Magnifisyncopathological

Nope, I wasn't able to make it to Ushicon. Ain't got no money.

With my move into a new apartment, my finances changed pretty dramatically:

1. My rent went from $500 a month to $545.
   
2. My new apartment complex takes care of all utilities except for phone and electricity, tossing in extended cable TV for free.
   
3. I dropped my DSL service.
   
4. I got a raise, roughly equal to $200 extra a month.
   
5. I dropped USAA as my automobile insurance carrier and picked up LiberyMutual instead, opting for automatic paycheck reductions to pay for it.
   
6. And I broke up with my girlfriend.

It really is a simple equation. If I don't make enough money to cover what I want to buy, then I have to lower my buying expectations and alter my habits. I'll be buying Zeigen Bock rather than Fat Tire...grocery brand foods rather than national brands...stay home rather than go out...reluctantly not buy new music and see new movies...and almost religiously turn my lights and electric devices off when I don't need them.

It doesn't work that way with government, of course. Obviously, some jurisdictions do a better job with their balance books than others and when crunch time comes, they cut government jobs and reduce spending. I don't want to lump everyone together.

But the feeling I've gotten over the years regarding the federal government and state governments in general is that it is simply not even up for discussion to cut payrolls by any significant degree and almost anathema to cut social programs. Everyone pays lipservice to "reducing waste" and "cutting the fat" from budgets, but those are problems of a systemic nature to all organizations. Eliminating costly departments and the programs they oversee are my preferred methods of reducing government red ink.

Perhaps that's why I'm hesitant to ever run for office. I'm too much of a fundamentalist to get any serious level of voter support. Cloaking my ideas in digestible rhetoric might work, but that is deception and any opponents could just point to this very blog and reveal what I truely feel about the issues. There'd be no point in trying to hide my intentions: I'd do my best to put Grover Norquist's famous quote of "get [government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" into actual practice.

In Austin, such a political stance is guaranteed to get you dead-on-arrival status.

Anyway, just pondering some things on this very nice Saturday afternoon.

Posted by drizzten at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[Updates below.]

Farewell Mapplethorpe, Hello Shakespeare

Under normal circumstances, the White House announcement that the president was seeking a big budget increase for the National Endowment for the Arts might have been grounds for dismay. Pronounce the acronym "NEA," and most people think Robert Mapplethorpe, photographs of crucifixes floating in urine, and performance artists prancing about naked, smeared with chocolate, and skirling about the evils of patriarchy.

Thanks, but no thanks.

But things have changed, and changed for the better at the NEA. The reason can be summed up in two trochees: Dana Gioia, the distinguished poet and critic who is the Endowment's new chairman.

Within a matter of months, Mr. Gioia has transformed that moribund institution into a vibrant force for the preservation and transmission of artistic culture. He has cut out the cutting edge and put back the art. Instead of supporting repellent "transgressive" freaks, he has instituted an important new program to bring Shakespeare to communities across America. And by Shakespeare I mean Shakespeare, not some PoMo rendition that portrays Hamlet in drag or sets A Midsummer Night's Dream in a concentration camp. (Check the website www.shakespeareinamericancommunities.org for more information.)

Mr. Gioia is moving on other fronts as well. He has hired a number of able deputies who care about art and understand that what the public wants is more access to good art - opera, poetry, theater, literature - not greater exposure to social pathology dressed up as art. After a couple of decades of cultural schizophrenia, the NEA has become a clear-sighted, robust institution intent on bringing important art to the American people.

Who cares about "limited government" anyway when you can use the government to promote a certain kind of culture and art...especially when it makes your side look good?

It's quite odd, really. People keep telling us - that is, professors and CNN commentators and Hollywood actors keep telling us - how very stupid President Bush is. Yet everywhere one looks he is supporting some of the most intelligent and dynamic people ever to occupy their cultural posts. Dana Gioia at the NEA, his counterpart Bruce Cole at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Leon Kass and his panel of distinguished scientists and philosophers at the President's Council on Bioethics (see their website www.bioethics.gov to get a sense of the good work they are doing on clarifying the enormous moral issues surrounding the debate over biotechnology). The Left keeps screaming about how dim George Bush is, but in the meantime, he has illuminated one area of public life after another with immensely talented and articulate people.

There is plenty of room for debate about whether and to what extent government should be directly involved in funding culture.

I'm with Rush on this:

Well, good, then they don't need to take money from other Americans! This reminds me of the argument over funding the Kansas City Symphony when I lived there. There were all these fund-raisers, and when people didn't open their wallets at them, the symphony demanded that the government force them to pony up the dough. I mean, nobody wanted the symphony, okay? Yet some people insisted the government fund the thing! I just don't understand this line of thinking. A lot of conservatives feel the same way, and they're none too happy with Bush these days.

UPDATE(6/18/2004 5:07pm)
Whom to Vote For?

Posted by drizzten at 09:37 AM | Permalink

No, I'm not whining about new technologies and ideas replacing the old ones.

I'm quite happy about it. :)

Check out the new Mises Blog and Samizdata. The former's changes are best described as superficially tweaked (I look forward to the comments system) while the latter is considerably new throughout.

To anyone curious, I doubt I'll change this place much for the forseeable future. It's nice and comfy in here.

Posted by drizzten at 01:44 PM | Permalink

I've lived in Austin for over three years and not once have I been to Ushicon. It's this weekend, from Jan 30th to Feb 1st. Pre-registration has closed and at-the-door prices are

3-Day Pass     - $35
Friday Pass     - $20
Saturday Pass - $20
Sunday Pass   - $10

Koda Kumi (Final Fantasy X-2, Gilgamesh, Cutey Honey)
Johnny Yong Bosch (Trigun, Akira, Gatekeepers, Witch Hunter Robin, Wolf's Rain)
Douglas Smith (BubbleGum 2040, Those Who Hunt Elves, Sorcerer Hunters, GoldenBoy, and Steam Detectives)
Monica Rial (Steel Angel Kurumi, Excel Saga, Noir, Angelic Layer, and Kiddy Grade)
Tiffany Grant (Neon Genesis Evangelion, Blue Seed, Sorcerer Hunters, and hundreds more)

Yes, that's a damn impressive list for a city the size of Austin.

If any readers have been to Ushicon or know of someone who has, please let me know what the experience was like.

Posted by drizzten at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Updates below.]

Education cost study under way

Texas' 1,040 public school districts should soon know how much it costs for an "average" education in their district, academic researchers said Thursday.

[...]

The study is important because once lawmakers know how much it costs for an average education in Texas, they can develop a tax structure to pay for it.

© 1995-2004 The E.W. Scripps Co. and the Abilene Reporter-News.

Putting a price tag on the cost of an adequate education could become a double-edge sword, Clint Independent School District Superintendent Donna Smith said Thursday.

A large number would make it even more financially difficult for lawmakers, who want to reduce school property taxes and end the "Robin Hood" system that forces wealthy school districts to share with property-poor districts.

"If they come back with a very high number that we can't (afford), then what do we do?" Smith asked.

[...]

"They might say, 'We'll give you what's adequate, and if you have the resources and ability to raise more, then go ahead,' " she said.

Property-poor school districts, including all nine in El Paso County, could not get as much extra "enrichment" money as wealthy districts could.

Each penny of such an enrichment tax would raise about $11 for every student in the El Paso Independent School District and less than $2 for every San Elizario student.

Taxpayers making the same effort in the Alamo Heights (San Antonio) district would raise $56 per student with every penny of tax rate, while the same taxing effort would produce $114 per student in the Highland Park district.

Clint spent $6,589 per student last year, or $499 below the state average, according to the Texas Education Agency. That amounts to a $4.3 million difference for the 8,572-student district.

