unraveling
31.May 2013
Is that the best you got, big boys?
I'm feeling more love for Megyn Kelly after seeing
her
epic smackdown of Lou Dobbs and this other bozo who
all of a sudden are all about "science" and the "animal kingdom" to
explain why men should be dominant and women should stay home with an
apron on. As she points out, "Just because you have people agree with
you doesn't mean it's not offensive."
As for Lou Dobbs... I would love to see him spring into action when
the Serengeti is on fire. I don't think the lions and tigers and oh my
will grade on the curve, though: "he's done very well, or as best he
can" might just not be good enough.
Shifting north and to the (far) right
The Pacific Northwest Inlander has "a version" of
Sierra Crane-Murdoch's excellent piece that was first published in
High Country News
(where a paywall kept many interested readers away). Having read it, I
think it may be time to
subscribe
to HCN again; it's excellent, detailed reporting of the political
evolution of north Idaho. The exodus from southern California to
Kootenai County has not been secret, but I haven't seen it covered this
well:
Their
Own Private Idaho. The message is in the medium's subhead:
"How Kootenai County became the most Republican county in the most
Republican state in the nation."
It's so "Republican" that infights are breaking out to weed out the
too-moderate and the too-conservative. If you're foolish enough to try
the "Democrat" label, never mind if you're gentle, affable, have
bipartisan appeal, children who served on active duty in Iraq, founded
North Idaho Youth for Christ, served on the school board, city
council and as County Clerk, your chances have not been good.
(A bit of a turnaround, though? The Inlander also has former
state senator Mary Lou Reed's celebration of the
takeover
of the Coeur d'Alene School Board being averted.)
A number of the
characters have shown up in the Spokane (WA) Spokesman-Review's
Huckleberries Online
blog from time to time, either as dramatis personae or
commenters, and the article provides some background I appreciate.
Crane-Murdoch also notes the wider cultural shifts and polarization that
underlie our parochial battles:
"The consequences have only begun to emerge. Journalist Bill Bishop and
sociologist Robert G. Cushing, in their widely praised 2008 book,
The Big Sort
["Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart"],
suggest that the U.S. has become a patchwork of ideologically distinct
communities that elect representatives who are frequently unwilling to
compromise. No wonder, they write, that Congress is gridlocked, and
issues such as health care, which once crossed party lines, are now
definitively partisan. 'What happened,' writes Bishop, 'wasn't a simple
increase in political partisanship, but a more fundamental kind of
self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing social division.' Americans had
created communities that functioned as 'social-resonators' in which they
could hear the 'amplified sound of their own voices and beliefs.'
"Indeed, Kootenai County's transformation suggests that the most
indelible impacts may be felt in the echo chambers themselves—in
the counties, red and blue, where the majorities' values are reinforced
in every facet of local government, and where it's easy to forget the
way the other half thinks. 'It's taking us a step back,' one
self-described conservative told me, 'because by making our own private
Idaho, we're insulating ourselves from the world.'"
A bit of the local color late in the article adds a funny postscript to
the tiff surrounding Tina Jacobson's
departure from the KootCo Republican Central Committee last May:
"She told me that she wanted more time to work on her novel, a
paranormal romance about an ambitious anti-tax crusader who is elected
to the Idaho Legislature and falls in love with a ghost."
Which really, is all we've been lacking in Idaho politics lately.
30.May 2013
Vultures circling
Last we were in Michigan, the closest
we got to Detroit was Andrew Moore's remarkable "Detroit Disassembled"
show at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, of which
Moore's website has remnants,
but seems to be undergoing disassembly as well.... the National
Building Museum was a later stop for Moore's show, and its site has
"press
images" worth browsing, even if the "full-size versions" aren't
really full-size.
"National
Time clock," for example, is a 34" x 27" print, and the
birches
growing in books covers 40 square feet).
Then there was the business in the last presidential election,
Romney's proposed banker's cure making
headlines and soundbites that cost him one of his home state's electoral
votes.
And now? With the economy picking up a bit and housing on the rebound,
it seems distressed properties are harder to find. That will bring a
gaggle of famous turnaround artists such as Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush and
the hosts of "Morning Joe" taking the country air up on Mackinac Island
for Davos
in the Great Lakes.
"The least surprising development to anyone following Detroit's woes has
been Wall Street's continued ability to squeeze money out of a city that
can't afford to keep its streetlights on or police its neighborhoods...
In recent years, Detroit's water department has paid Wall Street banks
hundreds of millions in termination fees alone in order to get out of
bad municipal bond deals. (The city utility is so broke, it issued new
bonds in order to pay the fees to get out of the old bonds!)"
Now they've got the place being run by "emergency managers" from a law
firm that also represents banks holding the city's debt, bankruptcy
lawyer Kevyn Orr's spokesman telling The Detroit Free Press that
the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts might make a rather
nice addition to a creditor's rec room.
Seriously.
Seriously?
"We have no interest in selling art," [Bill] Nowling said this evening.
"I want to make that pretty clear. But it is an asset of the city to a
certain degree. We've got a responsibility under the act to rationalize
that asset, to make sure we understand what's it's worth.
"We have to look at everything on the table. As much as it would pain us
to do it, and it does, I'm a great lover of art and so is Kevyn, we've
got a responsibility to rationalize all the assets of the city and find
out what the worth is and what the city holds."
"Rationalize" all the assets, that's a new one. Nowling wouldn't name
any names of the people having a new look at Matisse and van Gogh, but
would say that "these are people savvy enough to know where all the
money for the City of Detroit is." Mark Binelli is thinking out of the
box for his NYT op-ed:
"Why stop there? Perhaps as part of a settlement, Mr. Orr can negotiate
with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra to play at creditors' annual
shareholder luncheons, or work out a deal wherein laid-off autoworkers
perform free annual tuneups on the limousines of bank executives. Better
yet, he could tear a page from the Chrysler turnaround—which, of
course, ended with the company's being purchased by Fiat. See where I'm
going with this? Italians love art, they love cars, and they know how to
monetize old ruins!"
29.May 2013
You say it like that's a bad thing
There must be a downside of having the Adobe Flash plugin crash;
certainly if you're wanting to watch some video, it would be an
inconvenience. But for news pages with a right-hand rail larded with
advertising I have no interest in, the gray, frowny-faced notices are
not bad news. Turn that frown upside down!
Memorial Day
Of course they did
Seems almost too easy to come up with examples of
"social
welfare" groups that were targeted by the IRS testing the law, but
it's useful to balance the outrage with something. There may even be an
example of groups who were genuninely wronged, even though I haven't
seen any of those reported yet.
The New York Times reporters looked at "more than a dozen"
organizations, none of which ran major election advertising campaigns,
so a rather small sample. They note that "IRS agents are obligated to
determine whether a 501(c)(4) group is primarily promoting 'social
welfare'," so at most they might have underachieved in that
obligation. Instead of quibbling over the small-fry, let's do have a
full investigation of the spawn of the execrable Citizens United
decision, Crossroads GPS, Priorities USA, American Action Network and
Americans Elect, and stop their money-laundering for SuperPACs.
