BlakeBlog

The Copenhagen Treaty: A Powerful Warning

Latin Kidnappings Come to San Jose

Already a popular pastime throughout Latin America, and growing in popularity in the Southwest US border states, kidnapping ordinary people for small amounts of money seems to have arrived in San Jose. In this specific case it seems that the kidnappers weren't that good at it, as they reportedly didn't get any money yet they released the kidnapped.

Let's hope that the San Jose PD are able to nip this in the bud, as it's extremely corrosive to the social compact. Remember, don't run around life in Condition White.

Folks Know the Stench of Death

Here's the money quote from a recent AP story about the June sales of Ford, GM, and Chrysler vehicles:

Ford is the sole U.S. automaker to avoid bankruptcy protection and it's the only one not receiving government loans to keep from running out of money.

Bankruptcy is unnerving enough, but buying vehicles from a company that's owned and, effectively, governed by D.C. bureaucrats is something most folks just don't want to deal with. Sure, the government will guarantee the warranty on that new GM vehicle, but expect about as much service as you get from the IRS, Medicare, et al.

People are voting with their wallets, and Ford is being rewarded for standing up to government pressure. I'm glad to see there's some common sense left out there.

Shoreline Sheep

From the San Jose Mercury News, June 4th:

In e-mails and phone calls to the Mercury News this week, more than 20 people who said they attended the KISS-FM Old School Fiesta Concert on Saturday criticized Shoreline security for not more closely examining their bags or not patting them down in a search for weapons.

Six people were stabbed and there were numerous fights during the concert, which ended 15 minutes early. [...]

Aaron Siuda, a Live Nation spokesman, reissued the same one-paragraph statement released Monday, assuring people that the company takes security very seriously and blamed a few "irresponsible patrons" for "isolated fights" Saturday night.

But that kind of response doesn't satisfy Ric Mora, 54, of San Jose. He said he left the concert two hours early when some people started throwing chairs.

"I thought they would hit my wife," said Mora, who added he would prefer Shoreline use wands to check everyone who enters like at events at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton. [...]

According to Mountain View police spokeswoman Liz Wylie, [...] "But these were not your average people. We believe this was between gangs and they were looking to fight, no matter what."

So, let's see: A bunch of folks complain that security didn't strip search everyone, yet most of the violence was from fist fights and throwing chairs. The strip searches wouldn't have prevented any of the violence, but it sure would have been another erosion of everyone's liberty. Ben Franklin ("They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.") is right once again.

So Much for Saving Money

One of the fancy Philips Marathon CFL bulbs I installed in my office in February just went pop. So much for the "seven year life" that Philips claims. The warranty requires that I send the old bulb in, along with the receipt (which I do still have) and the proof of purchase (which of course I recycled back in February).

I guess I could buy another bulb and send it's proof of purchase in with the dead bulb. That way I'd have a spare on hand (which seems necessary since I now have my doubts about their reliability), but sending the dead bulb in to Philips costs nearly as much as a whole new bulb. Frustrating.

Response to Fisher's "Too Hard on AIG?"

Here's the email I sent to Patty Fisher, a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, in response to her column "Too Hard on AIG?"

Dear Ms. Fisher,

Your column entitled "Too Hard on AIG?" contains quite a few dubious comments. For example, you trot out the fact that John Chambers makes 861 times as much money as the average janitor who works there. I'm sure that that's probably true, but show me any janitor who could do Mr. Chambers' job? Mr. Chamber's business savvy has clearly lead Cisco through good times and bad to continue to make tremendous profits for its owners—owners who include a lot of pension funds and individual investors throughout all sectors of the economy. $11.2 million in compensation seems to be generating a pretty good return for everyone.

Similarly, you paint the AIG "bonuses" as if they were given based on the financial performance that drove the division responsible for the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) into the ground. My understanding is that the "bonuses" were actually retainers used to ensure that the people with the best knowledge of how to unwind the CDOs and recover as much money as possible would stay on with AIG until AIG could finish disposing of those toxic assets and shut down the entire division. Without those "bonuses" most of those people would have moved on to other jobs long before the assets were disposed of, meaning AIG would loose the institutional knowledge necessary to recover most of that money. By investing $165M AIG was able to recover nearly $1,500,000M dollars. Now that's a good return on investment.

Then you resort to the good ol' politics of class envy by crying that you haven't had a bonus in 10 years, so by implication it's unfair that anyone else should enjoy a bonus. What poppycock. If you don't like your compensation, do something about it—even in this down economy it's easier than ever to start your own blog and monetize your knowledge capital. The writing on the wall couldn't be any more clear that your industry is declining and won't exist as we know it within a decade. Get entrepreneurial and stop playing the victim!

