Let's Fly Under the Bridge

Yugo, Guy

2009-06-01T15:52:00.000-07:00

Ask the man who's owned one in the collective sense:

When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu decided in the mid-1960s that he wanted to have a car industry, he chose me to start the project rolling. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I knew nothing about manufacturing cars, but neither did anyone else among Ceausescu's top men. However, my father had spent most of his life running the service department of the General Motors affiliate in Bucharest.

My job at the time was as head of the Romanian industrial espionage program. Ceausescu tasked me to mediate the purchase of a minimum, basic license for a small car from a major Western manufacturer, and then to steal everything else needed to produce the car.

Three Western companies competed for the honor. Ceausescu decided on Renault, because it was owned by the French government (all Soviet bloc rulers distrusted private companies). We ended up with a license for an antiquated and about-to-be-discontinued Renault-12 car, because it was the cheapest. "Good enough for the idiots," Ceausescu decided....

"Too luxurious for the idiots," Ceausescu decreed when he saw the first Dacia car made in Romania. Immediately, the radio, right side mirror and backseat heating were dropped. Other "unnecessary luxuries" were soon eliminated by the bureaucrats and their workers' union that were running the factory. The car that finally hit the market was a stripped-down version of the old, stripped-down Renault 12. "Perfect for the idiots," Ceausescu approved. Indeed, the Romanian people, who had never before had any car, came to cherish the Dacia.

....Ceausescu was an extreme case, but automobile manufacturing and government were never a good mix in any socialist/communist country. In the late 1950s, when I headed Romania's foreign intelligence station in West Germany, I worked closely with the foreign branch of the East German Stasi. Its chief, Markus Wolf, rewarded me with a Trabant car -- the pride of East Germany -- when I left to return to Romania.

That ugly little car became famous in 1989 when thousands of East Germans used it to cross to the West. The Trabant originally derived from a well regarded West German car (the DKW) made by Audi, which today produces some of the most prestigious cars in the world. In the hands of the East German government, the unfortunate DKW became a farce of a car. The bureaucrats and the union that ran the Trabant factory made the car smaller and boxier, to give it a more proletarian look. To reduce production costs, they cut down on the size of the original, already small DKW engine, and they replaced the metal body with one made of plastic-covered cardboard. What rolled off the assembly line was a kind of horseless carriage that roared like a lawn mower and polluted the air worse than a whole city block full of big Western cars.

After German reunification, the plucky little "Trabi" that East Germans used to wait 10 years to buy became an embarrassment, and its production was stopped. Germany's junkyards are now piled high with Trabants, which cannot be recycled because burning their plastic-covered cardboard bodies would release poisonous dioxins. German scientists are now trying to develop a bacterium to devour the cardboard-and-plastic body.

The FLUBA awaits the Obami.

Never trust anyone over 30

2009-06-01T15:42:00.000-07:00

Especially with the future of the auto industry:

It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantlingGeneral Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.

But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.

....A month ago, when the administration was divided over whether to support Fiat’s bid to take over much of Chrysler, it was Mr. Deese who spoke out strongly against simply letting the company go into liquidation, according to several people who were present for the debate.

“Brian grasps both the economics and the politics about as quickly as I’ve seen anyone do this,” said Lawrence H. Summers, the head of the National Economic Council who is not known for being patient whenever he believes an analysis is sub-par — or disagrees with his own. “And there he was in the Roosevelt Room, speaking up vigorously to make the point that the costs we were going to incur giving Fiat a chance were no greater than some of the hidden costs of liquidation.”

Mr. Deese was not the only one favoring the Fiat deal, but his lengthy memorandum on how liquidation would increase Medicaid costs, unemployment insurance and municipal bankruptcies ended the debate.

That last sentence would seem to have let the cat out of the bag. This policy isn't about saving GM as much as it is about continuing to hide the insolvency of the agencies that politicians have touted as the 'social safety net' lo these many decades.

The Trouble With Larry

2009-06-01T15:34:00.000-07:00

Irwin Stelzer thinks none of this would be happening if Larry Summers was still alive:

The administration, led by GM and Chrysler CEO Barack Obama, also decided to lay hands on the auto industry. First it shortchanged the companies' creditors--pension funds and investors who had lent the -companies money on terms that gave them preferential access to the companies' assets should there be a bankruptcy. What matter contractual obligations when the United Auto Workers is awaiting payback for its support of Obama in the primary and general election campaigns? Surely Summers knows that such a move will make investors more reluctant to lend in the future and inclined to charge higher interest rates to any companies they do finance. Some say Summers sat in on these meetings and either lost the argument--implausible, in the view of those who have jousted with him in the past--or remained silent. Say it ain't so, Larry.

The administration has also promised to lower health care costs by introducing new IT systems and expanding insurance coverage. Virtually every expert says that information technology might be a nice thing--automated records, easily accessible--but at best will have only a trivial effect on costs. And just how expanding coverage can lower costs remains a mystery to most economists. Unless, of course, the administration is planning to ration health care, a nightmarish system that until recently led the National Health Service in Britain to deny treatment to patients suffering from macular degeneration until they were blind in one eye. Summers knows all about these cost figures and the inefficiencies of rationing. Did he decide to go along to get along? Say it ain't so, Larry.

Then there is energy policy. The president says he can make us independent of foreign oil. Summers knows he can't. He knows too that many economists contend fuel efficiency standards are more likely to deny consumers the cars they want than to have any effect on global climate, given the developing countries' plans to build thousands of new coal-fired generating stations. .... Say it ain't so, Larry.

....There's more, but you get the idea. When Barack Obama won the election and began to staff up, those of us who worried that the administration's policies would lean so far in the direction of political pandering as to create serious economic problems took heart when we learned that Larry Summers was to be at the center of policy-making. His fearless intelligence and debating skills would certainly prevent the administration from making terrible, irrevocable policy errors. Christina Romer, chosen by Obama to chair his Council of Economic Advisers, might prefer that appointment to fidelity to her academic research findings--tax cuts are more effective in stimulating an economy than is spending--but surely Larry Summers would not. So great is his reputation that Obama's chief political adviser, David Axelrod, told the press, "I'm not sure we would have gotten him but for the fact that we have a crisis that is equal to his talents."

Many of us joined Axelrod in praising Obama for landing Summers. And those who know him even slightly had no doubt that he has the good sense to treat fools slightly more kindly than his reputation would lead one to expect. So he could be heard. But we wonder if his voice of sanity has gone the way of Paul Volcker's, stifled and ignored. Say it ain't so, Larry.

Home on the Deranged

2009-05-10T15:31:00.000-07:00

Steven Malanga details the decades long obsession American politicians have had with home ownership, and its unintended consequences. Predictably, no one seems to have learned:

...before we’ve even worked our way through this crisis, elected officials and policymakers are busy readying the next. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts congressman who serves as chair of the House Financial Services Committee, has balked at proposals to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which would eliminate their risk to taxpayers and their susceptibility to political machinations.

Why? Simple: the government uses them to subsidize the affordable-housing programs that Frank supports. California congressman Joe Baca, head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, also opposes reining in affordable housing lending. “We need to keep credit easily accessible to our minority communities,” he asserts.

Republicans and Democrats, meanwhile, have scrambled to reignite the housing market through ill-conceived tax credits and renewed federal subsidies for mortgages, including the Obama administration’s mortgage bailout plan, which recalls the New Deal’s H[ome]O[wner's]L[oan]C[orp].

As Harvard economist and City Journal contributing editor Edward Glaeser has observed, mortgage lenders have finally “recovered their sanity”—only to have government dangling subsidized low interest rates and tax credits in front of them and their potential customers all over again. Behind these efforts is a fundamental misconception among politicians that housing drives the American economy and therefore demands subsidy at virtually any cost.

Emperor...No Clothes

2009-05-06T13:35:00.000-07:00

We think Joe the Plumber and Cliff Asness would get along just fine:

Here's a shock. When hedge funds, pension funds, mutual funds, and individuals, including very sweet grandmothers, lend their money they expect to get it back. However, they know, or should know, they take the risk of not being paid back. But if such a bad event happens it usually does not result in a complete loss. A firm in bankruptcy still has assets. It’s not always a pretty process.

Bankruptcy court is about figuring out how to most fairly divvy up the remaining assets based on who is owed what and whose contracts come first. The process already has built-in partial protections for employees and pensions, and can set lenders' contracts aside in order to help the company survive, all of which are the rules of the game lenders know before they lend. But, without this recovery process nobody would lend to risky borrowers. Essentially, lenders accept less than shareholders (means bonds return less than stocks) in good times only because they get more than shareholders in bad times.

The above is how it works in America, or how it’s supposed to work. The President and his team sought to avoid having Chrysler go through this process, proposing their own plan for re-organizing the company and partially paying off Chrysler’s creditors. Some bond holders thought this plan unfair. Specifically, they thought it unfairly favored the United Auto Workers, and unfairly paid bondholders less than they would get in bankruptcy court. So, they said no to the plan and decided, as is their right, to take their chances in the bankruptcy process. But, as his quotes above show, the President thought they were being unpatriotic or worse.

Let’s be clear, it is the job and obligation of all investment managers, including hedge fund managers, to get their clients the most return they can. They are allowed to be charitable with their own money, and many are spectacularly so, but if they give away their clients’ money to share in the “sacrifice”, they are stealing.

Clients of hedge funds include, among others, pension funds of all kinds of workers, unionized and not. The managers have a fiduciary obligation to look after their clients’ money as best they can, not to support the President, nor to oppose him, nor otherwise advance their personal political views. That’s how the system works. If you hired an investment professional and he could preserve more of your money in a financial disaster, but instead he decided to spend it on the UAW so you could “share in the sacrifice”, you would not be happy.

....Let’s also mention only in passing the irony of this same President begging hedge funds to borrow more to purchase other troubled securities. That he expects them to do so when he has already shown what happens if they ask for their money to be repaid fairly would be amusing if not so dangerous. That hedge funds might not participate in these programs because of fear of getting sucked into some toxic demagoguery that ends in arbitrary punishment for trying to work with the Treasury is distressing. Some useful programs, like those designed to help finance consumer loans, won't work because of this irresponsible hectoring.

Careful what you wish for, UAW

2009-05-06T11:37:00.000-07:00

NYU's Thomas Cooley says, you'll be sorry:

Government interference in the normal conduct of business has had a chilling effect on financial markets and threatens the progress of the recovery.

....Investors, other than the banks who desperately needed TARP funds for survival, are leery of any program that uses them. Anyone who took TARP funds has been subject to government interference in managerial decisions. The restrictions on bonuses and executive pay have been widely discussed in the media. Less well known are restrictions on the banks' ability to hire foreigners, and the constant harassment by Congress over internal management decisions on everything from the use of private aircraft to the locations of conferences. Some of these concerns are well justified, of course, but it wasn't clear ex-ante what all of the rules were and it isn't clear ex-post either.

....The Obama administration has shown repeatedly that it is willing to change the rules and even challenge the sanctity of contracts in the interests of its political agenda. The best, most recent example is the Chrysler restructuring.

The administration decided to tilt the restructuring in favor of the unions. The government proposed giving the United Auto Workers' retiree health fund a 55% equity stake in Chrysler--more than the combined stakes of Chrysler's merger partner, Fiat, or the other secured creditors that are owed roughly $7 billion. When some of the secured creditors, who were offered 30 cents on the dollar, balked, they were attacked by Obama as speculators.

....Citi, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, all major recipients of TARP Funds, all deep in the pocket of the Treasury, agreed to the administration's plan. So it looks like bankruptcy law will take a back seat to social policy.

There is at least some poetic justice in this outcome. The unions, whose years of work rules, and pension and health care deals helped sink the company, will have to eat their own cooking from now on. But their future success needs not only labor but capital.

Why would private capital get involved when the rules of the game are so capricious? No one would take that gamble when it is clear that, in dealing with the government, private capital will always take a back seat to politically powerful entities.

Cheaters Never Prosper?

2009-05-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

It seems their enablers do:

At the Ashley Madison agency, which revels in the motto, "Life is short. Have an affair," the global economic downturn is proving a boon for business.

....the message is hitting home as the economy reels, according to Noel Biderman, the company's founder and chief executive.

Membership has soared from one million to 3.6 million in just 12 months, and he expects another surge after the company launched a service allowing members to access the site from their mobile phones. The innovation is aimed at would-be cheaters who are nervous about leaving evidence of their infidelity on their computer at home or work.

Mr Biderman said that many couples who would otherwise have divorced were seeking affairs at the moment because of the cost of hiring lawyers and the difficulty of selling the marital home.

....It is free to register with Ashley Madison, but members pay with purchased credits to send messages to other users. The agency charges $49 (£33) for 100 credits or $249 for 1,000 credits and 50 credits buys 60 minutes of instant messaging time or 10 emails to different users.

They shoot horses, don't they?

2009-05-03T16:05:00.000-07:00

If, they don't, they might start, in Indian country:

WARM SPRINGS INDIAN RESERVATION —
Here on this reservation in north-central Oregon, horses are woven deeply into daily life. They are traditionally used by tribal members in their work and their culture, whether it be for rodeos or horse parades.

Gathering, breaking and selling wild horses has long been part of the tribe's economy. Horses that don't make the grade are sold for slaughter.

But the nation's final three slaughterhouses were shuttered two years ago, and a perfect storm has formed with a glut of horses, lack of a market and economic recession.

Tribal rangeland managers now estimate 20,000 wild horses are overrunning Indian Country in Washington, Idaho and Oregon, with an annual foal crop raising the population by some 20 percent a year.

....Agricultural and rangeland experts from five tribes have been meeting quietly since last winter to explore options to manage horse populations on reservation lands. Their ideas, still in discussion, run the gamut.