And while we're at it, let's consider
what
Fred Wertheimer points out: the law says that 501(c)(4)
organizations enjoy their tax exemption by virtue of being
exclusively engaged in "social welfare" activity. The IRS
regulations have relaxed that to "primarily" to keep themselves out of
the kind of political firestorm they just stumbled into, and from there
to the notion that up to 49% is OK, and measuring with a rubber
yardstick. Wertheimer:
"What is clear, in my view, is that the IRS got this wrong twice. They
got it wrong in targeting conservative groups for review based on their
names and their identified interests, and they got it wrong in not
investigating and acting against groups that in our view were blatantly
abusing the tax laws by improperly claiming to be 501(c)(4) groups so
they could keep the donors paying for their campaign activities secret
from the American people."
Groping for a reason
In one of the filing cabinets in the house (and ok, maybe a few other
spots, too) there are a couple manilla folders labeled "clipfile," from
the good old days when one might clip something out of a newspaper.
Not all our clips are in manilla, and not all are "organized."
But most of what I've been "clipping" for the last 15 or 20 years is now
collected in computer files, which I like much better. Less mass and
clutter, primarily, but also I tell myself I could find something if I
wanted or needed to. It starts with a decision of which directory
(a.k.a. "folder") to put it in. That will leave it with the date of
filing, too, whether or not the contents are dated. If my system were
more advanced, I might arrange for keywords, author, a database, but
that's more than I've felt the need for. Occasionally, a story comes
along that defies simple, single classification, and forces me to
arbitrarily pick a folder.
Nathaniel Rich's piece for the NYT Opionator blog is such a one:
Showdown
at the Airport Body Scanner. Medicine? Technology? Politics?
Politics\Terror? Travel? or Culture? take your pick. Psychology would be
good too, if I had one of those.
Haven't been in airports much lately, but I remember the drill well
enough, and the enthusiasm travelers have for sharing stories of
inconvenience. What I like about Rich's take is that he acknowledges the
tenuousness of his technical concern, but stands by it, proudly.
"Many scientists will insist that the low levels of radiation absorbed
in airport security checks have no deleterious effect. That's
wonderful—I'm happy to concede that my fears are most likely
baseless. But as long as there is any question of risk, no matter how
small, I will continue to avoid the machines."
I also like his attention for detail in describing the "public groping"
he's treated to for his temerity in insisting on refusing the X-ray
treatment. After all, "civil disobedience is worth nothing if it's not
done in public."
"Airplane travel is disquieting, as is dealing with peevish federal
officers, as is life. Even the slightest gesture of assertiveness can
create the pleasing illusion that you control your fate."
23.May 2013
Words fail
That's what direct mail king Richard Viguerie says in
a
letter to his fellow outragees, the Republican Members of Congress
(or at least the Speaker of the House and the Senate Minority Leader, to
whom it's addressed), with a potpourri of political
hacksactivists co-signing. Gary Bauer, James Dobson, Ralph Reed
and Phyllis Schlafly catch my eye.
How many of the apparently political organizations doing business as
Citizens for the Republic, American Values, Citizens United, Media
Research Center, ForAmerica, Public Service Research Foundation, Family
Talk and Family Talk Action, Center for Military Readiness, American
Target Advertising, Gregory Management Company, Rebecca Hagelin
Communications and Marketing, Traditional Values Coalition, Frontiers of
Freedom, Capitol Resource Institute, The Committee for Justice,
Americans for Limited Government, Faith and Freedom Coalition, Catholic
Family and Human Rights Institute, Vision America Action, Eagle Forum,
Traditional Values Coalition, Reagan Biographer, The Conservative
Caucus, Inc., Liberty Counsel, National Tax Limitation Committee, and
ConservativeHQ.com will have already caught the IRS's eye for possibly
dodgy 501(c)(4) applications as if they were "social welfare"
organizations?
They don't say, but they do say that "Words can hardly convey the depth
of our outrage." And they want a government handout to
"make whole those organizations and individuals who suffered
discrimination or who were politically targeted by the Obama
administration's IRS.
"Many organizations incurred tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary
legal and tax preparation fees pursuing their not-for-profit tax
exemption. Others simply gave up and folded their organizations in the
face of the daunting financial burden, intimidation and bullying at the
hands of Obama's IRS bureaucrats."
It's like stealing, don't you know. They want legislation drafted!
Which should be much easier than first describing the "illegal acts"
they imagine have been committed, and how said acts "discriminated," and
just how those "tens of thousands of dollars" went toward "unnecessary"
preparation fees, or even better, the aggrieved parties who simply gave
up. The sky would be the limit to salve such intimidation and bullying,
would it not?
22.May 2013
We're all outraged
Maybe something Congress does will fix what's wrong with the IRS (if
indeed something is significantly wrong with it, which has yet to be
demonstrated). Will it come about as the result of committee hearings? I
can't see how that could happen. Catching up on
last
Friday night's Newshour, and this snippet from "Chairman Camp,"
Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., making his statement to kick the already
resigned acting chairman on his way out the door:
"The reality is, this is not a personnel problem. This is a problem of
the IRS being too large, too powerful, too intrusive, and too abusive of
honest, hardworking taxpayers."
Too large for what? Too abusive of whom, now?
What do "honest, hardworking taxpayers" have to do with organizations
seeking tax exemption under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code? There
were reportedly 200 or fewer employees charged with dealing with 70,000
non-profit applications a year. 3,500 apiece. Beyond the facile "we are
all outraged," where's the beef?
There's more substance in
a
single piece of reporting from the New York Times
than four hours of Congressional testimony, I'm guessing.
A former IRS employee who runs a newsletter devoted to tax-exempt
organizations is quoted, describing an organization that bears no
resemblance to Chairman Camp's bogeyman:
"The I.R.S. is pretty dysfunctional to begin with, and this case brought
all those dysfunctions to their worst. People were coming and going,
asking for advice and not getting it, and sometimes forgetting the cases
existed."
But the more important point—indeed, the well-buried lede—
is down at the bottom:
"Even as the agency was scrutinizing small nonprofit organizations,
critics say, it appears to have done little to crack down on large
501(c)(4) groups that spent at least half a billion dollars on political
advertising during the last four years, some in seeming defiance of the
IRS rules."
Four votes for a $third of a billion
The Spring Valley Community Infrastructure Development vote in Tuesday's
election here in Ada County is an interesting story. According to the
powers that be, the election turnout was an astounding 85.7%, as
compared to a near-catatonic
5.38% for
everything else that was on various ballots. It's perhaps less
astounding when you see that we're talking about
6
of 7 total registered voters. Exactly two-thirds of the 6 people who
voted said "aye" to issuing $325 million in bonds. That works out to
$46.4 million per voter (or well into 9 figures each with 7% interest
added on).
The Boise Guardian provides some of the fascinating, arcane, and
soon to be expensive detail of the case, which appears to be about
mega-developers feeding big time at the public trough, in the
form of "municipal" bonding for their notion to build thousands of
housing units north of Eagle, in the dry foothills.
