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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, June 11, 2005
Humor From 1837 It has been a common practice for some decades for people in the process of legal separation to put, "Not responsible for any debts but my own" ads in local newspapers. I don't know what the exact legal power of these ads are, but here's an amusing variant from the nineteenth century. From the May 12, 1837 North Alabamian, p. 1: Honest Caution.--The following advertisement appeared in a Savannah Journal: Labels: humor White Sentiment Towards Indians, 1837 I've been scanning in all my notes from previous books (the HP multifunction printers let me scan directly from pages to PDF), and I keep finding interesting and surprising items. From the Arkansas Times and Advocate, November 27, 1837, p. 2: Emigration of the Chickasaws. -- We understand that the entire tribe of the Chickasaw Indians are now on their way to their new country west. -- They are in charge of Col. Upsham, emigrating agent. The country purchased by the Government for the Chickasaws is bounded on the south by Red River, and lies west of the Choctaws.Okay, talk is cheap--but is this what you expected newspapers of the time to be saying? Moonbats One of the signs of a moonbat is their ability to discredit multiple causes at once because of their need to use a stupid or offensive tactic--and then tackle multiple causes with it: A group of naked cyclists took part in a bike ride to protest against oil dependency and to "celebrate the human body." Falling Federal Budget Deficits This may seem like a yawner of a news story to many people, but it really does matter to your personal finances: JUN. 10 2:52 P.M. ET The government ran a deficit of $35.3 billion in May, a little over half the imbalance of a year ago thanks to a continuing surge in tax revenues, the Treasury Department said Friday.The falling long-term Treasury yields are at least partly being driven by this, I would guess. The economy is booming; people are working; they are sending gobs of taxes to the IRS in withholding, in quarterly payments, and the fat checks that many of us had to write on April 15. This isn't entirely surprising; I was pointing out the good news on this in January as well. I had mentioned a few days ago that Greenspan was surprised (as was I) at how low long-term Treasury yields are, but I wonder if Greenspan just has been too pessimistic about how rapidly falling deficits are dropping future interest rate expectations. Dropping federal deficits means downward pressure on long-term interest rates (good for most consumers, bad for those of us who need high interest rates to retire). This is also good news for home owners--low interest rates will just fuel continued "irrational exuberance" in the housing market. It does take some of the pressure off my own building plans, because it means that I am not likely to see mortgage rates go up before I get the house finished, and before I sell my current house next summer. There is a lot of talk that the housing market is in the bubble stage, and from what I have read, some markets--Florida and San Diego, for example, are clearly at an absurd speculative bubble level. Houses in Florida are being bought and sold same day--because prices are rising fast enough to pay a realtor's commission, then resell the house again without losing any money! That the market is insanely speculative in those places doesn't mean that the bubble will pop tomorrow. These sort of speculative bubbles can sustain themselves for a long time--but as soon as anyone lets any air out of the bubble (say, from a sudden rise in mortgage rates), the bubble can pop with startling speed, leaving the last fool who pays $390,000 for a four bedroom, two bath, 1174 square foot house built in 1958 wondering what happened. Friday, June 10, 2005
Water Delivery Calculations A few days back I asked for suggestions on how to calculate water delivery based on pipe size and elevation. A lot of people sent suggestions, some more precisely suited to my needs than others. TechnicalVideoRental.com gave a very detailed answer, here. I have confidence that even with five feet of elevation, and a two inch water line, my 1400 gallon water tank will give me enough gallons per minute to keep the pressurization tank filled. I ran up to the property today at lunch, to see if progress is continuing. They have excavated the back a bit more, because we needed it to get the foundation in.  Here's the cistern, which arrived just as I was leaving.  It was lighter than it looked--three of us managed to slide it off the trailer without any great effort--and yet seemed very durable. Here's the view from my back yard.  Labels: house project Grand Jury Refuses To Indict We covered this incident in November on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog and updated the account in February. The grand jury just refused to indict the shooter in this case, and from this news account in the June 10, 2005 Rocky Mountain News, it sounds like they made the right decision: CENTENNIAL - An Arapahoe County grand jury will not recommend criminal charges against a man who shot a married couple, killing the husband, during an altercation outside an Aurora video store last November.This is one of those cases where you wish that someone could have stopped Davis, the guy swinging the metal bar, and said, "Wait a minute! Has it occurred to you that you are about to use potentially deadly force against someone who may have a gun on them? Should you perhaps cool off for a couple of seconds?" Unfortunately, it sounds like Eichstedt didn't have much choice on this--perhaps he could have avoided exchanging words with Davis, but when Eichstedt drew his gun, he was on the ground. It wasn't a light blow; Eichestedt says that he has suffered permanent brain injury from this. Eichstedt isn't crowing about this, either: Eichstedt's attorney, Larry Pozner, said that the clearing of his client shouldn't be considered a victory because a life has been lost and the lives of others will be changed forever.So far, we have a sobering reminder that some people have short tempers, and shouldn't be allowed around metal bars. We have a man permanently injured by the blow. We have a life lost. This is the point where everyone needs to back down, and cool the rhetoric. But no, some troublemakers just can't shut up: Black activists were angered that Eichstedt wasn't arrested the night of the shooting.So does Rev. Holmes think that if a white guy had