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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, May 21, 2005
Encoding Social Pathologies in the Structure of Our Buildings That's the title of this post about New York City building an apartment complex specifically for people raising their grandkids--because the parents are dead, flaked out, or otherwise not fit to be parents. As TJIC points out: This is inordinately sad, pathetic, and wrong.I agree completely. This, unfortunately, is not the first time that we have designed our buildings around a social pathology. Take a look at houses built in America in the 1920s and 1930s. They have nice front porches. Take a look at houses built in the 1970s and 1980s. Why did the front porches go away? Because if you left anything on the front porch in most of America during this time, it would get stolen. You see similar transformations of the relative positions of doors and windows--you won't find a big window adjacent to the front door--too easy to smash it in and unlock the door. In one sense, it is probably prudent to design buildings around worst case scenarios, because buildings last for decades--but it is also very sad. It is an acknowledgment that our society has chosen to accept the social pathologies, rather than make a serious effort to fix them. Friday, May 20, 2005
Foucault Test If you are an historian or other academic, you may think that a "Foucault test" is one where you are asked to make sense of an incomprehensible block of deconstructionist text. But actually, there is another Foucault--one who came up with something useful. Big Bertha, the 17.5" reflector I bought a while back (very cheap) has never performed as well at high magnification as it should. I've done enough experimentation now that I believe the problem is either a defective primary mirror, or the diagonal mirror is too large. What makes a telescope mirror defective, and what is a Foucault test? You may recall (but more likely, you don't) that somewhere along the way, proponents of the New Math showed you a cone, slice about four different ways. My recollection of this was from fourth or fifth grade. I could not for the life of me see why I should care about the difference between a circle (cutting the cone parallel to the base), an ellipse (cutting the cone at a bit of angle), a parabola (cutting the cone parallel to the slope), or an hyperbola (cutting the cone at a sharper angle than the slope). Here's a picture, to refresh your memory:  Associated with every figure sliced from the screaming flesh of the cone are two foci. The two foci are on top of each other for a circle, and some distance apart for an ellipse. Here's how you use those foci to draw an ellipse:  It turns out that all planetary orbits are ellipses. The parabola has two foci also--one real close, the other at infinity. The hyperbolas far focus is beyond infinity (which makes only a little less sense than saying it is at infinity). What does any of this have to do with telescopes and Foucault? It turns out that the ideal telescope mirror is a parabola: one focus is up close--about where you put your eye. The other focus is at infinity. A parabola takes the image at infinity (and for practical purposes, all astronomical objects are at infinity) and focuses all the light and image where you put your eye. Making parabolic mirrors isn't easy. You normally start by grinding a telescope mirror spherical, and then altering its shape with some rather empirical methods, into a parabola. I've done this before, long, long ago, when I made a telescope mirror. It isn't easy--and until the middle of the nineteenth century, no one really knew how to tell when a mirror had reached the perfection of a parabola. Just to make life really miserable for telescope makers, to make a really good telescope mirror, you have to make that parabola so accurately that it is accurate within 1/4 wavelength of light. Yes, you read that correctly. This means that the surface of the mirror has to be within tolerances of millionths of an inch. Until Jean Foucault (who also invented the gyroscope, Foucault pendulum, and proved that light moved more slowly in water than in air) came up with the Foucault test, figuring out whether a mirror was a proper parabola was largely experimental. You took the telescope outside, aimed at a star, and then tried to see if it would focus correctly or not. If it was fuzzy--if you couldn't get a crisp focus--it probably wasn't a parabola. The Foucault test is capable of measuring those millionths of an inch difference between a spherical mirror, and a parabolic mirror--and doing it with surprisingly simple mechanisms. Here's a detailed description of it. The essence of it, however, is that different parts of a parabolic mirror--different "zones"--will come to slightly different focal points than a spherical mirror. For a light source at the focal point, the spherical mirror will bring all the light back to the same point. The parabolic mirror will bring the light from different rings on the mirror to slightly different points--and a few millionths of an inch turn into fractions of inch of difference on the focal points. Anyway, I used to have a Foucault tester. I don't know. I am