Big fire in a small town
It's nothing to match the enormity of the tornado in Oklahoma this week,
but the fire that started in a garbanzo bean elevator and spread to
three grain bins in tiny Craigmont, Idaho rocked the town on May 12.
KXLY.com reported that a "massive interstate mobilization of fire
and law enforcement personnel" included jurisdictions spread over
north Idaho and Asotin County in eastern Washington, and
KREM's report said
"firefighters from 27 agencies" were involved, as the "giant fireball
could be seen for miles."
Craigmont used to be most notable for the slow curve and the cramped
railroad underpass on US 95 as you passed through on the way to
somewhere else. A highway upgrade reduced that to a "business route" and
the town blink-and-you-miss-it off to the side, easy to overlook for the
vast panoramas of the Camas Prairie.
(The
railroad went away around the same time the highway did,
leaving a most fabulous run of trestles orphaned to the fading glory
of a western or two.)
We drove by four days after the fire and were surprised to see smoke
still rising from the center of town. Eight days after the fire,
when we drove back home, we made the turn through town to see the pile
of rubble still burning, and the signs of spot fires some distance away,
grass burned, trees singed and burnt chunks of charcoal scattered over
the city park.
21.May 2013
Same old, same old
Inside
Joel on Software
,
which I've probably already read in serialized form, the
acknowledgments include a hat tip to "the inspiration, free hosting, and
publicity provided by Dave Winer of UserLand Software" and to "Philip
Greenspun, who taught me that if you know something, you need to publish
it on the Web for others to learn from."
If I were to write an Acknowledgments page (which is not a bad idea,
come to think of it), it would include Messrs. Greenspun, Winer and
Spolsky (in that order). In his 1999 classic,
Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
,
Greenspun says he created a "catalog of the mistakes that I've made
while building more than 100 Web sites in the last five years," written
"in the hopes that others won't have to repeat those mistakes."
I'm sure I did go ahead and repeat many of them, just as I'm sure I
have yet to build more than 100 websites. (I wonder how many Greenspun
looks after, since that takes more time than building, for me.)
The one lesson I did take away is that it's important to have good
pictures to accompany one's writing. It's not particularly important
that they be relevant to the text (although it doesn't hurt), but
they really do need to be interesting, whether or not the writing is.
(Which I guess is why Yahoo! is buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion.)
Where is he now?
Still blogging, at
Harvard, and promising "an interesting posting every day; an interesting
idea every three months." Far too modest, I'm sure. And there's
this, his eponymous top-level
index which would entertain you for a month were you to follow all the
branches.
My first foray into "blogging proper" (which is a preposterous pair of
words) was on one of
Dave Winer's
properties, the free blog service EditThisPage.com
which could have gone viral or made him a bazillionnaire if only he were
a little less grumpy or had made it easier to post pictures. Maybe he
was ahead of his time, or maybe he was just building the foundation for
the success of the likes of Craig and Angie and Zuckerberg and Karp.
Joel Spolkey
is still blogging too
although not daily. He's another writer/photog/tech guy who doesn't let
topical relevance stand in the way of posting a good photo.
This is what those thousands of years of evolution were all about: being
able to share our thoughts with a million other humans.
Anyway, I knew it was right about now, when irises are in bloom, but I'd
forgotten the exact day that is the anniversary of this particular
web property, and blog,
13 years a week ago.
It's a totally weird coincidence I'd never noticed before that my
first post was exactly 140 characters. Too bad that didn't accidentally
inspire me to come up with Twitter. I was thinking too narrowly in two
respects: not "a million," but billions of other humans; and not
sharing our particular opinions, but sharing the medium for
sharing.
The new, new thing
55
million blogs a year ago, edged into 9 figures now.
He said "certainly I'm not in a position where anybody should be
listening to anything I say about anything else in the world,"
but as the headline 20-something of the week with a $quarter billion
fortune, we're all drooling over David Karp's every utterance.
While driving this weekend, we heard multiple news reports about
Yahoo's buying Tumblr, first for $1.1 billion, then for "a little
over a billion dollars," where "a little" thus equates to
$100,000,000.00, considerably more than you, I, or everyone in the
neighborhood put together is likely to make in a lifetime.
But that's only $1 per Tumblr blog, cheap at eleven times the price.
So hey you teenagers who spend all day on an iPhone, if you're bored
with your high school classes, why not follow this well-worn path to
success? Drop out of school, come up with the next big thing for all
your friends who spend all day on their gadgets, and become a
bazillionnaire before you turn 30. Never mind if you're a little
antisocial for things like interviewing recruits, managing a team larger
than four, or working with other people present. All that can be worked
around.
"Because revenue was not growing as fast as they would have liked,
investors considered putting Mr. Karp in charge of Tumblr's product
development and finding a more seasoned chief executive."
Like... 30-something
Marissa Mayer.
She should be amply seasoned.
Microblogging is huge among younger users, who are huge among
marketers' preferred targets.
Jenna
Wortham:
"From the dawn of the personal blog, people have loved to, you know,
have a home to express themselves, and write about their thoughts, share
pictures... and for a while that was Facebook, and then it was
Instagram, and now it seems Tumblr has started to play a really
interesting role in that..."
Never mind that Tumblr's not making any money, they have eyeballs!
Engagement! $13 million in revenue last year, and as much in Q1 of this
year. Surely that's worth $1.1 billion.
19.May 2013
A question occurs to me
While reading
the
latest news about the unfolding IRS scandal, and the offhand
suggestion that "even in the best of times," the Internal Revenue
Service is "the federal government's most reviled agency."
Perhaps because I don't actually have that much revulsion for it;
yes, it's an annual burden to voluntarily comply with all the
requirements they administer, but I don't blame them. It's the
Congress that wrote all the underlying tax laws, you know.
Nearly four million words of it.
Shouldn't the Congress, even in the best of times, be our most
reviled federal entity?
18.May 2013
The Kochs' pet coke
Your pets are charming, I'm sure, but the Koch brothers' "petcoke" not
so much. Rather like an unwelcome black mound in the backyard, or
a
steaming heap alongside the Detroit River. Hello Alberta tar sands!
After processing, the residue is tens of millions of tons of "petroleum
coke," which would be good for making steel or aluminum were it not for
the "small grains" and high sulfur content. Kerry Satterthwaite,
petroleum coke analyst at a commodities analysis company based in London
figures that
"It is worse than a byproduct. It's a waste byproduct that is costly and
inconvenient to store, but effectively costs nothing to produce."
If you don't care about air quality too much, you can just burn it.
But we (and Canada) do. Mexico and China and India, maybe not so much.
That's good for Charles, David and William Koch, who make the money from
shipping tar sands waste to wherever, for whatever, and without having
to whiff any of the brown air.
If we get that Keystone XL pipeline going, we can move even more of
Alberta's waste product down to the U.S. Woo hoo.