hit Eichstedt on the head with an eight inch metal bar, knocking him to the ground, that Eichstedt wouldn't have shot him? Or does he think that it would have been okay for police to not arrest Eichstedt if he had shot a white guy under the same circumstances? Rev. Holmes needs a marble count. Here's another bizarre part of the story that just makes me shake my head in amazement: Davis, a Jehovah's Witness who could not accept blood transfusions because of his religion, died from hemorrhaging.But he didn't have a problem knocking someone to the ground with an eight inch metal bar? Someone, I think, was a bit confused about what being a Jehovah's Witness is all about--as reading this official position of the Jehovah's Witnesses about violence makes clear. "White Christian Party" I had so much fun tearing apart Governor Dean's idiotic claim that the Republican Party is a "white Christian party" and that many Republicans have never worked, that I figured you might enjoy today's Republican response: In another controversial remark, Dean recently characterized Republicans as "pretty much a white, Christian party."One of the signs of the power of what George Bush is doing is his ability to drive the left completely and utterly insane! Does Affirmative Action Admissions Help Blacks, Or Hurt Them? A number of black conservatives have argued over the years that affirmative action admissions to colleges actually hurt blacks. The argument has been advanced by Shelby Steele that to the extent that first-tier universities (say, Harvard, or UC Berkeley) admit students who are not adequately prepared for the demands of a first-tier school, it sets them up for failure. The same student might well gain admission to a second or third tier school (for example, San Jose State University) without any special treatment, and graduate. Is it better for a black freshman to drop out of a highly rated school like Berkeley? Or get a bachelor's degree from San Jose State? This works all the way down the ladder. The student who gets admission to San Jose State with inferior test scores and grades and drops out, would be better off attending a community college. Two years there might improve his skills enough to transfer to San Jose State--a better use of his time than a year of frustration and wasted money at San Jose State, only to drop out because his GPA is down around 1.5. The evidence that some have presented on this is the very high failure to graduate rate of affirmative action students. Now, there's a new study that seems to show that the same is true with respect to affirmative action admissions to law schools, summarized in this entry at Volokh Conspiracy by Rick Sander, who is guest-blogging over there. Sander uses data from by comparing graduation rates, bar passage rates, and the number who actually become lawyers for whites, blacks who attended their second-choice schools (which is something of a proxy for attending a school with less demanding requirements), and all black law students (who, on average, are admitted with much lower qualifications than their white counterparts). The results suggest that the claim of preferential treatment causes higher failure rates. Many years ago, then Senator S.I. Hayakawa told a joke about the difference between Republicans and Democrats. A Republican sees a man 100 feet out in a lake, screaming for help, and throws him 50 feet of rope, and tells him to swim the rest. A Democrat comes along, throws 200 feet of rope to the guy, and then runs along to do another good deed. (If you don't get this: what good is all that rope if there's no one holding on to it?) Unfortunately, a lot of what drives the affirmative action acceptance scam is guilt. Thomas Sowell's Inside American Education makes the point that the first-tier schools engage in sometimes outrageous efforts to get black students in--and far less effort to help them succeed. Why? Because a lot of what motivates this is liberal guilt. The problem is that liberals can't really do anything about poor quality primary and secondary schooling that puts many blacks at a disadvantage on grades and test scores. They really can't do much about the ghetto culture that tells black kids that pursuing an education is "acting white." (Well, they could, but they wouldn't be authentic liberals.) In spite of a lot of well-meaning tutoring efforts to help kids growing up in these situations stay in college (and my wife did some of that when she was a grad student), some deficits can't be made up overnight. The net result is a student who probably starts out trying very hard discovers that his writing skills are noticeably under par. His math skills are deficient--so he is taking (and failing) remedial math classes, instead of college algebra or calculus. There comes a point where you discover that you have worked extremely hard to get a D or an F--and there wasn't much that could do about it. I suspect that some students drop out, filled with self-loathing, wondering what's wrong with them--and others look for some way to blame what has happened to them on racism. Those students who see this as a racism problem are right--but probably not in the way that they think. My experiences as a college student and interacting with academics persuade me that there is not a group more interested in encouraging black students to succeed. I have seen professors bend over backward to give the benefit of the doubt to a black student whose work was less than par. The core problem here is that inferior primary and secondary education, and often destructive cultural influences, can't be overcome by admitting an unqualified student to an academically demanding institution. That's the racism that causes the problem. Slavery Reparations Again Professor Volokh points to a Jeff Jacoby column about slavery reparations, and how Chicago's ordinance requiring corporations doing busines with the city is being used in ways that are quite unjust--attempting to force Wachovia, a bank founded after the end of slavery, to pay reparations to people who have never been slaves. Eric Muller, of course, thinks differently. In the course of the comments, however, I noticed that one person made an argument similar to that advanced by the black economist Walter Williams some years ago: should reparations be paid for how poor black Americans are relative to white Americans? Or for how rich black Americans are relative to black Africans? In that case, black Americans would be obligated to compensate white Americans for their improved wealth! That