"That's nearly 50 classrooms" and teachers, Smith said. "That's like more than a campus in my district. And that just brings us up to the average."

[...]

The school funding problem is considered acute because more than half of the state's 1,041 school districts have reached the tax cap for operations and maintenance.

Shapiro said Republican leaders want to generate more money for public education but link it to incentives and school performance results.

Copyright © 2004 El Paso Times, a Gannett Co., Inc. newspaper.

Lawmakers are studying school finance to prepare for a special session, which Gov. Rick Perry is expected to call this spring.

State leaders said they are waiting for a report due in March that should advise the state on how much it needs to spend on education. No one yet knows what the report will recommend.

But Gov. Rick Perry seemed to put himself at odds with the rest of the state leadership when he said last week that schools would get no new money when the Legislature reforms the way the state pays for public schools.

Perry revised his message this week. The governor supports incentive programs but doesn't want to give schools a blank check, said Robert Black, a spokesman for Perry.

[...]

Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, didn't rule out adding new money to the education system. But she said new money should be tied to student achievement.

"What the schools want are new dollars, and what we would like to see is some system put in place so new dollars are tied to performance," Shapiro said. "And that's what we are trying to create at this moment in time."

When Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst proposed his school finance plan last year, it didn't increase funding for schools. But that's not an indication that Dewhurst doesn't support giving schools more money, said Mark Miner, Dewhurst's press secretary.

"He's talking about if we give schools more money, it needs to be combined with accountability and performance," Miner said.

© 1995-2004 The E.W. Scripps Co. and the Abilene Reporter-News.

Shapiro, R-Dallas, said an extensive report by Texas A&M University and University of Kansas researchers will be delivered to the Joint Select Committee on Public School Finance she co-chairs in time for the panel's next meeting, set for Feb. 19.

But what state leaders will do with the figure and how they will fund public education still is the looming question, said Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, a member of the panel.

"We have to be careful what we ask for," Van de Putte said after the panel's hearing on Thursday.

"Once we know how much it is going to cost, what happens then? Especially if the political will is not there" to provide that level of funding, she asked.

Van de Putte said there is a concern that the state would be sued "if we were not to fund at the 'adequate' level," which she said is a legal term, adding, "If we are told, by our own consultants, what the funding level should be, are we then obligated to fund at that level and are we legally liable if we do not?"

Portions © 2004 KENS 5 and the San Antonio Express-News.

Under the current system, schools in wealthy property districts are required to share part of their property tax revenues with poor districts. Lawmakers are looking for alternative sources of revenue that will help ease the burden on property owners.

A group of wealthy and poor districts have signed on to a lawsuit, scheduled to go to trial in July, suing the state over the so-called Robin Hood school finance system.

© 2004 Star Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

*drum roll*

Joint Committee on Public School Finance:

Public education is arguably the state's most vital responsibility. Regardless of political, ethnic or economic background, everyone should agree that a quality education is the key to our students' future in an increasingly competitive global economy. The Texas public education system faces severe challenges. In particular, the current school finance system relies too heavily on local property taxes. Already, half of our nearly 1,100 school districts levy taxes at or near the statutory cap of $1.50 for Maintenance and Operations. Moreover, the current school finance system was developed with little consideration of the costs of achieving the state's educational goals.

The Joint Committee on Public School Finance was created by Lt. Governor David Dewhurst and House Speaker Tom Craddick to address this critical issue. The Committee is charged to recommend innovative ways that the Legislature might fulfill its obligation to public education, while reducing the reliance on local property taxes.

The Joint Committee's charges included reviewing our tax system and assessing different options for public school funding. The committee and its highly skilled research team will be studying the entire public school enterprise, including appropriate funding levels for high academic performance; adjustments for legitimate student and school district cost differences; the role of the state in providing school facilities; and incentives for improved student performance and cost-effective operation. In addition, the committee and its researchers will investigate school and district practices that contribute to high academic performance and cost-effective operation.

As a result of its work, the Joint Committee on Public School Finance hopes to ensure that Texas taxpayers receive the maximum value for their money and that all Texas students have access to a quality education that enables them to participate fully in the social, economic, and educational opportunities of our state.

1. Education is a choice for parents and children to make. Since it is such an important and personal choice, the state should have as little to do with it as possible. That means amending the Texas Constitution and ridding it of any education obligations and ending the federal government's role entirely.
   
2. Just as I shouldn't have to pay for someone else's burger if they are hungry and just as someone shouldn't have to pay for a new pair of glasses if mine break...we shouldn't have to finance other people's education. In this regard, vouchers are only a small step in the right direction, freeing people to pick the public schools they want their children to go to, but still using tax money to do it.
   
3. If all else fails and Texans are simply unwilling to bear the responsibilities and burdens of a fully privatized educational system, I'd prefer a reliance or an increase in sales taxes over the imposition of a state income tax. This is my last resort option.

I work with Texas public school districts. I'm aware of how bad it is out there. I see no major movement towards the only solution that I think is best: schools should charge their students directly for the services they provide. Let uninhibited choices guide the creation of a free market in education.

UPDATE(4:05pm)
Here's an example of exactly the wrong kind of thinking:

Lawmakers are looking at measures to raise more money for education. They include video gambling, $1 a pack tax hike on cigarettes, and a split tax roll that would tax residential property at lower rates than business property.

There may be an emerging consensus on cigarette taxes and video lottery, Rep. Don Branch, R-Highland Park, said. While Perry has opposed any expansion of gambling, an aide said he consider any option other than a state income tax. A $1 a pack tax hike on cigarettes could raise about $987 million in revenue. The split roll property tax may not be a viable option in a Legislature controlled by Republicans.

It's unfortunate the debate is being restricted before the session begins. Everything should be on the table, including a state income tax. We need a better way to finance education. Schools need more money; and it should come from the state, not from local taxpayers. We must also be careful in reforming the school-finance system that we don't sacrifice the principles of equity.

© 2004 Texas Scripps Newspapers, L.P. A Scripps Howard newspaper. All Rights Reserved

Obviously, I take issue with the notion of additional cigarette taxes (shouldn't be a special one on them in the first place), inequity in property taxation (stop abusing businesses because they are businesses!), state income taxes, reducing local responsibility for wanted services and burdening the whole state with financing them and finally, placing wholesale faith and credit in the hands of government to determine what's right for our children.

UPDATE(3/5/2004 10:55am)
The report has been released.

UPDATE(4/9/2004 12:49pm)
Oppose all state income tax plans!

UPDATE(4/28/2004 9:25am)
The proposed solutions for Texas school financing aren't any better.

UPDATE(5/4/2004 9:10am)
I did some quick 'n dirty educational cost calculations of my own.

Posted by drizzten at 08:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Anyone watch today's Power Lunch on CNBC? I was browsing the 24 hour news channels at home during lunch and came across a speech on economic flexibility from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. His remarks were for something called the HM Treasure Enterprise Conference in London, England. Via satellite, he laid out a wonderfully broad historical case for free trade and free markets.

The overall theme was the great desirability of free market flexibility and how attempts to do otherwise in the past had conclusively failed. Sounding a specific interest in labor markets, Mr. Greenspan took aim at protectionism, noting how as market forces asserted themselves to present Japanese low-cost laborers as the Foreign Threat of the 80's those very same forces shifted economic focus to Mexico in the '90s and then subsequently to China, rendering hollow the idea that the American workforce must be protected from low-cost labor from abroad.

Some key quotes:

As the Great Depression of the 1930s deepened, John Maynard Keynes offered an explanation for the then-bewildering series of events that was to engage economists for generations to come. Market systems, he argued, contrary to the conventional wisdom, did not at all times converge to full employment. They often, in economists' jargon, found equilibrium with significant segments of the workforce unable to find jobs. His insight rested largely on certain perceived rigidities in labor and product markets. The notion prevalent in the 1920s and earlier--that economies, when confronted with unanticipated shocks, would quickly return to full employment--fell into disrepute as the depression festered. In its place arose the view that government action was required to restore full employment.