going to try and find someone locally who has one that I can use on Big Bertha's mirror. Labels: telescopes Moonbats on Parade Washington DC's delegate to Congress (meaning that she can only vote in committee, not for real) is a moonbat named Eleanor Holmes Norton. Congress is debating allowing law-abiding residents of the District of Criminals do something that the rest of us take for granted: buy a handgun. "Many people live in the District during the week who are members of Congress and they would like to be able to protect themselves in their homes," said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Texas Republican who wrote the D.C. Personal Protection Act of 2005.Delegate Norton did not simply oppose the measure as foolish, or potentially dangerous. I can at least understand when gun control advocates make the claim that guns are more dangerous to the owners than to criminals. There are certainly categories of people for whom this is probably true. If you have a history of severe depression, an uncontrollable temper, commonly drink or use drugs to the point of intoxication, or are so uncoordinated that you lack the ability to operate power tools without seriously hurting yourself, you are probably better off not having a gun in your home. No, Delegate Norton engaged in what criminologist Don Kates calls "poisioning the well." She made a statement that inclines me to think that any gun control law that Delegate Norton wants should be opposed because she clearly suffers from a hate-filled paranoia that stuns me: But one lawmaker warned the result could be dire.Read that carefully. She isn't saying, "Those gun nuts are so unconcerned about kids that they don't think about, or care about kids getting killed." She isn't saying, "Those gun nuts don't understand the enormous risk to which they are subjecting our children." (The District of Criminals is such a safe place, you know.) She is saying that proponents of allowing law-abiding responsible citizens to own handguns are trying to get children killed. Whenever I hear someone whining about how DC should be treated as a state, with two senators (or even one), and regular members in the House of Representatives, I look at Delegate Norton and I find myself asking: Why? If they aren't going to pick someone rational for a pretend member of Congress, why would they do any better getting to send real members to the Capitol? Delegate Norton makes my old misrepresentative, Lynne Woolsey (D-CA), seem like a calm and sensible intellectual by comparison. So why does this item start out the plural of moonbat? Eric Scheie over at Classical Values points out that moonbats are not limited to the left. Along with discussing Delegate Norton's derangement, he points to a discussion between Neal Horsley and Alan Colmes on Colmes's radio program. I am way too polite to quote the exact discussion, but remember Jimmy Carter's discussion that caused the ruckus in 1976, of "lusting in his heart" after women other than his wife? Mr. Horsley, who has since become a born-again Christian, should have kept the discussion of sexual lusts quite a bit more vague--and within species. The question, "Animal, mineral, or vegetable?" will never mean the same thing to me again. There are some things that you read and you don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just make circular motions of your finger next to your ear. Where Do Your Web Pages Go When You Die? No, I'm not planning to blog from Heaven--I rather doubt that there is Internet access there, and it would be rather heavily filtered, if it was. What I am thinking about is that all of us who put hundreds of megabytes of serious and important documents on our web pages (see my collection of primary historical sources for some examples) are going to die someday. (Except for Instapundit, who is counting on stem cell research and advances in life extension still unimagined.) What happens to these often useful pieces of material? As Roy Batty says in Blade Runner: I've seen things you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.There's also a saying among oral historians that "every time an old man dies, a library burns down." All this information, lovingly and perhaps idiosyncratically stored on individual web pages--lost for all time. As I was pondering this depressing thought today, I remembered something that I learned in Ancient Near East class (and may even remember correctly). Old Kingdom Egyptians may not have had a notion of an individual afterlife for anyone but the pharoah, his family, and a few lucky retainers who were killed to join him. Apparently by the Middle Kingdom, enough mid-level bureaucrats were beginning to have similar hopes for a life eternal, and so they start doing the mummification thing, too. To make sure that their tombs were cared for, and that someone would make appropriate offerings on their behalf, they set up what were effectively eternal charitable foundations with some of their wealth to keep someone doing the right thing--and I guess that at least for a few generations, this actually worked. So perhaps a little corner of immortality for those of you who create web content (blogging or otherwise) might be to make sure that you leave enough money to pay your ISP in perpetuity. Obviously, this is going to get complicated, because ISPs are not immortal. Perhaps what we still start to see is those of us who have put together useful or interesting collections of stuff online leave our "papers" to university libraries--with a lump of cash to keep our materials online...forever. A Recent Linux Convention If you don't know what Linux is, you won't understand the joke. Just skip this one.  