would clearly be unjust. Another commenter claimed that the miserable poverty of Africa today was because of the slave trade. I posted a thoughtful comment (not yet approved by Muller for display) pointing out that Africa was actually enriched by the slave trade; black Africans sold their "brothers" to Europeans and Arabs in exchange for cloth, tools, and guns (used to then fight wars in which to take more slaves). African poverty has a lot more to do with twentieth century colonialism and the corrupt post-colonial governments than slavery. The biggest problem of slavery reparations is that not all blacks deserve an equal share. There are black Americans with ancestors who were never held as slaves in what is now the U.S. (I will agree that there are not many.) There are black Americans whose slave ancestors were freed before the American Revolution, and others not freed until the end of the Confederacy. There are black Americans whose ancestors were slaveholders (sometimes black slaveholders), and black Americans whose ancestors were whites with no involvement in the slave trade. Do they all deserve the same share? To really make a revolution in this country, the judges only have to impose a slavery reparations tax. When Hispanics and Asians whose ancestors arrived here in 1950 find themselves in the same boat as those of us whose ancestors died defeating the Confederacy--then we may finally find ourselves freed from the emerging judgeocracy. I Wouldn't Recommend This... But it is also a reminder that while guns are dangerous, many criminals don't have terribly quick reflexes. An acquaintance used to use two cap pistols to show people that even if a criminal already has a gun pointed at you, it is often possible to draw and fire before the criminal can fire the gun. This report seems to confirm those experiments: MIDDLETOWN, N.Y. - The score is now Granny 2, robbers 0. The bad guys don't do very well against Carol Ordway. How To Stop Unlawful Gun Trafficking One of the recurring claims made by the gun control advocates for passing the Brady Law, and for various state "one-gun-a-month" measures, was to stop the flow of guns from free states to police states. Yet it appears that there is another mechanism that works as well, and perhaps there should be a bit more use of this approach: Six co-workers at an Office Max near Birmingham, Ala., decided to make some extra money by sending guns to gang-bangers in Chicago, prosecutors said.If the facts alleged in this news story are correct, these six Alabama men are in a world of hurt. If each of them had bought one or two guns, and sold them to someone in Alabama, who then drove to Chicago, they could claim ignorance. But 30 guns--and driving them to Chicago to sell--you can't claim ignorance on that. The volume would make them gun dealers, under some definitions of BATF's rules. Selling a handgun to someone who isn't a resident of your state? Definitely unlawful. I expect that unless the defense attorneys pull a rabbit out of the hat, these six men are going to go away for a long time--and I hope that it gets big publicity back home, to discourage others who think that they are going to make a quick killing selling guns to gang members. Thursday, June 09, 2005
Big Bertha, Turned Edge, Maternal Duck The skies finally cleared long enough to do some testing of Big Bertha with a black ring about 1.5" diameter, to test whether the problem is a turned edge to the primary mirror. This indeed appears to be part of the problem. The "two focal lengths" problem seems to be mostly gone, and the image is crisp at a higher power than it was before. The star test diffraction rings are a lot more even than they were before, and the very bright outer ring typical of a turned edge is gone. Still, the image of Jupiter wasn't particularly crisp at 156x, and contrast was lousy. Perhaps viewing conditions weren't so good. I am at least pretty sure that the major problem is not the size of the secondary mirror. When I put an off-axis aperture mask on the telescope, it doesn't make any appreciable improvement--unlike the situation before I put the black ring on the primary mirror. I will make a little more of an effort when I have a clear and stable night, and no need to go to bed for work the next morning--and I don't have to deal with a territorial, maternal duck. (The duck has decided to lay eggs under the tarp that covers up the scope. I haven't figured out how to explain to her that these eggs are never going to hatch, and since I move them to the trash every evening, she gets rather upset with me.) If this doesn't clean the image up, the next step is to send it off for interferometry testing, and perhaps refiguring. Still, it does an adequate job at low power. The Ring Nebula (M57) is pretty cool at 156x (since it is intrinsically a fuzzy object anyway), and even at 221x, it still is pretty decent. I suspect that if I can get this under a dark sky, it will do a nice job on the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51), and Andromeda (M31). Oh well, it only cost me $625. If I have to put another $500 into refiguring the mirror, it will still be a bargain. Labels: telescopes Wouldn't It Be Simpler Just To Blame It All On The Jews? You know the anti-American paranoia is bad when a Green Party official is saying that something is wrong: A fictional crime drama based on the premise that the Bush administration ordered the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Washington aired this week on German state television, prompting the Green Party chairman to call for an investigation.This isn't a private concern; this is government funded: ARD, and ARD-produced television shows, are funded by a monthly tax on German televisions. The network plays a role similar to the British Broadcasting Corp., or the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States, which is nominally independent but funded by taxpayers.A German diplomat's response: A German diplomat in Washington said no one in Germany took the plot seriously because it was "pure fiction."If German state television ran a program that suggested the Holocaust didn't happen--or that the Jews brought it upon themselves--I don't think anyone would writing it off as "mere fiction." This is very disturbing. Perhaps letting Germany onto the Security Council would not be so wise. "The Moral Equivalent of the Minutemen" Remember when Michael Moore made that claim? I guess that this is what he was talking about: FORT STEWART, Ga. (AP) Iraqi insurgents appear to be forcing