More broadly, government intervention was increasingly seen as necessary to correct the failures and deficiencies viewed as inherent in market economies. Laissez-faire was rapidly abandoned and a tidal wave of regulation swept over much of the world's business community. In the United States, labor practices, securities issuance, banking, agricultural pricing, and many other segments of the American economy, fell under the oversight of government. With the onset of World War II, both the U.S. and the U.K. economies went on a regimented war footing. Military production ramped up rapidly and output reached impressive levels. Central planning, in one sense, had its finest hour.

[...]

However, cracks in the facade of government economic management emerged early in the postwar years, and those cracks were to continue widening as time passed. Britain's heavily controlled economy was under persistent stress as it vaulted from one crisis to another in the early postwar decades. In the United States, unbalanced macroeconomic policies led to a gradual uptrend in the rate of inflation in the 1960s. The imposition of wage and price controls in the 1970s to deal with the problem of inflation proved unworkable and ineffective. The notion that the centrally planned Soviet economy was catching up with the West was, by the early 1980s, increasingly viewed as dubious, though it was not fully discarded until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 exposing the economic ruin behind the iron curtain.

The East-West divisions following World War II engendered an unintended four-decades-long experiment in comparative economic systems, which led, in the end, to a judgment by the vast majority of policymakers that market economies were unequivocally superior to those managed by central planning. Many developing nations abandoned their Soviet-type economic systems for more market-based regimes.

[...]

As a consequence [of deregulating large swaths of the American economy], the United States, then widely seen as a once great economic power that had lost its way, gradually moved back to the forefront of what Joseph Schumpeter, the renowned Harvard professor, called "creative destruction," the continuous scrapping of old technologies to make way for the innovative. In that paradigm, standards of living rise because depreciation and other cash flows of industries employing older, increasingly obsolescent, technologies are marshaled, along with new savings, to finance the production of capital assets that almost always embody cutting-edge technologies. Workers, of necessity, migrate with the capital.

Through this process, wealth is created, incremental step by incremental step, as high levels of productivity associated with innovative technologies displace lesser productive capabilities. The model presupposes the continuous churning of a flexible competitive economy in which the new displaces the old.

The success of that strategy in the United States confirmed, by the 1980s, the earlier views that a loosening of regulatory restraint on business would improve the flexibility of our economy. Flexibility implies a faster response to shocks and a correspondingly greater ability to absorb their downside consequences and to recover from their aftermath. No specific program encompassed and coordinated initiatives to enhance flexibility, but there was a growing recognition, both in the United States and among many of our trading partners, that a market economy could best withstand and recover from shocks when provided maximum flexibility.

[...]

The most significant lesson to be learned from recent economic history is arguably the importance of structural flexibility and the resilience to economic shocks that it imparts. The more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct in response to inevitable, often unanticipated, disturbances and thus to contain the size and consequences of cyclical imbalances. Enhanced flexibility has the advantage of being able to adjust automatically and not having to rest on policymakers' initiatives, which often come too late or are misguided.

I do not claim to be able to judge the relative importance of conventional stimulus and increased economic flexibility to our ability to weather the shocks of the past few years. But it is difficult to dismiss improved flexibility as having played a key role in the U.S. economy's recent relative stability. In fact, the past two recessions in the United States were the mildest in the postwar period. The experience of Britain and many others during this period of time have been similar.

I do not doubt that the vast majority of us would prefer to work in an environment that was less stressful and less competitive than the one with which we currently engage. The cries of distress amply demonstrate that flexibility and its consequence, rigorous competition, are not universally embraced. Flexibility in labor policies, for example, appears in some contexts to be the antithesis of job security. Yet, in our roles as consumers, we seem to insist on the low product prices and high quality that are the most prominent features of our current frenetic economic structure. If a producer can offer quality at a lower price than the competition, retailers are pressed to respond because the consumer will otherwise choose a shopkeeper who does. Retailers are afforded little leeway in product sourcing and will seek out low-cost producers, whether they are located in Guangdong province in China or northern England.

If consumers are stern taskmasters of their marketplace, business purchasers of capital equipment and production materials inputs have taken the competitive paradigm a step further and applied it on a global scale.

Yet globalization is by no means universally admired. The frenetic pace of the competition that has characterized markets' extended global reach has engendered major churnings in labor and product markets.

The sensitivity of the U.S. economy and many of our trading partners to foreign competition appears to have intensified recently as technological obsolescence has continued to foreshorten the expected profitable life of each nation's capital stock. The more rapid turnover of our equipment and plant, as one might expect, is mirrored in an increased turnover of jobs. A million American workers, for example, currently leave their jobs every week, two-fifths involuntarily, often in association with facilities that have been displaced or abandoned. A million, more or less, are also newly hired or returned from layoffs every week, in part as new facilities come on stream.

Related to this process, jobs in the United States have been perceived as migrating abroad over the years, to low-wage Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, to low-wage Mexico in the 1990s, and most recently to low-wage China. Japan, of course, is no longer characterized by a low-wage workforce, and many in Mexico are now complaining of job losses to low-wage China.

The onset of far greater flexibility in recent years in the labor and product markets of the United States and the United Kingdom, to name just two economies, raises the possibility of the resurrection of confidence in the automatic rebalancing ability of markets, so prevalent in the period before Keynes. In its modern incarnation, the reliance on markets acknowledges limited roles for both countercyclical macroeconomic policies and market-sensitive regulatory frameworks. The central burden of adjustment, however, is left to economic agents operating freely and in their own self-interest in dynamic and interrelated markets. The benefits of having moved in this direction over the past couple of decades are increasingly apparent.

Good stuff and one of the better policy statements from an actual American policymaker I've heard in some time. Mr. Greenspan may have turned in his staunch capitalist roots some time ago, but he's still a damn sight more correct than most people of his position and above.

Posted by drizzten at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It really is amazing how insane these Republican Christians are:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said Mr. Bush's failure to ask Congress to get to work on an amendment negated his other initiatives.

"If we throw out 6,000 years of human history that says marriage is between a man and a woman, then the rest of that doesn't matter," Mr. Perkins said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

No. Only restricting the definition of marriage to heterosexuals is of paramount, almost catastrophic concern.

Not that I go out of my way to find these things. I have enough things alternatively irritating and exasperting on my plate as it is. :)

UPDATE(1/26/2004 9:40pm)
Then again, this is detachment-from-reality on a whole different scale.

Posted by drizzten at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Updates below.]

Back in November, I wrote a post about noise ordinances and my opinions regarding them. The post lay dormant for months before getting a few comments. Those comments erupted into one of the most active discussions my blog has had.

As with the nature of people arguing over the scope of state power, the commentary veered off into theoretical and philosophical grounds, as it should. It became apparent to me that the thread was loosing coherency and needed seperate posts to address some of the issues brought up. This is the first; the second will follow this one.

Gil, from A Reasonable Man, disagreed with my fundamentalist stand against noise ordinances, saying:

I disagree with the "libertarian" position expressed here that opposes all noise ordinances affecting vehicles on public roads.

[...]

I think the essence of libertarianism is the idea that people should be free to pursue their own projects without other people imposing unreasonable costs on them. I say "unreasonable", because there is a threshold of "cost" below which it is ridiculous to enforce this rule. Every time I breathe I'm reducing the available oxygen to everyone else, etc. On the moon, it might become reasonable to enforce property rights to oxygen because it would be more precious.