The most controversial: opening a slaughter plant at the Warm Springs reservation, and maybe someday packing the meat for human consumption overseas, if the regulatory hurdles can be cleared and economics pencil out.

....There used to be a thriving horse market in this country, with buyers bidding on horses for processing plants in Stanwood; Maytown, Thurston County; and more than 20 other plants across the country, supplying an eager trade, particularly in Europe.

But the country's remaining three horse slaughterhouses, in Illinois and Texas, closed in 2007 after a sustained campaign by animal-rights activists that resulted in Congress forbidding USDA inspection of horse meat for human consumption. That ended any legal commercial packing industry for horse meat in this country.

Still, there is a demand for horse meat, particularly in Europe. But with no packer competition in the U.S. to supply it, and a glut of horses, foreign packers can set their price.

Trucking the animals long distances to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico also means buyers will take only the fattest, biggest animals.

For the sick, the old, and the skinny, today there is often no market at any price. Buyers who remember paying 70 cents a pound at auction are today paying as little as 6 cents a pound — if the packers will even take the animal.

....The bottom has fallen out of the horse market just as the recession is driving even owners of pedigreed, suburban stock to unload animals they can't afford to care for, overwhelming rescue and shelter operators.

It's the same story for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which is struggling to feed and care for some 30,000 wild mustangs gathered from public rangelands and put out to pasture in the Midwest in deference to opponents of slaughter.

The BLM is paying $27 million this year alone to feed and care for wild horses living out their days at taxpayer expense. With another 30,000 or so more wild mustangs still roaming the range, multiplying every year, the costs are growing. So far, the BLM has no solution to the problem.

Hold the Phone!

2009-05-03T15:51:00.000-07:00

At the University of Washington, the PhDs are in...but their telephones are out:

"I think we're all aware that we're living through events that in 10 or 20 years we'll be talking about in our classes," he said.

He's referring to the day they took his telephone away.

[Richard] Kielbowicz, whom I had to reach by e-mail, is a professor at the University of Washington's Department of Communication. These are lean times at the UW, so to save money this department that specializes in how society exchanges information has gotten rid of its landline phones.

....Most professors have personal cellphones, so they're hardly shut off from the world. Still there are some who feel the demise of the landline phone is sad.

....On the other hand, the relics never rang anymore.

Kielbowicz, who teaches a course in the history of communication technology from the Gutenberg press to the World Wide Web, says his office phone would ring maybe once every two weeks. Calls became so rare that he began to view any that did come in with trepidation.

"Students no longer call on the phone, ever," he said.

Republican Optimist, Thy Name Is...

2009-05-01T14:37:00.000-07:00

Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana:

In Indiana, Republicans are the party of change and reform; ask anybody -- our opponents, the press, everybody. In the rhythm of life here, four years ago we replaced a 16-year regime that had gone stale.

And so we are the party that restored fiscal integrity. We are the party that addressed health care for the uninsured. We are the party that rebuilt an attractive business environment. We are the party that cleaned up the ethics issues in government -- that and much more. We attacked our infrastructure problem in a novel and taxpayer-friendly way.

....you know, the results are in -- and incidentally, we just won with the largest vote total in the history of elections in our state for any office any year.

....I guess what I'm saying is that when Indiana Republicans meet, I always tell them we cannot control what the party looks like in other places or nationally, but here in Indiana if we don't remain the party always defining the agenda, bringing the new ideas and standing for constructive change, then people will excuse us from duty. And they should. ...

People want to know first of all that you hear them and understand what's going on in their lives. I work at this incessantly -- I was riding all over Salden, Indiana, on my motorcycle Saturday -- and that you have some thoughts about how you make life better, more secure for them. Now, those thoughts can be animated by what we consider Republican principles, and that's fine. In other words, I don't think fiscal prudence went out of style; in fact, people are rediscovering it themselves, right? Save more, spend less -- and I think they expect government to emulate that.

When we addressed health care for the uninsured, or insurance for those without, it's a very free-market solution -- it's basically HSA's for poor people -- and it's extraordinarily popular. I had a lady hugging me and crying down in a coffee shop in Connorsville Saturday morning because she got coverage -- I've had this experience a thousand times -- she got coverage and she couldn't possibly have had it any other way. I just think that the image problems we have are very real, but also addressable, by a Republican Party that goes out of its way to show that it cares about average people and the least advantaged.

Let me just go off on another one my little sermons I always give. Here's a political fact of life: You can be a blue-blood, silver spoon, coastal elitist, and if you have the Democratic label, you start with the presumption that you are connected to average folks. And the Republicans start with the negative presumption. So don't whine about it being unfair, just recognize it and go work on it.

Fat So?

2009-04-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

Life is like a box of chocolates, except you do know what you're getting in this case:

Consumers appear to be comfort eating their way through the recession if the surge in profits of U.S. chocolate giant Hershey is anything to go by.

The firm, which makes Hershey's Kisses and Kit Kat, today posted results for the first quarter of the year, revealing profits had jumped 20per cent annually.

Consumer psychologists are suggesting people could be using chocolate bars as a relatively cheap pick-me-up during the economic downturn.

No Mas

2009-04-21T09:10:00.000-07:00

Britain expects every gardener to do her duty:

Householder Sandra Smith has been ordered to cover up her garden gnomes after complaints that the naked ornaments were upsetting local children.

The gnomes, one male and two female, have stood in Mrs Smith's front garden for around 15 years in Hunnington in the West Midlands.

The grandmother has been forced to put clothes on the ornaments after a neighbour complained to Bromsgrove District Council and an officer phoned her.

Growth Industry

2009-04-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

The ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt makes a comeback in Seattle:

There's a bumper crop of new gardeners out there.

Business is booming at nurseries all [over] the Puget Sound [area], "It's easily been a 25 percent increase, if not more, this year in seed sales. Seed sales have been definitely huge for us," said Joe Abken of Sky Nursery in Shoreline.

And it's not just the brick and mortar stores. Gardening expert Ed Hume says his online seed sales in February were up 40 percent. Something he attributes to the current economic situation, "When you get a downturn in the economy, then the vegetable seeds start to sell."

....Gardening advocates, who have long struggled to get America grubby, have dubbed the newly planted tracts "recession gardens" and hope to shape the interest into a movement similar to the victory gardens of World War II.

Those gardens, modeled after a White House patch planted by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1943, were intended to inspire self-sufficiency, and at their peak supplied 40 percent of the nation's fresh produce, said Roger Doiron, founding director of Kitchen Gardeners International.

The National Gardening Association estimates that a well- maintained vegetable garden yields a $500 average return per year. A study by Burpee Seeds claims that $50 spent on gardening supplies can multiply into $1,250 worth of produce annually.

Battery Up

2009-04-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

The Chinese expect their executives to take one for the team:

Chinese companies, such as BYD, have been lauded for developing advanced batteries that could power a revolution in motoring.

BYD, a former battery maker, was the first company in the world to start selling a heavily-electrified hybrid car last December, easily beating larger rivals such as Toyota to the market.

....The Chinese government has also committed to funding new technologies, such as BYD's iron-phosphate-based lithium ion batteries, with £1bn of research subsidies.

In a bid to demonstrate the safety of his batteries to the environment, Wang Chuan-Fu, BYD's chief executive, has actually drunk a vial of his own battery fluid.

Not easy being green

2009-04-15T15:48:00.000-07:00

King County, Washington learns the cost of good intentions:

King County has agreed to pay $3.5 million to a former Seattle man and his wife after the man suffered a permanent brain injury when he was thrown from his bicycle on a road east of Redmond.

Lawyers for Jeffrey Totten and his wife Danielle Leavell said the county was at fault because it promoted Novelty Hill Road as a bike route but failed to maintain it in a safe condition.

....Physically, emotionally and cognitively disabled, Totten will never be able to work again. A Navy veteran, he bicycled daily from his home in Seattle's Fremont district to the energy firm where he worked in Issaquah.

The accident occurred while on a longer training ride with friends.

....John Christensen, an attorney for Totten and Leavell, said the family would have asked for more money if the case had gone to a jury.

....Christensen said Totten was put in danger because of a lack of communication between the county Parks and Recreation Division, which promoted Novelty Hill Road in online and printed maps as a bike route, and the Road Services Division, which allowed a hole around the survey marker to grow deeper with successive paving jobs.

Leavell said her husband was training for the 700-mile Paris-Brest-Paris bike event when the accident occurred.

Eliminate the Negative

2009-04-10T16:04:00.000-07:00

Then, accentuate the positive, with a little help from a future POTUS, and go on to direct some pretty good movies:

Mr. [Edward] Dmytryk's story was a searing indictment of the [Communist] party. He described being part of a conspiracy to break up the American Federation of Labor in Hollywood and to replacing it with unions controlled by communists. He revealed that the party bullied filmmakers into molding the editorial content of pictures in keeping with the party line.

He also said that the party had twisted his legal battle into a First Amendment issue so as to demonize congressional investigations. "It was like everything else the communists do," he told the Saturday Evening Post. "They would go into a lynching case, but instead of trying to help the Negroes, what they are really after is to use the incident to stir up still more trouble. The Negroes don't matter -- they're just a means to an end."

[Ronald] Reagan was emphatic that Mr. Dmytryk go public. When Mr. Dmytryk agreed, Reagan built a coalition of liberals and conservatives to champion him. The team purchased a full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter. "The Communist Party is now trying to destroy Edward Dmytryk," it read. "We will be surprised if there are not other attacks by the Party on other former communists who have the guts to stand up and be counted and to tell the truth."

Reagan argued to friends and colleagues that Mr. Dmytryk ought to be embraced for breaking with the Stalinists. The Reagan team even vouched for Mr. Dmytryk when he applied for life insurance.

The Coase File

2009-04-06T13:38:00.000-07:00

Green power, the salvation of the Obamanation, has a few problems of its own:

Wind turbines may supply power without pollution but they are also generating complaints about noise and even possible health effects for people who live near them.

Dan Williams says the 240-foot-tall turbines he can see from his hilltop home near Boardman in Eastern Oregon make so much noise they keep him awake at night.

Williams is among neighbors along Highway 74 demanding that Morrow County enforce state noise regulations on the Willow Creek Wind Energy Project or revoke its land-use permit.

The 40-year-old construction contractor told The Oregonian newspaper in Portland that wind-energy companies downplay the noise.

"They said this is going to be about as loud as your refrigerator in your house, which is a crock," he said.

....Other critics, including some in Oregon, cite work by a New York doctor who coined the term "wind turbine syndrome" to describe effects such as headaches, dizziness and memory loss of living near the machines.

"This thing is not rare," Dr. Nina Pierpont of Malone, N.Y., said of the syndrome.

....another resident of the area, Mike Eaton, agrees with Williams and other neighbors who complain about the noise and vibrations from the turbines.

The retired 61-year-old furniture maker said the turbines give him nausea by aggravating inner-ear and balance problems he's had since a 1966-67 tour in Vietnam subjected him to the constant pounding of an Army 155-mm artillery piece.

"I cannot live where I'm living now with these decibels and vibrations," he said.

France: Danny Devito no genius!

2009-04-02T17:17:00.000-07:00

The star of Other People's Money probably wouldn't do too well in this environment:

PARIS — When negotiations over the revamping ofCaterpillar’s operations in the French city of Grenoble broke down this week, the workers did what more and more of their countrymen are doing these days: They took their bosses hostage.

It was the fourth such incident in France in the last month.

This week, François-Henri Pinault, the chief executive of PPR, the group that owns Gucci, was trapped by a group of employees who surrounded his car and blocked the road with garbage cans.

In two other incidents last month, workers at a 3M plant held their boss for more than 24 hours in a labor dispute, and workers at a Sonyplant held their boss overnight to gain better severance packages.

While detaining company executives against their will is not new in France, the tactic has been used only sparingly. But French labor policy experts say they expect more such actions because the despair and anxiety that drive employees to such acts is increasing as the labor market worsens.

“The traditional way of holding a strike is to occupy the workplace, showing that ‘it’s our company, too,’ ” said Antoine Lyon-Caen, a professor of comparative labor law at the University of Paris-Nanterre. “It’s not unheard-of that the managers get taken hostage, but it has been very rare.”

When Bernie Went Ponzi

2009-04-01T17:40:00.000-07:00

Former head of the NYSE, Richard Grasso, speculates it was when the investment world went penny wise instead of 1/8 foolish in the late 90s. Which eliminated a very lucrative anomaly in trading, which Bernie Madoff had been exploiting:

How would you describe it to a layman?

His broker-dealer, Bernard Madoff [Investment] Securities, executed orders in Big Board-listed stocks away from the Big Board that were given to that broker-dealer by other broker-dealers in return for payment from order flow. He would pay a penny a share to many of the regional broker-dealers in the U.S. to effectively buy their order flow. And in return, he would execute those orders in-house, at Madoff [Securities], and take the risk of the offset—meaning that when he had an inventory, he would lay that inventory or sell that inventory back to the primary markets, principally to the NYSE. And when he had an exposure as a result of being short, he would cover, or buy shares to cover his risk on the primary markets. The broker-dealers who gave him that order flow effectively got a penny a share.

....When you saw what he was doing, did it seem to be profitable to you?

Extraordinarily profitable, because remember during the period of time when he was doing it, the minimum price variation was 12.5 cents—meaning the tightest the spread could be was separated by an eighth of a dollar, which meant that if he paid a penny coming in and paid a penny going out—meaning a penny to the buyer and a penny to the seller—it was potentially 10.5 cents of profit for the Madoff organization.

But that good thing came to a halt:

And how long did he get away with this?

Oh, I would say 20-plus years. You see, what killed that business was when we went to pennies. Because you crush the spread and you crush costs. And there’s no more opportunity for him to pay a penny coming in if the market is a penny bid offered at two cents.

Right. What year was that?