some followers to commit suicide car bombings by tying or binding them inside explosive-carrying vehicles, the commanding general of allied security forces in Baghdad said Wednesday.These bombs are probably remote controlled--after forcing the drivers in at gunpoint, I would guess that the "insurgents" tape them in place so that they can't get out very quickly. If it takes more than a second or two to exit the car, that is enough time for the guy holding the remote control to set off the bomb. Why does the left love these people so much? Because the left has a long history of making excuses for mass murder. The Patriot Act: Don't Make It Permanent There is a lot of nonsense (and I'm being charitable) that the ACLU puts out about the Patriot Act. I think that while there are some areas for improvement, overall, it isn't the Frankenstein's monster that a number of people both left and right have claimed. However, some of the proposed changes make me nervous: for example, the proposal to allow federal law enforcement to skip going to judges for administrative subpoenas. I don't see the need for this change. I also strongly disagree with President Bush on another aspect: COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - President Bush, facing efforts by some in his own party to scale back the post-Sept. 11 Patriot Act, says it has made America safer and should be made permanent.I agree that the Patriot Act has made America safer. I do not think it should be made permanent. There are parts of it that probably should be. The wall between counterintelligence and law enforcement was a mistake, and removing that wall should be made permanent. But I think requiring the bulk of this law to be renewed every five years (as the original Patriot Act required) is a good barrier against these provisions becoming like the guest who doesn't take the hint at the end of the evening. Ward Churchill, Faux Indian It really shouldn't matter what ethnicity or race a scholar is. What matters is the quality of their scholarship. But since Ward Churchill was hired because of his race*, and because he has used his race to deflect criticism of his nonsense, it is now legitimate to see if he is really an Indian or not. This article in the Rocky Mountain News does a spectacular job of demonstrating that Churchill's claims about being either 1/16 or 3/16 Indian are simply false--as demonstrated by historical records, and by DNA evidence from his male relatives who are descendants of Churchill's supposed Indian ancestor on his mother's side. Even on his father's side, where the data is a bit murkier, there is simply no evidence to support his claims, and Churchill's inconsistent tales suggest that he may not even have much of a basis for claiming to be honestly mistaken about this. * I say, because of his race for one simple reason: a major research institution Colorado University would not have hired someone without a Ph.D. in his subject as a professor for any other reason. I have an M.A. in History, five published books, a few scholarly journals, a few academic conferences at which I have presented papers, and some teaching experience. I would never be considered for anything but an adjunct position, even at the very bottom of the academic ladder. Churchill was obviously hired as a professor because of his race. Fire Suppression I had read somewhere, I thought, that smoking in bed was the major cause of house fire deaths. It turns out that this isn't quite right, but in looking over these statistics from the National Fire Prevention Association, I have increased confidence that I need to focus more on fire extinguishers for internal fires, and worry mostly about wildfires as a threat to my new home. It turns out that while smoking causes only 5.6% of the house fires, it causes 23% of the deaths--presumably because people fall asleep while smoking, and by the time they wake up, the fire is already far advanced. I believe that at one time the U.S. Army had a rule that you could only smoke in bed if you had one foot on the floor--the theory being that it is very hard to fall asleep with one foot on the floor. Since no one in our household smokes--and we don't allow visitors to smoke in the house--this isn't a threat. Cooking fires are 30.5% of the fires, but only 10% of the fatalities. This is not surprising; most people don't start cooking, and then leave the house, or fall asleep. I would also guess that most of these fires are grease fires on the range, not fires in the oven. We have usually had a fire extinguisher in the kitchen in most houses for this exact reason. I think increasing the number of extinguishers in the house isn't a bad idea. "Heating equipment," which seems to mean furnaces and space heaters, cause 15.8% of the fires and 12% of the deaths. It would appear that much of this is improperly maintained furnaces (not an issue in a new house) and space heaters too close to materials that burn. We won't be having space heaters in the house. I won't worry much about this. "Electrical distribution equipment" causes 8.5% of the fires, and 8% of the deaths. This seems to be heavily associated with amateur electricians and the sort of crazy ten plugs on an outlet stuff that I don't generally allow anyone to do. I'm not going to worry about that. "Open flame, ember, or torch" is 8.9% of the fires, and 8% of the deaths. The wife likes to burn scented candles occasionally (and deaths caused by candle started residential fires is on the increase), but this is largely a problem of unattended candles. Extinguishers in every other room should solve this. Arson causes 10.3% of fires, and 20% of the deaths. Some of this is insurance fraud, I'm sure. (Maybe a lot of it is insurance fraud.) The rest seems pretty much impossible to prevent or avoid. The best you can hope for is to not make too many enemies, or attract the attention of firebugs. "Child playing" is 3.3% of fires, and 7% of deaths. I'm not worried about that at this stage. "Natural causes," which I think includes wildfires, is 1.6% of the fires, and 0% of the deaths. This seems to be wildfires, lightning, and similar. The deaths are low because people generally evacuate away from wildfires. This is also the one category where if I know there's a wildfire coming, I have the best chance of solving the problem. Hose everything down for several hundred feet in all directions, and put houses on the roof so that water is flowing off of it. The only case that this doesn't handle is wildfire while no one is home to start the water flowing. I'm told by a fellow Boisean about a foam pumping system for fire suppression that is automatic. It might make more sense to install sprinklers around the house that are designed not to water the ground, but to water the house, with a temperature sensor that starts the sprinklers when air temperatures reach 110 degrees, or something like that. But to be failsafe, I would have to switch from a manually switched emergency generator to an automatic switch. The number of these fires in this area just isn't high enough to justify this much money and paranoia. Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Carl's Jr. CEO Defends Paris Ad I don't remember where I saw it, but someone commented that if he hadn't known what Carl's Jr. was before seeing the Paris Hilton ad, he would have assumed that Carl's Jr. was a "gentlemen's club," not a burger joint. If you don't know what a "gentlemen's club" is, it is a euphemism for topless/bottomless/lapdance joints aimed at wealthy salesmen in big cities. When I worked in Marketing for a high-tech startup some years ago, most of our marketing staff in Atlanta went to one of these places, and apparently charged up several hundred dollars on the expense account. I rather doubt that they drank that much. Oh yes: most of them were married (often on the second or third marriage--I wonder why?) I went to the Georgia State Archives instead. Anyway, the Paris Hilton ad markets everything except the burger that Carl's Jr. is supposed to be selling--and a lot of people who regularly eat at Carl's Jr., like myself, are pretty upset about such a salacious ad featuring what some are calling an "heirhead." Here's O'Reilly's interview with the Carl's Jr. CEO. O'Reilly doesn't have any problem with the ad (and those who are aware of the allegations made against him last year won't be surprised), but at least recognizes something that the CEO doesn't--this is cutting into one of their core markets: families. O'REILLY: Anyway, families looking at this, a lot of them, are going to go well we hate you. We hate you. So that's not good for them. Who are you looking for?It may be a while before I go into Carl's Jr. again. I very much like their product. This sort of marketing is essentially an admission that they can't sell their product to "the 18 to 34-year-old male" without using sex--rather like Ford admitting that the Range Rover and Jaguar lines are so unappealing that they can only sell them is to offer $1000 contributions to a gay lobbying group to persuade gay people to buy them. Liberals Making Fools of Themselves I mentioned yesterday that the release of John Kerry's service records accidentally revealed that his grades at Yale were not only unimpressive--but even lower than George Bush's Yale grades. This so contradicted the continual liberal screeching during the campaign last year about how much smarter Kerry was than Bush that I didn't even bother to look for examples. So I was pleased to see that the Wall Street Journal dug out one of the more amusing examples of liberals making fools of themselves from last year. In this case, it was Howell Raines, former New York Times editor, in this article in the Guardian: To be fair, innate intelligence has to do with capability and ignorance to do with variables such as educational opportunity and personal diligence. But the conundrum remains. Is intellect important in presidents? If Americans can't solve the question definitively in the matter of John Kerry and George Bush, we damn sure ought to make an educated guess.When liberals say that someone is clearly superior in intelligence, they really mean, "He agrees with us." Bloody Chainsaw At The Border (Cont.) If there was any question about the mental health of the guy who tried to enter the country with a bloody chainsaw (and is now being held in conjunction with two murders in Canada--one victim beheaded), take a look at the picture of the guy (over at Michelle Malkin's blog). I don't think you need psychiatric training to have some suspicions that all is not right with this guy. Things You May Not Do At Recess Professor Volokh has a nice piece here about things that you aren't allowed to do at recess in a Tennessee elementary school: A 10-year-old student and his friends were barred from engaging in a certain kind of speech during recess at Karns Primary School. The recess in that school, I'm told, is about 30 minutes long, and students are generally allowed to play, sit and read, talk, and do lots of other things. But this student and his friends were barred from engaging in one particular kind of speech. What is this speech that a Tennessee school has decided must be banned?Volokh says that the complaint, including the letter from the principal, indicates that yes, students were prohibited from getting together to discuss the Bible during recess. Liberalism: isn't it wonderful? House Project: Emergency Water Pressure I think instead of relying on the ability to get gravity-fed water pressure from the cistern, it makes more sense to have the power panel include a plug for running an emergency generator. The scenarios that concern me about loss of electricity are: 1. Forest fire somewhere takes out power lines. This might be a couple of days without power. 2. Severe winter storm takes down a power line. This might be a few hours. Having an emergency generator lets us flip the switch to disconnect from the grid, turn on the generator, and have enough power to run lights, well pump, and pressurization tank. The builder has built a house before that used a propane-fired generator as backup power to the solar cells and batteries, so he has done this before. Labels: house project Fire Suppression I called the Horseshoe Bend Fire Department to find out: 1. If my house catches fire, are you who comes and puts it out? 2. What sort of fitting should I have on my 1400 gallon water tank so that you can hook up to it in a hurry? What was unnerving was that when I called the number for the Horseshoe Bend Fire Department listed on the Idaho Fire Chiefs Association web page--I got an answering machine. And it was one of those cheap answering machines that you can't customize the outgoing message! Hmmmm. Maybe I am going to be more on my own than I thought out there. UPDATE: It gets worse. I called information to get their phone number--and it is the number listed on the Horseshoe Bend Area Chamber of Commerce website. "I'm sorry, the number that you have dialed has been disconnected." UPDATE 2: I wonder what it would cost to have the fire suppression