Finally, you mis-represent the Bush administration as being anti-regulation by forgetting that his administration proposed sweeping regulatory reform—and stronger oversight—over Fannie and Freddie (New York Times, Sept. 11, 2003) that likely would have curtailed their market-distorting lending practices. Note that Democrats, led by Rep. Barney Frank, shot this legislation down and claimed there were no problems with Fannie and Freddie's practices. (Wall Street Journal, Sept. 9, 2008)

You also trot out the old canard that Bush passed huge tax cuts for the "wealthy," but when the "wealthy" are the only ones paying taxes, who else could benefit? The bottom half of all wage earners pay only 3.6% of the entire tax bill (U.S. Treasury's Office of Tax Analysis).

I guess about the only comment we do agree on is your high esteem for Alvaro Urbina.

Sincerely,

Blake Sobiloff

The Myth of US Guns in Mexico

There's been quite a bit of press recently about the inflow of "assault rifles" and other weapons into Mexico. Unfortunately, much of it is incorrect and it presents erroneous information about both the weapons available in the US and the laws the control their sale. Most egregiously, Gen. Barry McCaffrey keeps repeating these incorrect facts in his well-publicized presentations on the criminal problems in Mexico.

First, the "assault rifles" mentioned in these articles are typically said to be AK-47s. A real AK-47 assault rifle is a fully-automatic rifle—it will keep firing as long as you press and hold the trigger back. You can't buy these over the counter in America because fully-automatic rifles are not allowed to be manufactured, imported, or sold to US civilians.

There are two key controlling Federal laws here. The first is 1934's National Firearms Act (NFA), which tightly controls civilian ownership of machine guns by requiring FBI background checks and permission of your local police chief before you're allowed to take possession. The second is 1986's Firearms Owners' Protection Act, which prohibits civilian ownership of any machine guns manufactured after 1986. These two laws combine to make it virtually impossible for anyone to sell true assault rifles to civilians.

You can buy semi-automatic rifles that look like the fully-automatic AK-47s, but they aren't the same thing. The narco terrorists aren't using these wimpy semi-automatic versions when the fully automatic ones are easily available via the global arms market and corrupt (non-US) military personnel. Sure, a small number of semi-automatics are being smuggled into Mexico, but they represent only a very small percentage of the total number of weapons flowing into the area and aren't causing the problems the Mexican people currently face.

This is in direct contrast to Gen. McCaffrey's assertion that 90% of the weapons are smuggled across the US boarder. In fact, recent testimony by the ATF on the number of weapons being smuggled into Mexico from the US places the numbers in the hundreds, and that the military hardware is coming from other sources, not the US. The number of weapons flowing into Mexico is in the hundreds of thousands, so the US is not even supplying 1% of all the weapons.

(Speaking of military hardware, similar errors of fact are made by news reports that claim that hand grenades are being bought in US gun shops and at gun shows, then being smuggled across into Mexico. Again, hand grenades are categorized as "destructive devices" by the NFA, so they're subject to the same restrictions as machine guns and require a $200 per device transfer tax even if someone passes all the other ownership hurdles. I know the narco-terrorists are flush with cash, but even they aren't going to pay $200+ a hand grenade.)

One has to wonder why such an experienced person such as Gen. McCaffrey continues to repeat such grossly incorrect information. I think he's right to be concerned about what's happening down in Mexico, but pointing a finger of blame at American guns and gun owners is both wrong and distracting from the real root causes that we should be addressing.

My Illuminating Weekend

I've had a delightfully long weekend thanks to my company's President's Day holiday, so I got some time to get to some long-ignored items on my "To Do" list around the house.

First up was replacing all the innards of the downstairs toilet, as it had started running constantly after it was flushed. I know I could have replaced just the flapper valve, but I figure that if the flapper's gone bad it probably isn't too long before other components start giving out, too. Also, there's a nice wooden shelf above the tank that I have to remove from the wall before I can take the tank lid off, and I didn't want to repeatedly hassle with that shelf, either. So, I bought a kit from OSH and replaced everything but the handle. I got the job done in a little over an hour (including taking the time to remove the silicone plug where the rear tank mounting bolt should have been) and fortunately had no leaks.

Of course, later that night the flush handle broke off. Yes, the only thing I didn't replace. [sigh] Another trip to OSH and now everything but the porcelain is new and working well.

Now on to lights. Over the past week or so I've noticed that several light bulbs around the house have gone out. It must be the colder, winter weather. With the crazy economic actions going on at both the Federal and state level, I'm convinced that not only will interest rates continue to climb, but all sorts of new taxes are going to sprout up to take even larger chunks of my already decimated paycheck. As a result, I re-evaluated where we have incandescent lights to see if I can replace them with some CFLs and save some money over the long haul.