17.May 2013
Cultural divide
The author of
Pills Are Not for Preschoolers: A Drug-Free Approach for Troubled Kids
has a specific agenda we presume, but if her opening fact for this short
piece in Psychology Today is accurate, it speaks volumes:
"In the United States, at least 9% of school-aged children have been
diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In
France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less
than 0.5%."
It's safe to say there is not a ten or twenty times difference in the
incidence of bio-neurological disorders in the two countries; this is
about diagnosis and treatment with medication, of course.
Why
French Kids Don't Have ADHD, by Marilyn Wedge.
"French doctors prefer to look for the underlying issue that is causing
the child distress—not in the child's brain but in the child's
social context. They then choose to treat the underlying social context
problem with psychotherapy or family counseling. This is a very
different way of seeing things from the American tendency to attribute
all symptoms to a biological dysfunction such as a chemical imbalance in
the child's brain."
15.May 2013
Who's going to jail for this?
Saw that quip from Mr. Speaker, measuring his indignation as carefully
as the fine-tailored suits he and Mr. Senate Minority Leader wear for
their daily podium stand-ups. But consider Robert Reich's observation,
posted to Facebook (at least) this morning:
"Keep your eye on the big scandal. Although the IRS was wrong to target
conservative groups for review based on their names, the bigger wrong
was its failure to investigate the major groups—such as Karl Rove's
Grossroads GPS and Priorities USA—that falsely claimed to be 'social
welfare organizations' under 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code in
order to hide the names of their donors. And the real scandal of the
2012 election (which will be even worse next year, because they got away
with it) is how many corporations and wealthy individuals used this
loophole to disguise their identities while pouring hundreds of millions
of dollars into campaigns. The Supreme Court in "Citizens United" at
least assumed full disclosure, but the 'social welfare organization'
loophole in the tax laws has allowed corporations to keep political
spending secret even from their own shareholders.
"The worst outcome of the indignation over the IRS's targeting of
conservative groups would be for the under-manned IRS to pull back from
investigating all putative 'social welfare organizations,' thereby
turning the scandalous loophole into a giant river of secret money. Our
democracy is already being purchased by big corporations and the rich.
At the least we should know who the buyers are."
(And while we're wondering, who's going to jail for letting hundreds of
people take 6-figure salaries for legislative jobs when they're
running
a theater instead?)
Food for thought
As ever, Michael Pollan provides an entertaining smörgåsbord
on the frontier of food science, this time in next Sunday's NYT Magazine
feature,
Some
of My Best Friends are Germs. Yours, too. You've probably heard
parts of this unfolding story, but there's more to know and learn.
I changed my toothbrush storage location halfway through, for example.
And this made us think about the "royal we" in a new light:
"Our gut bacteria also play a role in the manufacture of substances like
neurotransmitters (including serotonin); enzymes and vitamins (notably
Bs and K) and other essential nutrients (including important amino acid
and short-chain fatty acids); and a suite of other signaling molecules
that talk to, and influence, the immune and the metabolic systems. Some
of these compounds may play a role in regulating our stress levels and
even temperament: when gut microbes from easygoing, adventurous mice are
transplanted into the guts of anxious and timid mice, they become more
adventurous. The expression 'thinking with your gut' may contain a
larger kernel of truth than we thought."
"The gut microbes are looking after their own interests, chief among them
getting enough to eat and regulating the passage of food through their
environment. The bacteria themselves appear to help manage these
functions by producing signaling chemicals that regulate our appetite,
satiety and digestion. ..."
14.May 2013
Nothing to fasten your seatbelt around
No offense to Salty Dog 502, but Spencer Ackerman went a little
overboard in effusing over
the
Navy's historic drone launch from an aircraft carrier. Yes, it's
a giant step for unmanned-kind (and yes, Rear Admiral Matt Winter
botched that line, too), but taking off from an aircraft carrier
is not "one of the most complex missions in aviation." As anyone who's
tried the Microsoft Flight Simulator can tell you, taking off is pretty
straightforward. Throttle up, giddyup, and point to the sky. The
boat wasn't unmanned, and with it driving into the wind and a
catapult behind you, there isn't a lot of complexity.
Landing on a carrier is tricky, and that remains to be done.
Check back this summer.
If it were my $billion project, I'd start with something smaller than
a 62' wingspan. The smaller you are, the chushier the atmosphere.
Of course, this was not the first unmanned aircraft to be launched off a boat
either;
Popular
Science mined Wikipedia to show the
RAE Larynx set up on the destroyer HMS Stronghold and a cordite-fired
catapult in 1927.
Saturn rings
A short article from Scientific American about
Saturn
shaking its rings points to the paper hosted on the Cornell
University Library arXiv.org,
Kronoseismology: Using density
waves in Saturn's C ring to probe the planet's interior, and its
fascinating, pellucid abstract.
"Saturn's C ring contains multiple spiral patterns that appear to be
density waves driven by periodic gravitational perturbations. In other
parts of Saturn's rings, such waves are generated by Lindblad resonances
with Saturn’s various moons, but most of the wave-like C-ring features
are not situated near any strong resonance with any known moon. ..."
It seems that the pattern speeds of six fast waves can be explained by
Saturn's interior sloshing back and forth, altering its gravitational
field.
Moving beyond political theater for Libya and the mideast
Ethan Chorin provides something I hadn't seen amongst the
finger-pointing and political sideshow about the attack in Benghazi:
an
insightful, informed opinion about what went wrong, why, and what to
do now.
His take is a bit like a smaller variant of the mistakes of Iraq,
"inspired and skillfully executed" application of force to kick things
off, with "the potential to do more good than harm." Winning the
aftermath of military intervention is no easy thing, however. Some of
what many "failed to foresee":
"how Libyan arms could fuse criminal and extremist elements and
intensify Islamist insurrections in the Sahel and beyond, including the
spread of rebellion to Mali and of lethal weaponry to jihadists in Syria
and Gaza. ...
"[T]he deeper question is why the United States and its NATO allies
believed that international responsibilities to Libya would end with
military action, and that Libya would somehow right itself. We will
probably never get to have a meaningful discussion about this, as long
as we are tantalized by theories about conspiracies or political
malfeasance."
13.May 2013
Austerity kills
Frugality seems generally virtuous even while so many of our cultural
memes are about excess. Swimming in advertising is confusing, by design,
for one thing, and the preachers are virtue never seem to be all that
bent on frugality for themselves. Perhaps it's moderation that's
generally virtuous, and frugality is going too far?
"If austerity were tested like a medication in a clinical trial, it would
have been stopped long ago, given its deadly side effects."
David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu address two questions about austerity:
how it kills, in
a
NYT Op-Ed, and
why it kills, in their new book,
The
Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills
. Maybe it's obvious and goes without saying
that if you can't make ends meet, don't have access to clean water,
nutritious food and basic sanitation, your prospects will suffer, but it
may be helpful to quantify the particulars for political purposes.
