Posted 11:27 AM by Floyd

Ten Days Was Probably A Record Anyway

Aaron Haspel prompted one of my Januaryween resolutions: to stop making fun of morons who write letters to the editor. Then I saw today's batch of letters, on the subject of economics. I was doing fine until I came to this line:

It may be time to re-examine the so-called ``guaranteed annual wage,'' even if that really doesn't work.

This is obviously a sign that I should make fun of these idiots. Even if that doesn't really work.

Besides, I stopped myself from eating chocolate for breakfast this morning, so I'm batting .500 for the day.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: The San Jose Mercury News letters page!

I read with great interest the Mercury News roundtable with Silicon Valley industrialists (Opinion, Dec. 28) and was impressed by their insight. Research and development, innovation, retraining, stock options and new markets would create jobs for Americans. Of course, they urged government and unions to stay out of the way.

The game plan sounds feasible, but the ``new markets'' part of it worries me. What happens to the American worker when jobs go overseas and those new innovative products are made and sold in India and China? Corporations would still make big profits, and the economy would look good. But the unemployment rate would go off the charts.

"I'm worried by new markets." How can it be bad to have hundreds of millions of new customers? Even granting that jobs going overseas is a problem, what does that have to do with "new markets"?

We seem to have forgotten the lesson of Henry Ford: Pay workers enough so they can buy the product. For 75 years, labor unions and the federal government have made sure that business would protect working people with decent pay, retirement, and health benefits. Who is going to do it now?

Jack Hasling
Cupertino

Imagining that you can increase your customer base by paying your workers more is the economic equivalent of perpetual motion. (Isn't there just a tiny public good problem there? If Ford pays workers so much that they can easily afford cars, then don't Chrysler and GM also benefit, without having to pay large salaries?)

If we have forgotten this idiot myth, that is a good thing.

Discussions about globalization and the business climate have addressed the issue of jobs losses. That may be good fodder for political rhetoric, but the real issue arises from the jobs evaporation due to increased productivity, which has given us the so-called ``jobless recovery.''

It's terrible when productivity increases. Just the other day I saw some guys digging a ditch for cable wire with big machines. Break out the shovels!

And how "jobless" can the recovery be when unemployment is at 5.9%?

Since this reality is with us to stay, will it not worsen the rich-poor divide begun by President Reagan and propelled by current President Bush? We need to acknowledge that we are now reaping the benefits (?) of monopolization, merger and robotization.

RONALD REAGAN SERVES THE ROBOT OVERLORD!

How do we support our economy of consumerism when ever fewer people can afford to live here?

"I refuse to answer questions containing two or more unwarranted assumptions" -- Nero Wolfe. "Economy of consumerism" sounds suitably indignant, but doesn't America just have ... an economy? What would an "economy of non-consumerism" look like? You would go into stores and pay them not to give you things?

And how can you say that "fewer people can afford to live here" with a straight face? Is there anyone leaving the US because it's too expensive? I mean, I know Alec Baldwin threatened to leave if Bush got elected, but I don't think he had any monetary concerns.

It may be time to re-examine the so-called ``guaranteed annual wage,'' even if that really doesn't work. How about guaranteed profit-sharing and options for everyone in this evolving, monopolistic, fully-automated, greed-driven society?

Robert Daley
Campbell

We must guarantee profits for everyone! THE ROBOT OVERLORDS ARE BUILT WITH GREED CIRCUITS!

Recent letters have expressed dismay at the accelerating flow of skilled jobs overseas. Since it is the economists who have asserted that everyone benefits when production occurs where it can be done most cheaply, why not take them at their word and export the teaching of economics to India, China, Russia or wherever else large numbers of highly trained, underpaid knowledge workers reside?

[Two paragraphs of similar juvenile nonsense deleted.]

Edward P. French
Santa Cruz

Since it is doctors who assert that eating fatty food is bad for you, why not take them at their word and make them eat only lettuce?

The global economy has made national sovereignty obsolete.

Yay!

It allows corporations to relocate to the ``highest bidder.''

Yay!

Governments create laws that make it easier to attract corporations -- at the expense of the competition.

Yay!

But all good things have to come to an end. It's time for the commie mewling:

As corporations hop all over the world, always maximizing profits by decreasing human costs, eventually they will run out of countries with a lower standard of living to exploit. But continued automation will make it possible to reduce employment to a bare minimum -- wherever they may locate.