We started that process in 1997 by going from an eighth to a sixteenth, which, you know, took 50 percent of the profitability opportunity out. And then, by 1999, we went to a penny.

So could that have been the first problem he had?

Yes, I don’t think there’s any doubt that the economics of his primary business evaporated.

But everyone knew her as Nancy

2009-03-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

It's adults only in some libraries, thanks to the Speaker of the House of Representatives:

In February, an overzealous law governing lead in products resulted in toys going from store shelves to the trash heap. Now, confusion over how the rules affect children's books has led some libraries to rope off kids' sections.

....Older books pose hardly any danger, according to safety experts at the Centers for Disease Control. The problem is the ambiguity in a law that leaves businesses facing lawsuits if they can't prove their products are safe. In addition to libraries, thrift stores, church bazaars and small batch toymakers are also unclear what they can and can not sell. Makers of bicycles and ATVs have pulled youth models -- designed to increase safety -- off the showroom floor at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Nancy Pelosi boasted last summer that the toy safety law would mean products weren't merely made differently in the future but would be removed from the shelves today. That's the real source of this mayhem, as she was amply warned at the time by Democrat John Dingell, among others. Ms. Pelosi prevailed, and now the harm to thousands of businesses, charities and even public libraries is manifest. Since the House Speaker won't admit a mistake and fix the law, the [Consumer Products Safety Commission] must do what it can to prevent more damage to the already challenging economy.

Burma Shave

2009-03-29T19:50:00.000-07:00

There's nothing new under the road that meets the rubber:

Don't be surprised if you see Col. Sanders out filling potholes. In an unusual cause-marketing push, KFC is tackling the pothole problem in Louisville, Ky. in exchange for stamping the fresh pavement with "Re-freshed by KFC," a chalky stencil likely to fade away in the next downpour.

"This program is a perfect example of that rare and optimal occurrence when a company can creatively market itself and help local governments and everyday Americans across the country," said Javier Benito, exec VP-marketing and food innovation at KFC.

Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson noted in a statement that budgets are tight for cities across the country, and finding funding for road repairs is a dirty job. "It's great to have a concerned corporation like KFC create innovative private/public partnerships like this pothole refresh program."

The KFC program appears to be part of a growing body of consumer-service marketing that connects in a meaningful way. This past holiday season, Charmin provided a public restroom in Times Square for the third year running. The company has also developed anapplication for iPhone and BlackBerry that helps consumers find toilets when the need arises.Samsung has installed electrical charging stations in many major airports to help travelers stay connected while in limbo.

Perhaps most importantly, while KFC seems more suited to pot pies than potholes and efforts like these are unlikely to sell chicken sandwiches in the short term, the company is likely to build a reservoir of goodwill among the general population -- particularly when they arrive at the pothole they've gotten used to swerving around.

The Barack Obama Doll

2009-03-25T16:48:00.000-07:00

When you pull its string, it says, 'Math is hard'.

In that sense, what it would do is it would equalize -- when I give $100, I'd get the same amount of deduction as when some -- a bus driver who's making $50,000 a year, or $40,000 a year, gives that same $100. Right now, he gets 28 percent -- he gets to write off 28 percent. I get to write off 39 percent. I don't think that's fair.

That is, of course, the flip side of progressive income tax schemes. High income people pay higher marginal tax rates and thus have higher incentives to donate to charity as a result. Obama seems to be decrying the unfairness of higher tax rates to people who pay lower rates.

But, it gets worse for Obama as the questioner follows up:

QUESTION: It's not the well-to-do people. It's the charities. Given what you've just said, are you confident the charities are wrong when they contend that this would discourage giving?

OBAMA: Yes, I am. I mean, if you look at the evidence, there's very little evidence that this has a significant impact on charitable giving.

About the evidence, Obama is wrong--as Tom Maguire has noted--there is such evidence.

However, this morning in the NY Times, carries an open letter that says that ain't Jake:

...I have decided to donate 100 percent of the effective after-tax proceeds of my retention payment directly to organizations that are helping people who are suffering from the global downturn. This is not a tax-deduction gimmick; I simply believe that I at least deserve to dictate how my earnings are spent, and do not want to see them disappear back into the obscurity of A.I.G.’s or the federal government’s budget.

....On March 16 I received a payment from A.I.G. amounting to $742,006.40, after taxes. In light of the uncertainty over the ultimate taxation and legal status of this payment, the actual amount I donate may be less — in fact, it may end up being far less if the recent House bill raising the tax on the retention payments to 90 percent stands. Once all the money is donated, you will immediately receive a list of all recipients.

It would only be far less if Obama gets his way and reduces the deduction for charitable deductions, because Mr DeSantis can, as of the law now, donate the entire amount of the bonus prior to taxes. But, it seems that confiscatory taxes do have the expected incentive, contrary to what the President said in his news conference.

Happy as a Pig in Slop

2009-03-25T14:46:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama backer and financial supporter of the Democrats squeals in delight:

A hedge fund manager who predicted the global credit crunch has said the financial crisis has been 'stimulating' and the culmination of his life's work.

George Soros, who predicted the global financial crisis twice before, was one of the few people to anticipate and prepare for the current economic collapse.

Mr Soros said his...decision to come out of retirement in 2007 to manage the [Quantum] fund made him $US2.9 billion.

And while the financial crisis continued to deepen across the globe, the 78-year-old still managed to make $1.1 billion last year.

'It is, in a way, the culminating point of my life’s work,' he told national newspaper The Australian.

Soros is one of 25, top hedge fund managers from across Wall Street who have defied the credit crunch crisis to reap a total of $11.6billion (£7.9bn) last year.

It shall be a crime...

2009-03-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

...not to drink small wine:

Pubs will be forced to sell wine in smaller glasses as part of a new Government crackdown on binge drinking.

No word yet on how many hoops the three hoop pot will need to have:

Be brave, then; for your captain is brave, and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny: the three-hooped pot; shall have ten hoops and I will make it felony to drink small beer: all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass: and when I am king, as king I will be,—

Well, Do you feel lucky?

2009-03-24T17:15:00.000-07:00

Do, ya, Mr. Yamaguchi:

A man of 93 has become the first person certified as a survivor of both the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi appears to be the only person in history to have survived not one, but two atomic bomb blasts.

....Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on August 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city.

He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city.
Traumatised, he then sought the refuge of his hometown - Nagasaki.

With devastating timing, he arrived just in time for the second attack, city officials said.

The Side Walk to Nowhere

2009-03-24T16:02:00.000-07:00

Coming to a neighborhood near you, paid for by you, if you live in Seattle:

Jesus Barajas wanted granite countertops and hardwood floors but is settling for Formica and carpet. Instead of hiring professional house painters and landscapers, he now plans to do the work himself.

The soured economy is part of the reason Barajas is downsizing his dreams for the new, 2,400-square-foot home he's building on property he's owned for nearly 30 years. Mostly, though, he's cutting back on amenities to pay for construction of a sidewalk outside his front door.

The price tag: nearly $15,000 for a 60-foot strip of asphalt.

Seattle officials admit Barajas is an unintended target of a year-old city ordinance meant to force developers to provide infrastructure improvements in the city's 22 designated urban villages.

....Barajas, a janitor for King County Metro since 1990, and his wife, Maria, a housekeeper at a downtown hotel, have saved for 12 years to afford the down payment on their $250,000 construction loan.

"I just want something to live comfortable after I retire," said Barajas, 61, adding that the new house will be his teenage daughter's inheritance.

The financial sting of building a sidewalk is all the more painful because Barajas wouldn't need one if he lived on the west side of 32nd Avenue South, instead of the east side. That's because the western boundary of the MLK at Holly Street urban village is the center line of Barajas' narrow residential street.

....Homebuilder Olivier Prock has spent countless hours trying to negotiate with city staffers on Barajas' behalf. ....

...he...has to pay for an engineer, a surveyor and an excavator. He also has to pay for a transportation-department review and inspection, along with traffic control while the sidewalk is built and street cleaning after it's done. By Prock's estimate, the sidewalk — measuring 60 feet long and 6 feet wide with a 5-foot-wide planting strip and curb abutting the road — will cost $13,920 to $14,420.

"At first I thought they were joking, I thought they misread the code," Prock said,....

The last new home on Barajas' street was built 10 years ago, he said. At that rate, Prock figures it could take 100 years or longer for a continuous sidewalk to be built.

"We'll all be dead and buried, and by that time, Mr. Barajas' sidewalk would have outlived its useful life," he said.

Sweden to Trollhattan; Drop Dead

2009-03-23T10:37:00.000-07:00

General Motors will soon abandon Saab to its fate, which doesn't appear to be socialism:

...the Swedish government has responded to Saab's desperate financial situation by saying, essentially, tough luck. Or, as the enterprise minister, Maud Olofsson, put it recently, "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories."

Such a view might seem jarring, coming as it does from a country with a reputation for a paternalistic view of workers and companies. The "Swedish model" for dealing with a banking crisis — nationalizing the banks, recapitalizing them and selling them — has been much debated lately in the United States, with free-market defenders warning of a slippery slope of Nordic socialism.

But Sweden has a right-leaning government, elected in 2006 after a long period of Social Democratic rule, that prefers market forces to state intervention and ownership. That fact has made the workers of Trollhattan wish the old socialist model were more in evidence.

....Swedish officials have condemned what they see as protectionism by other European countries that have pledged to prop up their own failing car industries. They have also been scathing about General Motors, Saab's owner, and the last thing they want is to seem to be bailing out a despised foreign company.

Struggling for its own survival, G.M. has said it will completely pull out of Saab by the end of 2009, a course that Ms. Olofsson, the enterprise minister, described as tantamount to declaring "that they wash their hands of Saab and drop it into the laps of the Swedish taxpayers."
She said: "We are very disappointed in G.M., but we are not prepared to risk taxpayers' money. This is not a game of Monopoly."

Saab lost about $343 million last year. It is now going through a Swedish process known as reorganization, a step short of bankruptcy, as it tries to persuade its creditors to prop it up while it looks for a buyer. Joe Oliver, a spokesman, said in an interview that "around six serious investors," from Sweden and abroad, had expressed interest.

Beginning to see the light

2009-03-22T14:51:00.000-07:00

And, it's not at the end of the tunnel:

Obama seems incapable of balancing the need to be a national leader and his childish desire to retain his image as the uber cool dude he so clearly believes that he is.

....Obama has never run anything other than his presidential campaign. He doesn't know the difference between governing and campaigning and he's sticking with what he knows.

....The most striking aspect of the Leno appearance is that while he's all smiles and self-regard, Obama is flat out not funny.

....He speaks like the kind of lecturer who puts their students to sleep. His first prime time press conference (there is another coming this week) was colossally dull, with rambling ten minute answers.

Still don't believe that Obama is the new [Jimmy] Carter? Michael Wolff writes: "It's instructive and humorous to remember that Carter ran a brilliant campaign that succeeded largely because his voice was new. Simple, direct, basic, human. And then, of course, he turned into a sad-sack twit."

Sound familiar? That sums up Obama rather well right now.

Not over til...

2009-03-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

It's over, RIP:

As her performance on Big Brother made clear, her years of formal education had left Jade Goody with little knowledge. She thought that a ferret was a bird and abscess a green French drink; that Pistachio painted the Mona Lisa; that Sherlock Holmes invented the flush lavatory; that East Anglia ("East Angular" in Jade-speak) was abroad; and that Rio de Janeiro was "a bloke, innit?"

She eventually attended Bacon's College in Rotherhithe – one of Britain's first City Technology colleges. Following her first appearance on Big Brother, the college felt constrained to emphasise that its exam results had improved since Jade left. ....

After leaving school, Jade eventually found employment as a dental nurse. When she applied for a place in the Big Brother house, however, she was up to her ears in debt, had recently been evicted from a flat in Rotherhithe over £3,000 of unpaid rent and was facing jail over an unpaid council tax bill.

....Given Jade Goody's status as a media creation, it was perhaps inevitable that when stories began to circulate of a "cancer scare", some assumed it was just another tasteless publicity stunt. That did not prove to be the case. After her initial diagnosis last year, it quickly became clear that her cancer was at an advanced stage. Radical surgery failed to stem its progress and early last month she was told it was terminal.

There was time for one more twist however, as, on February 22, in a blaze of publicity which was said to have earned her close to £1 million, Jade Goody married a 21-year-old carpet fitter, Jack Tweed. In order that the couple could spend their wedding night together, he was allowed to ignore the 7pm curfew which was a condition of his early release from an 18-month prison sentence imposed for assaulting a 16-year-old boy with a golf club.

Her husband survives her with her two sons.

Better left unsaid

2009-03-12T16:55:00.000-07:00

The policy of organized labor in Washington State, appears to be: Millions for defense of our perks, but not one dime for hypocritical tribute to virtue:

Lawmakers would not release the e-mail, but a copy was obtained by The Seattle Times. It apparently was from a staff member of the Washington State Labor Council to several members of labor organizations as well as a small number of state lawmakers.

It reads in part:

"Brothers and Sisters, Just a quick update on where we are on the Worker Privacy Act:

• "Great leadership call yesterday where folks agreed that we would push for passage in the House this week and then call for a union president meeting with the Governor and the Majority Leader of the Senate to move the bill through the rest of the process.

• "Union leaders would send a message to the State Democratic party and to the Truman and Roosevelt funds from the House and Senate that 'not another dime from labor' until the Governor signs the Worker Privacy Act."

[Emphasis, the FLUBA's]

So Easy Even Cave Dwellers Can Do It: Sleepers in Missouri

2009-03-10T16:04:00.000-07:00

Where getting the shaft means one mortgage loan by the private sector saves a homeowner:

An eastern Missouri family expects they'll be able to stay in their home built inside a cave after accepting an offer of a private mortgage contract. Curt Sleeper said Tuesday that a New Jersey-based business offered a 15-year loan with a low interest rate that should allow the family to keep their home in Festus, about 30 miles south of St. Louis.

