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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). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Friday, January 06, 2006
What Is This, Stupid People's Week? I just blogged this astonishing news story over at my Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog: An unpaid bill for $20,000 worth of sex acts apparently led to a confrontation Monday that injured a Wollochet Bay-area man and left one of his suspected attackers hospitalized with a gunshot wound.Yeah, I always that was a "cash and carry" business. I guess calling the prostitute's mother didn't go over well. I can just imagine the conversation between Riggs and the prostitute's mother. "Do you know what your daughter is doing? Shouldn't she be ashamed of herself?" "Who is she having sex with for money?" "Me." "Shouldn't you be ashamed of yourself for hiring a prostitute? And why haven't you paid the bill?" Is This Theory Really Untestable? I was reading an article that made the claim that this theory which gets lots of press has to "be taken on faith" and "no experiment can tell it it's right or wrong." No, no, not Intelligent Design--string theory. The article is in the January 2006 Astronomy, and it is Bob Berman's column. I don't know enough about string theory to know if he knows what he is talking about with these criticisms--but if he is, it would suggest that non-testability isn't a problem just for Intelligent Design: Problem one: String theory won't work in our reality of three dimensions plus the fourth dimension of time. To make it work, its creators had to invent six or seven additional dimensions, which contradicts our own senses and the rest of science. None of these extra dimensions can be possibly be tested. They have to be taken on faith.I suspect that there are some cosmologists and physicists reading this blog who can answer the question: is Bob Berman right? Is string theory untestable--does it have to be "taken on faith"? Labels: intelligent design An Astonishing Number of Faculty Positions Open in Idaho And I don't mean adjunct faculty cattle calls! At Idaho State University in Pocatello: 33 positions that are faculty, dean, or higher. At Boise State University: 45 positions that are faculty or dean. At University of Idaho: more than 20 full-time positions at professor or higher level. Slow Learner? I've never even heard of this Gary Glitter musician before, but when you see how many times he has been in trouble with this sort of thing before, you have to wonder if this is someone too compulsive to stay out of prison: HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - Former British rocker Gary Glitter was formally charged Friday with committing obscene acts with two girls aged 10 and 11 at a Vietnamese resort town, prosecutors said. Corruption and the Abramoff Scandals A liberal friend asked if I was going to say something about the problem of corruption. Well, sure. Almost all bribery is related to government regulation of the economy or manipulation of the tax code. Yes, you do occasionally find people doing corrupt things for idealistic causes, but not often enough for me to worry about. People risk jail because they want to get rich. The economist Thomas Sowell made the the point some years ago that, "When legislatures control buying and selling, the first thing to be bought and sold are legislators." When a governmental decision means that someone is going to make (or not make) tens of millions of dollars year, it is very easy to rationalize spending a few hundred thousand dollars to make sure that the government makes the "right" decision. Sometimes this money is a direct bribe, as with Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA), who recently pled guilty to accepting bribes from a defense contractor. More often, and more dangerously, the money is a contribution to someone's election campaign. There is no quid pro quo; Rep. X doesn't ever say, "I'll vote for this change in the law if you give the legal maximum to my election campaign." That would be both illegal and gauche. But because supporters of a particular measure are getting campaign contributions, and opponents are not, that law will change, and while it isn't a bribe, it might as well be. One of my neighbors was a member of the Idaho State Senate for several years. But over time, because he was unwilling to support various corporate welfare schemes, he found, unsurprisingly, that corporate campaign contributions kept dropping each election--and he finally decided that he couldn't afford to run for re-election just out of his own pocket. Just to add to the ethical complexity, sometimes business, industry, or labor interests will find themselves in the unpleasant situation of having to participate in this business of bribery just to get what is rightfully theirs. If your competitors have bought off politicians, and the laws now give them an unfair advantage, you may have to buy off politicians to restore equity. This isn't just a problem of special interests going to virtuous politicians and corrupting them. Politicians are sometimes the origin of the problem. Mike Royko's political