Maryland
5. Hawaii
6. California
7. Ohio
8. District of Columbia
9. Wisconsin
10. Rhode Island

So, just using the crime statistics mentioned above, how do these 10 fare?

• New Jersey: 23th in violent crime, 6th in property crime
• New York: 28th in violent crime, 5th in property crime
• Connecticut: 11th in violent crime, 11th in property crime
• Maryland: 44th in violent crime, 32nd in property crime
• Hawaii: 13th in violent crime, 49th in property crime
• California: 39th in violent crime, 24th in property crime
• Ohio: 26th in violent crime, 33rd in property crime
• District of Columbia: 52nd(last!) in violent crime (includes DC and Puerto Rico), 52nd in property crime
• Wisconsin: 18th in violent crime, 19th in property crime
• Rhode Island: 7th in violent crime, 17th in property crime

Now, we’re going to have to ignore the District of Columbia - no state is composed entirely of an urban area, so it’s going to be a bit of a statistical anomaly anyways.  Also, since Hawaii has a rather healthy tourism industry, we can probably assume with some measure of certainty that their crime numbers are going to be a little high.  Even with those data points out of the mix, however, we can still see that, if there’s a correlation between crime and tax load, it’s pretty weak, especially with regards to violent crime.  To help illustrate this, let’s go the other way (ignoring Puerto Rico):

• Maine: 1st in violent crime, 15th highest tax load
• Vermont: 2nd in violent crime, 8th highest tax load
• New Hampshire: 3rd in violent crime, 46th highest tax load
• North Dakota: 4th in violent crime, 33rd highest tax load
• South Dakota: 5th in violent crime, 45th highest tax load
• Rhode Island: 6th in violent crime, 10th highest tax load
• Utah: 7th in violent crime, 22nd highest tax load
• Wyoming: 8th in violent crime, 48th highest tax load
• Idaho: 9th in violent crime, 13th highest tax load
• Connecticut: 10th in violent crime, 3rd in overall tax load

Three of the states with the lowest violent crime rates in the country are also in the bottom five in overall tax rate, which pretty well sinks any causational link between tax rates and crime.  In fact, a quick look of the list reveals something far more interesting - they’re each in geographical clusters.  You have New England (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island), the Dakotas, and a chunk of the Rocky Mountains (Utah, Wyoming, Idaho).  This implies that there may be more of a link between violent crime and demographics than there is between violent crime rates and tax load.

All right, you might be thinking, perhaps crime isn’t the most illustrative example of how you get what you pay for.  What about education? Well, let’s use the same statistics the Las Vegas Sun used, which means taking a trip to the National Center for for Education Statistics.  For student/teacher ratio, we find that the top 10 states are:

1. Vermont (10.8), 8th highest tax load
2. Maine (11.5), 15th highest tax load
3. Virginia (11.6), 18th highest tax load
4. North Dakota (12.1), 33rd highest tax load
5. New Jersey (12.4), higest tax load in the country
6. Wyoming (12.6), 48th highest tax load
7. New York (12.8), 2nd highest tax load
8. New Hampshire (13.1), 46th highest tax load
9. Massachusetts (13.2), 23rd highest tax load
10. Alabama (13.2), 38th highest tax load

The relationship between tax load and class size is certainly a little firmer than it was for violent crime, but not by much - it’s clear that, if you throw lots of money at the problem, like New York and New Jersey, you can make some headway, but it’s certainly not necessary, and it may not necessarily help.  California, for example, is third from last with a student/teacher ratio of 20.9, just ahead of Oregon (21.3) and Utah (22.1).

Ah, you’re thinking, what about results?  Who cares about class sizes?  Talk to me about graduation rates! Okay, let’s talk graduation rates.  The top ten lowest dropout rates in 2008 were:

1. Connecticut (1.8%), 3rd highest tax load
2. New Jersey (1.8%), highest tax load in the country
3. North Dakota (2.0%), 33rd highest tax load
4. Iowa (2.1%), 31st highest tax load
5. Kansas (2.2%), 21st highest tax load
6. Indiana (2.5%), 28th highest tax load
7. Maine (2.7%), 15th highest tax load
8. Vermont (2.8%), 8th highest tax load
9. Nebraska (2.8%), 17th highest tax load
10. Virginia (2.8%), 18th highest tax load

Here, again, the correlation is a little stronger, but it’s still not a slam dunk - many of the states are in the middle of the tax pack or, at worst, slightly above it.  Meanwhile, if we take a look at the rest of the top 10 taxed states that aren’t in the list above, we find New York at 42nd with a 5.6% dropout rate (note that, according to these numbers, we’re at 43rd, not the 42nd that the Las Vegas Sun has us at), Maryland at 30th (4.1%), Hawaii at 36th (4.8%), California at 17th (3.3%), Ohio at 19th (3.3%), and Rhode Island at 24th (3.4%).  In short, high taxes does not necessarily lead to lower dropout rates.

With enough time, I’m certain that I could dig through more and more data and find the same thing - if there’s a correlation between tax load and government services provided, it’s not anywhere near as strong as many people would like us to believe.  The reasons are both obvious and multitudinous.  Health and education statistics are more about demographics than monetary outlays - if your citizens are broke (Maryland, with an emphasis on Baltimore), it’s not going to matter how much you bring in to your coffers or how high you tax your citizens, you’re still not coming out ahead.  The more expensive the state is to live in, the higher the tax load will need to be to provide the same level of services as another state - this is why Wyoming and New Hampshire, for example, can have low tax rates yet still receive high marks in program statistics, while New York and California are near the bottom.  Of course, tax rates are a factor in a state’s cost of living - the more you tax, the more people have to make to enjoy the same standard of living as a less taxed individual.  In short, “you get what you pay for” is a simplistic sentiment at best and completely misguided at worst.

To drive the point home…

• Why is our student/teacher ratio so high?  Because people move into this state faster than we can build schools and hire teachers. As long as that’s the case, it’s not going to matter how much money we throw at the problem - we’re still going to have higher than average student/teacher ratios.  The only way around this is if we try to build faster than our growth rate, in which case we may overbuild and find our education dollars going towards maintenance on a bunch of facilities we don’t need instead of actually teaching students.  It’s a balance, and, with the way our state grows, one that’s very hard to get right.
• Why is our high school dropout rate higher than the national average?  Because many of the students that show up in our high schools aren’t from here. It doesn’t matter how much money we throw at this problem - if you’re dealing with a bunch of high school-aged kids that move into a school district and suddenly find themselves “behind” because their school district teaches courses in a different order than ours does, you’re going to lose a few through the cracks.  I saw it happen quite frequently when I was in high school, and, believe me, all the teachers and the counselors in the world would not have helped.
• Why is our post-secondary education rate so abysmal?  This one is easy - because Nevada doesn’t have a lot of jobs that call for a college degree.  College graduates go where the jobs are.  Guess what?  Most of Nevada’s jobs are non-skilled, tourist-oriented, low-paying jobs that most college graduates aren’t going to settle for.  Instead, they’re going to move to states that have jobs for them.  Consequently, those states will have higher post-secondary education rates.  Want to fix this?  Spending more money in the college system might help - what will help more is encouraging high skill jobs to come to Nevada so college graduates will want to stay or move here.
• Why is our suicide rate so high?  We’re a state that receives a bunch of tourists who gamble lots of money.  Some of them don’t fare so well.  Three guesses how that will affect our numbers.  Also, guess how much suicide prevention money will help solve this.  Hint:  The answer is not at all.
• Percentage of uninsured?  This one is also easy - remember what we covered with our college graduates?  Good jobs = good benefits = high post-secondary education rates and lower percentage of uninsured.  Poorly paying jobs = terrible benefits = low post-secondary education rates and a higher percentage of uninsured.  Higher taxes will help with this how?

I think I’ve made my point.

More Quick Thoughts

1. Do women get as upset about tomboys as men get about metrosexuals?
2. This article on Slate is why I don’t get paid the big bucks - it explains my position on the whole Israel-Gaza mess better than I did.  No victory, no peace.  Know victory, know peace.  Simple as that.
3. While I’m referring to that earlier post, another point I made was that we’re a long way from being away from an oil-based economy.  I’m not the only one noticing this, though I don’t agree with the idea that we should stage increasing gas taxes to do something about this.  As the article itself notes, Europe already had a small car and mass transit culture due to geography - that just made it where gas taxes were a little less noticeable.  The United States, on the other hand, is a bit more sparsely populated.  We’d be better off looking towards places like Australia and Canada, both of which are far-flung countries that rely heavily on road travel, for more appropriate and applicable lessons.  That said, if we absolutely have to have increased fuel taxes for political reasons, and I really hope we don’t, I could go with a tax exemption for shipping and freight.  This would ensure that higher taxes do not lead to higher prices throughout the rest of the economy.  As we have already learned, higher fuel prices leads to more expensive goods since the price of shipping the goods themselves, to say nothing of the materials that the goods are made of, increases, and that increase has to be passed down to the customer.  Setting our tax code up to exacerbate that tendency would not serve anybody’s interests, best or otherwise.