"We're excited about it." To celebrate: "We're throwing a party at a friend's cave," he said.

Curt and Deborah Sleeper fell in love with the unique geography of an old mining cave in 2004 and figured out how to build a house inside of it. But they were having trouble making a large payment that was coming due on the property, prompting them to put their home up for auction on eBay.

They no longer plan to auction the home through the Web site, but Sleeper says the house will remain there until paperwork is completed on the loan.

Jon Demarest, owner of Logical Source Inc., confirmed that his the Fairfield, N.J.-based archiving and medical record company offered the Sleepers a mortgage.

Where Everybody Knows You're Gone

2009-03-10T15:57:00.000-07:00

The recession claims a victim; a famous bartender:

Eddie Doyle was the guy who really did know everybody's name, at least when he started working at the tavern that inspired the television show "Cheers."

To the tens of thousands of tourists that later passed through, Doyle remained behind the bar to offer a smile, a beer and tips about where to find the Boston that wasn't shown on TV.

Now Doyle is out of a job, laid off from "Cheers" after 35 years. The bar's owner has said a tough economy and sagging business forced the move, which was one of several layoffs.
Doyle said he's not bitter, just surprised and a little sad.

....Doyle, who was laid off in February, has spent the past few weeks cleaning out his office and reflecting on what he considered a great run.

....Doyle was nothing like his TV counterpart, the womanizing barkeep Sam Malone. He's married to the same woman he met at the bar when he was a regular there in the early 1970s.

Lights are on...

2009-03-10T11:35:00.000-07:00

...but, no one is answering:

The British Government is finding it "unbelievably difficult" to prepare for the G20 summit because no one in the US Treasury department is answering their calls, Britain's top civil servant Gus O'Donnell has said.

....Amid the worst global economic crisis in decades, the Cabinet Secretary said Number 10 was having trouble even getting in touch with key personnel at the US Treasury.

"There is nobody there," he told a civil service conference in Gateshead. "You cannot believe how difficult it is."

The reported comments come after Downing Street aides were left frustrated by the White House's chaotic handling of arrangements for Gordon Brown's visit last week.

Bank Failure

2009-03-04T14:56:00.000-08:00

The gang that couldn't drill straight:

The thieves hoped to steal thousands from the Royal Bank of Scotland branch in Poynton, near Macclesfield, Cheshire, but clearly had not done their homework.

Having forced their way into the wrong property, they tried – and failed – again to get into the bank before running out of time and fleeing.

....Insp Gareth Woods of Cheshire police said: "This offence seemed organised to a certain extent but was clearly not the slickest and best executed crimes we have ever seen.

"It looks like they've broken into a flat above the bank and pulled some carpet up and made a hole in the floor only to end up in the space below.

"They clambered back up and went to another room to drill a hole in the ceiling of the bank but couldn't gain access.

"We can only assume they must have taken a long time to do it and they probably fled because they ran out of time or were disturbed."

No Pressure Cooker

2009-03-03T14:06:00.000-08:00

Onc French chef prefers no heat in his kitchen:

A young French chef awarded his first Michelin star on Monday said he fought to stay out of the revered guide, afraid that joining the star system would be a poisoned chalice.

Cedric Bechade, 32, said he asked Michelin's reviewers to leave his Auberge Basque eatery in the foothills of the Pyrenees out of the 2009 guide for France, but that they "did not respect my wishes as a businessman."

Now he holds a star, Bechade said the need to hold on to the make-or-break ranking - or be seen as losing his edge - was an unwelcome diversion from the business of making good food.

What goes up

2009-03-03T13:11:00.000-08:00

Must come down...of its own accord, or it's pay the Piker:

Hikers who reach the summit of Pikes Peak but are daunted by the descent have reason to find a second wind — calling rescuers will cost a hefty fee.

The city council of Colorado Springs set a fee of $100 or more if uninjured hikers call 911 for help because they're not up to walking down the 14,000-foot peak.

The fee could increase if snow has to be plowed from Pikes Peak Highway for rescuers to fetch a stranded hiker.

Rather be in Philadelphia

2009-03-03T11:23:00.000-08:00

Where the doughnuts are:

British Transport Police (BTP) officers are currently in the States to share railroad security and counter-terrorism practices with officers from Amtrak Police Department (APD), which looks after America's railways.

But first things first - the day began with the all-important visit to Dunkin Donuts.

Officers from BTP then jointly patrolled Philadelphia's 30th Street Station where they observed Amtrak's security operations onboard trains and around the station.

Cash for the barrelheads

2009-03-02T11:16:00.000-08:00

Italy's growth industry:

The Mafia and its loan sharks, nearly everyone agrees, smell blood in the troubled waters.

"It's a fantastic time for the Mafia. They have the cash," said Antonio Roccuzzo, the author of books on organized crime. "The Mafia has enormous liquidity. It may be the only Italian 'company' without any cash problem."

At a time when businesses most need loans as they struggle with falling sales, rising debt and impending bankruptcy, Italian banks have "absolutely closed the purse strings," said Gian Maria Fara, the president of Eurispes, a private research institute.

That is great news for loan sharks. Confesercenti, the national shopkeepers association, estimates 180,000 businesses recently have turned to them in desperation.

New Kid on the Blog

2009-02-28T15:42:00.000-08:00

And everyone wants to play with him--but does he really teach in an English luxury car?:

Yesterday the Boston Herald interviewed Brad Delong. Brad said he thought I was a right winger, and that he didn’t agree with many of my views. Nonetheless I appreciate that despite ideological differences Brad called me “thoughtful.” I thought his paper on monetarism was very good, and cite it frequently. I am not a big fan of FDR, but given Brad’s remarks about me being right wing it is fun to be able to get to the left of many of his admirers in this particular post. (Now if only Paul Krugman would use the phrase ‘thoughtful right winger’ more often.)

Of course, he won't really have arrived until his comments are deleted by the host at Semi-Daily Journal.

As Seen on TV

2009-02-27T13:51:00.000-08:00

What the Boston Fed hath wrought:

Christopher Brooks, 39, pleaded guilty last fall to conspiring to commit wire fraud in connection with fraudulent loan applications on 18 Puget Sound-area homes that went into foreclosure and were sold by banks at a loss of more than $2 million.

....Brooks' mortgage-fraud scheme and the fallout spotlight an intensifying debate over how to deal with millions of loan defaults and foreclosures that are crippling the nation's housing and credit markets. ....

The FBI received more than 66,000 reports from banks last year, compared with fewer than 7,000 in 2003. Those suspected-fraud reports capture a fraction of the problem. Only banks — not other types of lenders or real-estate professionals — are required to report suspicious activity.

....The deluge of mortgage-fraud cases that is straining law-enforcement agencies now, experts say, could have been prevented if all lenders had followed traditional underwriting standards and been required to report fraudulent activity.

....At his sentencing today, Brooks was apologetic. "My intent going into this was not to take money from people, just flip houses, like they show in infomercials," he said.

Other People's Money

2009-02-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

The city of Seattle taxpayers are paying the price for their politicians' green delusions:

You may have seen the city's cars around town, painted with an eye-catching claim on the rear bumper: "This plug-in hybrid gets 100+mpg."

Also, a greener boast: "150+City MPG!"

Not exactly, it turns out. Not even close.

Try 51 miles per gallon, city and highway combined. Not counting the cost of the electricity.
It's what 14 plug-in Priuses averaged after driving a total of 17,636 miles. The pilot project is one of the few in the nation to subject plug-in hybrid cars to regular motor-pool duty, as opposed to being driven by hypermilers or alt-energy enthusiasts.

"We're not putting these cars on a test track," said Scott Thomsen, a spokesman for Seattle City Light, which has three of the plug-ins. "We've got them on hills and wet streets, in the cold and the hot, on short trips and long — all the conditions that real people deal with every day."

Getting 51 miles per gallon sounds fine compared to most gas cars. But it's a black eye for a technology that trumpets it will get twice that. And which doesn't pencil financially unless it hits at least 80 miles per gallon.

....The problem is the extra battery costs $10,000. At 51 mpg, the plug-in saves only about $200 in gas costs annually compared to a regular Prius in the city's fleet (and that's at $4 a gallon.) It would take 50 years to make back the cost of the extra battery.

Arabic Numbers

2009-02-21T16:37:00.000-08:00

They don't add up says the founder of Al Qaeda:

Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, who goes by the nom de guerre Dr Fadl, helped bin Laden create al-Qaeda and then led an Islamist insurgency in Egypt in the 1990s.

But in a book written from inside an Egyptian prison, he has launched a frontal attack on al-Qaeda's ideology and the personal failings of bin Laden and particularly his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

....Today, however, he believes the murder of innocent people is both contrary to Islam and a strategic error. "Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers," writes Dr Fadl.

The terrorist attacks on September 11 were both immoral and counterproductive, he writes. "Ramming America has become the shortest road to fame and leadership among the Arabs and Muslims. But what good is it if you destroy one of your enemy's buildings, and he destroys one of your countries? What good is it if you kill one of his people, and he kills a thousand of yours?" asks Dr Fadl. "That, in short, is my evaluation of 9/11."

He is equally unsparing about Muslims who move to the West and then take up terrorism. "If they gave you permission to enter their homes and live with them, and if they gave you security for yourself and your money, and if they gave you the opportunity to work or study, or they granted you political asylum," writes Dr Fadl, then it is "not honourable" to "betray them, through killing and destruction".

Bring it on

2009-02-20T10:14:00.000-08:00

Heather MacDonald--no coward she--responds to Eric Holder:

...if Attorney General Holder is really sincere about wanting a “frank” conversation about race, he should put the following items on the agenda:

The American electorate. The country just elected its first black president. ....

Crime. .... the homicide rate for black men between the ages of 18 and 24 is well over ten times that of whites. And disparities in other violent-crime rates are just as startling. In New York City, one of the nation’s safest large cities, 83 percent of all gun assailants were black during the first six months of 2008, according to victims and witnesses, though blacks make up only 24 percent of the city’s population. Add Hispanic perps, and you account for 98 percent of all shootings in New York City. ....

Education. .... The black high school drop-out rate approaches 50 percent. On the 2006 SAT, the average score in the critical-reading section was 434 for blacks, 527 for whites, and 510 for Asians; in the math section, 429 for blacks, 536 for whites, and 587 for Asians; and in the writing section, 428 for blacks, 519 for whites, and 512 for Asians. America’s lousy showing in international math, science, and reading tests compared with Japan and Western Europe is influenced in large part by the low scores of blacks and Hispanics. If blacks and Hispanics performed at the level that whites do, the U.S. would lead all industrialized nations in reading and would lead Europe in math and science, according to a study published in the Phi Delta Kappan in 2005.

.... Perhaps Holder could confront the stigma against academic achievement among many black youth, who deride studying and staying out of trouble as “acting white.”

The family. Closing the educational achievement gap will be difficult as long as the black illegitimacy rate is nearly 71 percent, compared with a white rate of 26 percent. Taxpayers foot the bill for this family breakdown—when fatherless children who never learned self-control and self-discipline disrupt classrooms and prevent other children from learning, and when the same fatherless children get sucked up into gang life and fail to connect with the world of work and responsibility. Many poor single mothers work heroically to raise law-abiding sons, but the odds are against them.

....If inner-city blacks behaved like Asians—cramming as much knowledge into their kids as they can possibly fit into their skulls—the lingering wariness towards lower-income blacks that many Americans unquestionably harbor would disappear. ....If Eric Holder wants to crank up our racial preoccupations even further, let him at least do so with a full airing of the facts.

It All Worked Out in the End

2009-02-17T15:39:00.000-08:00

The global financial crisis has no fury like a Chinese woman scorned:

The businessman, named as Mr Fan and said to be from the city of Qingdao on the east coast, invited the five mistresses, who had all previously learned of each others' existence, to dinner, according to a local newspaper, the Peninsula Metropolitan News.

Along with a friend, who worked for a model agency, and inspired by reality television shows, he then laid on a competition for them, according to the report.

One woman was eliminated during a "looks round" and two more, who worked as clerical officers in his company, during a speech round. The final round was a drinking competition.

The story came to light after the first loser, to show no hard feelings, took all four other women and the businessman out for a drive – upon which she drove over a cliff in the hope of taking revenge on all of them. As it turned out, she was the only one who died.

They've Gotta Beef With You

2009-02-16T15:20:00.000-08:00

Eat your vegetables, and save the planet, say some scientists:

[Nathan] Pelletier is one of a growing number of scientists studying the environmental costs of food from field to plate.

By looking at everything from how much grain a cow eats before it is ready for slaughter to the emissions released by manure, they are getting a clearer idea of the true costs of food.

The livestock sector is estimated to account for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and beef is the biggest culprit.

Even though beef only accounts for 30 percent of meat consumption in the developed world it's responsible for 78 percent of the emissions, Pelletier said Sunday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

That's because a single kilogram of beef produces 16 kilograms carbon dioxide equivalent emissions: four times higher than pork and more than ten times as much as a kilogram of poultry, Pelletier said.

If people were to simply switch from beef to chicken, emissions would be cut by 70 percent, Pelletier said.

Happy Valentine's Day

2009-02-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

Don't lose your head over it:

Orchard Park [NY] police are investigating a particularly gruesome killing, the beheading of a woman, after her husband — an influential member of the local Muslim community — reported her death to police Thursday.

Police identified the victim as Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37. Detectives have charged her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44, with second-degree murder.

....Muzzammil Hassan is the founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV, which he launched in 2004, amid hopes that it would help portray Muslims in a more positive light.