I have a lot of respect for Ayn Rand's works, and I think that the NAP is a great general guideline. But, I'm confident that it fails to capture the whole of morality.

[...]

I appreciate your concern for avoiding a slippery slope, but that's not a sufficient reason to insist that what's wrong is right. And a dogmatic application of the NAP is wrong.

I think there is objective morality and I think we can approach moral truths, just as we can approach physical truths, through an honest process of conjecture and refutation, and not by adhering to dogma.

So the issue is this: I believe moral action should be guided by objective ethics and those ethics should not contradict each other. If I am challenged in an arguement to prove what I believe is correct, that proof must be rooted in logic. Otherwise, it falls apart and becomes indefensible. Therefore, I have serious trouble accepting pragmatic and utilitarian (P&U) arguements for or against something.

I base a great deal of my ethics on the NAP and examining which actors are initiating force against one another to determine who is in the wrong. Normally, this doesn't cause too many problems. But in the case of soundwaves, it does. By its nature, sound is physical force that travel through air and object. Every day we are exposed to uncountable numbers of soundwaves of various frequencies and powers. We can hear some and only feel others. Once we create sound, the path it takes and the things it impacts are out of our hands. Beyond the simple thought experiments that we might dabble in regarding where a sound might bounce to or end up, we can't tell what'll happen to it.

From my absolutist viewpoint then, I should support noise restrictions because they violate the NAP and initiate force against those who have done nothing to you. In the case of subwoofers and powerful bass, the principle's violation becomes explicit as the forces involved can be great enough to rattle windows, wake people up, and literally disturb the peace. So why would I support the abolishment of noise laws as I did in my original post? Because I considered the individual property rights of the car owner to be more important than the property rights of the people affected by his music.

Admittedly, this feels strongly arbitrary, and it's beginning to trouble me. As the discussion in the comments continued, I began to realize I couldn't defend myself adequately. The typical way to determine property rights problems is to determine who initiated force, but using that standard in an ideal society would result in consequences that even I'd be wary of.

Gil says he thinks we can solve moral dilemmas through a Popperian approach just as we can solve scientific questions. I must say that I don't accept everything Objectivism proposes. However, one thing that has always remained close to me and was reinforced greatly by reading Objectivist writing is that in order to have standards to compare behavior to, we must have rules/statements/principles that are either directly axiomatic or a priori. Otherwise, if we adopt general themes or guidelines and use them instead, we run the risk of contradicting ourselves down the road, negating our positions. It's my deep distrust of P&U-based arguements. Additionally, the Popperian approach bothers me somewhat because it deliberately leaves open the chance that anything previously considered fact and truth could be false, ultimately resulting in a situation where no issue is truely considered settled.

Perhaps I'm as (or more) ignorant of critical rationalism as I am of Objectivism. I do leave open that possibility. :)

In the end, though, I have to stick up for what feels right in my gut if I'm unable to defend it from human criticism. And my position that noise ordinances violate property rights remains because they do. When I read about a law that makes it illegal for someone to play music on public roads that is loud enough to be heard from X feet away, I cringe. It represents another government attempt to exercise collective control over individual property. It's a symptom of the "do something!" syndrome that afflicts so many and provides room for the state to wade in and socially engineer.

Is this consequentialist and therefore a different form of P&U arguementation? I have a bad feeling it is.

But then again, the comments are open for those who disagree.

UPDATED 6/12/2009 1:50pm
Noise Ordinance Complaint at Shady Grove

Posted by drizzten at 06:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Updates below.]

Spending bill swells on diet of pork (text quoted from the Yahoo edition)

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) has defended the spending bill as "a titanic achievement in fiscal restraint" because it holds growth in discretionary spending to 3 percent.

The legislation provides $328 billion in discretionary spending for 2004, but the bill's total expenditures come to $822 billion when such entitlement programs as Medicare are included.

The fine print of the omnibus appropriations package, which covers funding for 11 Cabinet agencies, offers a glimpse of the way taxpayers' money is doled out according to the desires of individual members of Congress and the raw political power of the institution's leaders.

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

Every Senator and House Representative who voted for this gigantic stinking mass of shit should be thrown out of office and personal assets liquidated to begin the atonement process for dropping this kind of omnibus spending bill on the backs of American taxpayers.

UPDATE(1/23/2004 8:55am)
Then there's the awe-dropping numbers being touted by a report that says the long-term deficit (i.e., what the government will be paying more than 10 years down the road vs. what it will make in taxes) will be - conservatively - $44 to $45 trillion. That the great bulk of those number will be going to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare should surprise no one.

I'm unimpressed by Bush's pledge to freeze spending. It's a joke, because he's only planning on limiting growth in non defense and homeland security spending to 1%. What he should be doing is cutting spending, deeply. I'm talking about double-digit percentage reductions.

UPDATE(2/4/2004 9:30am)
More here.

UPDATED 9/14/2005 12:06pm
Tom DeLay Should Resign in Total Disgrace

UPDATED 9/28/2005 4:41pm
So Tom DeLay has been indicted for conspiracy.

Yawn.

UPDATED 4/4/2006 12:50pm
Tom DeLay Resigns, Finally

Posted by drizzten at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

No, not the TV show. I'm talking about the new Chinese food restaurant at the southwest corner of Burnet Road and Highway 183. The actual address is 9070 Research Blvd, Suite 101. It's phone number is 512-275-9622 and they are open Mon-Thurs 11am-10pm, Fri 11am-10:30pm, Sat 11:30am-10:30pm, and Sun 11:30am-10pm.

I needed lunch last Monday and since I live close by, I figured I'd give the location a try. The interior is very modern and attractive. It wasn't at all what I expected to see. Non-irritating adult contemporary played quietly in the background. I found the table a few inches too far from the booth's seats but it wasn't too distracting. I'd say less than 10 people were there, not counting the employees.

The menu would be familar to anyone accustomed to Asian cuisine. Egg rolls, various chicken and pork dishes, wonton soup, etc. There is bar, but the beer selection is wimpy even though large servings (20+ ounces) Kirin Ichiban in a glass only cost $3. I ordered a veggie egg roll ($1.50), the beer, and the Black Pepper Filet Mignon ($8.95).

Service was good, though slightly slow near the end. The egg roll, cooked on the oily side, was served with heated red sweet sauce. The entree came with a basic lettuce, tomato, and carrot salad. I choose the sesame salad dressing, which took some time getting used to. I've never had it before and the subdued taste wasn't what I was expecting. The steak was juicy and tender, though it was slightly overcooked. There were perhaps 10-12 steak "cubes" the size of stubby thumbs served on a bed of cooked carrot and onion stalk-slivers.

The prices were kinda steep for my tastes. All eleven lunch entrees were $7.95 and up; four were $8.95 and up. Dinner prices, according to the menu I took with me were worse with all seventeen were $10.95 and up and nine $14.95 and up. Many of the dinner entrees have the same names and descriptions as the lunch entrees, so there must be something else served with them during the later hours. Ditto for the price differences between the lunch and dinner prices for their stock chicken and beef dishes. Add on average $2 to the lunch price (usually $6.95 for chicken and $7.25 for beef) to get the dinner price.

Overall, I'd rate my limited experience with the place a solid 7.5 with points deducted for minor food quibbles, not-quite-there service, and general price curiosity. I'd eat there again and it'd make a good place to take a date. I couldn't find many reviews of the place online, it is very new, and I only went there between 2pm and 3pm during a national holiday, so your mileage may vary.

Posted by drizzten at 06:22 PM | Permalink

I have in front of me two documents. One is a letter from my apartment management and one is a notice inserted into my latest phone bill.

Each document is representative of the same bad ideas influencing society and our legislators.