biography of Mayor Richard Daley, Boss, mentions how in the late 1940s, when Daley was a member of the Illinois state legislature, it was common practice for members to introduce "getter" bills. The legislator had no intention of seeing the bill passed; they were regulatory measures adopted for the purpose of forcing particular industries or businesses to plead for mercy, by contributing money to the legislator--who would then privately ask other legislators to kill the bill. Robert Sherrill's The Saturday Night Special (1973) was an entertaining book about gun control in the United States. He makes the claim, based on interviews with staffers of the late Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, that Dodd's recurring introduction of gun control bills in the 1960s was strictly a fundraising measure--that Dodd didn't really care about gun control, but because so many gun makers were in the Northeastern states, he could use these bills to force the industry to pony up contributions. Some years back, economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman proposed that we amend the Constitution prohibit government interfering with the price system (which includes wages as well). Friedman's reason for this is that pricing provides valuable information for the sensible allocation of resources. The great Aral Sea disaster of the Soviet Union is among the crowning achievements of what happens when prices are set by the government, not by the market. The Soviet Union sucked the Aral Sea's drainage dry to grow cotton--and then, because it had destroyed the fisheries that employed Aral Sea workers, it started flying in fish from the Arctic Ocean, thousands of miles away, to keep the cannery workers occupied. Free market prices would have prevented this. The cost of this enormous irrigation system would have showed up in the cost of what Stalin called "white gold"--the cotton produced in the Aral Sea. If you can't sell overpriced cotton, you go out of business. I would argue that prohibiting the government from interfering with pricing would have another positive effect: it would reduce at least a little the opportunities for corruption. But the continuing scandals of corruption require something more than a ban on govenment control of prices. It would require a complete ban on governmental interference in the economy. As nice as that sounds in theory, in practice, there are probably at least occasionally circumstances where this wouldn't be a good idea, and there's no way that such a Constitutional amendment could ever pass. I think we are going to just have to accept that bribery (whether blunt or the indirect form of "campaign contributions") is a fundamental part of a democracy. Thursday, January 05, 2006
The Brilliance of Karl Marx I mentioned a few hours ago Hugo Chavez's "Jews control the world's wealth" speech of a few days back, and it got me to thinking of something that the historian Paul Johnson says that Karl Marx wrote, early in his career as an intellectual and impregnator of his hired help: "Anti-Semitism is socialism for stupid people." When I first saw that quote, I found myself suddenly astonished as Marx's brilliance--and wondering why he couldn't see that the reverse was equally true: "Socialism is anti-Semitism for intellectuals." In both cases, members of a group are imagined to be the source of most of the world's woes, rather than individuals, with individual flaws and strengths. To a socialist, capitalists have excessive and ill-begotten wealth and influence. To an anti-Semite, Jews have excessive and ill-begotten wealth and influence. To a socialist, capitalists have a certain cunning that lets them gather wealth unfairly. To an anti-Semite, Jews aren't smarter than others, just more devious. Now, here's the part where it gets really fun. I was going to continue this little piece of parallelism, but I don't have to anymore, with Hugo Chavez--who is both anti-Semite and socialist--bringing it all together. To a {socialist|anti-Semite}, the suffering of the masses is because {capitalists|the descendants of those who crucified Christ} have taken ownership of the riches of the world, a minority has taken ownership of the gold of the world, the silver, the minerals, water, the good lands, petrol, well, the riches, and they have concentrated the riches in a small number of hands. Warp Factor 5, Mr. Sulu! I share Instapundit's hopeful skepticism--but hey, maybe Star Trek will happen by the 23rd century! AN EXTRAORDINARY "hyperspace" engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government.This is the point where you produce the PowerPoint presentation, hit up the venture capitalists, and lease the BMWs. Why Liberal Is A Dirty Word To Me I've given examples before. Here's another--and before you say that I am falsely accusing this judge of being a liberal, read his reason for giving a 60 day sentence for repeatedly raping a child: There was outrage Wednesday when a Vermont judge handed out a 60-day jail sentence to a man who raped a little girl many,many times over a four-year span starting when she was seven."It doesn't make anything better?" Except that it guarantees