Ain't Got No Home (Equity)

2009-02-06T15:50:00.000-08:00

And therein largely lies the unique character of this recession, says Bruce Bartlett:

Economists have long known that there is a relationship between wealth and spending in the economy. According to most studies, people will increase their spending by about $5 for each $100 increase in their net wealth. Therefore, they will reduce their spending by $5 for each $100 reduction in their wealth as well.

....Just looking at the data we already have, we would expect that consumer spending would fall by $355 billion annually. If the total loss in wealth is closer to $10 trillion, as it probably is at this point, the reduction in spending rises to $500 billion per year. That adds up to a decline in the gross domestic product of 3.5% from what would otherwise have been the case, more than enough to bring on a recession all by itself.

Emerging research, however, suggests that the problem may even be worse in this recession because so much of the decline in wealth is concentrated in housing. Most research on the wealth effect is based on changes in stock prices. But people don't view changes in financial wealth and housing wealth the same way. They tend to view housing wealth as more stable and permanent, stock market wealth as less stable and more transitory. Consequently, economists now believe that the marginal propensity to consume out of increased housing wealth is higher than that for stocks--and hence the decline in consumption from lower housing wealth will be greater than standard estimates of the wealth effect imply.

Which would seem to imply that the stimulus package now being debated in congress will not help end this recession, since it doesn't seem to make any attempt to stabilize housing and stock prices.

Take my husband...Please

2009-02-06T13:41:00.000-08:00

Senator Debbie Stabenow pumps for the family business:

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) told nationally syndicated talk host Bill Press this morning that the recent flips of liberal Talk stations in several markets were a "disservice to the public."

Stabenow said that, in the day of the Fairness Doctrine, "you had to have balance," and continued, "I think something that requires that in a market with owners that have multiple stations that they have got to have balance -- there has to be some community interest -- balance, you know, standard that says both sides have to be heard."

Stabenow told Press that the airwaves are "dominated by one view" that "overwhelms people's opinions -- and, unfortunately, incorrectly," and said that "right-wing conservative talk hosts" are "trying to make people angry and saying all kinds of things that aren't true and so on."

When Press asked if it is time to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, Stabenow responded, "I think it's absolutely time to pass a standard." To Press' inquiry as to whether she will push for hearings in the Seante "to bring these owners in and hold them accountable," Stabenow replied, "I have already had some discussions with colleagues, and, you know, I feel like that's going to happen. Yep."

Senator Stabenow failed to mention that her husband, Tom Athans, is an executive with liberal talk radio's Air America.

More Cooks, Better Broth

2009-02-06T10:31:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama, fresh from announcing that unless his stimulus package is passed immediately the end of Western civilization is assured, decides to ask for more economics advice:

The Obama administration today announced a team of outside economic advisers, chaired by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker, to help sculpt a response to the deepening recession.

....In announcing the board this morning, Obama said he was seeking "to ensure that no stone is unturned as we work to put people back to work and to get our economy moving."

He added: "We will meet regularly so that I can hear different ideas and sharpen my own, and seek counsel that is candid and informed by the wider world."

Or, as the Red Queen put it, 'Sentence first. Verdict afterwards.'

Oh, so it isn't just us

2009-02-05T17:34:00.000-08:00

Robert Barro interviewed by Conor Clarke:

>[Q] Do you read Paul Krugman's blog?

[A] Just when he writes nasty individual comments that people forward.

[Q] Oh, well he wrote a series of posts saying he thought the World War II spending evidence was not good, for a variety of reasons, but I guess...

[A] He said elsewhere that it was good and that it was what got us out of the depression. He just says whatever is convenient for his political argument. He doesn't behave like an economist. And the guy has never done any work in Keynesian macroeconomics, which I actually did. He has never even done any work on that. His work is in trade stuff. He did excellent work, but it has nothing to do with what he's writing about.

[Q] I'm not in a position to...

[A] No, of course not.

[Q] I'm not in a position to know things like the degree to which Paul Krugman counts as a relevant expert on new Keynesian economics.

[A] He hasn't done any work on that. Greg Mankiw has worked in that area.

Change We Can Hope On

2009-02-05T10:17:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama launches a faith based initiative:

By now, it's clear to everyone that we have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression.

Bad start; that is not at all clear, and certainly there is no consensus in the economics profession that this is true.

Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes. And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.

That's a possibility, but only one possibility. Another is that if nothing is done the normal forces of supply and demand will work, as if by an invisible hand, to stabilize the economy.

Yet another possibility is that if 'something' is done by self-interested politicians, and it is the wrong thing (and at the wrong time) that will make things worse. That is, have a depressing effect rather than a stimulating one.

In the rush to shovel money to their friends, the Nancy Pelosis and Harry Reids of the world risk misallocating hundreds of billions of dollars to less highly valued resources. Which would make it all that much harder for the American people to re-organize their lives in ways that would allow the kind of prosperity we enjoyed for a quarter century (1983 through 2007) to return.

There is nothing in history to suggest that the current legislation before congress will have the effect that Obama is promising. Even his own Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, admitted as much last month when testifying at her confirmation hearing.

What's the Matter with Frank?

2009-02-04T16:13:00.000-08:00

The Kansan doesn't get basic economics, for one:

...state governments are in straitened circumstances these days, scarcely able to afford the upkeep on the roads and bridges they inherited from our statist ancestors. Indeed, one scarcely ever sees the word "infrastructure" without the inevitable qualifier, "crumbling." And few are willing to raise the gasoline taxes which pay for the repairs.

So the thing to do is give up. Lease those roads and bridges out. Let a private company collect the tolls, widen the lanes, and fill the potholes. They can make it work, and when they do, they will create jobs.

....Just to make sure Americans do the right thing, the pro-privatization worthies further suggested, in the words of a Reuters account, that maybe the coming federal stimulus package "should tie stimulus funds to private capital involvement." Apparently these privatization deals aren't sweet enough to sell themselves.

But there's good reason to be reluctant to privatize. It doesn't take an MBA to figure out that we didn't build our Interstate highways in order to create opportunities for venture capitalists. The purpose was public service.

Well over two centuries ago Adam Smith explained, in Wealth of Nations, how the public got what they needed, and it wasn't usually through 'public service'. It was by appealing to the selfish interests of producers of food, clothing and shelter. I.e., by offering money in return.

Some things couldn't be provided privately (or only with great difficulty) because there was no way to identify the beneficiaries and collect from their using them. Those goods and services were provided by governments and paid for indirectly (taxation). Which--as even Thomas Frank concedes in his WSJ piece--is a comparatively inefficient way to go.

So, what is Frank's problem with--now that the transponder technology exists to monitor usage of the formerly 'public good' of limited access highways and bridges--moving bravely into the 21st century, and adapting the superior (more efficient) method; charge very, very short term rental fees for the use of those highways?

How often does Frank see the adjective 'crumbling' accompanying the words apartment building? Or 'parking garage'?

Usually only when those things are owned and operated by government agencies, no?

Carbon Sink

2009-02-03T10:54:00.000-08:00

To Davy Jones' Locker, think some scientists:

Plants remove CO2 from the air through photosynthesis, incorporating the carbon in their tissues. So dumping corn stalks, wheat straw and other crop residues into the deep ocean, where cold and lack of oxygen would keep them from decomposing, would in effect sequester atmospheric CO2 on a time scale of millennia.

In a world that celebrates high technology, the idea sounds too simple to succeed. But Stuart Strand of the University of Washington and Gregory Benford of the University of California, Irvine, concluded that crop waste storage would make more sense than other proposals for carbon sequestration, including gas storage, sequestration directly in the soil, planting of more forests to take up more CO2, and fertilizing the oceans to foster more algae growth. Their findings are published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

The researchers calculated that crop waste burial would be more efficient than some other methods and could be adopted sooner, in part because existing technology and infrastructure could be used. Stalks could be baled in the field, transported to ports and loaded on barges for deep-water dumping. The researchers suggest any environmental impact could be minimized by concentrating the dumping in one area.

They estimate that large-scale agriculture produces enough waste worldwide that dumping it in the ocean could reduce the global annual accumulation of CO2 by 15 percent.

The Devil...We Don't Know

2009-02-03T10:39:00.000-08:00

If relying on foreign oil doesn't appeal, how about foreign lithium:

Demand for lithium, long used in small amounts in mood-stabilizing drugs and thermonuclear weapons, has climbed as makers of batteries for BlackBerrys and other electronic devices use the mineral. But the automotive industry holds the biggest untapped potential for lithium, analysts say. Since it weighs less than nickel, also used in batteries, it would allow electric cars to store more energy and drive longer distances.

With governments, including the Obama administration, seeking to increase fuel efficiency and reduce their dependence on imported oil, private companies are focusing their attention on this desolate corner of the Andes [in Bolivia], where Quechua-speaking Indians subsist on the remains of an ancient inland sea by bartering the salt they carry out on llama caravans.

The U.S. Geological Survey says 5.4 million tons of lithium could eventually be extracted in Bolivia, compared with 3 million in Chile, 1.1 million in China and just 410,000 in the United States. Independent geologists estimate that Bolivia might have even more lithium at Uyuni and its other salt deserts, though high altitudes could make producing the mineral difficult.

Amid such potential, foreigners seeking to tap Bolivia's lithium reserves must navigate the policies of [President Evo] Morales, 49, who has clashed repeatedly with American, European and even South American investors. Morales shocked neighboring Brazil, with whose government he is on friendly terms, by nationalizing its natural gas projects here in 2006 and seeking a sharp rise in prices. He carried out his latest nationalization before the vote on the Constitution, sending soldiers to occupy the operations of British oil giant BP.

At the La Paz headquarters of Comibol, the state agency that oversees mining projects, Morales's vision of combining socialism with advocacy for Bolivia's Indians is prominently on display.

Lost in Translaton

2009-02-02T11:26:00.000-08:00

From Davos via India, Whatever:

Irresponsible naïve Obama is surrounded with incompetent junks that were running the country from behind the scene keeping Bush Administration in the front. Obama is not getting it.

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz said any decision by President Barack Obama to establish a so-called bad bank to rid financial companies of toxic assets risks swelling the national debt.

Obama’s administration is moving closer to buying the illiquid assets currently clogging bank’s balance sheets and preventing them from boosting lending, people familiar with the matter said this week.

That amounts to swapping taxpayers’ “cash for trash,” Stiglitz said yesterday in a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Back to the Future; Hip to be Square

2009-02-02T10:46:00.000-08:00

It's not final for vinyl in the UK:

Digital music is accessible at the click of a button, CDs are portable and robust, and record players are rare to the point of extinction. Why would anyone buy vinyl in this day and age?

"To be really cool," says Mark Wadhwa, one half of the pair behind the Vinyl Factory, which in 2003 rescued the EMI vinyl pressing plant in Hayes from closure. "Everyone can download. If you've got a vinyl record you're different."

UK sales of seven inch singles increased from 180,000 in 2001 to more than a million in 2007, as young people discovered the format for the first time.

....Vinyl will remain a niche product, he says, but one made viable by the internet. "Before there might have been 500 people in the UK who would have bought a particular record on vinyl, now we can reach 200,000 people globally."

...."EMI from 1905 to 1970 spent millions of pounds perfecting the machinery that made their records," says Wadhwa. "The machinery was absolutely unique." As such, the Vinyl Factory has had to develop a method to hand-make replacement parts for the machines.

Fortunately the plant came with its staff, including a manager now pushing 80, whose parents worked there before him. Four highly skilled engineers have been retained to pass on their knowledge to the younger generation.

Saks and the City

2009-01-28T11:49:00.000-08:00

Being a trophy babe isn't all it's cracked up to be:

Once it was seen as a blessing in certain circles to have a wealthy, powerful partner who would leave you alone with the credit card while he was busy brokering deals. Now, many Wall Street wives, girlfriends and, increasingly, exes, are living the curse of cutbacks in nanny hours and reservations at chic restaurants like Masa or Megu. And that credit card? Canceled.

Raoul Felder, the New York celebrity divorce lawyer, said that cases involving financiers always stack up as the economy starts to slip, because layoffs and shrinking bonuses place stress on relationships - and, he said, because "there aren't funds or time for mistresses any more."

....Harriet Pappenheim, a psychotherapist who wrote "For Richer or Poorer," a 2006 book on money in marriage, said that the repercussions could be acute for Wall Street wunderkinder who define their identities through their job titles and the size of their bonuses.

"It's a big blow to their egos and to their self-esteem," she said of the endless stream of economic bad news, "and they may take it out on their partners and children."

Ill Wind

2009-01-28T11:12:00.000-08:00

The recent drop in oil prices is blowin' no good for the Brit's best laid plans:

The future of the world's biggest offshore wind farm has been thrown into doubt after its developers admitted that its economics are 'on a knife edge'.

Eon UK said plans for the massive London Array - a collection of up to 340 turbines off the Kent and Essex coasts - had been called into question by the falling price of gas, oil and carbon permits.

When finished, the £1.5billion farm should generate up to 1,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to meet the needs of 750,000 homes.

The farm is crucial to the Government's target of generating 40 per cent of Britain's electricity from wind, solar, tide and wave power by 2020.

However, Eon and other power companies are worried about the cost of offshore wind power. Not only are offshore turbines twice as expensive to put up as onshore ones, the costs are soaring in comparison to that of traditional fuels.

Paul Golby, chief executive of Eon - which owns a 30 per cent stake in the London Array - said the company was still committed to the project.

But he warned: 'The economics are looking pretty difficult.' Developers of the Array are expected to ask the Government for more subsidies.

What's in a name

2009-01-28T11:06:00.000-08:00

Extra dairy products, say the scientists:

Cows given names are happier and more productive, scientists claimed yesterday.

Be it Daisy, Buttercup or Ermintrude, such dairy cattle produce an extra pint and a half of milk a day, research showed.

...it equates to an extra 6,800 gallons a year at an average-sized dairy farm.