While Congress acted with alacrity to address the "problem" the
sequester had created for airline flight delays, there doesn't seem to
be the same urgency for mitigating harm to programs for nutrition
subsidies for hundreds of thousands of pregnant women, newborns and
infants, public housing budgets, or the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
"Our research suggests that investing $1 in public health programs can
yield as much as $3 in economic growth. Public health investment not
only saves lives in a recession, but can help spur economic recovery.
These findings suggest that three principles should guide responses to
economic crises.
"First, do no harm...
"Second, treat joblessness like the pandemic it is. ...
"Finally, expand investments in public health when times are bad. The
cliché that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
happens to be true."
When the IRS comes calling
None of the organizations I've been involved with to date have found
themselves on the wrong side of federal scrutiny, but I suppose it could
happen? None have had as broad a mission as to "make America a better
place to live" although we could have said that, sure. When it came time
to tread carefully around candidate elections, we made sure we were
beyond reproach, more so than some folks who make the news.
Predictably, I suppose, "Republicans fanned out on the political talk
shows on Sunday to express outrage that is only likely to grow."
Jonathan
Weisman's and Matthew Wald's report for the NY Times.
I imagine the Fox News talking heads must be apoplectic.
It brings to mind a previous round of fanning outrage, when the
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
was nefariously eviscerated by "activists" making stuff up. The outrage
was at community activism supposedly run amok, and succeeded in killing
the organization, in spite of there being no actual cause justifying
its demise.
Doing away with the IRS won't be so easy, but it certainly will give
Republicans something to focus their attention on; it's "sure to fuel an
effort that appears to be uniting dispirited Republicans and their
conservative political base: investigating Mr. Obama and his
administration."
It seems a safe bet that this will occupy Congressional committees (and
right-wing media, at least) for quite some time and that few or no
criminal charges will come out of it. The chances of political
organizations flying under non-profit sections of the tax code getting
well-deserved scrutiny for non-"social welfare" activities will go down,
and everybody will be happily indignant for a time.
Of course, if it were my ox being gored, my own outrage would be
measured differently. As it is though, it's hard not to see this as a
side show distracting from action on the actual problems we need to work
on to make America a better place to live.
12.May 2013
Even better than the Roll-n-Glow
The headline
Inventor
claims solar energy discovery tucked in a narrow column above
today's front-page fold does not do justice to the story below, and
jumped to A15. It's a superlative lollapalooza, "will shatter barriers
that have stymied efforts to make solar energy cheap, clean and
reliable." Not quite too cheap to meter, but $.02/kWh, that'll spin your
meter like there's no tomorrow, eh?
The sidebar after the jump says he has 700 inventions in 40 years, an
impressive career, that apparently started with "a gravity-measuring
machine he built in seventh grade to record passes of the sun and moon
on cloudy days." The lede for Greg Gordon's story on McClatchy's site
deems him "a little-known Maryland inventor," and we do wonder why that
would be. There's a nice testimonial from John Darnell "the scientist
and a former congressional aide who has monitored Ace's dogged research
for more than three years and has reviewed his complex calculations,"
who we're told "has no doubts."
"Anybody who is skilled in the art and understands what he's proposing
is going to have this dumbfounding reaction: 'Oh, well it's obvious
it'll work,'" said Darnell, a biochemist with an extensive background in
thermodynamics.
"Ron has turned conventional wisdom about solar on its head," he said.
"He thinks outside the box."
Five years ago,
Greg
Gordon published his first portrait of "a 69-year-old loner" who'd
"spent three years glued to the internet," "careening from one epiphany
to another." That story said "McClatchy has followed Ace's work for
three years," then culminating in Ace's "making public a U.S. patent
petition" [sic] for what he deemed the most "practical, nontoxic,
affordable, rapidly achievable" and beneficial way to curb global
warming and a resulting catastrophic ocean rise. Or as the application
title puts it, a
benign global
warming solution [that] offers unprecedented economic
prosperity.
The USPTO may still looking for an examiner with enough horsepower to
assess the claims for what sounds like a planet-wide swamp cooler,
"evaporating, by way of multiple aerosol-evaporators, vast quantities of
water to produce water vapors for cooling atmospheric air masses;
causing lightweight water vapors to naturally rise and condense at high
altitudes to form clouds; and thereby liberating vast amounts of high
altitude infrared radiation, as said clouds form, to further cool earth
by way of solar radiation reflected into space."
Before careening into that ephiphany, Ace had come up with things as
disparate as manufacturing and coatings for eyeglasses
and shaving lubricant,
but hmm, only a handful of grants come up in
a
quick search.
Oh, and as Gordon drily notes well into the earlier feature, "a patent
certifies that an invention is unique, not that it would work." Or
perhaps it certifies that an examiner thinks it's unique, and is
at least not obviously in violation of any of the basic
thermodynamic laws.
One commenter admitted that "Every brilliant innovation in the history
of technology looked a little bit loony when first proposed," without
adding that loony ideas look loony too. There isn't enough evidence in
the newspaper this morning to say one way or the other about Mr. Ace,
but there are enough red flags to decorate a Chinese office park.
This "will shatter decades-old scientific and technological barriers,"
but the "still-secret design" is "a no-brainer" that will
"vastly outperform all other known solar technology." Even though it's
"yet to be constructed and fully tested." (If it's yet to be
constructed, it hasn't been tested in any way, of course.)
A "staggering advance" to slash wholesale power generation cost,
and "a separate rooftop version" to put wholesale power generation out
of business.
"Ace said that he contacted five national laboratories during his
research, floating his interpretations of physics laws or
double-checking his methodology on complex math equations without
divulging his invention."
So there's that.
"[B]ecause his solar traps can collect energy at ultra-high temperatures,
the storage issue all but disappears. The energy can be stored for weeks
in silicon dioxide (pure sand) or other cheap materials and extracted
via heat exchangers as needed, he said, meaning that reliable solar
power plants could be built almost anywhere, though it would be more
expensive in cloudy regions."
But the darn chicken-and-egg of funding and protection and actual
development. The details are as confidential as they are unbounded.
"[Ace] said that he has been motivated by a desire to avoid an energy
disaster and to help reduce the national debt. He envisions licensing
his technology to the Defense Department so that military bases could
use the traps to generate cheap power and even profit by selling
low-cost excess energy to neighboring communities or host
countries."
Maybe what Ace needs is
an Amish
connection in his marketing department.
11.May 2013
Plot thickening
The better of our two Senators is looking increasingly sketchy, with
this latest story of
whoops,
there goes a quarter million dollars out of the campaign coffers.
"A loan authorized by a former campaign manager to an Idaho company
owned by a friend who contends somebody else stole the money...." How's
that again?! One observer noted that
"Senator Crapo is the Ranking Member on the Subcommittee on Fiscal
Responsibility and Economic Growth and the Senate Banking Committee.
Small wonder our financial institutions failed on his watch. He needs to
resign."
This goes all the way back to two years before the last time
Crapo stood for election.
"The loan was approved in 2008 by ex-Crapo campaign manager Jake Ball,
now
[former]
district director for Republican U.S. Rep. Raul Labrador, to an
Idaho-based company, Blueberry Guru, that's now defunct. Ball is a
longtime friend of Blueberry Guru owner Gavin McCaleb."