sprinklers built into my home. It might be worth something to the insurance company--especially if I can't find a working fire department. UPDATE 3: I called the Horseshoe Bend Police Department business number to ask them for the fire department's phone number--and I reached an answering machine. I think I recognize the voice; it is a neighbor, who is the police chief. I am beginning to think of an I Love Lucy episode where they get pulled over for speeding in a small North Carolina town where Andy Griffith is the police chief, the justice of the peace, the editor of the local newspaper, and everything else of importance. News Flash: RNC Chair Calls Democratic Party "Party of Jews & Mud People" You would be outraged, wouldn't you? Well, there is a major party chair engaging in the politics of racial and religious divisiveness, but it isn't the Republicans: Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, unapologetic in the face of recent criticism that he has been too tough on his political opposition, said in San Francisco this week that Republicans are "a pretty monolithic party. They all behave the same. They all look the same. It's pretty much a white Christian party."I fear that former Vermont Governor Dean simply hasn't gotten beyond his own experiences living in one of America's whitest states, and has no concept of why large numbers of Jews, agnostics, atheists, Hispanics, Muslims, and even some blacks vote Republican. CNN's exit poll for the 2004 elections show that Bush's vote included 44% of Latinos, 44% of Asians, even 11% of blacks, and 40% of those who described their race as "other". What about Dean's claim that the Republicans are pretty much a "Christian" party? Let's see: 25% of Jews voted for Bush in 2004; 23% of people who categorize themselves as "Other" (presumably Muslims, Bhuddists, Shintoists, various New Ager religions) voted for Bush, and 31% of the 10% of Americans who say that they have no religion, voted for Bush. Yes, Kerry did get the bulk of the vote from non-Christians, but to call the Republicans a "white Christian party" is nonsense. "This is one of those flaps that comes up once in awhile when I get tough," Dean said. "We have to be rough on the Republicans. Republicans don't represent ordinary Americans and they don't have any understanding of what it is to go out and try and make ends meet."Even broken down by income, this "working people" claim doesn't wash: 44% of Bush votes came from those with incomes below $50,000 (presumably family income)--and yet this group represents only 45% of voters. In short, Bush did a little worse among poor and lower middle class homes than Kerry, but not much worse. Where does he think the tens of millions of Republican votes in the 2004 presidential election came from? Surely he doesn't think that there are that many Americans who don't have to work for a living. Perhaps he is fabulously wealthy, well the Republicans must have even more people like Soros in their ranks. Earlier this year, Dean said this: "You think the Republican National Committee could get this many people of color in a single room?," Dean asked to laughter. "Only if they had the hotel staff in here."Or, perhaps, if they had all of Bush's Hispanic and black appointees to Cabinet positions, the Supreme Court, and federal judgeships. You know: judges like California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, who the Democrats tried very hard to keep from getting a Senate vote on confirmation to the D.C. Court of Appeals. UPDATE: Professor Lindgren approaches the question in a different way, using data from the 2004 General Social Survey: Since about 63% of the adult public in the US are white Christians, it would not be surprising if at least the majority in any party were white Christians....Of course, that also means that Republicans (self-identified, as opposed to how they vote) are about 21% above the national average for white Christians, and Democrats are about 16% below the average American. If Howard Dean wants to claim that Republicans are intolerant because they are more likely to be white Christians, then the argument is equally valid that Democrats are intolerant because they are less likely to be white Christians. The actual reason for the discrepancy, however, isn't party intolerance, but the differing values of the parties, especially on the moral questions related to homosexuality and abortion, and secondarily, on the question of what is the most appropriate role of government in regulating an economy. The Democrats have pandered on the race issue for a very long time, and this has certainly played a role in keeping blacks on the Democratic plantation. I am more than a little mystified why the Democrats have kept such a lock on the Jewish vote, especially as the Democratic Party has become increasingly the mouthpiece for the PLO, and hostile to Israel, while Republicans have become fierce supporters of Israel (sometimes more so than is really in our national interest). But aside from those two groups, the gap between Democrats and Republicans across religious and ethnic groups is really not so terribly dramatic. Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Why Are Long-Term Interest Rates So Low? I've blogged about this off and on, with some irriation, because I really need long-term interest rates to go up way up, at least briefly, so that I can retire. (This really means: so that I can devote my energy to writing and blogging, not maintaining korn shell scripts of insane length.) I am glad to see that I am not the only person who finds the flattening of the Treasury yield curve bizarre: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said it was hard to say why long-term interest rates were so low, but that even if they moved below short rates it need not signal a weakening economy.Except that I can remember the last time that long-term Treasury yields fell below short-term Treasury yields. It was in the mid-1990s, and it was because the declining deficit had caused a lot of bond investors to decide that long-term yields were not going to be so low for a very long time--and they bought long-term Treasury bonds as though they were never going to be issued again--and they turned out to be right, at least in the short-term. A couple months after that Treasury yield curve inversion, I bought $50,000 worth of Treasury bonds, due in November of 2016. They cost me about $47,000 at the time. They are worth about $62,000 now. They have been paying $3750 a year in interest ever since. (The