My wife is from China. Twenty-five years ago the Chinese decided they had had enough of communism, and allowed themselves to be "exploited" by foreign corporations. Now it is possible for people to have a Western lifestyle, with plenty to eat, a nice place to live, and appliances and electronics for convenience and entertainment.

When my wife was a child, before all of this "exploitation," she had a pound of meat per month and no toys.

What happens when there simply aren't enough jobs for everyone? The ``wisdom'' is that people must constantly retrain for different jobs. What happens when the jobs aren't there? Or at an unlivable wage? That is the experience many find in Silicon Valley today.

Jim Bridges
Sunnyvale

A century ago, a huge proportion of employment was agricultural. Now only a very small proportion of American labor, 1 or 2%, is farm-based.

From the point of view of a farmer in the year 1900, there are "not enough jobs for everyone". Are we all starving to death? Hardly.

Posted 9:45 PM by Floyd

Workers in Communist countries had a famous aphorism: "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." Here in America there is a similar, though friendlier, relationship between government bodies and left-wing interest groups: The pressure groups pretend to be adversarial plaintiffs, and the government pretends to defend itself.

Witness this sham that took place recently in San Francisco. The article goes back and forth in its chronology, so I will quote selectively. A San Francisco school had a student-painted mural:

The mural, called ``Different cultures united for a common cause,'' culminated a semester-long class that focused on social issues. The 15-by-15-foot scene, painted in June 2002, included a fist of power and a panther symbolizing the Black Panthers and ``justice for all people,'' said 19-year-old Reynaldo Marquez, who designed the mural during his senior year at McAteer.

The mural's completion coincided with the closing of McAteer, an under-performing school where enrollment and graduation rates had slid significantly.

The campus reopened that fall as the School of the Arts. Over the summer, parents from the relocating art school cleaned up the site and unwittingly turned the mural into a bold block of red.

Some students were allowed to paint a mural. There was no agreement as to how long the mural would stand. Sure, murals stand around for awhile, but did Marquez and company think people would still see it in the year 2052? Anyway, the school closed. Why would anyone expect that the mural would survive it?

And even if you think that the students were wronged, what possible legal recourse could they have? Could the students actually be given money because their mural was painted over? When the people who did so were not employed by the school district? Of course not! The very idea is laughable, right?

Right?

Well, there was an activist lawyer:

``Everybody was really shocked,'' said Brooke Oliver, the lawyer representing the muralists.

(Oh, come on. As if anyone gave a shit. Well, people at the School of the Arts were probably relieved that they no longer had to look at lumpenfuckingproletariat idiocy.)

And there was a school board that was happy to shovel money at their ideological pals. Deficit, schmeficit! It's not their money:

According to a district press release, the school principal ``immediately expressed remorse for the mistake.'' At Oliver's suggestion, the district looked into restoring the mural. But art conservationists for both sides determined it could not be recovered.

("Art conservationists for both sides?" This sounds like a courtroom drama gone horribly wrong:

"We need to plan the art conservationist testimony. Who have the plaintiffs got?"

"Likrensky."

"Well that's good news for us. That guy hasn't won a case in a decade. Anyone else?"

"They might have Smythe. He won't return our phone calls"

"Smythe!? David Smythe? My God. He's the Restorinator. By the time he gets done the jury will be in tears. There's only one thing to do: Get me Magnum, P.A.C.")

And so some lucky kids, a charity, some paint stores, and of course a lawyer got a big payday:

The district this week finalized a $33,000 agreement that will go toward a new mural, to a charity and to the 10 former McAteer High students and the community artist who together created the courtyard mural of the Latino labor leader.

Let's review how the loot will be split:

As a result, community muralist Antonio Chavez and the 10 former students will divvy up almost $20,000, in proportion to their roles in the art project.

I hope the kids all agree on how much work they did. I can see it now:

"Two hundred fifty? Yo bitch, I own tha mothafuckin' fist. Ain't no mothafuckin' ''united for a common cause'' wit'out no mothafuckin' black fist!"

A charity that supports single women with children will receive $1,250 of the settlement,

Where the hell did that come from? I'm drawing a blank as to how painting over a mural injured single women. "Every time revolutionary art is painted over, an angel gets a new pair of wings and is born into a nontraditional family"?