World’s Largest Ghost Town?

I don’t remember where I found this, but do the following:

1. Go to http://www.realtor.com.
2. Search for “Detroit”.
3. Sort the results by price, lowest to highest.

There are houses that cost as little as $1. The first 50 results, at least today, are all $300 or less.  Think about this for a second - this includes the land. If you read the fine print, of course, it turns out that many of the houses for sale are being auctioned, so what you’re seeing is the auction price, which is still pretty incredible.  To put this into perspective, if you do the same search in Reno, for example, the cheapest land you’ll find will be for around $10,000, will be about 15 miles or so out of town, and won’t have any improvements (utilities, structures, etc.).

What’s the catch?  How is this possible?  What does this even mean?

The catch is pretty straightforward - the houses and land are in Detroit, which isn’t exactly prospering at the moment.  Detroit has been hemhorraging jobs for the better part of three decades or so.  Notice how many of those <$1,000 properties being listed were all built in the ’50s?  That’s no accident - immediate post-WW2 was Detroit’s heyday.  Since then, however, Detroit’s population has been declining steadily since - it’s now slightly more than half of its population during the ’50s - driven in part by detereorating economic conditions in Detroit as the domestic auto sector continues its nose-dive and in part by good ol’ fashioned white flight.

Even so, though, it still doesn’t explain how it’s possible for homes to be selling for less than a month’s rent in Reno.  After all, one would think that gentrification would have to kick in at some point.  Sure, I understand that Detroit’s neighborhoods aren’t particularly safe, but one would think it would only be a matter of time before some enterprising young people sat down and said, “Wait - so, we can buy a home for less than the cost of a decently maintained used car?  Who cares where it is?! Sign me up!”  It seems simple and straightforward.  What would be cheaper - living in the dorms in the University of Michigan, or having you and a couple of friends cough up a few grand between the group and buy a house and commute?

Yet, this isn’t happening.  Why not?  Part of the problem is Devil’s Night - most of those dirt cheap homes are undoubtedly victims of that, which means that buying the home would involve cleaning the mess up.  Worse yet, if the home has been abandoned for a while, it’s almost certainly been converted into a drug house at some point, or has at least fallen into such a state of total disrepair that it would require incredible time, money, and commitment to rehabilitate it.  This surprisingly active link to the Detroit News helps outline what happens to some of these abandoned properties and how they were abandoned to begin with.  Then, there’s Detroit’s rather tumultuous local political scene, culminating in the recent arrest of the mayor.

So, why are the prices so low?  The answer to that is very simple - the banks just want to be rid of the properties.  The longer they hold on to them, the longer they have to pay property taxes and “maintain” them.  Since nobody’s particularly anxious to move into the properties, the banks would much rather give the properties away and get them off of their books than keep them for any longer than they absolutely have to.

The end result is that Detroit is rapidly devolving into America’s largest ghost town, and possibly the world’s, though I suspect there are parts of the former Warsaw Pact area that might have a word or two to say about that.

Thus It Begins…

Although it was nice to be away for a few days, sans Internet access and sans work responsibilities, it’s nice to be back.  Honestly, I was starting to get restless by the end of the weekend.  Due in part to that restlessness, I feel like touching on something big - something grand.  Today is a good day for grand ideas - with the year almost over and the economy in trouble, everybody is feeling a little introspective, and I’m feeling no different.

I think… no, I intuit, if it can even be called anything that serious, that humankind is at an inflection point.  Since the 1700’s or so, humanity has become increasingly specialized.  There was a time when it was possible for one man to achieve a solid understanding of all that was knowable; we called this person a “Rennaisance Man“.  Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to achieve this sort of understanding - even individual fields have different specialties that you can drill into and get lost in.  For example, pretend you want to achieve a solid understanding of computers - how they work, how to make them do what you want them to do, perhaps even be able to come up with some new, novel use for them.  It sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?  It’s all a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, after all… or is it?  Okay, that’s not fair - quantum computers are still about a decade away from being anywhere close to mainstream; at this point, quantum computing is probably at the same place that the computer that we know and love was in 1950.  Let’s step away from there and just focus on normal, ordinary binary computers.  Now, what branch of computers do you want to focus on?  Do you want to focus on gigantic mainframes, the kind of computers that you see at your mother’s house, or something in between?  How about a cluster of computers like your mom’s, all working together to generate performance that would blow a mainframe out of the water?

Whoa there, you’re thinking to yourself.  Let’s just focus on the kind I see on my desk. Fine - I can work with that.  So, is that a Windows machine on your desk, or are you one of those using a Mac?  Perhaps your IT guy is a real propellerhead and has you using a Linux workstation, of all things, which opens up a huge can of worms.  Okay, okay - you’re probably using a Windows machine, like roughly 90% of the world, give or take.  Fine - Windows XP or Windows Vista?  Or, is your IT department still limping along with Windows 2000?  Windows NT 4?  Or, ye gods, Windows 98?! Okay, it’s probably Windows XP, and even if it’s Windows 2000, the differences are small enough where we can probably safely ignore them for now.  So, what flavor of XP is that on your desk?  Home, Professional, or Media Center?  Wait, are you in a third-world country where Starter Edition is sold?  Are you using a tablet?  If so, that means we’re talking about Tablet Edition… crap, okay, hold on - are you reading this article from work?  If so, you’re probably using XP Pro.  We’ll just assume you’re not using the 64-bit version, since that raises all kinds of fun issues, like Windows on Windows and 64-bit native drivers.  Fine.  Let’s dig into that little machine on your desk…

Let’s start with logging in.  Do you log into your computer with a password and all that good stuff?  Okay, you’re probably using your XP Pro machine in an Active Directory environment - you don’t want to know what understanding that would entail (You in the back with the Novell eDirectory login screen - shut up! We’re trying to keep this simple!).  Seriously, we’re just talking about the login screen here.  Don’t care?  That’s okay - we’ll move on.  Go ahead and log in… now, what do you want to do with your computer?  Maybe you want to play like the big boys with little command-line scripts.  Maybe there’s something about that little black box that you find absolutely mesmerising.  Fine.  Here’s the list of commands for CMD, the default command line in Windows XP.  Have fun.  Not enough control for you?  Okay, well, you can always use Windows Script Host, where we can unleash the object-oriented train wreck that is WMI upon your unknowing soul.  This’ll help with that, by the way.  Wait - you want results in real-time?  Powershell might be helpful, but do you want v1 or are you feeling daring enough to try the latest Community Technology Preview of v2?

Wait - you don’t even know what you want to automate yet.  That’s fine.  Let’s start with something familiar.  Go ahead, play with Microsoft Office.  Perhaps you just want to write a script that automates pulling data from one Excel sheet into another.  Sounds good - that’s what Visual Basic for Applications is all about, after all… or is it?  Perhaps .NET is more to your liking?  Don’t tell me you don’t like Visual Basic… we might have to throw down Visual C#, or worse, Visual C++… oh boy.  Or, you could just make a good ol’ fashioned macro - that could be fun.  I’m not even going to begin to explain what a lambda expression is, or why XML is all over the place now, much less what a singleton is, and if I have to dig into Java and explain beans, I quit.  JSON?  That’s it… we’re done here.

We’re just talking about that computer on your desk, right?  Right off the bat, we’re faced with a conundrum - how deep do we feel like delving?  Are we shifting into programming, or just basic system administration?  If we’re dealing with programming, what are we programming, exactly, and what terminology are we going to be using?  What programming language(s) are we playing with?  What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?  If we’re talking about system administration, how local is it?  What do we need to control, and on how many computers do we need to control it?  How do we feel like exercising that control?  Each of these decisions requires increasingly in-depth knowledge of the platform, and, at each point that we drill down, we take time away from ourselves that allows us to drill out.  The time that you spend staring at all of the namespaces in root/cimv2 is time that you’re not spending working with Powershell cmdlets, which would also be time that you’re not spending working with the VBA class model, which is also time you’re not spending dealing with other platforms entirely.  At each point, your ability to understand the forest is diminished as you delve further and further into it, looking for that one tree that you need to get your job done.