interest in exempt from state income tax, which makes it worth a bit more than $3750.) I would not be at all surprised if another Treasury yield curve inversion might mean the exact same thing--falling deficits (yes, they are falling) will make long-term Treasury bonds worth owning. By the way: Greenspan also warned about hedge fund foolishness. If you are rich enough to be heavily invested in hedge funds (generally, this is multimillionaire and billionare territory), you are probably so far to the left that you can't stand to read this blog. Still, it is a reminder of where greed gets you: Greenspan told the conference low long-term rates had led hedge funds, the largely unregulated investment pools that cater to the wealthy, to take on greater risks in a scramble for returns.Does anyone remember LTCM? The Cynical Fear of Democracy Among Canada's Liberals The Canadian Supreme Court struck down laws against same-sex marriage a while back, and so now the Liberal Party (which the Gonery hearings are showing to be a completely corrupt institution, using government money to fund advertisers who did little, and then kicked the money back to the Liberal Party campaigns) is trying to get a same-sex marriage law passed to formalize this. There are Liberal MPs who are not prepared to support this. One MP just pulled out of the Liberal Party over this issue, and others are threatening to do so--or perhaps bring down the Liberal Party coalition control of the government by voting against the budget. What is so depressing is to see how much contempt the Liberals (like their counterparts in America) have for democracy. From the National Post: Martin and Cotler met with same-sex opponents to address procedural concerns and hash out potential amendments. But there wasn't even consensus among opponents that the legislation should be delayed until fall.They know darn well that there isn't majority support for same-sex marriage in Canada, but so what? Who runs Canada? The Liberal Party, or the Canadian people? It Is Amazing How Addictive Some Drugs Are... And how irrational people get when they are denied those drugs. And the drugs don't even have to be illegal: CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Four people were injured and six arrested following a brawl at a convenience store over a pack of cigarettes, authorities said.In the larger scheme of things, cigarettes aren't as socially damaging as alcohol and marijuana, especially because the vast majority of the damage that they do is to the smoker. Trying to ban them would probably be about as effective as bans on marijuana, but if someone invented a bacteria that destroyed all tobacco plants, the world would be the better off for it. A Bloody Chainsaw, Brass Knuckles, A Sword... Anything Else To Declare? Mental Illness? This isn't as light and humorous of a story as it might at first appear: BOSTON -- On the morning of April 25, Gregory Despres hitchhiked to the Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained by what appeared to be blood.The bad news is what he did with those weapons in Canada: The following day, in the village of Minto, New Brunswick, the decapitated body of a well-known country musician named Frederick Fulton was discovered on his kitchen floor. Police found the 74-year-old man's head in a pillow case under a kitchen table and the body of his common-law wife, Veronica Decarie, stabbed to death in a bedroom.The answer, of course, is that while U.S. Customs was plenty suspicious of this guy--and they questioned him for two hours before allowing him into the country--they didn't actually have a legal basis for holding him: Bill Anthony, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said the Canada-born Despres couldn't be detained because he is a naturalized U.S. citizen and wasn't wanted on any criminal charges on the day in question.Exactly. General suspicion isn't enough to hold someone at the border. For that matter, that chainsaw could have been covered with deer's blood. (Yes, there are people that use chainsaws for slaughtering deer. My daughter can tell you stories of such, now that she is living away at college.) Here's the important part of the story, as far as I am concerned: "I guess (Despres) didn't give answers the officer liked, so they checked and - lo and behold - it was the guy they were looking for (in Canada)," said Quincy Police Chief Robert Crowley.As a general rule, I am inclined to think that someone who uses a chainsaw to take someone's head off--other than as part of trying to make the victim unidentifiable, which does not appear to have been the case here--is probably a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Canada, unfortunately, has gone down much the same deranged path as the U.S. with respect to deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. UPDATE: This article reports on a new study that claims the U.S. leads the world in the number of mentally ill: One-quarter of all Americans met the criteria for having a mental illness within the past year, and fully a quarter of those had a "serious" disorder that significantly disrupted their ability to function day to day, according to the largest and most detailed survey of the nation's mental health, published yesterday.Part of why I am a bit skeptical of this study is that the article goes on to point out: But the rest of the news from the survey -- which did not include some of the most serious disorders, such as schizophrenia, for which patients are often institutionalized -- is mostly discouraging.This seems to suggest that institutionalized patients were not surveyed. If other countries are using a similar surveying technique, then what you may be seeing in our high rates of mental illness is that America leads the world in not institutionalizing the seriously mentally ill--not that we actually have more mentally ill people. While a number of other industrialized nations, such as Britain, are taking the same deranged path, thanks to the ACLU, we have been world leaders in putting the mentally ill on steam grates, instead of in hospitals. Labels: deinstitutionalization It Isn't Just Body Parts You Can't See That People Want Longer Chinese are busily buying modern versions of the rack, and having surgery, to get taller: In recent months, advertisements on Chinese television are regularly promoting "stretching machines," which look like benches reminiscent of the medieval torture rack.You know, as silly as all this sounds--it isn't completely silly. When I went off to USC, in 1974, I