Why I'm not a Move-On.org member

Move-On.org is economically retarded.

They sent me this:

Dear MoveOn member,

We all know gas prices have skyrocketed over the past year, but it's just supply and demand, right?

Everybody's taking a hit, aren't they?

Well—no.

As millions of Americans struggle to make ends meet, thousands of oil company executives are struggling with a different problem: what to do with all their extra money.

We get record prices, they get record profits. And it's gotta stop.

Tell Congress to pass a windfall profits tax. If big oil companies continue over-charging Americans, some of their ridiculous profits should be invested in green jobs and alternative energy research.

Clicking this link will add your name:
http://pol.moveon.org/windfallprofitstax/o.pl?id=12763-6117917-4lxJVT&t=3

The oil industry's profits are absolutely staggering. In 2007, the industry netted $155 billion. In profit. For context, Barack Obama's plan for a clean energy future calls for $150 billion. Over 10 years.

Thanks for all you do.

I totally disagree with this. First, the logic is terrible. If this is a windfall, then it's temporary: There's expectation that circumstances are abnormal, and will revert to normality. The profits are due to an aberration, and thus are a "windfall". So if there's reason to believe things will get back to normal, that this is an exceptional moment, and that the profits are a windfall, then the tax won't have any effect: Things will revert to normal with or without the tax. Do we we really want a government that raids profitable businesses? It provides incentive to hide success or squander resources to make sure a business is never too profitable, lest Uncle Sam come and take your "extra" money. "We leave the lights on all night so we don't make too much money. Don't want to have one of those 'windfalls'".

If it's not a windfall, and it's in fact because of a fundamental shift in economics, how will taking a company's profits accomplish anything we want to see happen? Taking profits surely won't give them any incentive to lower prices: "Gee, thanks for taking all our extra money. Now that we don't have it, we realized, we're better off practicing detachment from material things, and will hence lower our prices to be sure we never are surrounded by money again. Also, we are late for yoga class."

The only way prices will come down is if demand drops or competition enters. And competition enters an industry when profits are high. High prices for traditional energy make newer, greener energy more economically attractive. Let the cycle play out, and we'll get where we want to go. People will buy greener cars, drive less. Public transit will get funded and built. All of these things are capital infrastructure shifts, and will take time to come about. High prices for gasoline will keep us moving in that direction. If gas goes back to $2/ gallon, folks will keep driving hummers.

Lastly, have some perspective. Gas is more than a pound per liter in the UK. With 1.96 dollars per pound, and 3.79 liters per gallon, that's pushing $8/ gallon. So we need to stop whining and trying to get someone else to pay for what is our common burden of moving our economy towards a new and better system of energy and transportation.

Move On needs to hire some economists.

Every Women's Shampoo Commercial I Have Ever Seen

Once upon a time there was a girl. She had no boyfriend and was alone and was overlooked at her job. No one noticed her. Her clothes didn't fit her well and were unflattering. She exuded all the sensual appeal of a dead haddock in an ice chest. The entire world was bathed in cold blue light. The reason for all of this was her hair.

Then she tried our shampoo! It was designed by scientists and also by nature! Our scientists have taken naturally occurring beauty molecules from exotic species and wrapped them up in chemically engineered hair-penetrating particles! These particles have names that sound science-y, yet pretty! In this animation, you can see the beauty going RIGHT INTO ANIMATED HAIR, which then becomes wavy and shiny! It totally works!

Now the world is lit by warm yellow and orange light. The girl's wardrobe is flattering. Her career is great, and handsome, rich, interesting men make obvious fools of themselves to pursue her. She is stunning, yet still like-able, in an easily internalized "my best friend is prettier than I am, and when we go out guys talk to her first" insecurity-inducing way. This is all due to her spectacular new hair, which is awesome not because a battalion of stylists spent 4 hours on it for this shoot, but because of our shampoo. Available at Walgreen's.

The Earth is 6000 years old

Cool article about rapid phenotypic response to environmental change, ostensibly due to increased selection favoring more primitive genes and their characteristics. Easy to evolve fast when reverting to an earlier version of the software. No need to write new code, just make more copies of the old stuff and turn it back on again.

Of course, evolution is just a "theory". It's also possible the Flying Spaghetti Monster took all the old sticklebacks out and put in the new ones that he made, while no one was looking. Just to test our belief in Him.