This is just computers we’re talking about.  I’m not even going to touch on economics, physics, chemistry, law, medicine, etc.  The list goes on.  Meanwhile, we have journalists, specializing in their own schools of thought, trying to explain to everyone else these other specialized schools of thought and how they’ll affect everyone else, followed by politicians that are neck-deep in their own highly specialized schools of politics and punditry doing their damndest to prove they matter by writing laws that meddle in fields that even the specialists barely understand.  Take dealer franchise laws, something that’s remarked upon fairly frequently when discussing the Detroit bailout but never really explained.  They nearly sunk Chrysler when DeSoto went under in ‘62.  They cost GM a handsome sum when they canned Oldsmobile.  But, does anybody actually know what one of these laws looks like?

You will now - I present to you Nevada Revised Statute 482.36352:

NRS 482.36352 Termination or discontinuation of franchise: Notice; grounds; protest by dealer; hearing.

1.  Notwithstanding the terms of any franchise, a manufacturer or distributor shall not terminate or refuse to continue any franchise unless it has received the written consent of the dealer or:

(a) It has given written notice of its intention to the dealer and the Director; and

(b) Either of the following conditions occurs:

(1) The dealer does not file a protest with the Director within the time allowed by this section; or

(2) After the dealer has filed a protest and the Director has conducted a hearing on the matter, the Director issues an order authorizing the manufacturer or distributor to terminate the franchise or permit it to lapse.

2.  The notice required by this section must be given to the dealer and the Director:

(a) At least 15 days before the effective date of the intended termination or the date on which the existing franchise is to expire if the grounds for the termination or refusal include any of the following:

(1) Except as otherwise provided in NRS 482.36396 to 482.36414, inclusive, transfer of any ownership or interest in the franchised dealership without the consent of the manufacturer or distributor unless that consent has been withheld without good cause;

(2) Material misrepresentation by the dealer in applying for the franchise;

(3) Insolvency of the dealer or the filing of any petition by or against the dealer under any law governing bankruptcy or receivership;

(4) Any unfair business practice by the dealer after the manufacturer or distributor has issued a written warning to the dealer to desist from that practice;

(5) Revocation of a dealer’s license under this chapter;

(6) Conviction of the dealer for a felony; and

(7) Closure by the dealer for a period longer than 14 days, unless the closure was caused by a force beyond the control of the dealer.

(b) At least 60 days before the effective date of the intended termination or the date on which the existing franchise is to expire if the grounds for the termination or refusal do not include one or more of those set forth in paragraph (a).

Ê The notice required by this section must include a statement of the particular grounds for the intended termination or refusal to continue a franchise.

3.  A dealer who has received a notice pursuant to this section may file a protest with the Director:

(a) Within 10 days after receiving the notice if it states one or more of the grounds specified in paragraph (a) of subsection 2;

(b) Within 30 days after receiving the notice if it does not state one of the grounds specified in that paragraph; or

(c) In either case, within 30 days after the end of any appellate procedure provided by the manufacturer or distributor.

(Added to NRS by 1981, 698; A 1985, 1831; 1999, 2507)

NRS 482.363521 Termination or discontinuation of franchise: Compensation of dealer.

1.  Upon the termination or refusal to continue a franchise, the manufacturer or distributor shall compensate the dealer for:

(a) The dealer’s inventory of new vehicles, including new vehicles not of the current model year if delivered to the dealer during the 18-month period immediately preceding the effective date of the termination or refusal to continue the franchise. As used in this paragraph, a “new vehicle” is one which has not been damaged, materially altered or registered with the Department or with the appropriate agency of authority of any other state, the District of Columbia, any territory or possession of the United States or any foreign state, province or country.

(b) The dealer’s inventory of parts and accessories which:

(1) Have been purchased by the dealer from the manufacturer or distributor; and

(2) Are listed in a current parts catalog of the manufacturer or distributor.

(c) Any special tools purchased by the dealer from the manufacturer or distributor, less a reasonable allowance for depreciation.

(d) Any equipment, furnishings or signs purchased by the dealer from the manufacturer or distributor, less a reasonable allowance for depreciation.

(e) Except as otherwise provided in subsection 4, the fair rental value for 90 days, and any additional period allowed by the Director after considering the difficulty of finding a new tenant for the dealer’s premises affected, after the effective date of the termination or refusal to continue of the portion of the dealer’s place of business that was used by the dealer to sell or service vehicles or other products of the manufacturer or distributor.

2.  Compensation paid pursuant to paragraphs (a) to (d), inclusive, of subsection 1 must be paid in an amount at least equal to the greater of:

(a) The amount actually paid by the dealer for the vehicles, parts, tools and equipment; or

(b) The amount currently paid by other dealers in this State for the vehicles, parts, tools and equipment.

3.  If compensation is paid pursuant to paragraph (e) of subsection 1, the dealer shall allow the manufacturer or distributor paying the compensation the use and possession of the premises affected.

4.  The manufacturer or distributor is not required to pay compensation pursuant to paragraph (e) of subsection 1 if the dealer has been convicted of a crime involving fraud in connection with his application for or operation of the franchise.

5.  This section does not relieve a dealer of his obligation to mitigate damages resulting from the termination or refusal to continue the franchise.

(Added to NRS by 1987, 2200; A 1999, 2508; 2003, 20th Special Session, 300)

So, in short, according to Nevada state law, if GM decides it wants to kill a dealership, they would have to give the dealer two month’s notice, hope and pray the dealer doesn’t appeal to the Director, then buy every car on that lot, every sign at the dealership, all of the tools, all of the spare parts, and then pay rent on that location for three months.  That’s assuming the dealer doesn’t fight it.

Now, multiply those costs by 1,750 and assume that, if Nevada’s business friendly climate is any indication, that other state franchise laws might be far more restrictive.  That’s the law GM has to work with, times fifty.  These are the sorts of laws that journalists have to explain to those that don’t want to read state revised statutes until their eyes bleed.  These are the sorts of laws that federal lawmakers(!) have to contend with when deciding if we should use the federal purse to loan some money.

These are just dealer franchise laws.  These are just the dealers we’re talking about - we’re not even touching on management or labor.  As for labor, you don’t want to know what labor laws in Michigan look like.  Labor Disputes and Employment Relations, anyone?  Check out the section on Solicitation of Strikebreakers to get a general feel for what’s going on there.  It goes on like this.  Does anybody really understand what’s going on?  Are they talking to the people that write the checks?

The world is full of these examples - full of little trees, planted all over the place, each doing a magnificent job of making life ever more complicated and more difficult to fully understand.  This is natural - we have 6 billion people, each of them more educated than ever before, each able to dig deeper than ever before.  Unfortunately, our lives are still organized in a very forest-centric sort of way; our political structures, for example, are built around the idea that it’s possible for a few hundred people to see the forest from the trees and govern appropriately.  Clearly, even under the best of times, this is well-nigh impossible - there’s just too much there there for anybody to really get a solid grasp on.  This is why a hands-off approach to government is necessary - there is simply no way anymore that a government can interfere with much of anything without causing myriad unwanted side-effects that few can foresee, much less understand.  There is risk in this, sure - but it’s not like the choice is between risk-free public government management and risk-full private self-government.  It never was.  Public government has risks - just ask its employees.  Heck, ask those that have to pay for those employees.

Wordpress is telling me that I’ve already cranked out over 2500 words, which means I probably should have stopped a loooong time ago… so I’m done.

When Internet Trolling Goes Horribly Wrong

That’s right, folks - it’s the greatest set of trolls to hit the Internet since the unfortunately named GNAA.  Ladies and gentlemen… the Westboro Baptist Church and their latest hit, “Santa Claus Will Take You To Hell”!

Considering how much attention is paid to homosexuality, I am a little curious if the GNAA isn’t somehow behind this.  I mean, it does fit their MO, in a roundabout and contrarian sort of way.  One thing is certain - if the Westboro Baptist Church ever starts talking about goats, that’ll pretty well seal it.

As far as trolling efforts go, I’ll give this one a 6/10.  It does reference some facts, namely, that our current celebrations of Christmas does, in fact, borrow heavily from pagan influences.  However, they’re not the first group to come up with this position - I seem to remember the Jehovah Witnesses having similar views regarding most major holidays, albeit more moderately expressed, so we’ll have to count that against them.  I’m also docking points for needlessly throwing homosexuals into the placards - it seems to me that some of their members didn’t get the memo regarding what, exactly, they were protesting.  On the other hand, I’ll give them partial credit for the creativity and graphical nature of the placards that did go off message; if you’re going to be wrong, you might as well be completely wrong, instead of trying to half-ass it.