Did You Know? The more readers I get, the more advertising revenue. Let's see, at current rates of readership growth, I'll be able to do this full-time around...oh, 2050. So feel free to pester your friends to share in the Clayton Cramer experience. You will see if you click the Site Meter at the bottom left of this very long page that I am averaging more than 1300 visitors a day. Southern Lights Really cool page of pictures from Antarctica. Go there. Click. Enjoy! Here's a sample:  The Nuclear Option You know, the current cloture rule, requiring 60 votes to end debate, is really pretty recent: 1975. This history of cloture shows that the number of votes required for cloture has varied substantially over the history of the Senate--there's nothing particularly hallowed, sacrosanct, or traditional about the current 60 votes: In the smaller Senate, unlimited debate continued on the grounds that any senator should have the right to speak as long as necessary on any issue.What if the Senate voted to make 55 the number of votes required for cloture? There's nothing magical about 60. Romanticizing Mental Illness If you really want to see damaged thinking, look at how the artistic sorts romanticize mental illness, of which One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest was among the most damaging in its effects on a generation of judges. This isn't a new problem. My wife tells me that Victorian writers did the same thing with tuberculosis that 1980s artsy-fartsy sorts did with AIDS: they turned the suffering into some sort of sign of being especially blessed by God. Here's an interesting column by Michael Judge about how at least at the Iowa Writers Workshop, the noted writer Frank Conroy played a part in stomping this foolishness into the ground: Like so many other writers and believers in what the poet James Wright called the "pure clear word," I will never forget Frank Conroy, the memoirist, novelist and longtime director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who died of cancer last month at the age of 69. ... It Works For Fish You know those offensive spam emails you get offering you drugs that will make some body parts larger? Why, you ask? Talk to the fish! You might think it's grand to be a well endowed fish. After all, some female fish prefer mates with larger sex organs, a new study finds. This Should Be a "Duh!" Report But since there are people out there trying to justify that adults having sex with children doesn't cause the children any harm--and the ACLU argues that there is a constitutional right of minors to have sex with adults--I suppose it is worthwhile to remember that it causes serious harm: Although most research on the consequences of childhood sexual abuse has focused on female survivors, a new study suggests that men who were the victims of sexual abuse as children may suffer from similar issues.The survey started with 17,000 adults who belonged to an HMO in California. That's a nice large sample size--although the fact that it was done in California may bias the data a bit. The highest rates of sexual abuse that I have seen in surveys have generally been in California. This could be because: 1. More sexual abuse of children happens in California. 2. Californians are more willing to admit on a survey that they were victims. 3. People who were sexually abused as children move to California, where the rather dramatic problems that these people have as adults are more widely accepted. The percentages abused are somewhat surprising, compared to a lot of other surveys: In the survey, 25 percent of females and 16 percent of males reported experiencing childhood sexual abuse.What is surprising about this is the high percentage of males--most surveys done into the late 1980s in North America find this number closer to 9%. When asked about the gender of the perpetrators, women reported that men committed the abuse 94 percent of the time. But men reported that the abusers were nearly equally divided among men and women, with women accounting for 40 percent of the perpetrators.This is surprising to me--women have not traditionally been even a small fraction of child sexual abusers. Note that because of the greater percentage of women that were sexually abused, this still means that men are disproportionately abusers. Previous studies in women have shown that childhood sexual abuse increases the risk of mental health problems as well as social problems, and this study confirmed that men share that risk.No surprises on this. I do hope the ACLU will wake up and stop trying to constitutionalize child sexual abuse. Labels: child sexual abuse Thursday, May 19, 2005