Idaho puts "defunct" in the U.S. Senate, I tell you what. The Senator
"had no knowledge of this transaction until it was brought to his
attention in 2010," which, let me check my calendar, is three
years ago now. These things take a while to "figure out,"
apparently.
The quotes from people in this affair sound like stuff from The
Onion.
The
Senator's attorney says "Certainly there's been a lot of money
that's been properly used in his campaign."
Please define "a lot," and compare and contrast with the total amount of
campaign contributions. Also, "so there's probably 250 people who cared
enough about the senator to give $1,000 and may have to dig deep and
give it again."
You think? That sounds like a very tough sell to me.
The
man who moved the money says
"he made no effort to keep the loan of Crapo's campaign funds to a
longtime friend secret, though he didn't disclose it to Crapo until he
was leaving his campaign staff in late 2010."
The loan went to a guy "with 10 years of experience flipping houses."
Who made it all the way to 2011 before going bust.
"He's bankrupt," Crapo's attorney Stephen Ryan said, adding that he
"took people's money and invested it. Based on our experience, he didn't
do a very good job."
Sharp as a tack, I tell you.
10.May 2013
Targeted, unfairly?
Tea Partiers, patriots, and Tea Party patriots are "livid"
according
to the Associated Press to find out that their buzzwords were used
by the IRS to identify groups worthy of additional scrutiny in regard to
political activity as it pertained to applications for non-profit
status. "Social welfare" is the 501(c)(4) term of art that many
political trucks have driven through; "some" activity is OK, but "their
primary activity must be social welfare." Should we try to assess that
in some way, or just take applicants' word for it? Surely, no one would
dare lie to the IRS, amirite?
There's been an apology from higher-ups, who claim that it was
lower-downs who decided to do all that, but the apology is not yet
abject enough for some. "Not enough!" thunders Senate minority leader
Mitch McConnell.
"I call on the White House to conduct a transparent, government-wide
review aimed at assuring the American people that these thuggish
practices are not under way at the IRS or elsewhere in the
administration against anyone, regardless of their political views."
"Transparent" is the buzzword of the day this month. "Government-wide,"
seriously, can we afford that with the sequester on and all? "Thuggish."
Hmmm.
Half of 300-ish cases have been closed, and none had exemptions
revoked ("though some withdrew their applications"). Oh, and it was
"about a quarter [that] were singled out because they had 'tea party' or
'patriot' somewhere in their applications."
Sounds like the system is working exactly the way it's supposed
to, to me. Also does not sound anything like "harassment." I'm not
saying that never happened, or never happens. I'm just saying there's
nothing in the report so far to indicate that it did. Yet another
"government-wide review" is not in order. But thanks for asking.
Slow learner
Wayne Hoffman's making a living out of "restoring liberty and improving
lives" if you can believe the slogan of his Idaho Freedom Foundation,
and he uses his run-ins with the law as fodder for his opinions.
A couple years ago, he was pulled over for driving 35 mph in a 30 zone,
which sounds a little dodgy, and for not wearing his seat belt,
for which, don't you know we have a law in this state. But
according
to his reading of the mind of the legislature,
they "never intended the law to be used in this manner," but rather just
wanted to "educate drivers about the seat belt law."
Consider yourself educated then, Wayne?
I rather thought the whole idea of required seatbelt use had been
settled, somewhat tragically, by our free-wheeling libertarian
Congressman (as she preferred to be known)
Helen
Chenoweth's demise, but Hoffman was making a larger point, about
the insidious threat of Obamacare.
"The question is, what's next?" he asked, ominously.
Well, what's next for Hoffman is
a
citation for 73 mph in a 55 mph zone, and more complaining about the
need for restored liberties. Not for himself, mind you, annoyed but not
devestated by a $155 fine, but for "the working poor" who could not take
that kind of hit in stride.
Back in the day of the federally imposed slow-down to save gas when
speed limits were set to 55 even in the wide open spaces of the west and
on highways designed for 70 or 75mph, there were some legitimate
arguments to be made. These days, up in the panhandle, I imagine 55
zones have a valid safety justification for libertarians and liberals
alike. 15 or 20 mph over the limit is way too fast.
The "risk of running afoul of laws" that everday Idahoans face is
actually quite manageable. If you don't want a big ticket, don't speed.
And if you do speed and get caught, don't be such a whiner. Perhaps
Wayne has heard this from other passing motorists, but hasn't quite
caught on yet: LEARN HOW TO DRIVE.
Money for nothing
By now, you've heard of the audacious hack and grab to
drain
$45 million cash from automated teller machines in "precision
operations that involved people in more than two dozen countries
acting in close coordination and with surgical precision," I assume?
There's so much to admire in all this technical expertise and
organizational development, you just wish they could have applied their
considerable talents to a more productive end.
I trust the U.S. Attorney's office of the Eastern District of New York
won't mind if I share the photo of Elvis and Emir here on the blog; it's
just too precious, from the fingers to the tidily bundled bills.
Their part in the enterprise remains to be proved, but it's easy to
imagine them part of the "cashing crews," buying "luxury items like
Rolex watches and expensive cars" to launder the cash. Happy day for the
salespeople on commission, too!
Working with prepaid debit cards and unleashing withdrawal limits,
it turns out Japan is the best place visit an ATM, where "some banks
allow withdrawals of as much as $10,000 from a single bank
machine," which I suppose would be ¥1,000,000-ish?
Not as happy a day for the purported leader of the New York cashing
crew, Alberto Lajud-Peña, 23, found dead in the Dominican
Republic late last month. Might have to do with "the computer experts
watching the financial transactions from afar, ensuring that they would
not be shortchanged on their cut."
9.May 2013
Senator Blockhead
Every once in a while I get a vague notion that one of my U.S. Senators,
at least, is above average (unlike the decidedly
sub-par one), even if we continue to agree on very little. I called
his office yesterday to voice my support for the Senate proceeding on a
confirmation vote for Gina McCarthy, nominated to head the Environmental
Protection Agency, an organization which has important work to do.
(Unlike, from all appearances, the U.S. Senate.) Then today, I read in
the NYT that
Republicans
blocked a vote on McCarthy, by boycotting a meeting of the Senate
Environment and Public Works Committee.
"[Republicans] said they took the action to protest what they called an
inadequate response by the nominee, Gina McCarthy, to more than 1,000
written questions about E.P.A. policies and internal practices."
And sure enough, Idaho's Senator Mike Crapo is one of the eight minority
members of the committee. So much for vague notions.
Update:
Robert B. Semple Jr., on the (NYT) editorial page editor's blog:
The
Latest G.O.P. Temper Tantrum.
"[T]he Senate Republicans are now beginning to act and sound just like
the House Republicans who have spent the last two years trying to
undermine the E.P.A. at every turn."
8.May 2013
Did I say that out loud?