The charity was probably stuck into the settlement on a last-minute whim, to make the operation look better. I bet it was like the scene in Die Hard where the head thief pretends to be a revolutionary and agitates for the release of Asian Dawn. "I read about them in Time Magazine."

and supplies for another mural will be bought with $2,500. The remainder of the settlement will pay for the attorney's fees.

It was very polite of the Mercury News to obscure how much Brooke Olive earned for a few afternoons of indignance. I'll do the math:

Around $9500.

Oh, and the district isn't done spending tax money:

``It certainly is one of the district's top priorities to make sure we have everyone in our community understand the importance of diversity,'' said district spokeswoman Lorna Ho.

And how do we do that?

The settlement also requires the district to hold cultural sensitivity workshops and put together a plan to protect its artwork.

Add the diversity workshop scam artists to the list of people with their hands out for the district's money. They don't work for free.

The next time someone whines about how California's schools face unprecedented hardship, or how education is in crisis, remember how easy it was for the San Francisco school district to give away forty grand of taxpayers' money.

Posted 4:13 PM by Floyd

Here is a great article by ESPN's Rob Neyer about the gambling problems in the early days of baseball. Gambling was widespread and led to many fixes and accusations of fixes. The worst (but not only) incident in which players took a dive was of course the 1919 World Series.

It was in the wake of this scandal that baseball commissioner Landis instituted the lifetime ban for betting on one's own team. This is more evidence that Pete Rose can never be reinstated into baseball. One hears people complain that the Hall of Fame admits drunks, addicts, and satyrs. If drink or cocaine or skirt-chasing had led to players taking payments to lose baseball games, and then to a well-publicized rule that players who engaged in such behavior would be banned, that objection might have some basis.

(Link via the excellent Baseball Musings.)

Posted 9:27 PM by Floyd

Aaron Haspel noted that political blogs can be boring because it so easy to make fun of some moron of the opposite political persuasion. I'm certainly guilty of that as much as anyone else.

(Though I note that in the same article Haspel linked to an Indymedia review of the Return of the King. And how could he, or anyone else, resist? I (block)quote:

The Racist Tapestry of Lord of the Rings !

By Lloyd Hart

I don't imagine that it was the intention of the director or the producers of the Lord of the Rings films to paint a racist stereotypical tapestry over what could be described as a basic set of principles of humanity's behavior in the natural environment and with each other. However, the fact is that the only people of skin color in the entire three part series of films are all associated with the Dark Lord Sauron, the destruction of the earth and all of its occupants. Not to mention the elephant riding mercenaries that resemble the cultures of the Arab world as well as Africa, Persia and East Asia and the fact that the Monarch of the land of Rohan, King Théoden a white guy yelled out "You great warriors of the West" in the final part of his speech to rouse the troops into battle in the third film.

In these times when a homicidal maniac from Texas (the Texas capital punishment policy under Bush) has stolen the American throne and called for a "crusade" against the "evil doers" in nations that white people have been invading, terrorizing, raping and pillaging in for 5000 years with zero provocation, I think we could manage some cultural sensitivity in our popular culture which one must acknowledge has a powerful propaganda affect on the general population that participates in it.

Can you imagine how people of skin color, of Persian, Arab and East Asian ethnic background feel when they come out of these films where all the heroes are white and all the "evil doers" are of dark skin. Being married to an Asian American I watch people disregard my wife everyday while regarding me, simply because of her skin color. Being part of a European family that has lived on the North American continent for 400 years I've been lucky enough to gain perspective that when you create an evil character (Uruk-hai) that resembles native Americans as they have done in the Lord of the Rings films a great deal of cultural and racial alienation will occur.

A brief UL of the various idiocies committed by Hart:

• Hart assumes that his view of race holds true anywhere in the world. A black person from Nigeria who saw the orcs (one of whom, I think Shagrat, is a dead ringer for John Kerry), or the leftover-from-a-Mystery-Science-Theater-3000-movie Uruk-Hai, would never in a million years see them as Negro. There are other features that people pay attention to besides lily-white-skin or the lack thereof.
  
  
• Elephants were used in battle by Semitic North Africans and by Greeks, and said elephants are now extinct, so it's hard for someone in an elephant-dwelling land to be insulted by the RotK villains' usage of these creatures.
  
