Posted 11:42 AM by Floyd

A few weeks ago I wrote a satirical post in which I maintained that marriage must be protected from gay people, in order to protect the dignity and sanctity of the institution as it currently exists in this country -- for examples, reality TV shows that pay people to get married, and Las Vegas' drive-through wedding chapels. As Andrew Sullivan reports, advice columnist Dan Savage made the same point -- though not by blogging, but by getting married:

Amy Jenniges lives with her girlfriend, Sonia, and I live with my boyfriend, Terry. Last Friday I accompanied Amy and Sonia to room 403, the licensing division, at the King County Administration Building. When Amy and Sonia asked the clerk for a marriage license, the clerk turned white. You could see, "Oh my God, the gay activists are here!" running through her head. County clerks in the marriage license office had been warned to expect gay couples sooner or later, but I guess this particular clerk didn't expect us to show up five minutes before closing on Friday.

The clerk called over her manager, a nice older white man, who explained that Amy and Sonia couldn't have a marriage license. So I asked if Amy and I could have one--even though I'm gay and live with my boyfriend, and Amy's a lesbian and lives with her girlfriend. We emphasized to the clerk and her manager that Amy and I don't live together, we don't love each other, we don't plan to have kids together, and we're going to go on living and sleeping with our same-sex partners after we get married. So could we still get a marriage license?
"Sure," the license-department manager said, "If you've got $54, you can have a marriage license."

...

Posted 11:26 AM by Floyd

Life Imitating Art Department

Here is an Onion "news article" from a few weeks back:

BAGHDAD — Officials overseeing Saddam Hussein told reporters Monday that the detained former Iraqi leader rules over his cell "with an iron fist."

"Saddam is a very powerful man with a larger-than-life presence, and when he's in that cell, there's no mistaking who's in charge," said a special-forces officer who commands the watch of Hussein at an undisclosed location in Iraq. "We gave Saddam a small bag of nuts. While he was asleep, the rats got into the nuts and ate some of them. In retaliation, Saddam caught one of the rats' young, tortured it, and left it strapped to the wall with dental floss for days. Then, after it was dead, he stuffed its severed head with nuts and paraded it around the cell to warn the other rats."

"But Saddam will also be kind to the vermin and occasionally toss them an almond to fight over," the officer said. "In this way, he teaches the rats both to love and to fear him."

According to a CIA official, the dictator "personally monitors" every inch of his 12'x11' cell.

...

Today Tim Blair linked to a preview of a documentary on Australian jihadist David Hicks:

After watching this program Hicks, the man, leaves me cold. It will sound silly, but it repulses me to learn, from a former Guantanamo Bay inmate, that Hicks passes the time by catching mice and hanging them.

Posted 4:13 PM by Floyd

Here, in a nutshell, is everything that is wrong with the United Nations:

The United Nations Security Council voted late yesterday to blame Basque militants from the ETA group for the attacks.

All the UN's faults are on display: Insouciance, irrelevance, racism, stupidity. Also the UN is a democracy. A commonly cited fault of democracy is that the majority can vote to loot the minority; another is that a legislature imagines that it can determine the answer to any question by majority vote. Congratulations, UN Security Council; you're the 21st century analogue of the Indiana state house that in 1897 attempted to legislate the value of pi.

(Australian News link via Tim Blair.)

Posted 3:42 PM by Floyd

Now that the weather in the Bay Area is so nice, why are people still sitting inside writing letters to the San Jose Mercury News?

Offshore justice

Scott Peterson's attorney, Mark Geragos, is dissatisfied with the jury pool in San Mateo County (Page 1B, March 10). Maybe the judge should follow the example of many of our tech companies and ``outsource'' the jury. The trial could be held in Redwood City or Modesto and beamed via closed circuit TV to a jury in India. With that country's large population, perhaps it could find 12 people who speak English and have never heard of Scott Peterson.