The Heritage foundation is
trying
to distance itself from the history of a co-author of
its
recent study of the cost of every and any thing labeled "immigration
reform." Drive a stake for $6.3 trillion, with a $T, for the
"lifetime fiscal deficit" these incoming freebooters will draw. Talking
Points Memo reports that co-author Jason Richwine (Ph.D.!) opined in
2009 that
"immigrants should be barred based on low IQ, which he claimed would
have the effect of keeping out many Hispanics in particular, who may
have a 'genetic' predilection towards lower intelligence." ...
'No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites,
but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ
children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against,' Richwine
wrote."
Hold on there partner,
"This is not a work product of The Heritage Foundation. Its findings in
no way reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation," Mike Gonzalez,
vice president of communications at Heritage, said in a statement. "Nor
do the findings affect the conclusions of our study on the cost of
amnesty to the U.S. taxpayer."
Well, except for that dark cloud of suspicion, eh?
Can't hardly wait to hear what
Richwine
has to say about his other specialties, "welfare and religion." His
lengthy C.V. on the Heritage site seems to be one essay after another
about how people are overpaid. Him, too, maybe.
7.May 2013
Counting bikes
Saddled up and headed into the morning at a most unaccustomed hour
today, dutifully early for my 7:00 to 9:00 shift for the
Ada County Bicycle
Count, at the human-unfriendly intersection of Chinden Boulevard,
Veterans Memorial Parkway and Curtis Road. The cool air was redolent
with spring after yesterday afternoon's thunderstorm, cottonwood smell
and the sound of red-winged blackbirds and frogs wafting out of the
wild little triangle subtended by Ustick, Curtis and the bench. Down at
the corner, my appointed hour coincided with the sun coming over the
foothills as an added treat.
Two hours sounds like a long time to stand around and wait for things to
happen, but sliced into quarter-hour segments, the time passed
relatively quickly, as I counted up 21 helmets, 25 cyclists northbound
through the intersection, and 20 others spread out over the other eleven
possibilities. Just under half of the cyclists used the sidewalks and
crosswalks for some or all of the often slow process of negotiating an
intersection that is of, by, and for cars and trucks, most of all.
The motorized flow rate is about a hundred times greater than that of
cyclists and pedestrians. All but two of the 45 cyclists went through in
a sensible, practical, and legal manner.
The one kid who did not made a swooping turn through the gas station to
get his timing on, and then angled across Chinden to suit himself, and
made two lines of traffic stop to avoid hitting him. The gal who did
not, definitely old enough to know better, made a "right" turn from
northbound to eastbound, using the west and north sidewalks (that's
fine), not bothering to request or wait for walk signals, crossing
halfway while left-turn arrows gave vehicles the right of way on the
outbound halves of the crosswalks. She did kind of slow down out in the
middle of the intersection and keep from going right in front of
any drivers, at least.
I let the pulsing roar of the cars and trucks blend into the background
of my attention as I watched for non-motorized traffic, even after the
one fellow who chatted with me suggest "you should count the people who
run red lights!" (Hey, it's a long wait if you have to sit through
another turn.) I took a few pictures, including one of an incipient jam
when a school bus stopping downstream backed traffic up to and into the
intersection. After I got home and looked at it, I could see that yeah,
there were three or four people who must've run the red light and
failed to make sure their exit was clear before they entered. D'OH!
No accidents, which is good, and just one guy preparing to roll right on
red through the crosswalk had to jam on his brakes when he realized
there was a cyclist about to cross with a walk signal (after waiting 2
or 3 minutes to get it). The cyclist was watching, and smart enough not
to push his luck.
Back up the bench and away from the intersection, I could hear the
blackbirds again, still singing for the morning.
6.May 2013
Or was that 'ad ignorantum'?
Idaho's Senator Jim Risch stopped by the newspaper during his most recent
vacation-recess-district/state
work period and
chatted
with Dan Popkey
about how much he loves his job, how easy it is, and how well everyone
gets along while they're doing next to nothing nothing.
"You know, I really enjoy this job. I really like this job," Risch said
last week, saying it's a breeze compared to the seven months he served
as governor in 2006. "Governor will wear you down. You can't do that job
permanently. This you can do ad infinitum."
Just turned 70, planning on being re-elected next year, and what the
hell, why not another 6 years of all-expenses jet-setting to do "what he
wants to do" while enjoying the shows at Ford's Theater.
Could we set expectations any lower?
5.May 2013
Education conspiracy theories
It's not exactly clear why education should be a locus of continuing
controversy, but many of the complaints seem to tie into one conspiracy
theory or another. The government wants more and more money, wants to
control the minds of our children, the United Nations is doing the
groundwork for One World government, it's all about teacher's unions
and so on. The latest thing to spark the bat signal is
Common Core curriculum standards, and in the Sunday paper,
the Idaho Statesman
ran competing "Reader's Views" on the topic,
from the executive directors of
The
Common Sense Democracy Foundation of Idaho and the
Idaho
Freedom Foundation.
Hadn't heard of the former, but the latter is familiar as Wayne
Hoffman's hobby horse and a sort of farm team for the Heritage
Foundation and ALEC. "Democracy"
sounds suspicious like this state's distaff party, but Travis Manning
lists plenty of majority support for the Core, including our
Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna, Governer, and Education
committees in both the state House and Senate, as well as national
figures Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie. Ah, but there's the
National Education Association in favor, so it must be a conspiracy of
some sort, yeah? Manning suggests asking teachers, there's a novel
idea.
On the other hand... Hoffman notes that Luna "says there is a lot of
misinformation out there," followed by a curious "but." Curious, because
it connects to what might well be a recitation of misinformation. At
most, it's a list of critics and generic criticism. Less education
choice and competition? A push for federal control of all education?
The standards are mediocre and injurious? The "most compelling
discussion" by Hoffman's account is one parent's complaint about "her
third grader struggl[ing] with overwrought math homework."
Hoffman has experience as a reporter, and a lobbyist, and you would
think by now he could formulate an argument, rather than just filling
space with overwrought verbiage, but he's not demonstrating competence
here. I don't imagine he's so credulous as to find one parent's story
about her third-grader to be "most compelling," which leaves me no
conclusion to draw but that he's clutching at weak straws.
He celebrates a resolution from the Republican National Committee, and
"success" at "delay" of implementing standards, without ever having
established any reason for the demonization. "Homogenization and
standardization of education" is bad? We need something for our
"regional differences"? Funny that never came up a committee down in
Texas was determining what all would go in school textbooks.
Why is anyone listening to this man, and why is he taking up space in my
newspaper?
3.May 2013
When will the shooting start?
It's not news that
the
"culture war" is about more than just guns, but with tens of
thousands of NRA members gathering in Texas, and a star-studded cast of
headliners including Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Glenn Beck and
Ted Nugent, be still my heart. Wayne LaPierre tells NRA members they
"deserve to be proud" and "exemplify everything that's good and right
about America."
Imagine that, all you have to do is pay your dues. Oh, and some shooting
exemplifies good and right, too.