GM Reducing Offerings This news article reports that GM is going to stop offering a full line of cars in all brands. If you don't follow this carefully, General Motors has several different divisions, originally because these were different car companies that GM bought: Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac, and so on. Once upon a time, there were very significant differences between the different brands. Buick had their own V8; so did Chevrolet; so did Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac. They shared a lot of other common parts, such as water pumps, carburetors, and Fisher Body made all the bodies, but there was a lot individual engineering, and a bit of competition between the different divisions. In the 1970s, GM started to share engines. By the late 1980s, Chevrolet and Cadillac made V8s, the V6 was from Buick, and everyone mixed and matched. Every division wanted to have a car competitive with the other divisions--and increasingly, the cars were identical except for purely cosmetic body differences and a few minor options. A late 1970s Chevrolet Nova was essentially the same car as its Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick counterparts. Only the Cadillac version, the Seville, was substantially different. Oldsmobile did a lot of original engineering work in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They produced some pretty interesting cars, like the Aurora. Unfortunately, Oldsmobiles had a reputation for being cars for old people with better taste than the ones that bought Buicks, but not quite rich enough to buy Cadillac. Hence, the "This is not your father's Oldsmobile" advertising slogan that they used for a while. It didn't work, and GM pulled the plug on Oldsmobile a couple of years ago. The proposal now is to keep Chevrolet and Cadillac full line divisions, and make the others divisions "focused" on their specialties. This would suggest that Buick should become the luxury division, building full-sized sedans and SUVs only, and Pontiac should become the sports car division, building the GTO, the supercharged Bonneville and Grand Prix, and the rumored return of the Firebird Trans Am. Hummer would continue building SUVs for people with too much money and too little sense. Saturn would build inexpensive compacts. This all makes sense--but it might make even more sense to knock Buick out of the running completely. There isn't even a market for Buicks with middle-aged sorts like me--I suspect the only 20somethings buying Buicks are the meth freaks buying Buicks with 200,000 miles on them. Global Warming & Antarctica A reminder that this is a complex subject, and getting arrogant is not wise: A satellite survey shows that between 1992 and 2003, the East Antarctic ice sheet gained about 45 billion tonnes of ice - enough to reduce the oceans' rise by 0.12 millimetres per year. The ice sheets that cover Antarctica's bedrock are several kilometres thick in places, and contain about 90% of the world's ice. But scientists fear that if they melt in substantial quantities, this will swell the oceans and cause devastation on islands and coastal lands.I mentioned a while back the problem of increased solar energy at the surface--and that we really don't know how much is associated with increased solar output, and how much is caused by atmospheric transparency changes--and exactly what the relationship is. Labels: global warming China & Taiwan (Humor) I really can't call the People's Republic "Red" China anymore. It isn't really Communist, but closer to Fascism, with a weird mix of totalitarian politics, private and state capitalism, and not even a pretense of laissez faire. But people would look at you funny if you started calling it Black China. Anyway, I'm re-reading Professor Anders Henriksson's Non Campus Mentis: World History According to College Students. There's a review of it by me here. The short version is that it is a collection of sentences out of college papers and exams that construct a history of the world that leaves you breathless with laughter. Sometimes the humor is because of a particularly tragic spelling error (the kind that reminds you that many college students learn English now by listening, not reading): "The five European grade powers were England, France, Germany, Russia, and Australia-Mongolia." "Literature ran wild. Writers expressed themselves with cymbals." "There was a change in social morays." "The Civil Rights movement in the USA turned around the corner with Martin Luther Junior's famous 'If I Had a Hammer' speech. Martian Luther King's four steps to direct action included self purification, when you allow yourself to be eaten to a pulp." Other tragicomic moments are the result of scrambled collections of facts--but scrambled across many centuries, rather as if Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) actually took place. (This is one of my favorite movies, by the way.) "Friedrich Nietzsche was a German movie producer who wrote Triumph of the Will and Superman." "The history of the Jewish people begins with Abraham, Issac, and their twelve children. Judyism was the first monolithic religion. It had one big God named 'Yahoo.' Old Testament profits include Moses, Amy, and Confucius, who believed in Fidel Piety." "Admiral Dewey sank the Spanish Armada in Vanilla Bay." A number of the amusing moments, however, suggest