Those Who Forget The Past…

(Note: I’m writing this from my phone, which means this will be short, sweet, and lacknowledge links until I get a chance to clean this post up later. You’ve been warned.)

It’s the holiday season, which means it’s time for the annual atheist tradition of “Let’s act mortified about Christmas!” We have signs on state capitols, articles decrying the Dear Leader-like adulation of a long dead Nazarene, and the usual complaints focusing on how, no matter where you go, there’s no escaping the wacky traditions of our superstitious neighbors and fellow countrymen. Each year, for the better part of a month, we go through this, and each year we prove, once and for all, why more than half of America should never, ever vote for an atheist.

Is it because atheists are a self-serving lot? Some are, to be sure, but not the majority. If we can have an African-American President while Alan Sharpton and Jesse Jackson run around, we can certainly rise above our “spokespeople”. Is it because we have no clearly defined moral compass, bereft of some higher authority to keep us on the straight and narrow? Of course not - if it’s possible for the Westboro Baptist Church and the Unitarians to read from the same Bible and worship the same God, there’s clearly as much room for interpretation with a higher power as there is without. No, the reason is so much simpler than that.

We’re not willing to pay attention to history.

See, here’s what we’re missing: How did Christmas get so popular that it not only causes the entire Western World to don green and red, it caused the Jews and Black Liberation types to come up with imitations of their own? Easy - Christmas was an adaptation of a much earlier but just as popular holiday itself. When Christianity was first spreading through Europe, it was facing rather heavy resistance itself. Did early Christians just sit around, act smug, and ridicule local customs? Sure, at first. After a while, though, somebody thought, “Hmm… perhaps our chances of being lion food would be slightly less if we preached a more positive form of Christianity! I mean, one God is so much more convenient than a bunch of petty, squabbling gods, and there’s no good reason we have to observe Jesus’ birthday on his actual birthday, right? He was the Son of God, after all… What was God’s birthday? Right.” Suddenly, instead of being the leading source of lion food in Europe, Christianity became the “in thing”, spreading across Europe faster than your household plague.

There’s a lesson in this.

We atheists have a strong selling point: Why waste your time worrying what some indefinable, probably imaginary being thinks about how you spend your Sundays? Isn’t having zero gods to tend to so much easier than having to worry about some all-seeing, all-powerful, but very invisible and undiscernable God? What if we just decided that, instead of getting all pompous and self-righteous every December, we just told the world, “Hey, join with us and we’ll let you drink all of the hot toddies you want, guilt-free! It’s cool, you can still have your gifts and your days off. We’re just not going to expect you to go anywhere you don’t want to go or pretend to enjoy any boring sermons, that’s all. Deal?” Honestly, I think that we would get so much more accomplished that way instead of the usual, “You are all a bunch of superstitious rubes!” routine that we throw down every year.

Seriously, we’re atheists! Why are we trying to out-boring the Christians?

(NOTE:  Fixed some typos, finally added some links.)

UPDATE:  This is more like it!

Moments In Blunderbustery

Okay, this post really has nothing to do with blunderbusses; I just wanted to highlight a couple of brilliant government-sponsored blunders.  Both examples are from the SF Gate:

Signs to warn Hwy. 99 drivers of fog:

(11-12) 04:00 PST Fresno — California authorities plan to unveil a highway safety program to alert motorists when heavy fog makes driving hazardous in the San Joaquin Valley.

[...]

Officials with the California Department of Transportation and the California Highway Patrol say the new changeable message signs will update automatically when visibility sensors detect poor driving conditions.

That’s right - the same state that’s good for a $28 billion deficit and wants a federal bailout has set up a system to let people know that there’s fog… y’know, on the off chance that not being able to see was an insufficient warning.  Apparently, some people can’t seem to grasp that, if it seems like they’re driving through the middle of a grey pea-soup filled cloud, they might be… um… driving through a grey pea-soup filled cloud. Of course, any questions asking how one expects to see a sign letting you know that you’re driving through a nearly impenetrable gassy wall of water vapor when your vision is impaired due to driving through a nearly impenetrable gassy wall of water vapor were quickly refracted and ignored.

Meanwhile, if you guessed that those banks we’ve been throwing money at aren’t using the money to increase the credit supply but instead to increase executive compensation and fund bank buy-outs, well, good news…

Banks promise they won’t use bailout money for pay:

Members of Congress complained Thursday that banks haven’t used $163 billion infusion of capital, already received or promised by the government, to open credit lines for more lending.

[...]

Treasury has so far has devoted $250 billion of the bailout money to buying equity in banks and another $40 billion to insurance giant American International Group Inc. The hope was that the infusion of news capital would enable them to increase lending, but so far that hasn’t happened, lawmakers said at a hearing by the Senate Finance Committee Thursday.

Instead, some of the recipients of the money have continued to pay dividends to stockholders, provide pay raises and bonuses to executives and other employees and level takeover bids at other companies. Lawmakers said they want to impose restrictions on all those activities for companies getting bailout money.

That’s right - our crack team of legislators gave the banking industry $750 billion dollars to increase liquidity but failed to require that banks spend that money on actually increasing liquidity. So, instead, they’re treating the money like college kids routinely treat financial aid checks and spending it all on their friends.  Of course, legislators are also the same people that think that, when you’re driving in fog, what you need is a sign letting you know you’re driving through fog, so I guess this shouldn’t come as a huge shock.

I Have A Small Blog In Me…

So now I shall pass it.

First, after watching the Red Sox/Rays game, I have the following question:

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Personally, I’m not sure which way to vote on this one.  I’m pulling for a Red Sox vs. Manny World Series, if only because watching Manny try to take on Red Sox Nation singlehandedly would be highly entertaining.  Past that, it’s a little difficult to get excited about the Phillies, and as for the Rays… yeah, okay, Tampa Bay has never made it to the playoffs before.  Great!  Glad to see they could make it.  Even so, it’s a little hard to get excited about a team that had to remove “Devil” from their name because… why, again?  If there’s anything funnier than a team with the name “Devil” in it and teal being part of the official uniform (NOTE:  What is it about Florida teams and teal?!), I can’t think of it.

Nothing says evil like teal.  Nothing.

Speaking of evil, how about this?

General Motors has held discussions about acquiring Chrysler, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported late Friday.

The talks between GM and Cerberus Capital Management, which owns Chrysler, began more than a month ago, the Times reported on its Web site.

I’m not even sure who this is a worst idea for, and I’m not the only one.  On the one hand, GM has an opportunity to buy a competitor with minimal foreign marketshare, a reckless overabundance of trucks and SUVs that nobody wants in its inventory and its product pipeline, and absolutely no marketspace that anybody believes it has any sort of leadership, save for possibly a fading minivan segment if you’re feeling generous.  Concurrently, Chrysler has an opportunity to get bought out by a company that may be filing for bankruptcy within the year.  It’s a win-win!

(Wait… wait, no… no it’s not.)

One final note…

What is it about women and bathrooms?  Thankfully, the ESO isn’t like this, but there seems to be an overabundance of women with wacky hangups involving the bathroom.  I remember working with one woman who absolutely refused to do anything in a public bathroom, especially if there was anybody else in said bathroom.  I’ve run into women that get offended when people dare to poop in their bathroom - even when the other person happens to live there!  The list goes on and on and on… and I have to wonder here - what kind of wacky, puritanical madness led to this state of affairs?  Why on earth is it more ‘ladylike’ to pretend that you’re just hanging out in the bathroom, doing absolutely nothing at all, instead of treating the bathroom as a place of purpose where you dispose of bodily waste?  Are you seriously telling me that it’s more ‘ladylike’ to pretend that you’re just “hanging out” in what is essentially a publically available entry point for either a sewer system or a septic tank?  Would you pretend to hang out over a manhole?  How about a dumpster?  Why does hanging out in front of a dumpster pretending you don’t have trash make any less sense than “hanging out” in a bathroom pretending that you don’t pee or poop?

Here’s a hint:  Women that don’t poop aren’t women - they’re robots. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like robots - I think they kick ass, and if we can find a way to pull off a convincing lovebot, I’d be all over that like white on ranch.  Of course, if we had lovebots, we’d have to be careful to ensure that our reproductive equipment doesn’t get rootkitted somehow; last I checked, human beings have numerous security vulnerabilities that are trivially easy to exploit…

Perhaps it’s best if we just move on.