Calvin Carter
Half Moon Bay

Maybe we could outsource the San Jose Mercury News letter page. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Calvin Carter. It tolls for thee!

Posted 4:04 PM by Floyd

Say What?

I haven't posted much this week because I've been fighting off a cold. Also I have had to spend a lot of time at home waiting for Comcast to come make my cable internet work. (Apoplectic veins-popping-out-of-head rant to follow.)

But I'm not the only one who's having trouble coming up with good blog output. What on earth possessed Stephen Green to write this?

The election hasn't even been held yet, and already Vladimir Putin has named his new cabinet:
Putin retained the cabinet's strongest advocates of market reforms and left the military and internal-security forces in the hands of fellow KGB alumni. He removed entrenched ministers left from Boris Yeltsin's presidency in favor of his own loyalists and installed a close aide in the office of the new prime minister.

If you ask me, the cabinet sounds pretty damn good. Let me explain.

If Russia is ever going to become a fully modern nation -- and let's hope like hell it does -- it's going to need two things:
1) More real economic freedom.

2) A strong hand to keep everything from blowing up before freedom sinks in.

And don't let the KGB bogeyman scare you. Back in the bad old days, it was Leonid Brezhnev's KBG who tried to put Mikhail Gorbachev in power. They failed on the first attempt -- and we got the brief gerontocracy of Konstantin Chernyenko. After he died, the KGB finally got their man as General Secretary.

And why would the KGB want Gorby? He wasn't a spook -- he was an old party hack best known for some minor agricultural reforms. And that's exactly why they wanted him.

The KGB, better than any other body in the old USSR, knew that reform was needed if the country was going to survive. They saw the future -- that was their job, after all -- and it was bleak. Old Splotchy looked like the best bet to reform the government enough to survive, but not so much that the Party would fall from power.

The fact that they ended up wrong on both counts doesn't change the fact that the KGB knew the value of reform.

So when you see that Putin -- himself an old KGB hand -- has appointed more of his old cronies to power, you might breathe a small sigh of relief. We might not get along with them very well, we might have good reason to distrust them, but in many ways they're the best hope Russia has right now.

" A strong hand to keep everything from blowing up before freedom sinks in." Isn't it the strong hand that usually keeps freedom from sinking in? I mean, the world is not exactly overflowing with examples of countries liberalized by their secret police.

Stephen thinks that Russia needs a firm hand to implement reform. But there are different kinds of firmness. There's Bill Clinton firm, where you are in support of free trade, even though many in your party want protectionist exceptions. There's George Bush firm, where you implement the foreign policy you think best no matter how much France and Germany and a bunch of intellectuals scream and fling their feces.

And then there's the KGB's own kind of firmness, which is not at all the same thing. I suppose when harnessed in the service of economic liberty, the "strong hand" of the KGB will consist of throwing people in the Lubyanka when they complain about the price of bread, and giving those who think that telecommunications should not be privatized a one-way ticket to a Siberian slave labor camp.

As for his evidence, citing the KGB's support of Gorbachev, it's hard to imagine anything that could be more tenuous and still exist. So the KGB supported Gorbachev? What choice did they have, faced with the stern menace of Ronald Reagan and having suffered through a succession of aged non-entities? Did the KGB really expect that Gorbachev would hold parliamentary elections free to any political party? That he would let Eastern Europe detach itself from the Warsaw pact?

Stephen wasn't the only blogospheric superstar to hit a false note today. Here is a post by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds on congressional indecency hearings:

VARIOUS PEOPLE seem to be portraying controls on broadcast indecency as some sort of Republican plot. This story would seem to offer a corrective:

Senate Panel Votes to Raise Indecency Fine, Put Limits on Violence: The Senate Commerce Committee voted 23-0 today to approve legislation that would raise fines for indecent broadcasts to as much as $500,000 and for the first time in history could subject violent TV programming whether originating on broadcast, basic cable or satellite TV channels to the same punishment.