The Newcastle University study found that naming cows encourages farmers to treat them as individuals, cutting stress levels and boosting milk yield.

Researcher Dr Catherine Douglas said: 'Just as people respond better to the personal touch, cows also feel happier and more relaxed if they are given a bit more one-to-one attention.'

By Any Other Name

2009-01-28T10:58:00.000-08:00

Would land you a discount:

[British] Holiday operator Travel Republic has criticised an adventure travel company for its decision to advertise "chav-free holidays".

Activities Abroad sent out an email earlier this week to 24,000 people on its database , containing two lists of names. The first list the names that it believed holidaymakers would be likely to encounter on one of its holidays – such as Sarah, Charles and Alice. The second was a list of names it believed people would be unlikely to find – including Dazza, Britney and Shannon.
Travel Republic has responded by offering a 10 per cent discount on holiday bookings for anyone possessing one of the "chav" names.

Paul Furner, managing director of Travel Republic, described the Activities Abroad's "anti-chav" stance as “offensive”.

“We actively encourage bookings from everyone, irrespective of their name and its perceived social standing,” he said.

“In fact we’re delighted to have 1600 Shannons, 1100 Courtneys, 600 Chantelles, 500 Kylies, 400 Tiffanys, 300 Candices and 200 Britneys on our database, and two Candices, a Chantelle and a Dazza among our staff.”

Play to Pay

2009-01-26T14:24:00.000-08:00

In Nevada, the brothentrepreneurs offer to pay protection money:

A lobbyist for the $50 million ... a year industry is asking state legislators to consider taxing brothels as a way to raise extra revenue for Nevada, which is facing a $2 billion budget shortfall, and to protect his industry from being criminalised.

George Flint, director of the Nevada Brothel Association, said that he saw the offer as "something of an insurance policy" against a possible future decision by the state to outlaw the industry, which was legalised in 1971.

Nevada is the only US state where prostitution is legal, although it is confined to counties with a population of under 400,000. Brothels are subject to local taxes but at present pay only $100 to the state for a business licence fee.

Juzgue no

2009-01-21T14:23:00.000-08:00

and ye may get more bucks:

Judges in Madrid have voted by a wide majority in support of strike action, voting 103 votes to 19 to take the strike action which is to start on February 18. The decision in Madrid follows similar decisions to take action in Murcia, Extremadura, Zamora, Málaga and Sevilla on the same day.

The judges say they are short-staffed and need more resources so as to carry out their jobs. Despite some concessions from the Ministry, the protests for now remain in place with judges in Barcelona and Asturias also reported to be considering action.

Supercalifrogilisticexpialidocious

2009-01-20T15:24:00.000-08:00

It's not easy eating green when you have to import from Indonesia:

Statistics on imports and exports of frog legs are sparse as few countries keep track of the amount of meat harvested and consumed domestically.

According to UN figures, global trade has increased in the past 20 years. France - not surprisingly - and the US are the two largest importers; with France importing between 2500 and 4000 tonnes of frog meat each year since 1995.

....Even top French chefs may be unaware of where their frogs are coming from. Bruno Stril, teaching chef at the Cordon Bleu school in Paris, France, is unsure where his suppliers source their frog legs. "I would like for them to come from France," he says. But he expects that most of the meat comes from other countries.

Stril is on the right track. Indonesia is the world's largest exporter of frog meat, exporting more than 5000 tonnes of frog meat each year, mostly to France, Belgium and Luxemburg.

...European kitchens initially found their own supplies in the surrounding countryside, but the fact that they are now importing from Asia suggests local populations were over-harvested.

This...could be a sign that frog populations, like many fish populations, will be harvested to near extinction.

It's an Obama Nation

2009-01-20T10:53:00.000-08:00

In which we can stimulate the economy by going about our business eating salted caramels...or not:

Fran Bigelow learned through a newspaper article that Barack Obama loves her salted caramels.

More news outlets picked it up, sending demand so high that Fran's Chocolates on East Pike Street [in Seattle] has scaled back production of pre-Valentine's truffles and chocolate hearts to make room for more caramels.

This month, salted-caramel production is up 50 percent to more than 18,000 pieces a day.

Save your Confederate money...

2009-01-18T15:39:00.000-08:00

The Irish may be rising (and leaving) again:

A leading Irish economist has called on Dublin to threaten withdrawal from the euro unless Europe's big powers do more to rescue Ireland's economy.

"This is war: countries have to defend themselves," said David McWilliams, a former official at the Irish central bank.

"It is essential that we go to Europe and say we have a serious problem. We say, either we default or we pull out of Europe," he told RTE radio.

"If Ireland continues hurtling down this road, which is close to default, the whole of Europe will be badly affected. The credibility of the euro will be badly affected. Then Spain might default, Italy and Greece," he said.

Mr McWilliams, a former UBS director and now prominent broadcaster, has broken the ultimate taboo by evoking threats to precipitate an EMU crisis, which would risk a chain reaction across the eurozone's southern belt, where yield spreads on state bonds are already flashing warning signals. The comments reflect growing bitterness in Dublin over the way the country has been treated after voting against the EU's Lisbon Treaty.

Which was predicted by none other than Milton Friedman:

The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help. The euro has no precedent. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a monetary union, putting out a fiat currency, composed of independent states.

There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money—money tempted to inflate—put out by politically independent entities.

The race is not to the swift...

2009-01-18T15:25:00.000-08:00

...neither bread to the wise...but time and chance and $600 lunches can make even French chefs appreciate fast food:

Upmarket French chefs used to serving meals costing as much as £300-a-head are having to open fast-food extensions because of the worsening economic situation.

....As the credit crunch bites, some of the biggest names are even offering sandwiches to previous big spenders.

....Paul Bocuse, the celebrity chef known as the "pope" of French cuisine, is among those who have introduced a fast food joint to his chain of restaurants which include the world famous l'Auberge du Pont de Collonges, near Lyon.

Ouest Express offers entire express meals from £10, and ham sandwiches and hamburgers at just over £4 and £5 respectfully.

Stimulus Watch

2009-01-18T11:06:00.000-08:00

John Lott must be laughing:

Gun sales have skyrocketed around the inland [Pacific] Northwest since the November general election, according to The [Spokane, WA] Spokesman Review newspaper.

Gun-shop owners cite fears that a Democratic president and Congress will tighten gun controls.
Store owners said the most sought-after items are semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity handguns.

Police records for Spokane County show gun sales at pawnshops more than doubled from November and December 2007 to November and December 2008. Applications for concealed-pistol licenses in Spokane County rose 40 percent in the last two months of 2008 compared with the same months a year earlier, according to police records.

Smiley...David Smiley

2009-01-09T17:19:00.000-08:00

He seems to have had a license to thrill:

Colonel David Smiley, who died on Thursday aged 92, was one of the most celebrated cloak-and-dagger agents of the Second World War, serving behind enemy lines in Albania, Greece, Abyssinia and Japanese-controlled eastern Thailand.

After the war he organised secret operations against the Russians and their allies in Albania and Poland, among other places. Later, as Britain's era of domination in the Arabian peninsula drew to a close, he commanded the Sultan of Oman's armed forces in a highly successful counter-insurgency.

After his assignment in Oman, he organised – with the British intelligence service, MI6 – royalist guerrilla resistance against a Soviet-backed Nasserite regime in Yemen. Smiley's efforts helped force the eventual withdrawal of the Egyptians and their Soviet mentors, paved the way for the emergence of a less anti-Western Yemeni government, and confirmed his reputation as one of Britain's leading post-war military Arabists.

Can We Dance

2009-01-08T12:55:00.001-08:00

Barack Obama in his speech on the economy today:

This crisis did not happen solely by some accident of history or normal turn of the business cycle, and we won't get out of it by simply waiting for a better day to come, or relying on the worn-out dogmas of the past. We arrived at this point due to an era of profound irresponsibility that stretched from corporate boardrooms to the halls of power in Washington, DC. For years, too many Wall Street executives made imprudent and dangerous decisions, seeking profits with too little regard for risk, too little regulatory scrutiny, and too little accountability. Banks made loans without concern for whether borrowers could repay them, and some borrowers took advantage of cheap credit to take on debt they couldn't afford. Politicians spent taxpayer money without wisdom or discipline, and too often focused on scoring political points instead of the problems they were sent here to solve. The result has been a devastating loss of trust and confidence in our economy, our financial markets, and our government.

Funny he didn't mention anyone by name. But, Karl Rove can supply some of them:

When Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama, then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, pushed for comprehensive GSE reform in 2005, Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut successfully threatened a filibuster. Later, after Fannie and Freddie collapsed, Mr. Dodd asked, "Why weren't we doing more?" He then voted for the Bush reforms that he once called "ill-advised."

But Mr. Dodd wasn't the only Democrat to heap abuse on the Bush reforms. Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts defended Fannie and Freddie as "fundamentally sound" and labeled the president's proposals as "inane." He later voted for the reforms.

Sen. Charles Schumer of New York dismissed Mr. Bush's "safety and soundness concerns" as "a straw man." "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," was the helpful advice of both Sen. Thomas Carper of Delaware and Rep. Maxine Waters of California. Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York berated a Bush official at a hearing, saying, "I am just pissed off" at the administration for raising the issue.

Ol' Man Winter

2009-01-07T10:25:00.000-08:00

He justs keeps snowin' along:

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) - More than 6 feet of snow in the past three weeks has left Spokane residents frustrated. Tempers are so frayed that a man was arrested for shooting at a snow plow operator.

This unusually harsh winter has disrupted schools, traffic, garbage pickup and mail service in the city of 200,000.

Roofs are collapsing, streets are clogged with ice and slush and locals are starting to refer to this as Sno-maggedon.

....Spokane has received more than 78 inches of snow...since mid-December. That's far above its average of less than 50 inches for an entire winter. Normally about 16 inches would have fallen at this point.

The local record for an entire winter is 93.5 inches set in 1949-50. That is likely to be shattered soon.

....Weight on roofs is a major problem. The National Weather Service has estimated that the existing snow is placing a load of about 25 pounds per square foot roof on roofs designed to hold 30 to 40 pounds. Rain forecast to follow the snow this week will add significant new weight, the agency said.

That has created a brisk market for day laborers willing to go up on roofs and shovel snow off for at least $15 per hour.

And, in the really unbelievable, Gonzaga's men's basketball team has lost 4 of it's last 5 basketball games.

Got the time?

2009-01-06T08:29:00.000-08:00

Ask a French protestor:

Looters ransacked a Paris watchmaker and grabbed more than EUR 200,000 worth of stock in the wake of a protest against Israel's Gaza offensive, the shop said Monday.

A manager of the Louis Pion boutique in central Paris' Opera district said "40 vandals came in, in three successive waves at three-minute intervals," on Saturday. Police confirmed they had opened an inquiry.

More than 20,000 demonstrators marched in Paris on Saturday to protest Israel's assault on Palestinian Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip and, while most dispersed peacefully, between 200 and 300 went on the rampage.

Following the protest, mobs that peeled off from the main march overturned around a dozen cars, burning several of them, and smashed the windows of several shops on Paris's iconic shopping street, the Boulevard Haussmann.

When the going gets tough

2009-01-06T08:15:00.000-08:00

The French go skiing:

Buoyed by major snowfalls and French families seeking to spend their euros closer to home, France's ski resorts are reporting a boom in business.

Hotels and chalets in the French Alps, the Pyrenees and other mountain resorts were almost fully booked over the holiday season, according to the Protourisme market analysis group.

"We are having an excellent start to the season," said Didier Arino, manager of Protourisme.

"Since the end of November, there has been a double-digit jump in the number of bookings."

....Arino said ski resorts are drawing many French families who have dropped plans for more expensive vacations in the sun.

"The economic crisis is helping French vacation spots. The French are not going abroad as much," said Arino.

Now Hear This

2009-01-05T10:32:00.000-08:00

Driving While Titanium may be hazardous to your health:

Doctors in the United Kingdom say modern titanium clubs create a "sonic boom" when they connect with the ball, which is so loud it could shatter golfers' eardrums.

Some believe the risk of going deaf is so great they have advised golfers to wear earplugs to tee off. Experts have identified at least one case of a golfer they believe has hearing damage as a result of using a titanium driver.

....When tested, the titanium drivers made a much louder sound than the steel-headed clubs.

The doctors' report, published in the latest edition of the British Medical Journal, concluded "caution should be exercised by golfers who play regularly with thin-faced titanium drivers".

Would you buy...

2009-01-05T08:32:00.000-08:00

...a used house from this man:

RESIDENTS of a model housing estate bankrolled by Hollywood celebrities and hand-built by Jimmy Carter, the former US president, are complaining that it is falling apart.

Fairway Oaks was built on northern Florida wasteland by 10,000 volunteers, including Carter, in a record 17-day “blitz” organised by the charity Habitat for Humanity.

Eight years later it is better known for cockroaches, mildew and mysterious skin rashes.

A forthcoming legal battle over Fairway Oaks threatens the reputation of a charity envied for the calibre of its celebrity supporters, who range from Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt to Colin Firth, Christian Bale and Helena Bonham Carter.

The case could challenge the bedrock philosophy behind Habitat for Humanity, claiming that using volunteers, rather than professional builders, is causing as many problems as it solves.

Good fences make good neighbors

2009-01-05T07:46:00.001-08:00

And Newark NJ finds the reverse is also true:

Some business owners in this crime-plagued city say recent enforcement of a decades-old ordinance banning some types of barbed and razor wire is making Newark more attractive to thieves.

Burglaries are up 17 percent from 2007 through November in Newark....

John DeSantis, owner of a lot used by an auto-repair business, says his property has had more than a dozen burglaries since the summer, when the city forced him to remove razor wire on top of the 7-foot-tall fence that surrounds the lot.