Finally, this wouldn’t be a blog at all if I didn’t mention that our stock market is apparently destined for great and terrible things at the moment.  It’s at times like these that I’m thankful that, up until very recently, I’ve historically been too poor to think about a savings, much less a retirement plan.  The good news, at least on a personal level, is that, assuming I start a retirement plan sometime in the near future, I’m going to be buying rather low.  So, with that in mind, I mean no offense to those whose lives are wantonly devastated by the current financial climate, but I’m an incredible cheapskate - the lower the market goes, the happier I’ll be at this particular moment.  Perhaps I could buy some stock that’s worth less than my truck!  Sure, it would take some effort, but with a little time and patience, I think it’s possible.

As a further aside, I’ve decided it’s official:  My truck shall henceforth be known as Serenity.  Don’t worry, it’s running fine - it’s just starting to make some interesting noises around the transfer case region again.  Good times.

Quickish Thoughts

Let’s see here…

1. New job that forbids posting on blogs or message forums while at work, per corporate policy?  Check.
2. Infant at home?  Check.
3. Hour long commute in each direction to work?  Check.
4. Moving soon?  Check.

And people wonder why I don’t post more…

Here are some thoughts that I’d love to spend a little more time developing, but want to throw out there so that way there’s something halfway fresh and interesting:

• Openfire rocks my world.  As far as open-sourced projects go, it’s in pretty solid shape, even if it has the traditional “What the heck is that?!” name going.  Openfire is an open-sourced instant messenger server based on Jabber (the same protocol used by GTalk and later versions of iChat, among others) that can also be used as a gateway for other, more common protocols, like ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and so forth.  What’s nice about Openfire isn’t just that it’s fairly lightweight (uses only 64 MB of RAM by default, unless you configure it to use more), or that it integrates fairly cleanly with Active Directory (yes, you have to look up a few LDAP structures in ADSIEdit, but you only have to do it once).  Openfire can also archive all messages that pass through it into a database of your choosing, including Microsoft SQL Server, which means that you can keep tabs on what employees are chatting about, maintain archives of internal chats, and control who gets access to what on the outside.  Very, very handy, and since it’s legitimately free, even the smallest businesses can implement this without much pain.  The one drawback is that it works best with the corresponding Spark IM client; I say it’s a drawback because, though Spark is fairly functional, it misses a lot of nice yet common features, like the ability to change fonts and font colors.  Normally I wouldn’t sweat that much, but having my default color turn out to be pink with no way to change it is a little obnoxious.  It does do the job, though, so I’m not going to sweat it much, and it does integrate with Openfire’s various features and plug-ins quite nicely.
• I don’t really care what Obama’s or McCain’s health care plans are - if either of them involve spending government money to “fix” health care, we’re going to be in trouble.  Here’s the deal:  Right now, the federal government isn’t just operating at a deficit - it’s hemorrhaging cash in the worst possible way imaginable.  According to the US Treasury, our current debt is, as of October 7th, $10,224,252,192,942.42.  On January 1st, 2008, the debt was $9,229,172,659,218.31.  That means that, in the course of 10 months, we borrowed nearly one trillion dollars.  We increased our debt by over 10% in less than a year, and we still haven’t started paying a dime for the infamous $700 billion bailout of the financial sector.  Since the economy is slipping, tax revenues are only going to go down, which means the debt is only going to get worse unless something is done to either curtail spending (i.e. slashing programs - big ones) or raise revenue (i.e. raise taxes by a lot more than either McCain or Obama can dare suggest).  As McCain was kind enough to point out in last night’s debate, the last president to raise taxes during a recession was Hoover; it would be an understatement to say that didn’t end well.
• Speaking of programs, take a look at this graph from the US Government Accountability Office:
  
  To put that into perspective, our current GDP is roughly $14.3 trillion.  According to the Heritage Foundation, the federal government has been bringing in about $2.5 trillion in tax revenue, or about 17% of our GDP; whether that includes transfer payments like Social Security is unclear.  If that chart is even remotely accurate, by 2016 we can count on spending all of our current federal taxes on Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, assuming we only spend what we tax and we don’t increase taxes.

  Needless to say, neither is going to happen - we’re going to borrow like mad and we’re going to have to either raise taxes or start breaking promises.  By 2080, we’re probably going to be doing a lot of both.

  The trouble here is not that health care is broken, or that our bureaucrats spent program money like water, though there is some truth to both of those statements.  The simple truth is that these programs, though sold as “pay-as-you-go” programs where each person pays in and then, after a set amount of time, gets their money back as health care and a nominal retirement, are not really “pay-as-you-go” programs, and never were supposed to be.  Think about it for a minute - do you really think that the first person to receive money from Social Security put anything into it?  How about the first generation?  Do you really believe for even a second that FDR & Friends got together and created a program that nobody could cash out from for 20 years until the first people finally put in enough to get something back?  Of course not, which is why any politician that pretends otherwise is either foolish or duplicitous.  If it was that simple, why get the federal government involved at all?  Why not just say, “Okay, American citizens, you’re hereby ordered to put some of your money in a savings account” and be done with it?

  The answer is simple - that’s not what Social Security and its ilk were ever about.  Ever.

  The point of these programs was to provide a nominal retirement and some basic health care to people that couldn’t provide it for themselves.  It was supposed to be paid for by those that could provide it, which means that every dime your parents put into Social Security went to their parents, and every dime that you’re putting into Social Security right now will go to your parents.  That’s how the system was designed to work, and, as long as people aren’t living for too long and having lots of kids, the system will work just fine.  Of course, as time has passed, we’ve enjoyed longer lifespans, with not-quite-as-long productive lifespans, meaning we’re able to work longer, but not as much longer as we’re able to live.  At the same time, we’re also having fewer children, which means there are fewer taxpayers supporting our social programs.

  So, while the entire model that underpins our current programs, the one that pays for the promises politicians made to our parents 30 years ago, slowly erodes and collapses, what are our current politicians promising?  Obama wants to create a small business health tax break, pay for catastrophic health costs, and create a public national health insurance company that competes against private companies, or at least provides insurance when the private companies refuse to.  Considering how well the last set of GSEs were run, I’m not exactly inclined to support the creation of another one.  McCain, meanwhile, wants to give everybody somewhere between $2,500-$5,000 to offset health insurance costs.  Granted, that’s not quite as spendy as Obama’s plan, but we’re still talking about up to $750 billion (that’s $2,500 times 300,000,000 Americans) that’s going to have to materialize out of thin air.

  We’re spending over $1 trillion a year that we don’t have right now.  How are we going to come up with enough money to meet either of their spending promises?

  The answer:  We can’t.

• Right now, The China Probrem is on, and it’s… it’s pretty messed up.  I can’t do it anymore!

Wildlife

Since I’m feeling less textual and more visual at the moment, I’ve decided that today’s post will be about some random wildlife I’ve been seeing around the apartment complex as of late.

First, some raccoons…

These were pointed out to me when, while I was outside, a neighborhood girl tried to get my attention.  At first, I was a little confused, especially since I didn’t know her at all, until she pointed towards that ledge.

Then, I became really confused.

Fortunately, I think the raccoons were about as confused by our presence as I was by theirs.  That said, when I grabbed my camera and took my picture, I learned that nocturnal creatures really don’t like sudden, unexpected flashes of light, which is why I don’t have more pictures of them; after firing the camera off, they started to work their way down to ground level.  As cute and rabies-free as they looked up there, I wasn’t about to get cute and cuddly with one up close.

Next up… our door frog:

I have no idea whether this is a frog or a toad.  I have no idea what kind of frog or toad that is.  What I do know is that little amphibian (about the size of the palm of my hand - more on this in a second) has been hanging around our front door for months.  I have no problems with this; I’m sure that, in some culture or another, having a frog on our porch is considered good luck, and besides, it undoubtedly helps address the proliferation of bugs in the area.

That said, this particular frog has a thing for the indoors.  One time, the ESO and I opened the door, only to discover that the frog was sneaking into our apartment.  Unfortunately, it made it in, which meant I had to get it out of there.  Being the kind of guy I am, I just picked up the amphibian (hence how I know for a fact that it’s about the size of my hand) and carried it outside.  In exchange, the frog pissed on my hand.  I suppose it was a fair exchange.

There is one bug, however, that even that frog won’t touch.  I present to you… our potato bug:

Okay, to be fair, this picture is a couple of years old, but I thought it would be rather weak to have a “wildlife” post with only two pictures.  So, here’s the freakiest, biggest bug I’ve seen in a long, long time.  I wish I thought to put a quarter or something next to it, because, believe me, it dwarfed anything smaller than a half-dollar.  According to the ESO, she used to see tons of these things when she was a kid - they’d get stuck on her screen door and start hissing.  Personally, I’m not a big fan of bugs that make noise, especially when they’re big enough to make serious crunchy noises if I try to step on them.