The apartment manager letter is a notice that they will be coming around over the next few days to inspect our porches. It says:

Dear Resident(s),

We will be looking at patios and landings next week. To avoid a lease violation, please remember the only things that are allowed on the patios are:

*Plants
*Patio furniture (furniture made specifically for outdoor use)
*Bikes
*And children's toys stored neatly

The only things allowed on the landing are plants.
Please do not set trash outside your door.

B.Q. pits are not allowed to be stored or used on the patios.
This is a city ordinance. (See attached)

The paper attached is something from the Austin Fire Department. I'm not sure if this is it's motto or not (it's written motto-style across the top), but The Mission Goes Beyond the Name is cruel irony.

Austin Residents:

In an effort to prevent fires at Apartment Communities, the Austin City Council has passed a local amendment to the UNIFORM FIRE CODE, prohibiting the STORAGE OR USE of barbecue pits, hibachis, or any other outside cooking appliance on balconies, porches, in storage closets, inside any building or closer than five feet to to any portion of combustible wall or building. This amendment includes all cooking appliances that use charcoal, wood, gas (including PROPANE) as a fuel.

While the Austin Fire Department is sympathetic to the inconveniences caused by the local amendment, it has been adopted in response to fire incident data, which have revealed an alarming number of fires in apartment communities in Austin. In fact, some of the dealiest and most destructive fires in Austin's history have occurred at apartment communities.

Fines for violating this amendment to the Fire Code start at $348.00 and can reach $548.00 for repeated incidents of non-compliance. The Austin Fire Department will be enforcing the amendment through on-site inspections.

If you have any questions, please call the Austin Fire Department's Emergency Prevention Division at 448-8310.

Thank you for help keeping our community safe!

I take little issue with my apartment complex setting rules for what it doesn't want us to set out on our porches, though I do consider the restrictions quite restrictive (what about standing ash trays or cleaning equipment like mops?). What I have a problem with is the change to the Fire Code. No doubt I'd have a lot of problems with the Fire Code if I read through it, but since this has presented itself to me and is a good example of what I want to get at, it'll do fine.

The notice I recieved is from SBC, my telephone provider. In my latest bill, it sent me a notice along with a few other notices, but this one stuck out:

Notification

You may notice a new charge called the "Texas Universal Service" that pays for the Texas Universal Service Fund. This fund was created by the state of Texas to help pay for keeping local phone rates affordable for low income customers and customers in high cost rural areas and to serve customers with disabilities. If you have any questions about how this charge or how it is calculated, please call your telephone company

So, what are the bad ideas I spoke of?

1. A dangerous problem exists. Therefore, the government should step in and regulate or ban most instances of the behavior that causes the problem.
2. A number of people go without some services. Therefore, the government should step in and divert and redistribute wealth to those who need it.

Posted by drizzten at 05:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Updates below.]

Tom Jenkinson, aka Squarepusher, is scheduled to play at Antone's on Wednesday, April 21st. According to 33º, the tickets are $16 cash and $17 for credit cards. The Antone's website has some info about the event, namely that advance tickets are $15 and that the doors open at 9pm and the show starts at 10pm.

Now, I'd normally leave work this instant to get tickets, but the 'pusher has a bit of a reputation preceeding him, namely that he has become somewhat notorious for his no-show erratic behavior. In fact, he was supposed to drop by Austin a few years ago and disappeared before the event. So I'll wait until late February to pick my tickets up.

But I'm still very excited.

UPDATE(4/12/2004 8:29am)
Tickets purchased!

UPDATE(4/22/2004 11:45am)
The show kicked ass.

Posted by drizzten at 02:14 PM | Permalink

Some see fluorescent fish as neon signs of trouble (registration required, quoted text from Yahoo)

Past the shark lagoon and piranha tanks at a Park Ridge pet store dart tiny fish that some consider far more alarming.

The glowing red and green swimmers at the Living Sea Aquarium represent the vanguard in the brave new world of genetically engineered pets being sold across the United States. Marketed under such names as "Night Light Fish" and selling for up to $30 apiece, they gleam like inch-long neon signs, thanks to DNA transferred from sea coral and jellyfish.

The fish have existed for years and have been deemed safe by numerous scientists and government agencies. But their recent introduction to the American public--and the lack of regulations covering them--makes some people worry what other manmade critters might follow.

The species that has jump-started the debate over genetically altered pets is the GloFish. Yorktown Technologies, an Austin, Texas-based company, has sold it for a month and rolled it out nationally last week at a suggested price of $5 per fish.

The GloFish's red glimmer comes from a coral gene that was added to the embryo of a normal zebra fish, said Alan Blake, Yorktown's chief executive officer. Scientists in Singapore came up with the idea to monitor water quality, trying to get the fish to glow in the presence of toxins.

Yorktown got the right to sell the fish in the U.S., but consulted with scientists and federal agencies for two years before offering it to hobbyists, Blake said.

Where do fluorescent zebra fish come from?

Fluorescent zebra fish were specially bred to help detect environmental pollutants. By adding a natural fluorescence gene to the fish, scientists will be able to quickly and easily determine when our waterways are contaminated. The first step in developing these pollution detecting fish was to create fish that would be fluorescent all the time. It was only recently that scientists realized the public's interest in sharing the benefits of this research. We call this the GloFish fluorescent fish.

How common is the use of fluorescent zebra fish in science?

For over a decade, fluorescent zebra fish have been relied upon by scientists worldwide to better understand important questions in genetics, molecular biology, and vertebrate development. Fluorescent zebra fish have been particularly helpful in understanding cellular disease and development, as well as cancer and gene therapy.

Does the fluorescence harm the fish?

No. The fish are as healthy as other zebra fish in every way. Scientists originally developed them several years ago by adding a natural fluorescence gene to the fish eggs before they hatched. Today's GloFish fluorescent fish are bred from the offspring of these original fish.

Back to the Tribune article:

Food and Drug Administration officials said they didn't need to regulate the fish because people would not eat them, and because there was no evidence of an environmental threat. Scientists who reviewed research for California's Fish and Game Commission said the fish, if released into the wild, was unlikely to survive in the state's relatively cold waters.

Despite those findings, the commission last month still refused to exempt the GloFish from California's ban on genetically engineered aquatic creatures, imposed in May. Commissioner Sam Schuchat wrote that "creating a novelty pet is a frivolous use of this technology. No matter how low the risk is, there needs to be a public benefit that is higher than this."

Either you own property (i.e., the technology to create the fish), you have agreed to share the ownership, or you don't. Perhaps Yorktown agreed to let the state make some of it's business decisions, allowing it veto power over what's worth putting to market and what isn't.

In this case, the state is asserting it's ownership over the ideas (and therefore, the people and property) in this company and others. That, ladies and gentlemen, is socialism. It's nothing like what people face in other countries, but it is what it is.

The potential environmental effects of the other genetically engineered fish available in the U.S.--a rice fish whose implanted jellyfish DNA causes it to glow green--have proven worrisome elsewhere in the world. The Japanese government last year raised concerns that it could disrupt native species.

Fish may be the first genetically altered creatures to reach the marketplace, but others may not be far behind. A New York company is trying to use gene splicing to create a cat that does not inflame allergies.

The cloning expert doing the research, Dr. Jerry Yang of the University of Connecticut, said funding problems have slowed the work but that initial results are promising. He's been able to create embryos that are missing the allergen gene.

He said his project was different from the glowing fish because allergen-free cats can occasionally be found in nature.

"We don't think we're creating anything new," he said. "We're creating existing animals."

No single federal agency regulates transgenic animals, though USDA officials say they are evaluating whether they should play a role. Craig Culp of the Center for Food Safety, an advocacy group that works to curb technologies it says are harmful to health, worries that indifference could allow some altered species to get loose, wreaking havoc on the environment and food supply.