Sounds pretty bipartisan to me -- unanimous. (Then, of course, there's Kerry's support for the dropping of Howard Stern's show.) But here's the really interesting bit:

At today's vote, Sen. Hollings also introduced an amendment that would have required cable operators to offer their programming a la carte, allowing consumers to buy and pay for only the programming they want. But he withdrew the measure after it became clear that he didn't have the votes to support it.

It seems to me that this proposal would answer any complaints (except with regard to labelling, I guess) that any parent could have about indecent programming on cable -- you don't want the channel, don't buy it. The cable industry naturally opposes this -- bundling the Celebrity Underwater Kite-Flying Channel with HBO is how they fleece consumers make a lot of their money -- but I hope that it's an idea that will come back. (And I can only attribute Hollings' failure to get enough votes to undue influence on the part of the cable industry, as I can't imagine any Senator's constituents opposing this idea.)

Yes, it's rare for me to praise Fritz, but this looks like a good idea to me.

...

Bundling, and other "fleecings" such as loss leaders and differential pricing, are techniques used by pretty much every commercial enterprise in existence. Shouldn't cable companies be allowed to set their prices and services as they see fit?

Can you imagine what would happen if Congress wantonly interfered in the pricing decisions of private enterprises? How about if Congress implemented the "good idea" that airline tickets prices should be proportional to the distance travelled? (Result: immediate bankruptcy of the airline industry.) Maybe we should get the feds involved in prescription drug prices. How much does it cost a pharmaceutical company to make one a pill? Pennies! Drug prices are a scandal! They should be lowered by fiat! (Result: no way for drug companies to recoup research costs; patients become familiar with herbal remedies.)

Glenn updated his post with reader discussions. There were arguments over whether bundling is a good idea, but nowhere did Reynolds address the issue as to whether Congress should get involved with private companies' rate charges.

I note that both Stephen (in Colorado) and Glenn (in Tennessee) have had warm spring weather, just like us out here in California. Maybe one shouldn't expect good blogging on the first week of nice weather in spring.

Posted 5:23 PM by Floyd

Best lunatic comment ever, from Vodkapundit:

(Take a deep, deep breath.)