I hate bugs.

Oh, and yes, this is the best I’ve got.  If you want something more serious, go read about the latest and greatest way Congress is earning its record low approval ratings.

Re-Establishing Normalcy

Welcome back, everyone.  I know I’ve been gone for a while - between the new job and my dad visiting, things have been rather busy around here.  Now that normalcy is beginning to return, however, I should be able to maintain a somewhat more or less regular pace.

Since just about everyone and their mother is weighing in on the bailout, I suppose I can join the fray.  Before I begin, I’d like to make a note about my qualifications:  I took three semesters of Economics.  I got in A in Micro, either a B or a C in Macro (don’t remember), and a D in the third one, which I was a little too distracted to focus on.  This means that, as far as economics go, I’m probably in “So, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night” territory.  With that in mind, I will state that, in principle, I agree with those that say that there should be no bailout and those who made poor investments should just learn to accept the consequences.  There’s quite a few of them out there, to be honest, on both sides of the political spectrum, and it’s understandable - why should I have to pay for the mistakes of a bunch of people far richer than I ever will be?  I mean, personally, I don’t really care why they failed.  I don’t care if it’s because Congress decided to order banks to lend to uncreditworthy people to increase minority home ownership, or if it’s because people decided to use financial instruments that nobody understands, or whatever.  It’s really not important.  What’s important is that a bunch of rich people are about to stay rich because our tax money is going to keep them that way.  F— that!

Then I remember where my money is and who’s in trouble.

I’m not going to pretend I know what caused this mess, though I do have some ideas; one of those ideas is that there’s no single thing that anybody did (Congress, the banks, whatever) that caused this to occur.  Part of it could be Congress trying to increase home ownership.  Part of it could be overregulation causing financial institutions to seek profits via more unconventional means.  Part of it could have something to do with the ginormous mess that is Fannie and Freddie.  Whatever the reason, it’s clear that, if we just let the financial sector melt itself down into slag, we’re all going to lose a lot more than $700 billion.  We’re already beginning to see some proof of this.  Want to buy a Honda?  Expect to see interest rates that are at least 4% higher than they were last month.  Planning to do any building?  Expect to see the interest rates for equipment purchases to go up at least 1.5%.  Imagine what would happen if it wasn’t just increasingly expensive to get a loan - imagine if it was damn near impossible.

Fortunately, I don’t have to - Megan McArdle did a halfway decent job of doing that for me.

Long story short, thanks to the joys of fractional reserve banking, if the banks decide they can’t loan money anymore, either because they’re broke or just plain scared, we’d be looking at a severe loss of money supply.  The last time we lost a huge chunk of the money supply, it took World War 2 to get us out of it.  I’d rather not see a reprise of that, and, if that means we pay off some people I’d rather not see paid off, well… things could be worse.

Think about it this way:  Let’s say you’re a farmer in a farming community.  You’re a good farmer - you tend regularly to your crops, you make sure they’re well watered and fertilized, and you make sure you only till as much land as your labor can support.  You make a decent living doing this, as do most of your neighbors.  There’s one neighbor, however, that isn’t quite as good of a farmer as everyone else.  Perhaps he was greedy and planted more seed than he could keep up with.  Perhaps he was lazy and didn’t tend to his fields as regularly as he should have.  Whatever the reason, his crops are failing and weeds are beginning to take over - noxious, virulent weeds that strike fear into the hearts of every other farmer in the community.

At this point, you and your fellow responsible farmers have one of two choices:

1. Let the bad farmer get what’s coming to him.  Let his crop fail, let the weeds wipe him out, and let someone who knows what they’re doing take over that farm.
2. Get the community together, bail the bad farmer out, and have everyone pull the weeds out of the farm before the weeds spread to every other farm in the community and wipe out everybody’s crops.

With most business failures, you can get away with pulling option 1 - yeah, you might get a few weeds on your farm, but it’s nothing you can’t handle.  In this particular case, though, the failing companies are really big farms and their “weeds” spread really fast.  Consequently, for better or worse, we’re going with option 2.  Option 2 has drawbacks, too.  For starters, you have to ignore your farm while taking care of your bad neighbor’s farm.  Worse yet, the bad farmer can continue to do business and sell the few crops that are successfully growing on his farm.  If you don’t let him do that, after all, he won’t let the community get on to his farm and pull the weeds.  But, it’s either that or we watch the weeds take over the community and bring everybody down.

That’s my take - I don’t like it, but, given a choice between spending $700 billion that we don’t have and watching a few trillion dollars in equity just disappear, well… I know that “trillion” is a bigger number than “billion”, so let’s just go with the smaller number, m’kay?  M’kay!

Common Sense Is Out The Window. Science Killed It. It Will Also Bring It Back.

All over sports radio, just about everybody is weighing in on the end of the BYU-Washington game.  Jake Locker, quarterback for the Washington Huskies, ran the ball in for a touchdown with two seconds on the clock, bringing the score to 28-27, BYU still on top, with only a routine PAT between Washington and overtime.  Needless to say, Jake was excited - he just saved the game for Washington, after all - so, in a fit of passion, he tossed the ball over his shoulders and began cheering with his teammates.

Then came the flag.  Unsportsmanlike conduct.  Excessive celebration.  15 yard penalty.  Suddenly, a routine PAT became a less-than-routine 35 yard PAT attempt.  BYU blocks it.  Game over.

Here’s the video:

There are two schools of thought regarding what happened that day:

1. The Pac-10 version (the game was at Washington, so it was officiated by Pac-10 referees) is that, according to the rules of the game, the referee did precisely what he was supposed to do.
2. The common sense version is that, yeah, rules are rules, but there has to be some flexibility, some interpretation.

The truth is, the refs did the right thing.  Their job is to enforce the rules of the game.  According to the 2008 NCAA Football Rules and Interpretations (note - it’s a PDF), Rule 9, Section 2, Article 2c:

2. After a score or any other play, the player in possession immediately
must return the ball to an official or leave it near the dead-ball spot.
This prohibits:
(a) Kicking, throwing, spinning or carrying (including off of the
field) the ball any distance that requires an official to retrieve it.
(b) Spiking the ball to the ground [Exception: A forward pass to
conserve time (Rule 7-3-2-d)].
(c) Throwing the ball high into the air.
(d) Any other unsportsmanlike act or actions that delay the game.

Did Locker return the ball to the official?  No.  Did he leave it near the dead-ball spot?  No.  That, in and of itself, means he was in violation of the rule, which means that the ref, according to the rules, had to enforce the following penalty:

PENALTY—Dead-ball foul or live-ball foul treated as dead-ball foul.
15 yards [S7 and S27] from the succeeding spot. Flagrant
offenders, if players or substitutes, shall be disqualified
[S47]. If a player or an identified squad member in uniform
commits two unsportsmanlike fouls in the same game, he
shall be disqualified.

There it is - 15 yards, first offense.  No ifs, ands, or buts about it.  The rule is what it is.  The referees aren’t supposed to enforce the rules based on their own personal whims - they’re supposed to enforce the rules equally and consistently.  That’s what we call fair these days.

Therein lies the problem.

At some point in recent history, we stopped assuming that humans were irrational and consequently needed to be dealt with flexibly.  We, as a society, collectively decided that flexibility was inherently unjust - why should the rules be applied one way with one person, then applied entirely differently with another person?  Why should the rules be applied one way in one circumstance, yet applied differently in a slightly different circumstance?  This, I suspect, was the direct result of the recent stressing of math and science in education, with a lowering of importance for art, music, and literature.  With art, music, and literature, there is no one right way to do things.  When there’s a method, there are ways to work around it, or subvert it entirely.  With math and science, however, at least the way it’s taught, there’s only one right way to do things.  When you add 2 and 2, you get 4.  You do that by adding the quantity of 2 to another quantity of 2.  There is no other way.  There is no other answer.  Even if you get higher-level and start throwing in different bases, yeah, you might be able to say the answer is actually 11 (base 3), but it still represents the exact same quantity represented by 4.  You’re just labeling it differently.

With this idea firmly implanted into the fabric of modern society, it’s no wonder we want rules to be interpreted as IF…THEN statements.  It’s so much more scientific, more methodical, more enlightened.  It’s perfectly logical.  If I break a rule, then I should get punished.  Equally importantly, if you break the same rule, then you should get punished the same way.  Simple.  Logical.  Pure.  There’s just one problem.  Conditional statements work great with computers because they’re deterministic, which is a really fancy way of saying that, in theory, if you feed the same data and the same program to the same computer, you will always get the same answer because the computer will always take the same steps each and every time to get there.