"We're buying a fish that's been genetically engineered for our amusement and putting it into our kids' bedrooms without thinking of the ethical dimensions," he said. "It staggers the mind to think of what could come down the pike."

Such concerns prompted California to restrict transgenic aquatic animals to research use, and Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm has three bills on her desk that would allow the state to outlaw certain genetically engineered creatures.

"The GloFish is not our issue, but this technology could conceivably create species that would threaten our native fish stock," said spokesman Brad Wurfel of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

Posted by drizzten at 11:20 AM | Permalink

I mentioned this recently but didn't post the actual text. A little background first.

One of my co-workers sent out a message to our company's bulletin board, asking for help from anyone who was involved in, knew of, or was a blogger and blogging. She wanted help to possibly create an article in the Texas PR Express, a newsletter TASB publishes for public relations folks in the Texas education system. I read the solicitation and volunteered. The end result is below. It doesn't have much character or any of my personal "voice," but it is 90% mine. I also have a PDF file that retains the original formatting as well as a sidebar containing some links to blogs that I felt would be useful for this audience to know. They are Glenn Reynolds, Doc Searls, Weblogg-Ed, TexasISD, Jim Romanesko, and Blogcritics.

Asked and Answered: What is a Blog? by Charles Hueter, Administrative Secretary

Today, information can be disseminated many ways; newspaper, radio, television, and the Internet. The Internet alone provides a multitude of information vehicles, one of which is called a blog. Blogs are created and maintained by bloggers. When someone is working on a blog, they are blogging.

What is a blog and why use such an odd word to label it? The term slowly evolved during the late 1990's as shorthand for Web log, which is the Internet's equivalent of a personal journal. At its most fundamental, a blog is a section of a Web site that is updated frequently with commentary from the author and links to other Web sites. Think of a combination of the news ticker on CNN and the op/ed page of a newspaper. The blog's operator finds something interesting, posts a link to the material, and adds his or her thoughts. In many cases, the blog is also programmed to allow reader comment.

What are the advantages of blogging? Blogging is an inexpensive way to publish information. No printing or mailing is necessary. Most popular blog software is available for free, and there are free hosting services devoted to blogs. For example, Blogspot, located at http://www.blogger.com/, offers free web hosting and free blog software that hundreds of thousands of people use every day. Another website, http://www.typepad.com/, sets users up with and hosts blogging software from Moveable Type - the most popular standalone software http://www.movabletype.org/ - for a range of small monthly fees. Another super huge mostly-free blogging community like Blogspot is LiveJournal, which is at http://www.livejournal.com/. Personally, I use Moveable Type installed on a private Web hosting service. These and many other services out there are created with the beginner in mind, allowing for an ever-increasing set of features and ease of use.

If you've created a blog, it can be updated at any time anywhere there is an Internet connection. Blogging doesn't hog bandwidth, so it won't choke a dial-up modem's connection.

Blog posts are easily subdivided into subject categories and archives for simple browsing. Of great importance is the ability to go back to an old post and add new information and updated links. This ability to self-correct and still leave the original information up for viewing eventually creates a large historical database for reference.

How can a blog be useful in a public school? Dissemination of calendars of events, press releases, daily notices, homework assignments, and other information a school district needs to deliver to staff, students, or the community can be accomplished on line with a blog. Add in the ability for readers to comment, and a community can develop around the blog.

Low cost and interactivity are what gives blogs their advantage over traditional Web tools. Blogging keeps readers up to date and provides a referenced, indexed databank that is easy to use and cheap to run. It's a funky term for a powerful method of information circulation.

This article originally appeared in the January 2004 issue of Texas PR Express, a publication of the Texas Association of School Boards. Reprinted with permission.

Posted by drizzten at 12:56 PM | Permalink

This comment by a Slashdotter got my attention:

maybe a midlife crisis is just our internal clocks rolling over.

Posted by drizzten at 12:23 PM | Permalink

[Updates below.]

A long time ago, I once made a vow to myself. After watching the pain caused by the breakups of some of my friends and their partners, I promised to never put a girl through that. I told myself I would never break up with my girlfriends and would rather let things deteriorate to the point where she would break up with me first.

I was ignorant of human relationships back then. The idea seems so quaint now.

So she and I have been together since the end of October. We met through Friendster (she contacted me, making the first move) and when MySpace became a more attractive place to store our personals, we transferred over there together.

She lives in San Marcos and is in the middle of her first year of college at Texas State University (formerly Southwest Texas State), thus presenting the fourth problem, which is that she has no income of her own and relies on me and her family to support her. The third problem is I live in Austin and have a car...she lives more than 20 miles away and doesn't. Both of these things are issues I can rationalize away as the typical chaff each person in a relationship inadvertently throws in the face of the other. I haven't seen a relationship yet that didn't have some annoying flaw in one of the people involved. Comes with the nature of the game.

But the first two problems are more serious.

Our plans for Christmas and New Year's involved us being together on a constant basis for more than a week straight. We've spent every weekend together (always up at my place) since we hooked up, but this was a longer period of time. From Christmas Day to the 3rd of January, she and I did holiday stuff, got me moved to a new apartment, and worked on my New Year's Eve party at my grandpa's ranch in Sattler.

By this time, I had already noticed character traits in her that bugged me. I was trying to get used to them and had somewhat succeeded at this point, but I was always aware of them. The details are unimportant, but they were along the lines of a very needy and unconfident person. I initially thought it was coyness or playful shyness, but it's deeper than that. The emotional dependence irked me, but I liked her enough to not consider them relationship-ending things.

But then the New Year's party occured. She had told me a long time ago that she's anti-social and at the time I believed that was a good thing since I felt the same way about myself. I didn't know how strong those feelings in her were, however, until that night. The concise version is, with just about every one of my closest friends ready to do the countdown, she's off by herself sobbing about something...and no matter what I say she won't explain beyond saying she feels out of place. Now, we were both drunk at this point (second-hand information tells me she had hit some Bacardi fairly hard just prior to this incident), but I was clear-headed enough to realize the problems this would pose later on. If she can't handle this kind of event and if she has trouble handling smaller get-togethers like she had in the past with my friends, then I wasn't sure I wanted to be with her. Toss in what I thought was the unkindness and mistrust of not telling me what was wrong and after I convinced her to go to bed and after I returned to the countdown outside, I understood the only thought on my mind for the rest of the evening was to decide if I wanted to continue the relationship.

But we woke up on the 1st with no hangovers or hard feelings. We didn't talk about the incident like I had wanted, but after that she acted better towards my friends. She showing strong interest in getting a part time job once she returned to San Marcos. I left it on the back burner and became reoccupied with unpacking and getting settled in at my new apartment. So I dropped her off the 3rd after we made a good dent in the piles of crap to be set up. I had to go back to work on the 5th, so that was looming in my mind as well, not to mention the slow realization that I was about to go through a significant soak in financial red ink.

I was hanging out with Cameron that Sunday at his place when I got a call from her around 3pm.

"Charles, I did a very bad thing."

"Hm?"

"I did a bad thing and I need to talk to you about it."

"Alright, what's up?"

"...last night, I was at a party and got drunk and cheated on you with someone, an ex-boyfriend."

The feeling of a roaring nothing that I felt was odd. After she said that, I felt like I was waiting for a punchline for a joke that wasn't funny. I asked her to repeat herself and she did. I asked her why she did it and she couldn't answer me. I asked her how far she went and she said she didn't have sex but "got about halfway." Points for honesty and timeliness, I guess.

So I told her I needed more time to think about this and that I'd call her later on that night. I spend the time between feeling slightly odd and a little angry, but not much more than that. What got me was how surprisingly yielding my feelings were for her under this pressure. My relationship was being tested...and I was not experiencing any of the feelings I expected myself to feel if a girlfriend admitted she had cheated on me. I felt mostly two things: irritation that this made no sense for her to do and dismay that they very nonsensical nature of her act meant I couldn't trust her and was in for some weepy phone calls in my future.