that, while in prison, this guy won't rape any other children. "it costs us a lot of money": It sure does. What does he think it is going to cost to provide counseling for this child to deal with being raped? I've talked to more victims of child molestation than I can count, and the one thing that I know is that when advocates call child molestation "soul murder," they are often not far off. The damage done is huge; many victims end up destroying themselves and everyone around them, dealing with the shame. As recently as 2004, Judge Cashman was singing a different tune: The Attorney General’s Office announced today that Keefe L. Beattie of Johnson was sentenced to the State’s recommendation of twenty years to life to serve for the brutal murder of Margaret May. Ms. May was murdered in February of 2001 at her home in Johnson, Vermont where she had been providing respite care for Keefe Beattie. In sentencing Beattie, Judge Edward Cashman stated that the crime was both cruel and arbitrary and that the sentence imposed was necessary to ensure public safety.What? No concern about costs? About not making anything better? Or does Judge Cashman just not have a problem with raping children? Global Warming! Ocean Circulation Changes! But it was a bit far back to blame humans: An extraordinary burst of global warming that occurred around 55 million years ago dramatically reversed Earth's pattern of ocean currents, a finding that strengthens modern-day concern about climate change, a study says.Of course, this assumes that the warming we are seeing now is entirely or even mostly anthropogenic. Hmmmm. Maybe, if this has happened before, it is happening again? As Different River (who pointed me to this article) points out: Between 5 and 8 degrees Celsius! Egads! Even nowadays, the most pessimistic estimates nowadays say we’ve only had 0.6 of a degree in the last century. Labels: global warming The Mind Boggles I thought that this sort of anti-Semitism was completely gone--but since the speaker is a bit of a hero to the left, I guess that I am not surprised: CHAVEZ MAKES ANTI-SEMITIC CHRISTMAS SPEECHI don't speak Spanish, but others who apparently do have come up with a similar translation. I found myself wondering: is he talking about the United States? But it wasn't Americans who crucified Jesus. (Actually, it wasn't Jews who crucified Jesus; it was Romans--but little details like history don't usually bother anti-Semites.) Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Need A Little Cheering Up? Amir Taheri writes about all the good news from 2005: adoption of democratic constitutions in Afghanistan and Iraq; slow moves towards democracy in Egypt and Saudi Arabia; progress towards freedom around the world. Even disasters sometimes have had a silver lining in the clouds: The Asian tsunami, which struck five days before 2005 started, claimed many lives. But it also ended the 40-year insurgency that had claimed over 100,000 lives in the Indonesian province of Aceh.Among my favorite items, however: Opposition to the liberation of Iraq was supposed to topple the governments of Britain, Denmark and Australia, which are committed to helping Iraq. But that didn't happen. All three won new mandates, at times with increased majorities. Opponents of the liberation of Iraq, however, did not fare so well. Gerhard Schroeder, the most opportunistic chancellor that federal Germany has had since its creation, was chased out of office by Angela Merkel who had shed no tears over the demise of Saddam Hussain.I was repeatedly told by acquaintances who are British-born that Blair was going to be kicked out of office because of the Iraq war. "Everyone over there hates him." "He's going to be kicked out for lying about the war." "Everyone" it seems, wasn't a majority. Taheri, who is an Iranian exile, also explains that even the election of Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran's President has a positive side: Ahmadinejad has the courage, some might say recklessness, to cast aside the hypocritical mask worn by his two predecessors, both businessmen-mullahs, in a strategy of deception. He has eschewed taqiyah (dissimulation) and that, believe me, is welcome news. His presidency will force the people of Iran and the rest of the world either to come to terms with the Khomeinist revolution or challenge it in a meaningful way.If you aren't reading Gateway Pundit, you should be. That's where I found the link to this. Laptop Hard Disk Adapter For Desktop About a year ago, I bought a 20 GB hard disk to upgrade my HP Pavilion notebook computer. (The 4.3 GB drive that came with it was a bit crowded.) For one reason or another, I never got around to it, and most recently, I handed it off to my daughter and son-in-law, because his computer failed, quite spectacularly, with sparks and smoke. Anyway, I was trying to figure out what to do with this 20 GB drive, because I really could use some more storage space on my desktop computer. I want to run Linux, partly because of reliablity, and partly because I have come to despise Microsoft. I just don't have quite enough space left to install Linux. It turns out that there are a number of companies