Try that with a person.

Heck, try that with a real computer.  Real computers exist in the real world, which means that they’re bound by the exact same real-world forces that we are.  Thus, they’re victim to real-world problems like electrical shorts, manufacturing defects, heat, theft, water, and so on.  Any of these real-world problems will change the computer’s answer because it changes the program, the data, or quite probably both.  People are even less deterministic.  In fact, even in mathematics, there’s a term for this - it’s called non-determinism.  For example, think of a shopping list.  The data is simple enough - milk, eggs, meat, cheese, vegetables.  Does it matter what order we put them in the basket?  Probably not.  You might be able to optimize somewhat - perhaps the milk and eggs are next to each other, so getting them one after the other is a good idea.  However, there might be more than one optimal solution.  There might be no optimal solutions - if you only have 30 minutes to get your groceries and the cashiers are taking 35 minutes to check people out, you’re in trouble.

Somewhere along the way, our society chose to forget that.  It’s understandable - about 50 years ago or so, the best minds in the world largely forgot that.  That’s how, at one point, people decided that the best method of flood control was something simple, something methodical, something scientific - pave over rivers with concrete, raise the channels nice and high, then watch the river flow as fast as possible to sea.  Makes perfect sense, at least on paper.  Trouble is, the system only works well when nature brings in rainfall within the design parameters of those concrete channels, when people aren’t dumping stuff into the channels that alters their flows, when trees aren’t falling in, and so on.  None of these factors are even remotely guaranteed - on the contrary, each of these problems is guaranteed to happen at least once, at which point the entire system will fail.  The best minds in the world figured that out fairly quickly, which is why they’re playing with Quantum Mechanics, Chaos Theory, and String Theory, all of which are non-deterministic.  Society as a whole, however, tends to take a little more time to learn.  There has to be something to replace the old paradigm, something for the rest of the world to latch on to that they can use to get useful things done.  The trouble with new ways of thought at any point in time is that, being new, they have few known practical uses, at least at first.  Turing machines, for example, were nearly pointless theoretical exercises in 1936.  Now, they’re a core foundational concept for computer science students.  Quantum mechanics is, for 99.9% of the world, a nearly pointless and incomprehensible theoretical exercise.  Soon, however - very soon - it will become the basis of modern computing.  However, it took over 100 years and proving Einstein wrong (like I said, 50 years ago or so, the best minds in the world thought the world was deterministic) in order to get to a point where we will soon have a practical application of a theory that few currently understand at even the most basic level.  This means that people will need to be able to work on these devices, which means bright minds will need to simplify, or ‘dumb down’ quantum mechanics enough for less bright people to be able to work on their clever machines.

Does the kid at Jiffy Lube need to know about hydrodynamics to change your oil?  Does the guy at the big box computer store need to know about Ohm’s Law in order to remove the virus from your computer?  Of course not.  Do the products that they’re working on rely on these principles, among others to work properly?  Yes, but it doesn’t matter - none of those details will help you troubleshoot those devices enough to make learning more than the most basic concepts behind those ideas worth learning.  But, you will learn the basic ideas behind those principles - you’ll learn a distilled, simplified form of those ideas, sure, but you’ll know them just the same.  You’ll know that, if you change the oil of a car that’s been running for a while, the oil will be hotter than if the car sits for a while, and you’ll know that the oil will come out of the block faster if it’s hotter.  You’ll know that, if you have a 250 watt power supply in your computer, and you have a bunch of devices in it that draw more than 250 watts, your computer won’t function.  In the same vein, people will learn that their computer works just as well off as it does when it’s on.  People will learn that, with their new computers, given the same data and the same program, their computer can give them entirely different answers at random.

At that point, in order to fully grasp and utilize these ideas, we will need to change how we teach our children - we will need to teach them that the world, even in theory, is not deterministic.  Once they grasp that, the idea that humans are deterministic will seem as quaint and silly as the idea that skin pigment has a strong, direct correlation to intelligence does today.  Suddenly, zero-tolerance rules, explicitly designed to turn school administration into an exercise in pure determinism, will disappear in the new paradigm.  Workplace rules that treat humans like robots will disappear - if even your robots are non-deterministic, why would you expect your humans to be any different?

Then, finally, referees will be able to call a football game with some semblance of independent judgment, and everybody will understand why.

Funniest. Article. Ever.

Let it be said that, if more newspapers in the US wrote like this, more people would read them.

From the Guardian:  An EU ban on ads with sexist overtones?  Another quasi-fictional piece of translucent flimflam.

According to a pointless piece of eye-rolling anti-EU extrapolation that appeared in a number of newspapers, a smattering of MEPs are calling for the introduction of strict new advertising guidelines that could eventually lead to Eva Herzigova’s breasts being taken out and shot.

At least that’s the gist of it. As far as I can ascertain, the story largely represented a brilliant excuse to print the supermodel’s infamous Wonderbra ad for the 80 millionth time, on this occasion under the headline “Goodbye Boys”. Even though the Hello Boys campaign ran 14 years ago, editors just can’t let it lie. Rather than fading into obscurity it has, if anything, grown to represent some kind of sexual Year Zero which still haunts their collective mind’s eye to this day. Just as Philip E Marlow from Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective was obsessed by visual memories of his mum enjoying a bit of off-piste afternoon dick in a forest, so the image of a semi-naked Eva gawping with awestruck joy at her own overflowing cups is forever frozen in their consciousnesses, and they’re doomed to reproduce it again and again in a bid to help themselves and their readers come to terms with its sheer psychological impact. It wasn’t just an advert. It was the 9/11 of tits.

And now some killjoy EU busybodies want to travel back in time and ban it! Or something like that! Boo! Typical! Let’s bomb Brussels! Or maybe just France! Etc!

I don’t know why, but the idea of an exclamation mark following “Etc” just strikes me as hilariously ludicrous.  There’s just something about the dissonance of a term used to indicate a nearly apathetic inability to fully enumerate a set of information and a punctuation mark whose sole function is to indicate extreme force and emotion.  It just makes my funny bone resonate with tingly goodness.

Or, perhaps I’m just a geek.  Sue me.

Nonetheless, “The EU vote on the report is not legally binding but it could be used by governments to justify the biggest shake-up in the industry for years.” Or it could not. Who knows? Uh-oh, we’ve accidentally printed that photo of Eva again. Argh! Only one thing for it: we’re all going to have masturbate our way back to sanity together. Right, readers? Three … two … one … go!

Yeah, the article goes on like this.  I’d keep going but, well, I’m spent.  Ah… bliss…

Why Not?

After reading a few bloggers responses to the mad scramble at left-leaning blogs regarding the Palin pick, I’ve decided that, in the spirit of what’s going on at the other side of the fence, that I should join the fray myself.  Since I know very little about Biden or the Illuminati, this should sufficiently handicap me in much the same way that just about everyone seems to be handicapped by Palin and her background.

With that in mind, let’s see what kind of slanderous tripe facts I can come up with about Joseph Biden.

• Joseph’s middle name is Robinette! Clearly, that means he’s gay, or at least uses hair product!
• Joseph Biden is Jewish! [What?! - ed] This means he killed Jesus! No, seriously, I saw him do it!  I was at this 7-Eleven in Utah, just minding my own business, when I saw Joe walk in and put a cap in this guy’s ass.  It totally stunned me - I mean, here’s this guy from peaceful Delaware packing heat!  What the hell is up with that?!  Plus, who ever heard of a Jew killing somebody?  But, there he was, putting a cap in the guy - and what was his victim’s name?  That’s right - Jesus! The Jew killed Jesus! Then, he made himself a large cappuccino and left.  Damndest thing, I tell you!
• Joseph Biden uses contraceptives! That means he’s not a real Roman Catholic! [Wait... I thought he was Jewish? Don't let ignorance or facts get in the way now!  We're on a roll!]  I bet that, deep down, Biden is a closet Greek Orthodox!
• Biden is an Intergalactic Presbyterian! [Okay, are we just making up religions now? - ed]  He tried to secretly impregnate Marge Simpson, then tried to exchange protein strains with his opponent!
• HE’S A REPTILIOID!
• Biden isn’t actually himself.  He’s really his parent’s son’s Down Syndrome child, hidden away in a closet to hide their family shame.  After a lobotomy, he became the subject of a Tennessee Williams play, which raised enough money to allow him to have his extra chromosome surgically removed by the Illuminati, using contrails!  This was so successful, he was able to attend college and became a Senator!  HE REALLY HAS DOWN SYNDROME!
• Joseph Biden is part of the Matrix! He’s an agent, brought to destroy The One! He also has a really creepy smile, and implanted a probe in my abdomen!
• Joseph Biden is a Muslim! I saw him wearing a towel on his head at a Holiday Inn Express last night.  Plus, he refused to eat during daylight hours during Ramadan!  He’s one of them!
• Joseph Biden has a credit score under 500! MBNA has done everything possible to cover up this fact, but it’s absolutely true!  He came into my friend’s store to buy an… um… olphiclide, or something, and they ran his credit and it came back low! It’s true!  They wouldn’t even let him buy a metronome on credit!
• Joseph Biden is a known cause of cancer in the State of California! Whenever he visits there, he has to wear a warning label, like what you see on Sweet ‘N Low!   I’ve seen it!  It’s behind his neck, but only visible during the night - you have to shine a UV lamp at it to see it.  It glows pink.
• Joseph Biden is a reverse vampire! He’s killing all of our parents, or something!  Yeah!  And he wants to eat your babies, like the Hun!  He’s one of the Hun!  He’s Attila, or at least was in a past life!  I ran a past life regression on him once - his Saturnial signs pointed to a disturbance in Pluto and, what do you know, Attila the Hun materialized in his Centauri crossline!  Damndest thing!