was utterly startled by how many women there were on campus that towered over me--and I am 5'11". I know that studies have found that tall people do better on getting jobs than short people--and I would imagine that for guys under 5'6", and women under 5'0", this is probably a very serious problem. By the way, for a number of years I was convinced that I was 5'10"---perhaps the last time I was measured as a teenager by a doctor. I was pleased to discover during a lie insurance exam recently that I am actually 5'11"--what a difference an inch makes! Why I Will Never Be President My grades in college were way too high. For all the insults from Democrats last year about Bush not being too bright, and receving a "gentleman's C while at Yale," his GPA was very slightly higher than John Kerry's--and both were just C students on average. Water Pressure Physics Problem--And Lessons Learned On The House Project It turns out that the cost of the 290 foot well came to about $9200--$19 per foot to drill, and then $11 a foot for steel casing in the first 127 feet (to prevent wall collapse into the well) and then perforated pipe for the rest of the length, so that all water coming out of this 163 foot layer of sandstone ends up in the well. Now comes the next set of learning experiences. What my builder calls the "Dinosaur" method is to put a pressurization tank in the garage. (I think he enjoys working with me because I keep looking for a cheaper, more elegant, or simpler way to do things--and I think he hopes to pour some of this learning into future houses.) The water coming from the well pump fills this tank, and then shuts down until there is more demand for water. Pressurization tanks require electricity, and usually store about 120 gallons--although only 30 gallons are available on immediate demand. (I'm not clear on exactly why this is.) There are many types of well pumps, but deep submersibles are what we need in this application. The hot new fad is variable speed well pumps, and Grundfos, a German company, apparently makes the Mercedes of variable speed well pumps (with a Mercedes price tag--$1900). The traditional well pump is constant speed, and for our needs, under $500. So why would you want a variable speed pump? Every time you fill the pressurization tank, it turns off the pump. When the pressurization tank needs more water, it turns the pump back on again. Apparently, turning on a pump is the greatest strain; the more times a day that a pump gets turned on, the more quickly it will wear out. A variable speed well pump adjusts its speed for demand, so it is often turning at very low speed, pumping a very small amount of water; as demand increases, speed increases as well, and it pumps more water. With the traditional model--a small pressurization tank--this may be the difference between turning on the pump 20 times a day, and turning it on once or twice a day. I would also expect that at low speeds the variable speed pump draws less power than at high speeds. Anyway, one of my goals for this property was to have a large water storage tank. The original hope was to have it high enough up the hill to skip the pressurization tank, as well as to keep a water supply adequate for fire suppression in the event we lost electric power. It turns out that every 2.31 feet of elevation gives you one PSI water pressure. Alas, the top of the hill is only about 35 feet above the house floor level, so this wouldn't be enough pressure. Instead of pumping water from the well to a pressurization tank--and having to confront the variable speed versus constant speed well pump choice--we may just pump it to an 800 gallon water tank, a few feet up the hill. This gives us our fire suppression water supply. It also means that even without electricity, water will still flow (and apparently, through the pressurization tank). It won't fill the toilets very fast at 5 PSI, but you can at least flush, take a bath, wash dishes by hand in the sink, hose down the house and surrounding property in the event of a forest fire, and have drinking water. Best of all, the primary reason for a variable speed well pump goes away. We have the constant speed well pump stop when the 800 gallon water tank is full; we have it turn on when the tank is down to 600 gallons. The five gallon per minute pump runs for 40 minutes to fill the tank, and then shuts off. Since a typical house consumes 300 gallons per day, this means the pump cycles about 1.5 times a day--a bit more in summer, and a bit less in winter. We may change the settings to keep the water tank at 700 gallons in summer, and perhaps less in winter, when fire hazard isn't such an issue. With a little care, it is cheaper to have an 800 gallon water tank than to spend the extra $1500 for a variable speed well pump. There is one annoying plumbing problem that we still need to solve. How many gallons a minute will a 1.25" water pipe move with a particular pressure at the input? The concern here is that the water tank needs to refill the pressurization tank--and hopefully, refill it fast enough that even if two people are taking showers, and the dishwasher is running, that we won't run out of water in the pressurization tank in less than 15 minutes. I've searched around the web for a formula--because it seems like it ought to be simple--but all the pages that I have read either give formulas based on water velocity, or assert that the problem can't be simplified this much. So, if you know how to calculate from an input PSI, and a pipe diameter, how gallons per minute will be transported, please let me know immediately. This may determine how high up the hill we have to put the water tank. UPDATE: I seem to have found the solution--or rather, a friend of mine with a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering pointed me to this page. It would appear that if I have the units right, that five feet of water drop through a 1.25" pipe will flow about 42 gallons per minute--more than enough to keep the pressurization tank happy. The formal term for a government approved water tank is a "cistern." The 500 gallon cistern is $591; the 1400 gallon cistern is $1036. This is a no-brainer--we'll spend the extra $400+ and have enough water capacity to solve any fire problem, take us through many days of interrupted electricity, and enough water that if Rhonda decides she wants the fountain in the middle of the circular driveway, we'll have the water to do it. Labels: house project Monday, June 06, 2005
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