that contrary to the popular perception of wild college students, a number have been sublimating desires into their writing. "German unity was acheaved by William I coupling with Bismark. After several hurtful convulsions he culminated to power as the first Geyser of Germany." And the sentence on topic for the headline: "Manifest Destiny is China yarning to embrace Thai Won as a kind of imperialist foreplay." Well, yes, rather like the Rough Wooing of Scotland by England. Labels: humor A Classified Ad From The Idaho Statesman No, seriously: 3 EVIL BLACK WEAPONS: FAL .308 rifle, many extras. Nice! $895; SAIGA 12 AK-style Shotgun, like new. Tactical light and laser. No longer imported, hard to find, $395; Winchester 1300 tactical shotgun w/ "Cop Stock" folder. Like new, $295. Why Can't We Get Judges This Liberal On The Federal Bench? Imagine how different America would be if a judge this concerned about civil liberties were appointed to the federal bench: [She] was the only member of that court to denounce racist standards by which some police engage in stop-and-search operations:What flaming liberal is this? California Supreme Court Justice Janice Brown! I haven't looked up those cases myself--but when Nat Hentoff, well-known civil liberties attorney, writes an article making the case that Justice Brown is being unfairly and inaccurately portrayed as some sort of right-wing ideologue, it just makes you wonder what the real agenda of the Democratic Party is today. There might well be arguments against Justice Brown's confirmation--but it appears that the Democrats aren't playing particularly fair in their accusations against her. Is Racism a Factor in the Minuteman Project? Professor Bainbridge wants to believe that even if everyone involved isn't doing it for racist reasons, that some are doing so. There might well be--although I confess that I've never met someone who hated Mexicans. I've met people who hated Jews and blacks. I've met people who had prejudices about Mexicans, but that did not prevent them from dealing with individuals of Mexican ancestry on a fair basis. If you don't understand that last sentence, let me explain the difference between racial hatred and racial prejudice. Lots of people hold prejudices: assumptions about a group that don't necessarily prevent them from seeing individual members of that group in a positive light. Bigot A may regard members of group X as lazy, but if Mr. B, a member of group X, demonstrates that he works hard, Mr. A will hold Mr. B in high regard. Mr. A may still think of group X as lazy--but he thinks of Mr. B as a hardworking exception. To use a phrase of another time, Mr. A thinks of Mr. B "as a credit to his race." If Mr. A meets enough examples like Mr. B, it may soften Mr. A's view of group X. Over time, Mr. A may even decide that group X isn't lazy. This is one of the reasons why integration often worked to reduce racial prejudice. The more that people like Mr. A had to work with and go to school with members of group X, the more examples there were to call into question Mr. A's prejudices. The people driven by hatred, however, will not let Mr. B's hard work overcome that hatred. Mr. B will always be a member of group X, with all of group X's imagined flaws. At best, such people will find ways to reimagine Mr. B's positive qualities as some sort of sneaky and manipulative PR effort. The haters can't be educated, either formally or through meeting positive members of group X, into not hating; the hatred satisfies some fundamental need. Karl Marx's famous observation that, "Anti-Semitism is socialism for stupid people" is still true. It is equally the case that socialism is anti-Semitism for intellectuals. The same motivation applies: the need to reduce every individual to a member of a class, a race, or a group, with all the real or imagined characteristics of the class, race, or group. When I lived in California, there were certainly some widely held prejudices about Mexicans (although not necessarily about the larger class of Hispanics)--but they were just that, prejudices. As I said at the beginning, I don't think I ever met someone who hated Mexicans. They must be out there, but compared to those who hate Jews or blacks, they seem to be pretty rare. (Why this is would be a fascinating subject for examination.) Anyway, the Minuteman Project has repeatedly emphasized that its efforts to stop the flow of illegals into the United States is not racially motivated. Now I see that they are hooking up with a California group called Friends of the Border Patrol--and look at the name of the chairman: The Minuteman Project has reached an agreement with the Friends of the Border Patrol (FBP) to help promote a new "border watch" aimed at assisting U.S. Border Patrol agents in apprehending illegal aliens on the California border near San Diego.There are other Hispanics involved in these efforts, some of whom I have seen interviewed on Fox News. One of the activists trying to stop illegal immigration here in the Boise area is Canyon County Commissioner Robert Vasquez. This isn't about race. It is about border security, and the economic consequences for poor legal residents (of many races and ethnicities) of large numbers of illegals driving up the costs of the safety net, while simultaneously driving down wages. Wednesday, May 18, 2005