Many of the lights in the house are halogen or specialty, small-base bulbs that don't have CFL equivalents. However, I identified seven lights that get frequent use and could benefit from the switch: The front porch light, a floor lamp in the great room, the hanging lamp over the dining room table, the living room table lamp, and the three in-ceiling floods above my desk in my office. This time I went to Home Depot to buy the bulbs, as they have a better selection than OSH. $50 dollars later and I'm set with CFLs for all those locations. The front porch can get by with an old Ikea CFL I found kicking around in the lightbulb box, but the rest are new bulbs, including a dimmable one for the dining room.

The expensive ones were the three R30-style in-ceiling ones above my home office desk: $12 each for the Philips Marathon Classic 65s. They're dimmable, and they can dim to my preferred lighting level without flickering or buzzing, but like the CFLs of old they take a few seconds to come up to full brilliance. They're pretty cold-colored, but I guess it compliments the cold cathode light from my LCD monitors.

The dimmable 90 watt CFL for the dining room was from ecosmart, who don't seem to have a website. I have no complaints so far—it actually lights to full brilliance almost immediately (<5s) and dims nicely without buzzing or flickering.

The last two bulbs are from n:vision. They're straight-forward, non-dimmable 100 watt equivalents. What I like about the n:vision products is that they offer them in three different color temperatures: soft, bright, and daylight. Of course, they neglect to tell you how many degrees K those names refer to, but at least you have some control over the general color range. I picked the "bright" color, as both the lamps they're installed in are used for reading lights. They're a touch slow to get to full brilliance, but they hit 90% or so right at the start, so I don't really miss that final 10%.

Now, if you believe all the marketing hype around these CFLs I should be saving $45.50 a year, which means it'll take 14 months before they pay for themselves. Let's hope they last that long!

Oh, and one last lighting tidbit: A couple months after we moved into the house Michelle turned on the halogen sconces in the living room, only to get a big "bang!" and have all the lights in that room and my office go out. It seems that one of the halogen bulbs decided to go out in style with an electrical short that popped the circuit breaker. Unfortunately, it also managed to fry my subwoofer (the only bit of electronics not on a surge protector) and the dimmer portion of the light switch. So, while I was at Home Depot picking up CFLs I also picked up a new dimmer switch.

The Lutron Skylark eco-dim dimmer switch was $3 less than the standard Skylark dimmer, so I went with it without really understanding the eco-dim feature. After I got home and installed it I noticed that the sconces didn't seem as bright as before, so I looked up the Lutron website to read more about eco-dim. Well, I think they named it well, as it's a pretty dim idea that only eco-weenies could love: it simply provides only 85% of the maximum current to the lights! Hell, I already have a dimmer, so can't I dim the lights by 15% myself if I feel like it? Fortunately there's a switch on the side of the dimmer to turn the silly feature off.

How to Lie with Charts and Graphs

A while ago Kevin Kelly, over at his Cool Tools website, highlighted this gorgeous poster by Wallstats that visually represents where all your Federal tax dollars go. I thought it was reminiscent of the work of Edward Tufte, who has done amazing work towards improving the visualization of quantitative data. I was all set to even order one, as my office currently lacks any decent eye candy.

But then I read Kevin's comment "The immensity of military spending is made plain in this chart; the paucity of science funding equally vivid" and little alarm bells started going off in my head.

A quick examination of the poster shows that military and related spending takes almost the entire left-half of the page, making it look like we spend half of our Federal dollars there. Last I heard, before the wars our defense spending was around 12% of the budget; could it have really ballooned to nearly half?!

In short, no.

What this poster charts is the "discretionary" expenses, which are everything outside of the monstrous social welfare programs like Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security. It turns out, if you look at all the money the Federal government spends, nearly 52% goes towards these socialist programs, and only 22% goes to defense.

Now I'll certainly agree that 22% is a big chunk of the budget. But, considering that we've been fighting two wars for several years it's not that bad, and more importantly it's no where near the half of the budget that the Wallstats poster would lead you to believe. It's a shame that they couldn't have been more honest in their presentation of the information. 

U.S. Immigrations, or Border Bullies?

Michael Yon writes:

While the U.S. Immigration officer named Knapp rifled through all her belongings, Aew sat quietly.  She was afraid of this man, who eventually pushed a keyboard to Aew and coerced her into giving up the password to her e-mail address.  Officer Knapp read through Aew's e-mails that were addressed to me, and mine to her.  Aew would tell me later that she sat quietly, but “Inside I was crying.”

This is how our vaunted U.S. Immigrations treats harmless visitors to the U.S. I know that they have a tough job to do, and I hope and expect that Officer Knapp is just a bad apple that is spoiling the barrel. The key will be to see how Officer Knapp's superiors handle the report; do they make excuses for his unprofessional behavior, or do they take appropriate remedial action to ensure that Officer Knapp doesn't continue to act like a tin god?