Jury un-duty

Last week I got notice in my mail that my presence at Marin County Superior Court had been cordially and randomly requested. I dialed in last night, and the message was clear: All prospective jurors are needed.

So I got to the Civic Center for 9:30 and joined the queue. There were perhaps 120 people in the room. After the thrilling video about why California is great and America is great and Juries are great, the genuinely engaging and efficient woman who herds juror prospects read off a list of names. We'd be reporting to court room H. It was alphabetical. They got to my area of the alphabet, and read my name.

I left my leatherman on my keyring, inadvertently, after having been warned not to have one, so I had to leave it in the jury room. Then I went through the near-airport level security.

Court clerk pulled the first 12 prospective jurors. And I was one of them.

The case was going to be a DUI. And the accused wasn't going to appear, and wasn't going to testify, and had refused the breathalyser and blood tests. So we were asked if we knew anyone in the case, if we or family folks worked in law enforcement, asked if we had a zero tolerance for driving after any drinking. I couldn't honestly fail myself on anything. I didn't want to disqualify myself, nor did I want not to disqualify myself.

Juror after juror got dismissed or excused by the judge for everything from having had an alcoholic husband, family members killed by drunk drivers, bad run-ins with police, prior DUI convictions, etc. One woman had been hit by a DUI last Wednesday.

The defense attorney seemed keen to establish that folks on the jury thought it was ok to, or at least would admit to having a drink, then driving. Like me: I go to the brewpub, have a beer with my dinner, drive home. Not a big deal.

He questioned one of the new jurors about this, and he responded that he had the little card in his wallet that told you, based on height and weight, what was ok, questionable and too much to drink.

The defense attorney, perhaps from the right motive to make sure we didn't take the guideline as absolute, began to argue that we didn't know who put out the card, or what their agenda was, and that different people had different tolerances, and that it wasn't gospel, and what did they mean by "drink" anyway? Is a long Island Iced Tea equal to a glass of wine? And then he asked if any of us took issue with that.

Now I think he was trying to argue that we shouldn't take it as gospel. And I'm fine with that. But his argument got too close to the "Hey, who can trust those 'scientists' with all their 'numbers' and 'facts' and 'objectivity'" and he lost me.

So I raised my hand. Because I took issue with that.

"Actually, the card is very clear about what a 'drink' is. 1.5 oz of hard liquor, 5 oz of wine, 12 oz of beer. And servings are standardized in restaurants, too, based on alcohol content. It's why high alcohol content beers have to be served in smaller glasses. So that portion is very objective. The card is also clear about what's less objective, but even there, it's clear what is and is not open to interpretation. If you're a 6'4" 240 pound male and you've had one drink, you're fine, and if you're a 5'0 95 pound female and you've had 6, you're in trouble. The cards are clear about what is and is not open to interpretation and relativity."

Then he went back to the juror. Then there was a break.

A woman from the courtroom was passing in the hall, and turned and said with a smile, "You talk too fast!" I laughed and apologized. She came back by and I thanked her for saying so. Sometimes I go too fast when I'm revved up about something. She said it's because I'm a smarty, and that sometimes the brains go faster than the mouth can keep up with. Then I realized she was the court stenographer. Of course she noted my pace of speaking. And since she had to write down my occupation, the rest of the exchange made sense. We had a good chat, discovering we were both books not to be judged by our covers.

Then back to the court room. The two lawyers again ditching jurors because they can. The prosecution had nixed a few that I thought were "unsophisticated" and a few who'd had bad experiences with cops, and may not believe officer testimony. At least, those were my guesses as to why they got nailed.

And then she asked to have me ditched.

So I was done.

It was a surprise. I figured I was well qualified to reason to conclusions based only on the information and rules I was allowed to use. I'm good at partial information. But I think she thought science and logic boy wouldn't be able to get past the lack of breath or blood test. On the contrary, if blood alcohol content is positively but imperfectly correlated with impairment, then it's really always officer testimony that matters in convicting for DUI. And I could have handled that.

I really wonder why I got let go, but I guess I'll never know.

I agree with W

I can count on one hand the times I've agreed with the current President. I still need one hand, and expect one hand will last until Jan 2009.

While I admit I haven't studied the farm bill line by line, I'm against the farm subsidies. I'm sure there are some that I'd be okay with, but I don't support government interference in markets like this unless it truly serves the public interest.

I read a rather compelling proposition about a good way to insulate farmers from the weather and yield risks of farming without merely guaranteeing them money as we currently do.