  
• White people did not invade and pillage other countries until about 2000 years ago, and until about 400 years ago the targets of "white agression" gave as good as they got. I guess you could think that white people have been imperialists for five millenia if you thought that the Indo-Iranian Aryans who conquered India were white supermen -- another data point on the recent trend of cohabitation between commies and nazis.
  
  
• Hart commands the following amazing insight into American history and politics: Believes that capital punishment began in Texas with the election of George Bush as governor in 1995; thinks that the presidency is a throne.
  
  
• He then brags about how he's some kind of Son of the American Revolution or something. "People of color are alienated, and as a white person from a good family I have special insight as to why that is so."
  
  
• Finally he whines about how people disregard his wife because she's Asian. Dude, do you know any white people, besides the other spoiled rich kids at your commie hangouts? Any white man who sees an Asian woman and a white man is not going to be disregarding the Asian woman.
  

Anyway.)

Now and again I read someone in the newspaper who is pretty much an idiot. And yes, making fun of him is rather like shooting fish in a barrel. My excuse for doing so is that I am irritated that a person can be pretty much non-functional from the neck up and still receive a platform from which to hector tens of thousands of people.

Was there a specific instance of this recently, you ask? Oh mais oui!

Joe Rodriguez is a person for whom about six trees and three squid are killed every week to provide grist for his musings. He writes in the San Jose Mercury News, and this column is a typical example of his output:

The $10-an-hour solution
AMERICANS WON'T DO CERTAIN JOBS? THEY WOULD IF THE PAY WENT UP AND THERE WAS A CRACKDOWN ON HIRING ILLEGALS
By Joe Rodriguez
Mercury News

The caller said he was ``just an ordinary, moderate Republican.'' He was offended by illegal immigrants who want drivers' licenses, worried about good American jobs gone bad, and disappointed over the new talk about cutting a new immigration deal with Mexico.

Here was a guy who, like millions of ordinary Americans, sensibly touched on one of the basic but least talked about arguments against massive immigration. What offended him most was the claim that Americans don't want to do certain jobs. They will, he said, but at certain wages.

...

It's an appealing thought, isn't it? If only we got rid of the undocumented workers and drastically reduced the number of legal immigrants, unskilled but necessary jobs like mopping floors and digging trenches would pay decently again. Unemployed Americans would rush into the better ones, and we could bring in temporary guest workers for the rest.

This economic answer is a delusion. For starters, Americans are becoming better educated and more middle class. The population, in general, is aging rapidly. We will eventually become like the Japanese and Germans; we won't want menial jobs at any wage, so we'll have to import unskilled workers in large numbers. The question then will be whether they should have a chance at citizenship or remain second-class residents.

...

So here are just two modest proposals of my own to help enforce a new, Republican-driven immigration policy:

• Raise the national, minimum wage above $10 an hour because employers won't do it on their own. The goal should be decent pay and basic benefits for Americans in unskilled jobs, as well as a more stable workforce for their employers.

• Make the recruitment and hiring of illegal immigrants a felony. If you deny any American a job opportunity by breaking immigration laws, you should go to prison. That goes for corporate CEOs and middle-class couples who hire undocumented nannies, too.

Rodriguez' ignorance of basic economics is just amazing. If he was as ignorant of gravity he would lay awake at nights worrying that he might fall up instead of down. People are paid what their work is worth. If someone is making six bucks an hour washing dishes, increasing the minimum wage to ten bucks an hour is not going to give him a raise. It's going to outlaw his job.

Even more offensive is his call to make hiring an illegal immigrant a crime on a par with rape or manslaughter. It's an obvious sign of rhetorical and policy incompetence: "Crimes should be considered serious when they are ... stuff I don't like!" Rodriguez doesn't stop to think about what would happen to people who looked and acted foreign: Employers would fear that their documents were forged and would refuse to hire them.

How can you employ a columnist who has never heard of unintended consquences? Do Mercury News journalists know all twenty-six letters of the alphabet?

Posted 2:26 PM by Floyd

You Don't Say

I followed a link from Drudge to this penetrating article in the Hollywood Reporter:

WGA's Riskin resigns presidency following report

By Peter Kiefer and Jesse Hiestand

On the heels of a report that found her ineligible to hold office, WGA west president Victoria Riskin resigned as president of guild on Tuesday morning. Riskin has been replaced by WGA west vp Charles Holland effective immediately.

...

Why was Riskin found ineligible? The article doesn't say!