While Der ReichFrau Amerikaner who is simul also Nein-ReichFrau Amerikaner Hillary, and hosstud Bill, are deemed to control the coffers of the Democratic Party, I am NOT convinced Hillary will accept being VPOTUS with Kerry at this time - for one, the Clintons and Clinton Left still need W and the GOP to finish the US's WOT against rogue states; and second, if as the LeftNet indicates the Left in general desires Socialism in America, and Socialist AMerica under [Socialist] OWG by 2015-2020, which I believe for the Clintons is synonymous with saying COMMUNISM, a COMMUNIST-CONTROLLED AMRIKA, and a COMMUNIST WORLD ORDER by 2015-2020, then each and every non-Clinton US POTUS administartion, Democrat or Republican or Independent/non-aligned, is EXPENDABLE, ie MUST FAIL FOR THE SAKE OF COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM! The Clintons have only 2-3 US Presidential-specific tenures to essentially DEGRADE and DESTROY, IFF OUTLAW, free, Westernist, and Capitalist America as we know it! Radical Islamism, like Islamofascism, may possibly be nothing more than post-Cold War proxies for Cold War Communist armies, and they may merely a form of theo- or faith-based Socialism - be that as it may, or may NOT be, I sincerely doubt that as SECULARISTS OR SECULARIST ABSOLUTISTS, DEDICATED COMMUNISTS or COMMAND SOCIALISTS such as the Clintons and their cabal will long accept or tolerate any and all non-secular, albeit SOCIALIST, fractions. While for the time being fascist, communist, and lessor fractions work together in the UNITARY-MONOLITHIC cause of SAVING SOCIALISM, in the end only one can dominate, and the Clintons intend that to be COMMUNISM! THe Bush Republican WAR economy may be up and running comparative to all other world economies, but Bush and the successful GOP-Right themselves ARE STILL FAR FROM BEING SUFFICIENTLY WEAK LET ALONE THREATENED WITH POLITICAL-SOCIETAL DESTRUCTION - this is where allegedly anti-US "IMPERIALIST" GLOBAL LIMITED WARS [North Korea, Taiwan, Iran, etc.], American-specific Anti-Rightist Left-controlled "Rightist" NEOCONSERVATIVES-UNITARIANS, anti-US EUROS and the UNO, and NATIONALLY DESTRUCTIVE, "FAILED", US Presidencies come in! THE COMMUNIST CLINTONS LOSE NOTHING BY WORKING FOR BOTH A "NARROW" BUSH 2004 ELECTION WIN, vis-a-via PC ANTI-REPUBLICAN NATIONAL MANDATE, and probably under the guise of being achieved despite a SPLIT DEM TICKET; OR BY PC WORKING TO UNDERMINE OR ASSURE A "FAILED", AND NATIONALLY-GEOPOLITICALLY CONTROVERSIAL/
DESTRUCTIVE, DEMOCRAT PRESIDENCY! While former POTUS candidate John Edwards, of all the former Democrat 9, is Kerry's likely BEST ANTI-CLINTON bet, "Madman" or "Crazy" Centrist Howard Dean is more ideal for the Clintons cause because they get BOTH ANOTHER FAILED LIBERAL DEMOCRAT [ANTI-JIMMY CARTER CARTERISM] AND AN AMERICAN CENTRIST POTUS-WANNABE IMAGED AS TOO PSYCHOLOGICALLY UNSTABLE TO BE TRUSTED WITH ANYTHING RESEMBLING NATIONAL, GEOPOLITICAL, OR UNIPOLAR LEADERSHIP! I am anticipating the Clintons and Clinton Left will IFF during a Bush second term, and to include their INTERNATIONAL LEFTIST-SOCIALIST ALLIES, to immediately but PC "PUSH" the US INTO WAGING GLOBAL LIMITED WAR AGAINST NORTH KOREA AND OR IRAN, since any regional or geopolitical crises involving these two states will automatically, INTENTIONALLY OR UNINTENTIONALLY, involve NUCLEAR-ARMED RUSSIA ANDOR CHINA IN THE TOTAL EQUATION! I AM CONVINCED NONE OF THE COMMUNIST BUT PC CLINTONS LIKELY WILL EVER RUN FOR POTUS UNLESS THEY ARE ASSURED OF THE OUTCOME SINCE THE FAILED LEFT NO LONGER CARES ABOUT DIFFERENTIALLY OR COMPETITIVELY PROVING THE SUPERIORITY OF LEFTISM-SOCIALISM VERSUS RIGHTISM-CAPITALISM, BUT NOW DESIRES UNILATERAL AND UNCONDITIONAL STATE-PROTECTION OF ITS AGENDAS WITHOUT IDEALLY HAVING TO PROVE ANYTHING TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, NO AMERICAN SHOULD BE SURPRISED THAT CONSPIRACY, ASSASSINATION, MALICE, BRIBERY,................ELECTION FRAUD IS NOW THE FAILED LEFT'S METHODS OF CHOICE! Remember, its owg by 2015-2020, and America's GDP to GO DOWN. or stay leveled at, circa $35.0T, by 2050! HILLARY IS WAITING FOR WAR, AND FOR US BODYBAGS TO GO UP - ONLY the Failed Left has both everything to GAIN, and everything to LOSE, BY SUCCESS OR FAILURE TO [FORCIBLY] IMPOSE SOCIALISM AND ANTI-SOVEREIGN OWG ON HYPERPOWER AMERICA!?