This is kind of fun!  Anybody care to join in?

You Know Who Else Liked Government Sponsored Youth Activites?

I just finished reading Jim Lindgren’s article on one of Obama’s more interesting campaign points - universal community service for middle and high schoolers.  An excerpt from Obama’s campaign site:

BARACK OBAMA’S PLAN FOR UNIVERSAL VOLUNTARY CITIZEN SERVICE

–Pause–

Okay, let’s stop at the title:  How is it possible for voluntary citizen service to be universal?  Don’t universal things tend to require that everyone participate?  Very curious - let’s see how Obama overcomes this semantic trouble.

Obama believes the American people are ready to serve their communities, but not enough have been asked or know how. His presidential campaign has been at the leading edge of citizen engagement. Campaign supporters have performed more than 6,400 community service events such as tutoring, building playgrounds, and volunteering at shelters, using the organizing tools at My.BarackObama.com. As president, Obama will work to inspire Americans from all walks of life to serve and will help build the architecture for them to do it. Obama’s plan will:
•   Encourage national service to address the great challenges of our time, including combating climate change, extending health care, improving our schools and strengthening America overseas by showing the world the best of our nation.
•   Expand AmeriCorps to 250,000 slots and double the size of the Peace Corps.
•   Integrate service-learning into our schools and universities to enable students to graduate college with as many as 17 weeks of service experience under their belts. (Emphasis mine - DC)
•   Provide new service opportunities for working Americans and retirees.
•   Expand service initiatives that engage disadvantaged young people and advance their education.
•   Expand the capacity of nonprofits to innovate and expand successful programs across the country.
•   Enable more Americans to serve in the armed forces.

Before we dig into the bolded part, I’d like to point out that, as far as that last item goes, I don’t think the problem is that Americans are insufficiently abled to serve in the armed forces.  On the contrary, last I checked, each branch of the military is actively looking for new recruits.  So, it’s not like they’re really pushing people away at the moment.  Perhaps Obama will increase their recruitment budgets?  That would be nice.

Now, about that “service-learning”… would you like to know more?

II.     INTEGRATE SERVICE INTO EDUCATION
Barack Obama calls his years working as a community organizer in Chicago’s South Side the best education he ever had. He believes that all students should serve their communities. Studies show that students who participate in service-learning programs do better in school, are more likely to graduate high school and go to college, and are more likely to become active, engaged citizens. Schools that require service as part of the educational experience create improved learning environments and serve as resources for their communities.  Obama’s plan sets a goal for all students to engage in service, with middle and high school students performing 50 hours of service each year, and college students performing 100 hours of service each year. Under this plan, students would graduate college with as many as 17 weeks of public service experience under their belts.

This would be the universal part of “voluntary” service.  See, nothing says “voluntary” like forcing people to do it in order to get an education. Education in the United States, you see, is compulsory.  By tying “voluntary” community service to compulsory education, you are not making the community service “voluntary” anymore.  That said, let’s pretend for a second that it didn’t matter - let’s pretend that it didn’t matter one whit that Obama is talking about forcing parents and students to do one more government-mandated activity on top of their regular lives.  Let’s pretend that Obama isn’t talking about requiring adults who happen to go to college to engage in unpaid federal labor for a bit.  What would this community service program give us?

1. If you’re poor, would you be better off getting a paid job, or getting an unpaid job?
2. If you’re poor, would you be better off if your children got paid jobs, or were doing federally mandated unpaid community service?
3. If you don’t like going to school, will you like it more if you have to attend more government-mandated functions in order to finish it?
4. Is it legally possible, in a Constitutional sense, for the federal government to require adult citizens to engage in any civil service that doesn’t involve the draft?
5. College students are a very supportive demographic for Obama.  How would college students feel about having 100 hours a year taken from them that could be better served by working, in order to keep their student debt load at a minimum, or by studying, in order to maximize their college education?

Look, I don’t like McCain by any stretch of the imagination, but at least he’s not talking about drafting everyone over the age of 11, which is pretty much what Obama is talking about here.  Sure, Obama’s not sending everyone off to die, which is fine and great, but he’s still saying that, on top of the taxes that everyone has to pay, every parent will have to make sure that their children get to their government-mandated community service activities and that every person between the ages of 11 and 18 give the government 50 hours of free labor a year.  Oh, and if you happen to be interested in furthering your education, you’re going to need to chip in another 100 hours of free labor each year.

To summarize:

• College students - Obama is bad for you guys.  Really bad.  You don’t need more time taken out of your already busy lives by a politician that thinks he knows better than everyone.
• Parents - Obama is bad for you, too.  See above, only your time is going to be nuked by having to provide transportation for each of your kids’ mandatory 50 hour community service blocks.  Good luck with that.
• Working people - Obama is bad for you, as well.  Guess who’s paying for these government-funded community service projects?  That’s right - everyone that pays taxes.  That would be you…
• Rich people - And you.  Then again, you weren’t voting for him, anyway.

This message was paid for by the Committee to Elect Anybody But Obama.

Best Topical Headline Ever.

Thank you, Fark.  Thank you.

Then: America must embrace wind power to save the planet. Now: Big Wind is despoiling nature, ruining America’s farms, splitting up families. Soon to come: America must embrace moonbeams and unicorn farts to save the planet

Naturally, the first comment under this thread goes a little something like this:

voltOhm

2008-08-17 01:39:05 PM

Heh.  I’m not sure what more there is to say.  I could insert a rant about how generating electricity and energy is going to require more than simply waiting for the stuff to fall from the sky - I mean, you have to have something to, I don’t know, collect it with, right?  But, that would be incredibly redundant and pointless, so there you go.

Random Thoughts for a Saturday Night

• I don’t care what this commercial says, Soyjoy does not cause spontaneity, nor is it fortified with optimism.  It’s a bar of soy. A bar of Vicoden, on the other hand, could very well cause spontaneity.  Outside of that, though, do they really expect people to believe that, if they happen to eat something one step away from fruit-filled tofu, they’ll suddenly want to jump rope and spread herpes and mono to strangers?  Ugh.
• I showed the ESO Firefly last night - plowed through the first three episodes.  Her view, at least thus far, is that it would be a perfectly tolerable show if it wasn’t for the constant twang in the background.  She likes the dialog and thinks the “space cannibals” (Reavers) are an interesting twist; unfortunately, she’s having some serious troubles getting past the “western” part.  Can’t entirely say I blame her - it took me a bit to warm up to that myself.  Then again, I had Kaylee around to encourage me; for whatever reason, neither Mal nor Jayne are doing it for her.  Weird.
• I like bullet points.  They’re fun!
• The Dakota has been successfully repaired.  This makes me incredibly happy, in no small part since it means I can actually drive it again.  Ah, good times.
• It is said that, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Russia invaded Georgia - that’s an action.  Georgia, by the looks of things, seems to be largely destined towards becoming a slightly rebellious vassal state of Russia; this was probably expected within minutes of Russia declaring they were invading Georgia.  On the other hand, Russia has successfully freaked out the rest of its neighbors enough that the Ukraine is offering the services of its early warning system, Poland is volunteering to host our missile defense system, and Estonia is providing IT support against Russian hackers.  Of course, each of these actions have equal and opposite reactions, as well - for example, the reaction from Russia regarding Poland’s enthusiasm towards our missile defense shield was to threaten Poland with nuclear assault.