Note that two people worked on this five-paragraph press release / whitewash. Also note that there is a box under the article which says "Want to use this article? Click here for options!" Use the article for what? A supply of capital V's and W's?

If you actually care about what the deal was with Riskin, go to flyover country. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune explains the flap in the first three paragraphs of its article on the story:

The head of the union representing Hollywood screenwriters resigned Tuesday after an investigator determined she was ineligible to hold office because her guild membership had lapsed.

Victoria Riskin, president of the Writers Guild of America's Western branch, stepped down and was replaced by union vice president Charles Holland, who will serve the remainder of Riskin's two-year term, which runs through 2005.

Stanford law professor William B. Gould IV, hired by the guild to review the matter, had reported to the union's board Monday that Riskin did not do enough paid writing work to maintain her membership when she was elected to a second term last September.

Posted 11:01 AM by Floyd

Author Michael Crichton has given many wonderful speeches lately, and the text of one is posted on John Ellis' blog. Crichton criticizes speculation in the media, and notes the mysterious authority that the media enjoys:

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

There is one other entity that receives the same sort of undeserved respect, and that is the state. As James Donald once said:

[P]eople in the biomedical industry hold the FDA in utter
contempt. I find it interesting that people generally believe that
those government institutions that they have to deal with heavily are
corrupt and grossly incompetent, but that all other government
institutions, with which they are less familiar, are just fine.

Posted 8:53 AM by Floyd

The latest pathetic instance of anti-gun scholarship, found in the comments of a Tim Blair post:

The Effects of Gun Prevalence on Burglary: Deterrence vs Inducement
Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig
The proposition that widespread gun ownership serves as a deterrent to residential burglary is widely touted by advocates, but the evidence is weak, consisting of anecdotes, interviews with burglars, casual comparisons with other countries, and the like. A more systematic exploration requires data on local rates of gun ownership and of residential burglary, and such data have only recently become available. In this paper we exploit a new well-validated proxy for local gun-ownership prevalence -- the proportion of suicides that involve firearms -- together with newly available geo-coded data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, to produce the first systematic estimates of the net effects of gun prevalence on residential burglary patterns.

The proportion of suicides that involves firearms is a proxy for gun ownership? With that sort of attitude toward statistics, you could prove anything you wanted to. As another commenter pointed out,

I remember that study (or one similar to it) in which the suicide proxy was used. Of course, it created widely erratic swings because certain areas where gun ownership is hugely common have such a low incidence of suicide (and crime in general) as to make the study worthless.

Also note that gun suicides are not always reliably reported. They are sometimes hushed up as "accidents."

Posted 9:05 AM by Floyd

I asked my friend Dave, I asked my friend Evan, they said it was fhqwhgads

Some fun links for you Homestar Runner fans:

• The Wikipedia entry on Homestar Runner. Has lots of information on each character and the important features of the comic.
  
  
• The Great H*R Fan Resource, which includes a comprehensive list of all Easter eggs in Strong Bad emails, toons, and the website. For example, in the Trogdor email, try clicking on the R in Strong Mad's carving.
  

Posted 12:47 PM by Floyd

A considerable proportion of propaganda for the regulatory welfare state consists of taking credit for advances made possible by capitalism and technology. Here is an example, from today's San Jose Mercury News:

Rules save lives

Last month saw a devastating earthquake in Iran, similar to one not too long ago in Turkey. In stark contrast, one of the same magnitude in California had comparatively little loss. It is at times like these that Americans should give thanks for all those ``onerous regulations'' and inspections that so many people want to abolish.

David Porter
Mountain View

Earthquakes kill a thousand times more people in Turkey or Iran than America because America is a wealthy country with secure property rights. When a home is constructed in America, it will be sold to someone who views his dwelling as a significant long-term investment. Furthermore the house is likely to be financed by a decades-long mortgage. Of course houses (and office buildings) are going to be constructed earthquake-safe. Why would anyone spend half a million dollars for a California lot, and then another several hundred thousand dollars to construct a dwelling, without taking some basic and relatively inexpensive precautions to make sure that the structure will still be standing when the next big earthquake comes along? Why would a mortgage financier lend a huge sum of money to a home buyer without making sure that the collateral is secure?

I was reminded of this just a few weeks ago, when my mortgage company CitiMortgage did not receive my home insurance renewal because of a clerical error. CitiMortgage promptly informed me that if I did not renew my insurance, I would be purchasing insurance from them.