I was very correct on that last one. I called her that night and she gave me a few more little details but they changed nothing. The point of this phone call was for me to decide to continue on with her. As I made plain to her, there was nothing she could say or do to change the fact she did what she did. She couldn't explain herself beyond variations on, "I don't know why I did it, I'm sorry" and since she was sober enough to stop halfway through her act(s) to realize what she was doing, I had to assume she was sober enough at the beginning to know what she was doing in the first place. I made this point and she had no response to it. I asked her if it was about me or something I did and she emphatically denied it. So that left me wondering both how crazy she was for doing this and how must trust I was going to invest in her from here on out.

I told her that I wanted a two week break with no communication between us. She took it badly but I remained firm and after some pointless silences and her promises of changing, I ended the call. Before I did, she said she wanted to talk about it one more time as soon as possible. I asked her of what consequence it would be, for the reasons outlined above. She was insistent so I agreed on a Monday call that I would initiate.

So my Monday was ruined. Even though the commute to work was better from my new place, I was still going back to work after a long holiday. Add on a growing financial crisis (checking account overdraft fees are piling up), the specter of this evening phone chat with her, and the onset of a depressing bout of pity I had for her...and by the time I got home from work, my demeanor had reversed itself from ready to start a new year to loathing the approaching day's end.

I called her and we talked for 22 minutes. Actually, I did most of the talking. She sobbed most of the time. Half the call was filled with simple silence when neither of us had anything to say. I reiterated my stance and she told me she couldn't do anything beyond say she was sorry and that she wanted me to stay with her. I knew this wasn't going to get anywhere because the choice was up to me to make and I had already made my choice. Her emotions had pretty much taken hold of her and it felt like I should go ahead and say what I really wanted to say.

I told her again my problems with what happened.

"Something has to happen for this to work out. You have to be punished beyond what you're doing to yourself internally right now. And that's why I want the time off. I like you...but I don't like you enough to continue things and forgive and forget. We had a lot of fun together, but consider this a temporary breakup. Best of luck finding a job and keeping your grades up, but I need us apart right now."

She was beside herself and by the end of the call, I found it more and more pointless to talk to her. She did have the presence of mind to say two weeks wouldn't be the end of it; that she felt this was the end of it from what I'd said. I couldn't respond to that other than to say I didn't know if we should continue and wouldn't know until the two weeks had passed.

That was almost a week ago. The time in between has been spent see-sawing back and forth between wanting to be rid of the whole ordeal and formally breaking up with her...and pitying her and her situation and wanting to get back with her to keep her life on track. You see, for her (and I regret the arrogant way this sounds), I was the best thing to happen in a long time. If half the stories of her ex-boyfriends are true, she's been with some real jerks. Compared to them, I'm a fucking rock star. I don't feel self-satisfied or smug about knowing this, and I can say with no distortion that this has happened more times than not in my relationship history. The girls that are attracted enough to be with me seem to need a refuge, a place of stability, someone with their shit together. Or who at least appears to have their shit together.

This added to my list of annoyances with her because it confirmed for me what I had already known about my past and told me I hadn't managed to break the cycle and find a new kind of girl. It meant she was "one of them," one of the kinds of girls I knew I wouldn't be able to establish anything long-term with. Despite the fact she was far better than the women of my past in these terms, she was still too dependent on others to keep her life acceptable to her, which of course makes no sense when combined with her anti-social tendencies. It was a kind of meta-anger at the whole situation.

But at the same time, knowning that also means knowing how important I am for her and for these women in general. My companionship means a lot to them and when it goes south, they go south with it. One of my exes implied that suicide was the only option for her if I didn't spend the night with her after breaking up. So I stayed, enduring one of the most insane and pointless nights of my life. She was the most extreme of these cases, but the pattern has remained over time. So during this week of self-imposed exile from her, I'm thinking about what she's going through and it depresses me. I don't like hurting other people and I don't like it when my actions cause others to cry and hate themselves further.

Her sister contacted me through MySpace to give her two cents. She was far more reasonable than my girlfriend, but her arguement boiled down to the same thing: take her back because she needs you and is more sorry than you can imagine. So I replied at length why that wouldn't work. She hasn't responded but is smart enough to get my point.

And so yesterday, my girlfriend sent me a short e-mail asking me if I would please call her because she wants to work this out and she misses me greatly. It's the first weekend we've had apart since we hooked up and I know it's eating her away.

I have to decide what to do, even though I know what's best for me is to break it off entirely and go our seperate ways. I may not call her. Just let it die off without another communication. That would be a cowardly but simple way to do this. Or I could wait out the next week and then tell her I wish to be apart formally and indefinitely. That would be the most consistent way to do it.

I can almost hear her pacing around the phone.

Jesus Christ, sometimes I wonder why relationships are worth this.

UPDATE(7/26/2004 3:02pm)
Mental attraction vs. physical attraction

Posted by drizzten at 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Divers Probed for Giving Fish Champagne

Three Polish divers faced a police investigation Thursday for possible illegal fishing and animal abuse after a news photo showed them plying a freshly caught pike with champagne at an outdoor New Year's party.

"They may have committed offences of poaching and maltreating a fish," said Maria Niedziolka of the National Fishing Authority, which notified police of the incident.

The picture in Nowa Trybuna daily showed three frogmen neck-deep in a lake, with one of them tipping a bottle of cheap Russian bubbly into the fish's open mouth.

Nowa Trybuna Opolska/Reuters - Handout

One of the divers told news agency PAP that they had found the pike half-dead and wanted to "restore it to consciousness by treating it with champagne."

It was not clear whether the fish survived. Police said it would not be needed as evidence in the investigation.

Apparently, it is a crime to mistreat or abuse animals in Poland and pouring champagne into a fish's mouth seems to qualify. So, I would assume that since this is a criminal matter, charges must be filed, court dates must be set...and convictable evidence of the crime and it's responsibility must be collected and analyzed. I don't know what the criminal procedures are in Poland (I sense a Polish joke coming), but I do know that if I were prosecuting this kind of crime in America, I'd want the fucking fish in order to determine if it was abused.

Because for all we know, these divers could be lying and the photo a fake.

Posted by drizzten at 08:24 AM | Permalink

A great many conservatives value the Drug War and maintaining laws against the ownership, production, distribution and use of narcotics. A great many conservatives also value strong border protections and immigration laws.

When President Bush announced his overhaul of US immigration policy yesterday, a common complaint from conservatives (and others) is that granting full or partial amnesty to illegal immigrants provides incentives for others to arrive in America illegally. It gives them additional reasons and benefits to come here. And that's a good sensible arguement. I don't necessarily support it's intended conclusion or goal, but the arguement itself seems logical.

But they don't seem to have made the connection those against the Drug War have made that making something illegal provides an incentive for people to engage in underground business activity. When something is banned and people want to continue using it, it's price goes up. After a point, the rewards of producing and distributing that thing outweigh the risks of getting caught. It's straight economics, very much like the immigration issue.

They say it's wrong to incentivize illegal immigration. But the prohibition of drugs incentivizes their black market activity. I'd like to see someone bust one of these conservatives in this point during a debate and see what they have to say.

Posted by drizzten at 08:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Second Thoughts on Free Trade

I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect free trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt but almost as a part of the moral law," wrote John Maynard Keynes in 1933. And indeed, to this day, nothing gets an economist's blood boiling more quickly than a challenge to the doctrine of free trade.