that sell adapters that let you plug a laptop computer (which has a different set of plugs) into a an IDE interface (the common one for desktop computers). I bought this one for $12.95 plus shipping. These adapters are also useful if you have a bunch of stuff on a laptop hard drive that you want to backup before you install a new hard drive, or if you need to get access to files that are on a laptop that has gone to its final reward. House Project: Debugging Continuing The electrician reports that the pressurization pump problems would not reproduce itself. I am wondering if removing the lead filters introduced a bubble somewhere, and it just took some time to work its way out. The electrician reports that the battery has the generator almost starting, so he is now contacting the manufacturer for guidance. The additional filter housings and filters to provide 5 micron and 1 micron prefiltration comes to a few hundred dollars, and should be here in a day or two for the plumber to install. The builder agrees that the best solution to the water problem in the garage is to cut a drain into the concrete in front of the front garage door, and in front of the rear garage door, so that rain coming in at an angle will drain away from the concrete. He is waiting for a couple of consecutive dry days so that he finish the grading--and then hope for another gully-washer so that we can see if this has solved the problem, or if we need to take more extensive measures. He is going to try and get the gateposts and the mailbox post sunk now that the ground has defrosted. Last house project entry. Labels: house project People Too Stupid To Manage Their Own Affairs Michael Williams points to a news report of large numbers of Britons who clearly can't manage their own finances over the Christmas holidays and observes: Although I have libertarian sympathies I'd label myself more as a conservative than as a libertarian, mainly because I just don't think pure libertarianism can work. Why? Because humans aren't rational and we very often do things that aren't in our best interests, and when a critical mass of society lives miserable lives because of their own poor choices it's certain to bring the rest of us down as well. The externalities are unavoidable. Case in point: a significant percentage of people simply can't handle their own finances -- this article is about the UK, but I'm confident the situation is even worse in the US.There's a worthwhile discussion in the comments section, raising legitimate questions about the limits of governmental supervision. It seems clear to me that a majority of Americans (and I presume of Britons, and other nationalities as well) are responsible and rational about the finances, about what intoxicants they use (if any), how they drive, use a gun, etc. If I was feeling extremely generous, I might even say that a large majority are responsible and rational. Still, there's at least 10-30% of the population who show insufficient responsibility or rationality. One problem with turning this into an either/or choice--should the government play nanny to everyone, or let everyone do what they want--is that rules that might make sense for the hopelessly irresponsible have a bad habit of turning into nuisances for the responsible majority. There are some people who really shouldn't have guns (or cars, or their choice of intoxicants): convicted felons; psychotics; and perhaps a few other categories. There are some people that probably should have a gun only under adult supervision (such as minors). But there is a tendency in some circles (generally liberal or leftist) to assume that if some people can't be trusted with a gun, or choice of intoxicants, then no one can be trusted. Minors aren't allowed to buy cigarettes, or alcohol, or drive without parental permission. They can't buy a gun, or carry one (except under quite strictly defined circumstances). They also get special protection under our employment laws with respect to hours and types of work. We have different rules for convicted felons. In most states, they lose the right to vote, and to own a gun. We have yet another set of rules for certain categories of sexual crimes, with requirements for reporting their residence every time they move. In some states, people who have been locked up against their will in a mental hospital have a number of legal restrictions with respect to gun ownership for a few years. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with these different sets of rules for different classes of people. They are a method of solving very real problems that some people have, without imposing onerous restrictions on the vast majority. A Great Invention Honored The inventors of the CCD chip: The inventors of a light-sensitive component integral to digital cameras, camcorders and medical imagers will share a $500,000 award for work that has revolutionized how people view themselves, the world and the universe. Cost/Benefit Analysis & Prescription Drugs Apparently, those fine folks at Public Citizen (Ralph Nader's "give us what we want or we'll sue" tantrum lawyers) have forced the manufacturer of a particular drug to remove it from the market--and some people that need that drug to treat their narcolepsy are not happy about being "protected": If Ralph Nader is run over by a beer truck and killed, if a very large meteorite falls on the offices of Public Citizen and vaporizes the lot of them, I won’t feel sorry. Not the least little bit.Now, I agree that there are probably prescription drugs that are so dangerous, and the benefits so small (perhaps because some other drug can replace it), that there might not be a strong argument for having it available. The poster child (um, maybe not the right phrase to use) for this is thalidomide, which caused horrifying birth defects. Of course, as a male co-worker pointed out, "There's no reason why I couldn't have taken it." Oddly enough, the FDA in 1998 approved the use of thalidomide (under very tightly regulated distribution conditions): for the treatment of the debilitating and disfiguring lesions associated with erythema nodosum leprosum (ENL), a complication of Hansen’s Disease, commonly known as leprosy.There's also a strong argument that if a pharmaceutical manufacturer becomes aware of some serious health risks associated with a drug, they need to immediately inform doctors and pharmacies of it, to make sure that patients understand the risks. In some cases, for some patients, the risks may make sense because the costs of using another drug--or not having another drug available--may justify continuing to take the drug. Taking a drug completely off the market may make Ralph Nader happy. It may even be a net benefit to the society, if for the average consumer, that drug is more risk than benefit. But there are always going to be a few people for whom the cost/benefit equation is a bit different, and for whom that drug makes sense. Bond Yields As I've mentioned over the last few days, the Treasury yield curve inversion has got me wondering when to go buy bonds. I think there's perhaps a little more room for yields to rise--but there's a lot of government agency bonds with yields above 6% right now--and some of them have maturities of as little as 15 years. They are callable (meaning that the agency could redeem them ahead of maturity for the face value), but these are bonds that are trading below par (meaning, for less than their face value), so the most that you lose on these is interest from years beyond the date that the agency calls them. Criminal Libel You may not be aware of it, but a number of states still have statutes that make libel a criminal matter--meaning that false statements that injure the reputation of someone else can get you thrown in jail, not just sued for damages. From what I have read, criminal charges for libel are often the result of cases like this one in New Mexico: Mata was charged with harassment, stalking and criminal libel after he made a written complaint against Farmington Police Officer Mike Briseno. He also circulated a petition requesting the officer be investigated, and he picketed the police department with signs that said Briseno is a “liar” and “dirty.”Now, I find Montoya's argument quite powerful. Perhaps Mr. Mata's statements were false--but it is a little worrisome when alleging that a police officer has abused his authority gets you arrested. On the other hand, some of the criminal libel charges that have been filed aren't in this category: After University of Northern Colorado student Thomas Mink posted a doctored photo of a UNC professor on his Web page, the professor complained to Greeley police, who then went to Mink’s home and confiscated the computer used by the student and his mother. Shortly thereafter, a federal judge issued a restraining order preventing the district attorney from threatening Mink with the criminal-libel law. Mink’s legal challenge to the Colorado law will be heard early next year in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.I recall in the early 1970s, one of the underground newspapers in Los Angeles was charged with criminal libel for running a photograph that purported to show actress Angie Dickinson having sex. The photograph was altered, with Angie Dickinson's face put on someone else's body. There are other forms of libel involving photographic doctoring that I think might well justify criminal charges, because they create a serious risk of provoking violence. There should be no question about whether criminal libel laws are Constitutional. They were present when Congress passed the First Amendment, and no one seemed to see a conflict. As others have pointed out, freedom of the press and freedom of speech meant that you could not be prohibited from publishing or speaking; it did not mean that you were exempt from punishment for abuse of those freedoms. As an analogy, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" guarantees only that the government can't disarm individuals because they might abuse that right. It doesn't preclude punishment for abusing that freedom. Nations Failing To Live Up To The Kyoto Accord From the Independent, one of the low quality left-wing newspapers in Britain: Britain and Sweden are the only European countries honouring their Kyoto commitments to cut greenhouse gasses, according to a think-tank report.And over here, reporting on New Zealand's decision to not go ahead with a "carbon tax," perhaps as a first step towards dumping the Kyoto accords. Thanks to Warwick Hughes and the Kallini Brothers for the pointers to these news stories. Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Religious Fanatics Take Over Congress Well, specifically the First Congress: Resolved, That, after the oath shall have been administered to the President, he, attended by the Vice President and the members of the Senate and House of Representatives, proceed to St. Paul's Chapel, to hear divine service, to be performed by the Chaplain of Congress already appointed. [Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, 1789-1793 MONDAY, APRIL 27, 1789]Yeah, it's really clear that the First Congress, which went on to pass the First Amendment, intended neutrality between "religion and irreligion." An Interesting Conflict Of The Establishment & Free Speech Clauses Let's put this in the abstract form first. A judge has ordered someone not to use certain words in a public place--at the request of a political pressure group. Whatever happened to freedom of speech? The ACLU happened to it--the judge was responding to their request to prohibit the use of certain words. Specifically, the ACLU's argument is that the use of "Jesus Christ" or "Savior" in a legislative invocation violates the establishment clause: INDIANAPOLIS -- All eyes will be on the speaker's podium in the Indiana House tomorrow as the chamber convenes for the first time since a federal judge ordered that the official prayers cannot refer to Jesus Christ or any specific faith.Now, I've never been comfortable with legislative bodies opening with prayer, both because of the hypocrisy that it provokes, and because it seems to me to be mixing clean water (religion) with dirty water (government). But it is certainly Constitutional--as even the Supreme Court has admitted: Although prayers were not offered during the Constitutional Convention, the First Congress, as one of [463 U.S. 783, 788] its early items of business, adopted the policy of selecting a chaplain to open each session with prayer. Thus, on April 7, 1789, the Senate appointed a committee "to take under consideration the manner of electing Chaplains." S. Jour., 1st Cong., 1st Sess., 10 (1820 ed.). On April 9, 1789, a similar committee was appointed by the House of Representatives. On April 25, 1789, the Senate elected its first chaplain, id., at 16; the House followed suit on May 1, 1789, H. R. Jour., 1st Cong., 1st Sess., 26 (1826 ed.). A statute providing for the payment of these chaplains was enacted into law on September 22, 1789. 2 Annals of Cong. 2180; 4, 1 Stat. 71.Now, I can understand why the ACLU would be uncomfortable if the opening prayers were always from the same denomination, or failed to represent the diversity of the people who were represented in that legislative body. But the problem seems to be that, shockingly! the majority of prayers offered have been Christian, in a state that is majority Christian: The judge ruled that having a predominance of Christian prayers in the state House illegally advanced one religion over all others. Prayers are normally offered by visiting members of the clergy; when one is not present, a lawmaker says the opening prayer.I would completely agree that excluding all other faiths from the opening prayer is wrong. I could disagree, but at least understand an argument that no prayers should be offered because it gives preference to religion over irreligion. I could understand and disagree if Judge Hamilton had decided that Christian prayers had to be the minority (in a Christian majority state). But saying that Christian prayers being dominant in a state where Christianity is dominant violates the Establishment Clause--and therefore no explictly Christian prayers can be offered? That's crazy! The Minimum Wage Worker Supporting A Family Claim Different River points to some data that demolishes the idea that the minimum wage needs to be raised for the benefit of workers trying to raise families: So: 1.8% of workers earn the minimum wage, and 5.3% of those workers come from households below the poverty line. In other words, only 0.0954% of workers – that is, less than 1 in 1,000 workers – are minimum-wage workers from households below the poverty line. And no doubt not all of them are the highest-earning worker in the household. Some of them probably even have other jobs themselves.This has long been my belief--that if the goal is to help the workers with the lowest wages, then highly regressive taxes, such as Social Security and Medicare, should be either made completely flat, or exempt the lowest wage workers from these taxes. Yes, this would mean there would be little (if these taxes were made flat rate without a ceiling) or no money (if these workers were exempted from these taxes) going into their social security accounts. But realistically--how many minimum wage workers stay at that level their entire life? For the vast majority of workers, minimum wage is a phase you go through for a few months or, for most, for a year or two, as this Bureau of Labor Statistics abstract explains: For example, a study by Ralph E. Smith and Bruce Vavrichek examined the 1-year earnings mobility of workers that initially worked at minimum wage jobs.