When we pay our farmers (or, as is more often the case, agribusinesses) to make food, we do get cheap food. But it's an illusion: We tax ourselves, then give this tax money to food producers, who give us (and people who are not us) cheaper food. So we're paying for it anyway, at least, insofar as we pay taxes. Folks at the lower end of the income spectrum who pay less in taxes don't pay for as much subsidy, so may get some financial benefit from the scheme. $2 in taxes saves them $5 in food, maybe. I haven't done the math.

The problem comes when we start exporting this cheap food around the world. When corn from the US, which has been shipped from the other side of the planet, is cheaper than the corn grown down the road, local agriculture suffers. Just as government subsidies to Airbus give them an unfair (in the WTO sense of "unfair") advantage, so do our subsidies unfairly advantage our agricultural products. So local agriculture, local productivity, local self sufficiency in countries around the world suffer because of these policies. And where people are poor with few prospects, desperation grows and violence comes out of it. Am I saying corn subsidies breed suicide bombers and genocide? Perhaps not directly, but it's a contributing factor.

And some of this bill continues to fuel the biofuels illusion. The simple math on arable acreage * yield per acre * gallons per yield shows that we'd just end up with really expensive food, and still be using a ton of oil, and still producing CO2. If we want energy independence, we have to look at nuclear and electric.

So I'd rather see it not pass. But congress won't deny agribusiness and middle America its handout during an election year.

I will write my congresswoman, though, and ask her not to override the veto. I'll at least have done what I can.

Amazing art

Combines real world art with digital capture and compilation to produce the net effect. I have no idea how the ideas arise, but it's brilliant.


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Yay

Why I'm proud to be Californian.

Crossing fingers

That the CA court upholds the universal civil right to marry.

No matter what, this'll get appealed to the Supreme Court, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'm not sure how it would go down. Since "Separate but equal" doesn't work for races and education (separate is intrinsically unequal), I would expect it doesn't work for life partnership institutions. Either we all get married or we all have civil unions, but no half measures.

That said, anything that moves towards full equality is progress, even if we can't get there in one leap.

I may have been right

That there would be negotiations about terms and concessions before bowing out. Just had no idea it would be about direct movements of money:

"Howard Wolfson, Mrs Clinton’s chief of communications, meanwhile admitted to debts of $21 million, but insisted the show would go on. The candidate has already lent her campaign $11.6 million, and there are suggestions that Mr Obama may help her out with a fundraising event if she quits soon and works for the good of the party."

One one hand, it's understandable. I'd miss $10 million, for sure. On the other hand, seems crappy if HRC can get the money she "lent" her campaign back, while all the non-millionaires who did not lend but gave her money are just out their donation amount.

I think Obama supporters have been gracious in victory, largely, based on the comments I've seen around the Interwebs.

I hope this passes

Again, I wish I had a vote in SF.

I have only mild reservations about disrespecting the office. They're more than made up for by my lack of reservations disrespecting the man and his decisions.

Geeking out about rowing

My cox from San Diego has an extra-cool speed/ stroke coach for the boat. It's a little piece of electronic equipment that judges speed from a tiny magnetic impeller under the hull that deduces the speed of the hull by revolutions of the impeller per second. It also records strokes and stroke rate via the magnet under the stroke's seat passing over a magnet on the deck between the tracks.

So for a race, it can show by minute, or in this case, by approximate distance through the race, our speed and our stroke rate.

He sent out the data, and I immediately had some fun with it. Thought this was very cool.


You can see our start (high strokes per minute, with speed climbing from 0 up to top speed). You can see our move around the 500m mark (rate bumps up, speed bumps). Then you can see our big move at the 1000m mark, our next surge when our cox called on folks individually, and our finishing sprint.

I'm pleased that rate and speed were so tightly linked. Shows we're efficient with our rate changes. We'll work on higher speed off the line for 1000's.

Why Hillary's "Still in the Race"

She's not.

But she's a smart politician. And even though it's now even more mathematically obvious than it has been before that she's not going to get the nomination, she can't come out and concede just yet.

Well, she could, but that's not her best, self-interested move. Dropping out today would be the equivalent of walking away from the roulette table, but leaving her chips behind.

She has political capital to spend. She can ask the question of the Democratic establishment and the Obama camp, "What will you give me if I end it now?". Actually, she's more likely to enter the negotiation with a clear list of demands, some of which are there only to be discarded as negotiating chips. "I'll drop out now, and try to rally my white, blue collar, economic protectionist rhetoric-loving supporters to you, if you: 1) Appoint me to the Supreme Court at the earliest opportunity, 2) ..."