Have
a listen to the incoming NRA president, James Porter extolling our
freedom to y'all to "fight like hell to protect our 2nd amendment
rights,"
"fightin', scratchin', head-buttin', we got the pads put on, we got our
helmets strapped on, we're cinched up, we're ready to fight, we're
fightin' every day."
The shooting never stopped, actually. We, the people, are
shooting—to
kill—every day. In the less than five months since the Newtown
massacre,
the
crowd-sourced estimate is that another 3,822 people have been
killed by guns.
Fire for effect
The Cornucopia Highway, Lone Fir Road, Fish Lake Road and the Pine Creek
Highway meet in tiny Halfway which had 15 minutes of fame back in the
dot com bubble by
pretending to be
Half.com, Oregon for certain promotional considerations. Of course
you don't remember Half.com; eBay subsumed it more than a decade ago,
and who even knows what their business model was? Half off?
It won't be too obvious what "Halfway" was about either, because you're
not familiar with Pine, Oregon and Cornucopia, are you? It's sort of
halfway to the North Pole, but then the 45th parallel has no shortage of
scenic attractions around its length. Barely 300 people live in the
town, but that is not stopping them from thinking big.
What if... two masked men in hoodies busted into the local charter
school and started shooting up a staff meeting? They'd best be prepared
for that, right?
The
"preparedness" exercise the locals came up with beggars the
imagination, but I will give them credit for at least picking a day when
there were no kids in school.
As the school district's Safety Committee and School Board "critically
evaluate policies and procedures and decide what to do next," if they
decide gee, we should arm teachers, the next event could be
"live fire" and even more exciting than this one was.
Because you just never know!
2.May 2013
Idaho Gives?
The first step for this new (to Idaho) idea is to
explain
it (for the promoters), and understand it (for the target audience),
and the second step is to loosen the latter's grip on their wallets.
Everybody asking for money at once? Didn't seem to make sense to me, but
maybe with a bunch of special events and a game show feel (time
remaining, 14 hours and counting down) they can get some incremental
give. I'll chip in the blog love anyway for this new idea:
Idaho
Gives.
"Today, Idahoans will come together for a day of giving to support the
nonprofits in communities across our state. From midnight -11:59pm a
share of every dollar raised by Idaho nonprofits will be matched with
funds from the Idaho Gives award pool. In addition, the top five
organizations with the most unique donors (nonprofits are divided by
size) will receive bonus grants of $3,000, $1,000, $500, $250, and $250
respectively. If you give between the hours of 9am and 6pm(MT), the
organization you support has the chance to win an extra $1,000 because
of your donation!"
There are plenty of our favorite charities on the three lists
(sorted by size), but with more than 400 to consider, yikes. For just
those we support, we get about three times the solicitations we're
prepared to respond to. Fewer, and more accurately targeted would suit
me better than more, more, more. 400 in one day, that's too many for
me to wrap my head around. But they're closing in on $120,000 in more
than 1400 donations from 1059 donors in with more than half the day to
go, so good on 'em, I guess.
1.May 2013
Investment advice can sometimes be risky
Professor Dwayne Barney has an ordinary-sounding
bio blurb on Boise State
University's site, lots of education, teaching areas, office hours,
some featured publications. I hadn't heard of him before reading his
piece in the Idaho Statesman's Business Insider section this week,
"Buying
government bonds can sometimes be risky."
Having bought a few government bonds over the years, yes, I'm
interested to know more about that. I'm well aware that before the real
estate bubble popped, municipal and other government bonds seemed
boring and safe, but we can't necessarily assume that any more.
The chances that "Uncle Sam might run out of cash" still seem
negligible, even if the clowns in Congress do have the power to roil the
markets from time to time. I'm not the only one who took Standard and
Poor's credit rating downgrade in the summer of 2011 with a grain of
salt; the ratings agencies played an important role in enabling the
finance debacle, by declaring toxic waste "instruments" to be
sweet-smelling and AAA. I have no reason to give more credence to Uncle
Standard than to Uncle Sam.
What else? The threat of inflation, yes.
"The safety of investing in a government bond whose payoff is expressed
in fixed units of fiat currency is risky in an environment where the
government and central bank are reckless with stimulus spending and
monetary expansion."
Hmm, "fixed units of fiat currency" sounds like wing-nuttery dog whistle
language, what the hell? I've been around most of six decades and all
I've ever known is "money," honey. Fiat is an Italian car, or a dictatorial
press release. It's not something that came up in polite conversation or
in the college economics courses I took, or in any of the businesses
I've worked in for the last 40+ years. I'm pretty sure there is no more
than a tiny fraction of people in business or general Business Insider
readers who know what he's talking about. "Government" and "risky"
always plays well in Idaho, though.
Inflation is a meaningful economic issue, but not a bogeyman. In the
early 1980s, it ran as hot as can be, but life went on. We borrowed
money to buy a house in 1984, at 10.5% annual interest, can you
imagine? Still, we made our payments, bought groceries, and
what-not.
If you could buy government bonds with your gold and silver coins and
they paid you back likewise, would you be better off? Inflation-proof?
No, you would not. Inflation, and interest rates are at issue for
any bond or fixed income investing, not unique to government
paper.
Barney brings up Treasury Inflation Proteced Securities as an investment
that "eliminates the risk of inflation," and then complains that TIPS
"are paying negative real interest rates." Because... why, doctor?
Because "real" rates are as compared to inflation which is low
right now. Your TIPS investment doesn't require you to pay the
government interest to loan them money, it just doesn't pay you very
much interest. You can go look for yourself; you can obtain a negative
yield by paying a premium for the bond, but there are
only positive interest rates (some small, some not so small) in
the auction
results.
Why would you pay $107 for a $100 bond? If inflation lights up, the
deal is that the government will increase the principle amount, and your
guess would pay off. If inflation stays modest, you lose. Why would you
pay $1,456.70 for an ounce of gold? Because you think it'll be worth
more of that "fiat currency" and/or groceries in the future. Good
luck.
After not making much of an argument, Barney wraps up by observing that
"risk is a fact of life in investing" and "there is no sure thing."
"In an environment of gargantuan budget deficits and rapid money
creation, a long-term investor should be wary when purchasing those U.S.
government bonds that used to be regarded as the ultimate safe
haven."
Personally, I would be more wary of professors spouting
important-sounding nonsense without a legitimate argument, and flogging
the book they just wrote. Rather than a link to BSU at the end of the
story, playing to the credential that got him in the newspaper, the
trailing tag is to his book site, capitalasmoney.com, which is mostly a
blog. Top of that blog today is the April 18 entry,
Bitcoins:
A Step in the Right Direction, leading with the news flash that
"the free market is at work in attempting to come up with alternative
solutions to government-controlled fiat money." After the plaudits for
that bold idea,
"Creating a new 'money' that eliminates the government and central
bank's monopoly on currency manufacturing is a significant move towards
economic freedom and transparency."
Riiiight. Maybe the good professors have some bridges for sale, too?
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
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Monday, 03-Jun-2013 09:09:37 MDT
http://fortboise.org/blog/201305.html