Yet in that essay of 70 years ago, Keynes himself was beginning to question some of the assumptions supporting free trade. The question today is whether the case for free trade made two centuries ago is undermined by the changes now evident in the modern global economy.

Two recent examples illustrate this concern. Over the next three years, a major New York securities firm plans to replace its team of 800 American software engineers, who each earns about $150,000 per year, with an equally competent team in India earning an average of only $20,000. Second, within five years the number of radiologists in this country is expected to decline significantly because M.R.I. data can be sent over the Internet to Asian radiologists capable of diagnosing the problem at a small fraction of the cost.

These anecdotes suggest a seismic shift in the world economy brought on by three major developments. First, new political stability is allowing capital and technology to flow far more freely around the world. Second, strong educational systems are producing tens of millions of intelligent, motivated workers in the developing world, particularly in India and China, who are as capable as the most highly educated workers in the developed world but available to work at a tiny fraction of the cost. Last, inexpensive, high-bandwidth communications make it feasible for large work forces to be located and effectively managed anywhere.

We are concerned that the United States may be entering a new economic era in which American workers will face direct global competition at almost every job level - from the machinist to the software engineer to the Wall Street analyst.

Any worker whose job does not require daily face-to-face interaction is now in jeopardy of being replaced by a lower-paid, equally skilled worker thousands of miles away. American jobs are being lost not to competition from foreign companies, but to multinational corporations, often with American roots, that are cutting costs by shifting operations to low-wage countries.

Most economists want to view these changes through the classic prism of "free trade," and they label any challenge as protectionism. But these new developments call into question some of the key assumptions supporting the doctrine of free trade.

The case for free trade is based on the British economist David Ricardo's principle of "comparative advantage" - the idea that each nation should specialize in what it does best and trade with others for other needs. If each country focused on its comparative advantage, productivity would be highest and every nation would share part of a bigger global economic pie.

However, when Ricardo said that free trade would produce shared gains for all nations, he assumed that the resources used to produce goods - what he called the "factors of production" - would not be easily moved over international borders. Comparative advantage is undermined if the factors of production can relocate to wherever they are most productive: in today's case, to a relatively few countries with abundant cheap labor. In this situation, there are no longer shared gains - some countries win and others lose.

When Ricardo proposed his theory in the early 1800's, major factors of production - soil, climate, geography and even most workers - could not be moved to other countries. But today's vital factors of production - capital, technology and ideas - can be moved around the world at the push of a button. They are as easy to export as cars.

This is a very different world than Ricardo envisioned.

When American companies replace domestic employees with lower-cost foreign workers in order to sell more cheaply in home markets, it seems hard to argue that this is the way free trade is supposed to work. To call this a "jobless recovery" is inaccurate: lots of new jobs are being created, just not here in the United States.

In the past, we have supported free trade policies. But if the case for free trade is undermined by changes in the global economy, our policies should reflect the new realities. While some economists and elected officials suggest that all we need is a robust retraining effort for laid-off workers, we do not believe retraining alone is an answer, because almost the entire range of "knowledge jobs" can be done overseas. Likewise, we do not believe that offering tax incentives to companies that keep American jobs at home can compensate for the enormous wage differentials driving jobs offshore.

America's trade agreements need to to reflect the new reality. The first step is to begin an honest debate about where our economy really is and where we are headed as a nation. Old-fashioned protectionist measures are not the answer, but the new era will demand new thinking and new solutions. And one thing is certain: real and effective solutions will emerge only when economists and policymakers end the confusion between the free flow of goods and the free flow of factors of production.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

The case for free trade does rest on Ricardo's past work, but only partially. It is a pragmatic defense of free trade and can therefore be undermined by changes that happen over time. It's a principle, but one that due to it's nature, has been diluted for the reasons the article's authors mention. It's original meaning is doubtless losing staying force.

The case for free trade rests on deeper roots. Morally, it is more right to allow people to freely exchange goods and services, to freely associate and communicate, than not. Systemically, central planning of any economic sort by parties not truly involved in the economic processes they are attempting to influence fails in the long run and creates unintended negative consequences that end up causing at least as much trouble as the initial "problem."

The article's authors seem to ignore the most obvious response to their assertion that Comparative Advantage no longer applies: Ricardo's principle actually applies to individuals and that's where economics matters. Countries don't move en masse towards one unified collective goal; they are made up of unique and independent people who have differing wants, needs, and abilities. This complexity is flatly beyond anyone or any group to manage and control. But that's a pragmatic response.

The real reason why free trade is desirable is because freedom is more moral than slavery. And in order to enact the euphemistic "new thinking and new solutions" Chuck Schumer and Paul Roberts vaguely hint at, you must first exert control over people to force them, in one way or another, to do what the people in charge want. Economic slavery is no different from civil slavery and telling me I'm free to do x, y, and z doesn't make me any fundamentally less a slave if I'm not allowed to do a. Mr Schumer and Mr. Roberts are lying when they imply their ideas don't amount to protectionism because that is exactly what they are: measures enforced in order to protect American jobs from competition.

This article is a large strawman using a deceptive reading of a single principle of free trade in order to attack the entire doctrine.

UPDATE(1/8/2004 1:02pm)
Andrew Sullivan points to a reply to the NYT article written by Noam Scheiber that tackles Schumer and Roberts from another angle.

UPDATE(1/9/2003 10:07am)
Another hit against the piece from Slate's Michael Kinsley:

One of the tiresome conceits of political debate is that when opponents agree on something, it is more likely to be true. Another is that an assertion is more credible if it comes from someone who used to assert the opposite.

The joint byline on the New York Times op-ed page Jan. 6 - "By Charles Schumer and Paul Craig Roberts" - certainly was a shocker. Schumer is a liberal Democratic senator from New York; Roberts is one of the wildest of the bug-eyed supply-side conservative economists. Schumer's connections to the financial establishment and Roberts' free-market ranting make their message surprising as well: They have turned against free trade. But two people can be just as wrong as one.

[...]

The core of free-trade theory is the concept of "comparative advantage." Schumer and Roberts make the classic college-student mistake of confusing comparative advantage with absolute advantage. Nations trade because for each one there are goods or services it is more efficient to buy from abroad than to produce at home. If there is nothing America can offer the world that is either uniquely desirable or cheaper than elsewhere, the world will not buy anything from America. And after a while the world won't sell anything to America either, because we won't have the foreign currency to pay for it. So, even in this extreme case there is no need to restrict trade because trade will restrict itself. But in fact, as Ricardo demonstrated, there will always be something worth trading. Even if Nation A can produce both apples and oranges more efficiently than Nation B, it will still make sense to concentrate on producing one fruit and import the other. And Nation B will make itself poorer, not richer, by keeping out fruit from Nation A. If Nation A retaliates by keeping out fruit from Nation B - and why shouldn't it? - Nation B will be doubly punished.

That's the theory. It's pretty rock-solid. You can reject it in its entirety?as, for example, Dick Gephardt, the most protectionist of the leading Democratic presidential candidates, pretty much does. But most critics don't have the guts to defy reality and/or conventional wisdom (take your pick) to that extent. Schumer and Roberts cling to the free-trade label and endorse the general principle while claiming it no longer applies because "the factors of production can relocate to wherever they are most productive." In fact, that makes the theory even more compelling.

©2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

UPDATE(1/15/2004 10:05pm)
Another article, this time by George Reisman on the Mises Institute website worth reading.

Posted by drizzten at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posting from work here, so I have to be quick. My SBC DSL isn't working so I have no Net access from home. The move was made successfully and the new place looks good. I am aware of the new comments and discussion and will address them over the next few days.

I hope everyone had a Happy New Year. Mine will get a post of it's own.

And I've been published in a "dead tree" publication. The article is about blogging and I'll post a copy of it as well.

Posted by drizzten at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)