Posted 10:38 AM by Floyd

Most non-Californians have an unrealistic picture of the Golden State as having wonderful sunny weather all the time, due to popularization of Southern California beach culture. Certainly Los Angeles has fine warm weather the year round. (Though perhaps a bit too warm for some tastes; when I visited Anaheim in the summer of 2000 the temperature was 95 degrees during the day, and there was just enough humidity to make it uncomfortable.) The low-lying inland areas such as Sacramento are even hotter, with typical summer temperatures in the high 90's or 100's. And of course the desert, most infamously Death Valley, is hellish. (The average high in Death Valley in July is 115 degrees.)

The San Francisco Bay Area has a more moderate clime -- though really there is no one "Bay Area" clime. In the areas near the Bay but removed from the coast (which includes Silicon Valley and many East and North Bay cities), November through March is the rainy season, with highs in the 50s (when raining) and 60s (when clear). Summers are hot (80's to high 90's) and bone-dry -- in many years there is no precipitation for six or seven months. The inland areas (Napa, Livermore) are hotter in the summer, cooler in the winter.

San Francisco itself has beastly weather. In the winter it is cool and wet, and in the summer it is cool and foggy. In 2001 my wife Sherry's mother came from China to stay with us for six months. On the Fourth of July we headed north to show her the Golden Gate bridge. It was 85 degrees at my house -- and our weather in the hills is usually 5 to 10 degrees cooler than that of Silicon Valley below us. When we got to the Golden Gate it was 58, and I damn near froze. I had to buy a long sleeved shirt from a souvenir shop to keep warm.

Most of the coast is like this, from Santa Maria (an hour or so north of Santa Monica) through Morro Bay, Big Sur, Monterey, Half Moon Bay, Pacifica, and the whole coastline north of SF from Marin County to the Oregon border. If you were transported to a random California coastal location in July, it's likely that you would not be seized with the urge to surf, or ogle blondes, or drink beer. You would want to sue the Beach Boys for fraud and misrepresentation.

There is one exception, and that is Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz sits in the middle of the north end of the Monterey Bay, and is far enough from the open Pacific that it does not suffer from the usual coastal weather pattern. Santa Cruz is warm and sunny in the summer; without it Bay Area residents would have to board a plane to get to a nice beach. An added attraction is that there is a city to go along with the beaches. The East Bay city of Berkeley is famous for its loopiness, but Santa Cruz is equally weird. It has a vibrant and funky downtown, and you never know what you will see there. Last year I saw a man playing a theramin. On several of my visits last year I saw a bizarre character who wore glittery costumes and makeup and would play an accordian next to a makeshift disco ball that displayed light patterns on the sidewalk.

Yesterday was a very warm day (a record high of 81 according to weather.com), so Sherry and I drove down the coast to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. This is a little amusement park about a half mile from downtown, with rides (including the Big Dipper roller coaster, which seventy-five years ago was one of the best roller coasters in the country), carnival game booths, food, and a huge room full of classic video games. The place is kind of tacky -- locals invariably loathe it because they worked there in hot fry kitchens when they were teenagers -- but I like it because you can lay on the beach, drink an occasional Diet Coke, and play classic games like Space Duel and Berzerk.

Posted 12:27 PM by Floyd

An issue of importance to the tech industry is whether stock options granted to employees should be recorded as expenses -- the current legal position is that they are not expenses, though some companies such as Microsoft have chosen to expense them voluntarily. Today in the San Jose Mercury News opinion page, three people wrote letters advocating that stock options be expensed. If these are the best arguments that the pro-expense side can muster -- and they do seem fairly typical of what I have seen elsewhere -- then it would appear that the pro-expense faction has a very poor case.

The commentary on stock option accounting by executives at Intel, Cisco and Sun (Opinion, March 1) principally justified its arguments on the basis that these companies offer ``broad-based'' stock option plans. But no description of how these plans are broad-based was provided. If those plans are like most in the Valley, stock option grants are extremely skewed, as a percentage of base salary, toward the top level executives.