"The bottom line was, they said, 'It doesn't look good and we want to create a new image for the city of Newark,' " DeSantis said.

....DeSantis said he was surprised when a city official told him the ordinance was being enforced to prevent passers-by or anyone climbing the fence from being injured by the barbed wire.

"I said that maybe if a few of these thieves were injured, the word would get around that 'Hey, we can't do this anymore,' " he said.

Ring out the old

2008-12-31T16:38:00.000-08:00

After fifty years of failure, it would be fitting to say adios:

[Fidel] Castro's younger brother Raul, 77, who replaced the veteran dictator as president in February, will lead the main celebrations in the eastern city of Santiago, addressing a crowd from the same balcony where Fidel proclaimed victory on Jan 1, 1959.

....despite the triumphant slogans displayed in store windows, the new leader has scaled back plans for more lavish festivities after three back-to-back hurricanes in 2008 hammered the already enfeebled centralised economy.

Fidel, 82, will not make an appearance at the anniversary party – he has not been seen in public since undergoing emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006. But he still remains an imposing presence and few Cubans expect significant political or economic reforms while he is alive.

At the weekend, his brother was forced to announce fresh austerity measures, including a 50 per cent cut in overseas government travel, after officials admitted the economy had suffered its worse year since the collapse of their old Soviet benefactors in 1991.

The regime fears tougher times ahead this year as the collapse in world oil prices is likely to undermine the petrodollar fuelled largesse of firebrand Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Cuba's main financial backer currently supports Havana with subsidised oil supplies worth up to $3 billion (£2.1 billion) a year.

Many Cubans, tired of half a century of hostility with Washington, have pinned their hopes for change on the election of Barack Obama. Indeed, the US President-elect has promised to ease tough restrictions on Cuban-Americans visiting their relatives and sending cash remittances to the island.

Havana for its part this autumn quietly removed a prominent billboard near the US Interests Sections depicting George W. Bush as a bloody-fanged vampire in what was regarded as a goodwill gesture towards its long-time foes.

The Company He Keeps

2008-12-30T16:32:00.000-08:00

It's a clash of civilizations:

[Jimmy] Buffett, who turned 62 on Christmas Day, long ago became an icon of certain baby boomers — perhaps the least-hip demographic in the country — by offering the dream of throwing off their responsibilities for his tropical-party vibe.

But in the past decade, this chronicler of Margaritaville has really cashed in on his image.

....With his estimated annual income of more than $40 million, you might mistake his portfolio for that of Warren Buffett (not a relative). He's done it by sailing beyond most musicians' ticket, T-shirt and poster revenue stream.

The title of his most popular song shows up on restaurants, clothing, booze and casinos. Among the products he's involved with are Landshark Lager, the Margaritaville and Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurant chains, clothing and footwear, household items and drink blenders.

The Margaritaville cafe on the Las Vegas strip is said to be the top-grossing restaurant in the nation.

....In October, Buffett was chosen by Vanity Fair as No. 97 on a list of the 100 most influential people. In the world. He's nestled between Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris and anti-poverty crusader [Columbia economist] Jeffrey Sachs.

Broken Crockery Fallacy

2008-12-23T08:29:00.000-08:00

Help end the recession; break some stuff:

Stressed workers are flocking to The Venting Place in Tokyo where they pay to hurl crockery against a concrete wall in a bid to ease recession-related angst.

Katsuya Hara, who leads a team of chiropractors operating the therapy, said: "To break something, as all of us know from experience, is something extremely exhilarating and it helps bring down pent-up anger. We hope to become the new way businessmen and women relieve their stress."

Anxious visitors choose the crockery they would like to destroy, ranging from 200 yen (£1.40) for a small cup to 1,000 yen (£7.40) for a larger plate-smashing dish.

Marx was right

2008-12-23T08:01:00.000-08:00

First it's tragedy, then comes the farce:

Just in time for Christmas, Karl Marx is finding a new audience among Japanese comic-book fans.

The manga edition of his masterpiece, "Das Kapital," hit Japanese bookstores this month and sold about 6,000 copies in its first few days, said Yusuke Maruo of EastPress.

"I think people are looking to Marx for answers to the problems with the capitalist society," Maruo said. "Obviously, the recent global crisis suggests that the system isn't working properly."

Maruo said he hoped the comic version would provide an enjoyable introduction to the German socialist's original work, written in 1867. The targeted readers are office workers in their 30s.

Hockey Moms to the Rescue

2008-12-22T11:38:00.000-08:00

Doing their part for the economy:

'Lipstick effect' in full swing, economists say

....Economists believe that during hard times people forego extravagant purchases like cars, holidays and kitchens and instead spend their money on small luxuries like make-up.

Recent sales figures from some of the world's big cosmetic companies - L'Oréal, Beiersdorf and Shiseido - bear out the theory. In the first half of the year L'Oréal sales were up 5.3 per cent.

The theory was first identified in the Great Depression. Between 1929 and 1933 industrial production in the US halved but sales of cosmetics rose.

Cal Ripken It

2008-12-19T13:21:00.000-08:00

Show up for work, says the PGA Comish:

According to a story in the Sports Business Journal, [Tim] Finchem said ...: "We're asking every player to add a tournament or two to their historical schedule to assist the tournaments that historically have weak fields. We have a lot of title sponsors this year that are up for renewal. We have to put our best foot forward in terms of presenting our competitions."

He also asked players to be visible in corporate hospitality areas and to communicate that to the leaders of Tour sponsoring companies, according to the Sports Business Journal. He also asked players to avoid being publicly negative about the Tour.

....The PGA Tour isn't immune to the economic slowdown worldwide. Several of its sponsors are financial institutions or car companies, both of which are having significant economic troubles.

It's Only Make Believe

2008-12-18T09:24:00.000-08:00

Say the Scot scholars about Chick Flicks:

Watching romantic comedies can spoil your love life, a study by a university in Edinburgh has claimed.

Rom-coms have been blamed by relationship experts at Heriot Watt University for promoting unrealistic expectations when it comes to love.

They found fans of films such as Runaway Bride and Notting Hill often fail to communicate with their partner.

Many held the view if someone is meant to be with you, then they should know what you want without you telling them.

Psychologists at the family and personal relationships laboratory at the university studied 40 top box office hits between 1995 and 2005, and identified common themes which they believed were unrealistic.

'Honey, the academics think it would be better if we catch the Steven Seagall picture.'

Stop us if you've heard this one before

2008-12-17T13:21:00.000-08:00

A Muslim walks into a bar and says, 'How about a job?':

A Muslim cocktail waitress who claims she was sacked for refusing to wearing an 'indecent' red dress is suing a bar for £20,000.

Fata Lemes, 33, said the figure-hugging scarlet dress made her look like a nightclub hostess and was 'physically revealing and openly sexual'.

....She is suing for sexual harassment and sex discrimination.

She said she was fired when she refused to wear the dress and is claiming £20,000 for injury to her feelings and lost earnings.

What's a nice girl like you doing in....?

The Big 7 Oh

2008-12-10T14:50:00.000-08:00

Dave Leonhardt says it includes legacy costs:

...the Big Three really does spend about $73 [per hour] on compensation. So the number isn’t made up. But it is the combination of three very different categories.

The first category is simply cash payments.... It includes wages, overtime and vacation pay, and comes to about $40 an hour. ....

The second category is fringe benefits, like health insurance and pensions. ... the benefits amount to $15 an hour or so.

Add the two together, and you get the true hourly compensation of Detroit’s unionized work force: roughly $55 an hour. ....

The third category is the cost of benefits for retirees. These are essentially fixed costs that have no relation to how many vehicles the companies make. But they are a real cost, so the companies add them into the mix — dividing those costs by the total hours of the current work force, to get a figure of $15 or so — and end up at roughly $70 an hour.

Not so fast, says Heritage's James Sherk:

These figures are based upon calculations by the Detroit automakers themselves as published in SEC filings, their annual reports, and other materials. According to briefing materials prepared by General Motors, "The total of both cash compensation and benefits provided to GM hourly workers in 2006 amounted to approximately $73.26 per active hour worked."

....General Motors reports that it pays base wages of roughly $30 an hour.

....Other provisions raise cash earnings above this base pay. For example, workers at Ford earn 10 percent premium payments for taking midnight shifts and double time for overtime hours worked on Sundays.

Autoworkers put in substantial overtime hours at higher rates, raising earnings above their base pay. GM reported that its average hourly employee worked 315 overtime hours in 2006. Including all monetary payments--base wages, shift premiums, overtime pay, as well as vacation and holiday pay--GM reported an average hourly pay of $39.68 an hour in 2006.

To recap, Leonhardt thinks $40/hour is explained by cash wages plus fringe benefits. Sherk says it's cash only, and fringe benefits are extra:

The remaining $33.58 an hour of hourly labor costs that GM reports--46 percent of total compensation--was paid as benefits. These benefits include...:

Hospital, surgical, and prescription drug benefits;
Dental and vision benefits;
Group life insurance;
Disability benefits;
Supplemental Unemployment Benefits (SUB);
Pension payments to workers pensions accounts to be paid out at retirement;
Unemployment compensation; and
Payroll taxes (employer's share).

These benefits cost the Detroit automakers significant amounts of money. Critics contend that these benefit figures include the cost of providing retirement and health benefits to currently retired workers, not just benefits for current workers. Since there are more retired than active employees this makes it appear that GM employees earn far more than they actually do.

This contention contradicts the plain meaning of what the automakers have reported in SEC filings and in their public statements and would be contrary to generally accepted accounting principles.

Sherk follows with a tutorial on accrual accounting practices that make it clear that benefits for current retirees would not show up in these current year expenses (but would be on the balance sheet as liabilities).

Further, that GM, with almost 300,000 retirees receiving almost $5 billion in retirement benefits in 2006 (nearly $17,000 per retiree), couldn't possibly have only $15 (per current worker hour) as Leonhardt is claiming.

(Thanks to NC State's Craig Newmark)

Isn't It Legal?

2008-12-09T08:09:00.000-08:00

In the land of Obama--where domestic terrorists go to launch second careers as ghost writers--you can't sell something as insignificant as a U.S Senate seat:

Federal authorities arrested Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich Tuesday on charges that he brazenly conspired to sell or trade the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama to the highest bidder.

Blagojevich also was charged with illegally threatening to withhold state assistance to Tribune Co., the owner of the Chicago Tribune, in the sale of Wrigley Field, according to a federal criminal complaint. In return for state assistance, Blagojevich allegedly wanted members of the paper's editorial board who had been critical of him fired.

A 76-page FBI affidavit said the 51-year-old Democratic governor was intercepted on court-authorized wiretaps over the last month conspiring to sell or trade the vacant Senate seat for personal benefits for himself and his wife, Patti.

Otherwise, Blagojevich considered appointing himself. The affidavit said that as late as Nov. 3, he told his deputy governor that if "they're not going to offer me anything of value I might as well take it."

"I'm going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain," Blagojevich allegedly said later that day, according to the affidavit, which also quoted him as saying in a remark punctuated by profanity that the seat was "a valuable thing - you just don't give it away for nothing."

Hard Times

2008-12-08T12:54:00.000-08:00

Life imitates Woody Allen, all over Europe and the U.S:

Sex is free at Big Sister, but that is not cheap enough for some men. Customers get the cut rate in return for signing a release form that allows the brothel to film their sexual exploits.

Even with this financial incentive, Big Sister's marketing manager, Carl Borowitz, 26, a Moravian computer engineer, lamented that the global financial crisis had diminished the number of sex tourists in Prague.

....Big Sister is not the only brothel suffering the effects of a battered global economy. While the world's oldest profession may also be one of its most recession-proof businesses, brothel owners in Europe and the United States say belt-tightening caused by the global financial crisis is undermining a once-lucrative industry.

Egbert Krumeich, manager of Artemis, the largest brothel in Berlin, said that the recession had helped dent revenue by 20 percent in November, which is usually peak season for the sex trade. Meanwhile, in Reno, Nevada, the multimillion-dollar Mustang Ranch recently laid off 30 percent of its staff, citing a decline in high-spending clients.

Big Sister is not struggling as much as some of its more traditional rivals; its revenue is largely derived from the €30, or $40 monthly fee each of the company's 10,000 clients pay to gain access to its Web site.

But Borowitz said Big Sister hoped to offset a 15 percent drop in revenue over the past quarter by expanding into the United States. Big Sister also produces cable TV shows that air on Sky Italia and Television X in Britain, as well as DVDs like "World Cup Love Truck" and "Extremely Perverted."

Ester, an 18-year-old prostitute at Big Sister who declined to give her last name, said that big-spending clients had diminished, but noted that she was still earning nearly €3,000 a month, enough to pay rent and to pay for her favorite Louis Vuitton purses.

"The reason I do this is for the money," she said, after gyrating half-naked around a pole. Being filmed, she added, made her feel more like an actress than a sex object.

A Little Dab'll Do Ya

2008-12-07T10:06:00.000-08:00

Today's lesson in Public Choice Economics finds the usual suspects at work to put our soldiers lives at risk:

Scientists have discovered a lotion that can save the lives of U.S. soldiers exposed to chemical weapons — a product vastly superior to the standard-issue decontamination powder.

Naturally, the Defense Department wants to scrap the powder and switch to the more-effective lotion.

But there's a problem: After being lobbied by the companies making the powder, several members of Congress pushed through two earmarks worth $7.6 million that forced the military for the past two years to keep buying the inferior product.

The product, known as M291, is made from a resin sold exclusively by a Pennsylvania chemical company, which is then processed into powder by a New York company, then assembled into individual kits at a facility in Arkansas.

Among the lawmakers who championed the earmarks are Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.; Arlen Specter, R-Pa.; and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

Clinton, who is poised to become secretary of state, received nearly $7,000 in campaign donations from the beneficiaries of these earmarks in recent years. Specter got more than $47,000.