[3] They found that 63 percent of the minimum-wage workers in their sample were employed at higher-than-minimum wage jobs 1 year later. Also, Bradley R. Schiller found that "only 15 percent of the 1980 entrants still had any (minimum wage) experience after three years, "which suggests that long-term minimum wage employment is rare.[4] More than three-quarters of Schiller’s sample were still attending school while working at their first job, however, and relatively few of the sample workers had embarked on their post-school career.[5]Not contributing money to Social Security in the first year out of a forty year working career is not going to make any difference to the size of that worker's retirement check. But it may be the difference between having enough money to pay for shoes, or food. More About Treasury Yield Curve Inversion At least of this morning, the Treasury yield curve is no longer inverted. Some analysts are saying that this was a transitory behavior: "While the curve has moved to flat as a pancake to a bit inverted and yields open the year near 4.38%, we are not excited about further inversion just yet," said David Ader, fixed-income market strategist at RBS Greenwich Capital.The evidence suggests that the Fed is hoping all the interest rate rise in 2005 is enough to kill inflation. Monday, January 02, 2006
Treasury Yield Curve Inversion A few years back, I mentioned "yield curve inversion" to a friend, and he thought it sounded like a dangerous experiment in nuclear physics. (It does, actually.) What is really is, however, is the situation where the yield of a long-term Treasury bond drops below the yield of a short-term Treasury bond. Under normal conditions, this shouldn't happen. Why would you be willing to accept 4.5% for a 30 year bond instead of 4.6% for a five year bond? The answer is either: 1. Bond buyers (who tend to be big, smart institutions) think a serious recession is about to happen. If it does, interest rates will plummet, and the price of the long-term bonds will go flying up. Buying a bond with 4.5% yield means that when interest rates fall dramatically, the price of those bonds will rise. The longer the term, the greater the rise in the price of those bonds. We had one of these "hold on tight, the economy is about to go down" yield curve inversions in 2000. 2. Bond buyers think that inflation over the next few years is going down--and staying down. Back about 1994, we had a Treasury yield curve inversion. A few months after it happened, I worked up enough courage to buy 50 Treasury bonds with a yield of 7.5%. I still have those bonds. But instead of being worth about $47,000 (what I paid for them), they are worth about $60,000. They have also been paying me that 7.5% ever since. Great buy. So the question to ask is, "Is the yield curve inversion telling me that the market is doing #1 or #2?" If you are buying bonds, I'm not sure that it much matters. In recessions, your bonds will become more valuable, and you will be glad that you locked in a decent interest rate. If the inversion is because inflation is going away, then your bonds will become more valuable, and you will be glad that you locked in a decent interest rates. This looks like a no-lose proposition--if you are buying bonds. If you are buying or holding stocks, however, #1 or #2 makes a big difference. Back when I bought those Treasury bonds in 1994, I should have bought stocks as well. (I did, but not enough.) The stock market responded to the good news of dropping bond yields by reaching for the sky. The yield curve inversion in 2000, however, signaled #1--and people that bought stocks back then--or neglected to sell them--got a painful lesson in what recessions do to stock dividends and prices. The temptation to liquidate some of my equity mutual funds and buy long-term bonds is very strong--this might be #1. So is the temptation to hope that this is #2, and hold on. The Unglorious Act of Cutting a Manuscript Down To Size My publisher wants 100,000 words--from a manuscript of 167,000 words (including footnotes). The first step was to remove the chapters about gunsmithing and gun manufacturing in early America: this dropped about 35,000 words (and created the core of a second book!) The next step was to go through the footnotes. In many places, my footnotes provided a lot of detail that might be appropriate in a scholarly paper, but not in a book--and certainly not in a book that uses endnotes, not footnotes. I was able to remove another five thousand words that way. I am now working my way through the body of the text, looking for unnecessarily complex phrases that I can simplify. For example, there are a lot of places where the expressions such as "that is to say" or "It appears that" can be completely deleted. In other places, "it had been" simplifies to "it was." In a few cases, I am finding sentences that didn't need to be there and more rarely, paragraphs that added little nor nothing to the book. The next phase is my wife, using the pen equivalent of a chain-saw to throw away that which is superfluous. As of this evening, I am down to about 122,000 words. I probably don't have to get to exactly 100,000 words--but I would at least like to get to 105,000. Sunday, January 01, 2006