She's working on her exist strategy. She's formulating her demands. She can stay in until W. VA, or she can exit before W. VA, and use her time in W. VA to help Obama with the constituency with which he's performed least well: Rednecks Less educated, white, blue collar, socially conservative theists with guns. It's an important negotiating chip.

I predict she'll bow out before the last primaries, and negotiate some seating of the MI and FL delegations (which will contractually give enough of their support to Obama so as not to upset the nomination), and call that "keeping her promise to the people of MI and FL" in an act of pre-2012 pandering. She won't hijack the convention.

She's going to lay the ground work for an "I told you so" run in 2012. So she'll start mending fences with the Democratic party now. But such a shift in personal career strategy, from "win in 2008" to "win in 2012" requires some thinking. Once she's got a new plan, she'll move on it, and, once she's gotten as much as she can for promising to get out of Obama's way, she'll drop out.

On the mortgage bailout

I think the dudes in Canada are right:

"...if investors and managers thought there would always be a safety net, they would be encouraged to take inordinate risks in order to maximize profits."

As much as I want to let the Bear Sterns of the world suffer the consequences of their own bad decisions, I do think that preventing a full out financial meltdown is a good thing, and that a government entity that fails to intervene to dampen the size of the swings in the boom-bust cycle shirks its responsibility to its citizens.

Some of the financial benefit that comes from the kinds of radical moves the Fed has made comes from reducing the fear in the market. Institutions stop freaking out, because they know the Fed will take care of them. Which, consistent with the perspective of the Governor of the Bank of Canada, means the institutions suddenly grow the balls required to weather the storm, and take on the risk of staying in some of their positions. It stops the downward spiral of sell-offs dropping values which trigger sell-offs which drop values. It does make the institutions willing to assume more risk, which, at least in the short term, is the goal. But I agree that government's only sharing downside risk is playing a game of "heads, I win; tails, we lose" with financial firms. Great for firms, sucks for taxpayers with no ability to participate in the firms' up side. And in the long run, makes firms likely to bet it all on Red 5, then ask the government for more chips when they lose. Not good.

I have little trouble letting the market solve the problem. I really don't think we need more lending regulation. Institutions will have gotten enough fear of crappy credit risk to tighten their criteria on their own. It would be nice to protect the financially weak and stupid from themselves with laws that make it harder for them to get loans they can't afford. But I'm not sure this should or can really be accomplished: There's always a certain amount of risk of default, which can be priced. If priced right, consumers should be allowed to place big bets on themselves, or should find the cost of doing so high enough to be a deterrent. If the risk of default is high enough, the interest rate premium ought to get high enough that the default prone won't buy it. Conversely, if a firm prices the risk wrong, and has a defaulting customer, that's the firm's fault, and the firm should suffer the consequences. You bet on Red 5. It's Black 6. Gimme your chips.

I realize the economic shock that would come when the bottom 5% of homeowners all get repossessed. All home values would take a hit, some consumer spending would take a hit. But I also expect that prices fall to the point where prudent buyers who have sat on the sidelines, not participating in the crazy inflated bubble market, not buying in with high interest, 0 money down mortgages, who've been saving to make a full 20% down payment, will enter the market. And get rewarded for making the right decision. It can't spiral down forever. We can't prolong the inevitable. It's got to unravel to the point that most of the irrationality, fear and unsustainability is out of the market. So I suppose I'm advocating that government merely try to slow, not prevent the financial meltdown. I think this is what the Fed's trying to do, but I see too much sentiment that the government should try to prevent this from happening now and in the future. There, I disagree. It's not preventable, just cushionable.

I think I'm just saying we can't have it both ways: Bad credit customers are high risk, and if we want a world in which even those who can't afford houses can buy houses anyway, we have to allow those willing to take on risk (both financial firms and consumers) to do so. If we're unwilling to live with a system which can make bad bets, and in which consumers who make bets on their own ability to pay for something can lose, then we must accept that certain people just won't have access to credit. We just can't have a world in which poor folks with unreliable incomes, no assets and a poor history of paying their bills on time can stay in houses they can't or won't pay for. Some firms must go under, and some people have to move out before we as an economy can move on.

5 years out from Mission Accomplished

Nice job, Newkyular, Nice job.