No hired hands

2008-12-05T10:48:00.000-08:00

J Bradford DeLong isn't whining like Joe Stiglitz, he's making it clear he has no interest in working in the Obama Administration:

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? We all ask this question. There is something that some of you all can do today. And I beg you to please do so.

If you subscribe to the National Journal, pick up the phone and cancel your subscription, telling whoever you speak to that you will not resume until Stuart Taylor, Jr., is fired from the National Journal's staff.

Hip to be Square

2008-12-03T11:17:00.000-08:00

At the bowling alley, emulating The Dude:

..."The Big Lebowski," the Coen Brothers movie about an aging slacker who calls himself the Dude, and who, after a thug urinates on his prized rug, becomes caught up in a Chandleresque mystery.

Played with slouchy brio by Jeff Bridges, the Dude's chief pursuits involve bowling, avoiding work and drinking White Russians, the sweet cocktail made with vodka, Kahlúa and cream or milk.

The movie was a flop when it was released, but in the decade since, "The Big Lebowski" has attracted a cult following, and as the film's renown has grown, so has the renown of the White Russian, or, as the Dude calls them, "Caucasians." The drink is the subject of experimentation at cutting-edge bars like Tailor, in SoHo, which serves a crunchy dehydrated version — a sort of White Russian cereal.

....To see the White Russian renaissance in full bloom, it is instructive to attend a Lebowski Fest, the semiannual gatherings where fans of the movie revel in the Dude's deeply casual approach to life. There, the White Russian is consumed in oil-tanker quantities.

This was much in evidence at a fest held last month in New York, where 1,000 or so "achievers," as the movie's buffs call themselves, took over Lucky Strike Lanes, a bowling alley in New York. The White Russian demand was such that, in addition to two bars, a White Russian satellite station had been set up and bartenders were in back mixing vats of reinforcements.

It turned out that management was following a directive from the event's organizers. "When we line up a venue, we always have the White Russian talk," said Will Russell, a founder of the Lebowski Fest.

Russell has learned from experience to lay in provisions. He recalled an incident at an early festival in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky

"Milk sold out within a one-mile radius of the bowling alley" where the event was held, he said.

"We had to go to every local mini-market and gas station to satisfy the requirements of the achievers."

Not So NIHCE

2008-12-03T09:56:00.000-08:00

If you're dying of cancer in Britain:

When Bruce Hardy's kidney cancer spread to his lung, his doctor recommended an expensive new pill from Pfizer. But Hardy is British, and the British health authorities refused to buy the medicine.

....A clinical trial showed that the pill, called Sutent, delays cancer progression for six months at an estimated treatment cost of $54,000.

But at that price, Bruce Hardy's life is not worth prolonging, according to a British government agency, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. The institute, known as NICE, has decided that Britain, except in rare cases, can afford only £15,000, or about $22,750, to save six months of a citizen's life.

Madness...Method to it

2008-12-02T17:38:00.000-08:00

John Muellbauer thinks Bernanke has his Batmobile fuelled and ready to go:

It is time for unorthodox policy – one far more effective than Milton Friedman’s helicopter drops of money – because it is reversible. Indeed it is akin to ‘stabilising speculation’ by central banks.

The world’s main central banks should collectively buy mainstream securities (not the obscure assets as initially proposed under TARP). This is the best way to put liquidity into the pockets of consumers and companies. But these securities must be targeted to relieve the critical credit blockages impeding recovery. Many of the assets discussed below are now at the lowest real prices seen in decades. The influx of cash and credit will stabilise global activity, eventually increasing the real value of most of these assets. In due course, the central banks will be able to sell back the assets to the private sector. Assuming the stimulus works, this operation will be profitable for the central banks – a important difference when comparing this to fiscal measures that raise national debts.

The financial accelerator

A key part of the economic logic behind this unconventional monetary policy is provided by what economists call the financial accelerator, well explained by Bernanke (1983), building on Irving Fisher’s 1933 theory of debt deflation.

Running with the Big Macs

2008-12-02T09:45:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the club:

In a note posted on its support site in late November, Apple said it wanted to "encourage" people to use anti-virus to stay safe online.

The move is widely seen as a response to the growing trend among cyber criminals of booby-trapping webpages that can catch out Mac users.

Before now Mac users have been largely free of the security problems that plague Microsoft's Windows.

....in recent months, hi-tech criminals have signalled a change in tactics away from e-mail borne viruses. Instead, many are infiltrating popular webpages in a bid to infect the machine of any and every visitor.

Many seek to steal valuable information such as login names, passwords or game accounts instead of trying to install themselves on a machine.

Chuck and Sarah, sittin' in a tree...

2008-11-26T10:11:00.000-08:00

In camo, waiting for a moose to trot by:

Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is not known as a rugged outdoorsman type, has won a hunting award that puts him in an odd pairing with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who hunts moose and turns them into stew.

Field and Stream magazine singled out both lawmakers for praise in its Year in Review issue.

.... Schumer was a respectable marksman when he was a teenager, and even won an award, according to his spokesman - who blasted out a press release heralding the Field and Stream award.

...Schumer knows how to sniff out a political issue that plays well statewide.

Schumer joined an effort by North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad to voluntarily encourage landowners to allow private hunting on their land, which opened up many hunting grounds upstate.

As much as 85 percent of New York's land is private and most of it is off-limits to hunters.

The magazine cited the legislation in its award statement, while calling Palin the first "true hunter" since Teddy Roosevelt to run for executive office.

Old Folks Away From Home

2008-11-26T10:03:00.000-08:00

Might raise real estate prices in hard hit areas:

[Real] Estate agents in the United States hope a new administration in Washington D.C. will kick start talks for a retirement visa, the so-called “silver card” which would allow foreigners to easily retire in the U.S.

“I’m encouraged,” said Tony Macaluso, the Florida-based agent championing the visa.
The retirement visa is one of those ideas that’s so simple and makes so much sense it’s amazing that it’s never been adopted. While countries like Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico and Belize present a variety of programs to encourage international pensioners to buy homes, the U.S. offers no simple path for a foreign citizen to retire in places like Florida and California.

Although details still need to be hashed out, a retirement visa would allow foreign citizens of a certain age with a steady pension fund income and a few other verifiable requirements to retire in the U.S. without a hassle.

“There are a lot of people around the world who would love to enjoy their golden years in the U.S. and we don’t have a way for them to do it,” said Macaluso, who served as the 2008 international operations chairman for the National Association of Realtors and now fills a similar role with the Florida Association Realtors.

....“This is not an immigration proposal; it’s an economic proposal,” Macaluso said.

A recent study commissioned by NAR found 7.5 percent of foreign citizens polled expressed an interest in retiring in the U.S.—an unassuming number that could translate to millions of potential buyers, Macaluso says. That could provide a much-needed boost for markets like Florida, California and Colorado.

“If this was in place by now, a lot of inventory would be absorbed and prices would be strengthened because we would have an active market,” Macaluso said.

Chefs...broth

2008-11-26T09:51:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama appears to be emulating the old N Y Yankees philosophy of buying up all the good players and have them sit on the bench, rather than let them play for the opposition (which has names like Reid and Pelosi:

Paul Volcker, who helped tame runaway inflation in the 1980s during two terms as chairman of the Federal Reserve, has agreed to lead a new White House economic advisory committee, President-elect Barack Obama said on Wednesday, praising Volcker as "one of the world's foremost economic policy experts."

....Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who was a leading economic adviser to the Obama presidential campaign, will be the top staff member of the advisory board, the president-elect said, calling him "one of America's most promising economic minds, known for his path-breaking work on tax policy and industrial organization."

Adding them to the first team of Summers, Geithner, Romer and Orzag might make it crowded in the dugout.

Save the Tiger

2008-11-24T11:00:00.000-08:00

Or, bail out his sponsor?

General Motors Corp, which has warned that it will run short of cash early next year without support, and popular professional golfer Tiger Woods said on Monday that they would end their endorsement deal at the end of the year.

...."In light of the news coming out of Washington, this decision is the result of discussions that started earlier in the year, and the timing of this agreement with these other activities is purely coincidental," Mark LaNeve, GM's North American vice president of sales, said in a statement.

The Detroit automaker, which spends heavily in golf, has been slashing marketing costs across all venues, previously disclosing reduced spending on motorsports, as well as eliminating television ads next year during such events as the Oscars and Emmy award shows and the National Football League's Super Bowl championship game.

Terms of the arrangement were not disclosed although GM spokesman Pete Ternes said it ends the automaker's five-year deal with Woods a year early. Woods will continue to drive Buick vehicles through 2009.

What's the matter with the clothes I'm wearing?

2008-11-24T10:41:00.000-08:00

There would be something illegal with the car they're driving, but in Saudi Arabia, it's still rock n' roll to the she's:

They cannot perform in public. They cannot pose for album cover photographs. Even their jam sessions are secret, for fear of offending the religious authorities in this ultraconservative kingdom.

But the members of Saudi Arabia's first all-girl rock band, the Accolade, are clearly not afraid of taboos.

The band's first single, "Pinocchio," has become an underground hit here, with hundreds of young Saudis downloading the song from the group's Web site. Now, the pioneering young foursome, all of them college students, want to start playing regular gigs - inside private compounds, of course - and recording an album.

"In Saudi, yes, it's a challenge," said the group's spiky-haired lead singer, Lamia, who has piercings on her left eyebrow and beneath her bottom lip. (Like other band members, she gave only her first name.) "Maybe we're crazy. But we wanted to do something different."

In a country where women are not allowed to drive and rarely appear in public without their faces covered, the band is very different indeed. The prospect of female rockers clutching guitars and belting out angry lyrics about a failed relationship - the theme of "Pinocchio" - would once have been unimaginable here.

But this country's harsh code of public morals has slowly thawed, especially in Jidda, by far the kingdom's most cosmopolitan city. A decade ago the cane-wielding religious police terrorized women who were not dressed according to their standards. Young men with long hair were sometimes bundled off to police stations to have their heads shaved, or worse.

Today, there is a growing rock scene with dozens of bands, some of them even selling tickets to their performances. Hip-hop is also popular. The religious police - strictly speaking, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice - have largely retreated from the streets of Jidda, and they are somewhat less aggressive even in the kingdom's desert heartland.

The change has been especially noticeable since the terrorist attacks on the United States of Sept. 11, 2001, when the Saudis confronted the effects of extremism both outside and inside the kingdom.

More than 60 percent of Saudi Arabia's population is under 25, and many younger people are pressing for greater freedoms.

Doing violence to the idea...

2008-11-23T11:57:00.000-08:00

...of education, in the UK:

Secondary schools are being fined millions of pounds a year for expelling violent and abusive pupils.

....Chris Keates, the general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said: "Clawing back per pupil funding is understandable, as this funding should follow the child.

"What is totally unacceptable is this removal of additional money, without any clear criteria. It undermines the Government's stated view that head teacher and governing bodies should be free to exclude pupils when it is necessary.

"Stopping schools from permanently excluding pupils not only puts the education of that child at risk but puts the education of other pupils at risk.

"More and more teachers are telling us that they are coming under pressure not to exclude pupils. Fining schools distorts the system and should be outlawed.

"The Government needs to launch its own inquiry, as it did with admissions, to look at which authorities are setting these arbitrary penalties."

Cafe Standards

2008-11-23T10:44:00.000-08:00

Are making the traditional French cafe a memory:

In 1960, France had 200,000 cafés, said Bernard Quartier, president of the National Federation of Cafés, Brasseries and Discotheques. Now it has fewer than 41,500, with an average of two closing every day.

Not only are the French spending less and drinking less, cutting down on the intensity and quality of the debates, but on Jan. 1, France extended its smoking ban to bars, cafés and restaurants.

Marco Mayeux, 42, the bartender of Le Relais in Paris, said the ban alone had cut his coffee and bar business by 20 percent.

"A place like mine doesn't appeal to everyone; it's very working stiff," he said.

Daniel Perrey, 57, owner of the Café du Crucifix in Crimolois, blamed social change.
People are drinking less, smoking less and spending less, and even those who drink are newly wary of the local police. President Nicolas Sarkozy has asked the police to crack down on drunken drivers.

The café, Perrey said, is a kind of public living room, especially in small towns and cities.

"We have to be very careful," he said. "If we standardize everything in France, and we study everything, and forbid everything, we destroy respect for our culture."

Barack and the Barbaric Pirates

2008-11-19T14:56:00.000-08:00

Will the new CinC take the opportunity to make his place in history alongside Thomas Jefferson:

Last night the Indian Navy Ship Tabar struck a long overdue blow for freedom of the seas by sinking a pirate mother ship in the pirate-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden. At last, the pirates will know that the hijacking party has been crashed.

....Pirate hijackings are one of the oldest forms of naval warfare. The more civil term, privateer, was used by the Continental Congress to allow designated ships to attack any British ship during the revolution. The British allowed similar activities and the French attacked both sides. The tables turned after the revolution, as the United States became a world merchant sea power and began to confront the Barbary pirates based in North Africa, specifically Tripoli. These pirates had been terrorizing the Mediterranean basin for centuries and having learned that tribute and ransom could be collected, turned it into a business. Sound familiar?

Young America was drawn into this cyclone because it had no alternative. As resentment grew in Washington, Adams, Jefferson and the Congress, construction of new ships was authorized, which were available when Algiers declared war on the US for not paying tribute. After two wars in 1801-1805 and 1815, the United States obtained freedom of access in that area.

Why this diversion into history? History is starting to repeat itself, but with much higher risk levels. No one seems to know where the ransom money is going. Since Somalia has been a longstanding supporter of Islamic terrorist activity, it seems reasonable to assume that most of this money is going to expand terrorist attacks someplace.