Perhaps a law needs to be passed to force companies to really offer ``broad-based'' stock option plans in return for an exemption from stock option expensing. One way to do that is to require that a 401(k)-type discrimination test, applied to stock option plans, be met (ratio of stock options granted to base salary for the higher paid group cannot be different by a fixed amount from the same ratio for the lower paid group). The public should favor this law, as it would perceive it to provide for a more equitable allocation of option grants between all classes of employees.

Bob Roston
San Mateo

The debate over stock options concerns what large corporations report to the owners of their stock. Whining about rich people in this context is silly. Is there some accounting scheme under which corporate executives would not make vastly more money than ordinary employees?

So Roston wants to make expensing of stock options conditional upon implementation of various reforms advocated in Das Capital. Well that is exactly what I want as an individual investor! I can compare companies ABC and XYZ, and purchase ABC because XYZ's financials are inferior. Later I find out that XYZ had different accounting standards than ABC, because XYZ did not believe that it was as important to retain receptionists as it was to keep their CTO.

The arguments against expensing stock options by CEOs Craig Barrett, John Chambers and Scott McNealy (Opinion, March 1) were all too predictable.

Nobody can deny that stock options are a valued form of compensation. As a form of compensation, with a real cost to companies, they should show up as an expense on the income statement, just like salaries.

Unfortunately, the current accounting for stock options hides their cost, giving investors the illusion that many companies, particularly tech companies, are more profitable than they really are. Of course, to a CEO, stock options are the next best thing to a free lunch. They provide the perfect vehicle for companies to pay (and often wildly overpay) their CEO, the board, the senior staff, and regular employees without the real cost of doing so showing up on the income statement.

Eugene Shekita
San Jose

Certainly stock option grants are valuable forms of compensation. But are they forms of compensation which represent expenses for the company? The one does not necessarily imply the other. Consider that my employer recently named a "Quality Employee" of the year. This was compensation -- the employee was certainly gratified to be recognized as a key performer -- but it did not cost the company money.

Microsoft employees enjoy the benefit of discounts on Microsoft software. This is a form of compensation, but I would be very surprised if it appeared on Microsoft's books.

Shekita's assertion that options have a "real cost to companies" is the exact opposite of the truth. I am due to vest options next month. Let's say that I exercise 1000 options at $3 each. I will write a check to my employer for $3000. How is this a cost? Option grants affect shareholders by diluting their holdings, and shareholders are not informed as to the extent of the dilution by reading a balance sheet that shows increased expenses.

Craig Barrett, John Chambers and Scott McNealy make the mistake of equating options with employee ownership. Options, in fact, are not a form of ownership. Owners have real assets at risk. Those with options only exercise them if and when the stock value goes up. Often, they only own the stock momentarily on the day they cash out. And if the stock value goes down, options holders can walk away having lost nothing.

Options create a distorted incentive to boost stock price in the short-term by any means, legal or otherwise. Genuine employee ownership, on the other hand, creates incentives to build long-term value in ways that are good for employees, companies, and the broader community.

David Smathers
San Jose

It is true that corporate employees are free to sell their options. But they are also free to sell anything else that they own. A homeowner is free to sell his house whenever he feels like it; does that mean that public policy designed to promote individual home ownership is a fraud?

Now it is true that stock option grants allow employees to choose a time when they can buy and sell their stock. But how is that significantly different from me deciding to sell other stock that I own because I think it is at a high? And short-term gains are taxed more heavily than long-term gains, so employees have an incentive to acquire and hold their stock, rather than make a quick sale.

Smathers says that stock options encourage their holders to "boost stock price in the short-term by any means, legal or otherwise." This is true, but hardly profound. Any other metric of performance would encourage short-term manipulation of that metric. We focus on the short-term because it is hard to predict the long-term. (It's a good thing, in this context, that option grant holders can choose when to exercise their options. If they could cash in only on a specified date, there would be more incentive to manipulate the stock price.)