House Project: Debugging Various Systems Try not to read too much into my complaints about my new house yet. This is a complex system, with lots of parts. The house certainly works better than any Microsoft product so far. The real test of the builder will be how well he resolves the various problems. I spoke to the electrician today. 1. The backup generator didn't start because it didn't have a battery. (This strikes me as a "Duh!" sort of point, but I must confess that I didn't think about this, either.) He is going to get that on January 2 (the 1st not being a good day to hit stores for automobile batteries). 2. The jetted tub doesn't work because Rod is in the habit of tripping the GFI (Ground Fault Interrupter) in the bathroom when he is done, to make sure that someone doesn't ignorantly start the jets without filling the tub with water. I didn't even notice the GFI switch. I suppose that I should have thought about that. 3. The telephone and cable wiring that has no connectors was because Rod's son was supposed to walk through the house and make sure that they didn't miss anything. Whoops! Rod will take care of that on the 2nd. 4. The connectors lying on the floor are waiting for the appropriate wall plate. Rod will take care of that on the 2nd, also. My wife and I went up there on the morning of December 31, and the power is back on. At least there's no great danger of the house getting so cold as to freeze the pipes--it is very well insulated. We have not been happy about the interior painting, which is especially apparent in the dining room, which is pink. My son-in-law worked as a professional painter for the University of Idaho, and both he and my daughter immediately noticed how poorly the interior is painted. My son-in-law also figured out why. The interior was sprayed--not rolled--and he thinks that the paint was overdiluted to get it to spray smoothly. Unfortunately, when you spray onto gypsum board, the results are never quite as good as rolling full viscosity paint. Here's a wall in the family room. Because the paint isn't dramatically different from the color of the underlying gypsum board, it isn't spectacularly obvious, but you can see striping.  Click to enlarge A little more obvious is the dining room, where the pink is sufficiently different from the gray of the gypsum board to make the horizontal striping obvious.  Click to enlarge You also can't just take a brush or roller to a wall that was sprayed; you have to feather in the boundaries, or you get results like this, in the hall.  Click to enlarge Additionally, when you roll a wall, you usually start by cutting in the corners with a brush, and then roll into the corners. The brush knocks out the spider webs. Spraying just gives you paint globs on the spider webs. (Sorry, the pictures of the paint-encased spider webs didn't come out.) Because even three spray coats of paint is so thin, we already have places where paint has been scraped from corners--and we have moved no furniture yet! I suspect that this was the electrician rubbing against the wall while installing switches.  Click to enlarge And what is this hole in the paint? It is too high for anyone to have run into the wall, and chipped the paint. It almost looks like someone painted over a bug, but it overcame the fumes and flew away.  Click to enlarge This could have happened to anyone (although anyone would have used an eraser). The mirrors guy had marked the dimensions--and forgot that his scratch pad wasn't going to be covered by the mirrors.  Click to enlarge We are sufficiently disappointed with the painting that we are going to push the builder to roll one coat of paint at least on the walls. I believe that he found it impossible to hire painters (and he spent more than a month trying to find anyone to do this), so he ended up spraying it himself--and it looks like he might have been better off telling us that he needed to wait for painting subcontractors. I wouldn't have been happy, of course, but I am not happy with these results, either. Another annoyance: in addition to the wind whistle at the top hinge part of the front door, which includes a bit of a draft as well as noise, there is a similar problem at the kitchen exterior door, at the top opposite the hinges. It is a large enough gap between frame, weatherstripping, and door, that you can actually see some light through it.  Click to enlarge The water coming into the garage can be solved, I think, by just pouring a small amount of concrete outside the garage, where I have a piece of broken concrete sitting, to force water into the drain.  Click to enlarge Last house project entry. UPDATE: The builder says that he sprayed the dining room twice, and rolled it once. He thinks that what we are seeing is a weird lighting effect problem, not a paint problem--although he admits his wife also noticed that it looked like a bad paint job. Labels: house project |