The House Project Well, it is beginning to look like site-built, not modular. Site-built is $79 per square foot--or about $158,000 for a 2000 square foot home. The equivalent modular home would be about $135,000--cheaper, but I suspect that the site-built home will look better at resale, simply because a modular home still doesn't look quite like a site-built home--although the better ones are close. The site development costs are about the same either way. The current estimates that I am getting come to about $14,000 for the driveway--although about $8000 is for what they call "pit run," a type of large rock used as the road base on which the gravel goes. It turns out that the driveway will be going up a basalt spine that is probably superior to pit run for that purpose--I can't even get two inches down on this stuff before hitting what seems to be bedrock. It is likely that we will need either no pit run, or only a few hundred dollars worth for a couple of sections. Excavations for the foundation come to about $3600. Concrete foundation, garage floor, patios, and a walkway around the house: about $10,000. The well is being estimated at $10,000 (including water storage tank, pump, etc.), but this may turn out to be high, since I think we are going to get water at about 120 feet, not 200 feet. The first septic tank estimate came in at $5,500, but the contractor thinks that he can use a different system and bring it down to $4,000. Idaho Power is estimating $4,000 to run power to the house, and the trench to carry the power line is going to cost somewhere below $1,600 to excavate. (He is estimating 800 feet, but as I measure it, the distance from pole to house is closer to 600 feet.) The house itself is still the biggest part of the cost. I had ambitions for something a bit more modern, but it turns out that hiring an architect would run about $10,000 to $15,000 to turn my drawings and ideas into blueprints. I am not so foolish as to think that a contractor should start from my design and start building. Instead, we are talking the design of a nearby house that my wife rather likes (built by the same contractor), and expanding a couple of walls out to enlarge bedrooms two and three to a size where one makes sense as an office, and the other is big enough for my son--who may live there for a few minutes, a few months, or a couple of years--hard to say right now. It still won't be a four bedroom house, but I am reluctant to get too large of a house payment on this. Right now I am employed, and probably next year as well. Two years from now, I would not be surprised to see my job being done in Shanghai, at higher net cost, and lower efficiency. It is therefore wise not to get too reliant on a software engineer's paycheck in an era where such jobs are largely disappearing from the United States. Labels: house project Ann Coulter On Newsweek As I have observed in the past, Ann Coulter isn't always very fair, and often goes for the cheap laugh instead of a more thoughtful approach. But when has her feline claws sharpened up, and the story involves the left's shameless hypocrisy, she can be devastating: When ace reporter Michael Isikoff had the scoop of the decade, a thoroughly sourced story about the president of the United States having an affair with an intern and then pressuring her to lie about it under oath, Newsweek decided not to run the story. Matt Drudge scooped Newsweek, followed by The Washington Post.I really have to ask myself; do the leftists that run the American media worry even a little about the prospect of living in an Islamofascist state? Aren't they even a little bit concerned about a future in which the United States, to prevent further terrorist attacks that our government can't stop because the ACLU runs the FBI and the Department of Justice, agrees to implement Shari'a? Top Two Vehicle Manufacturers in J.D. Powers Quality Poll You probably know that J.D. Powers & Associates does a regular survey of new vehicle owners as a measure of quality. Okay, it is only a measure of quality in the first 90 days--the results might be quite different at the end of five years--but still, it is one measure of how well car makers are doing. No surprise that first in the poll is Toyota. But who was second? Honda? Porsche? BMW? Surprise, surprise, it was GM: DETROIT — General Motors Corp. (GM) and Toyota Motor Co. (search) had the top vehicles in 15 of 18 categories in a closely watched survey of 2005 models released Wednesday by research firm J.D. Power and Associates (search).When you consider where GM came from, this is even more surprising. GM Quality control was mixed (from fair to lousy) for a long time, with my 1977 Chevrolet Nova and 1978 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 being two examples. My 1977 Chevolet Nova was pretty darn good as it came out of the factory, and I can't claim to have had any real complaints about it. After 45,000 miles of extremely hard driving, I had about $90 worth of repairs. Actually, this wasn't hard driving. It was insane driving, including sliding it sideways once when the speedometer needle was wrapped around into the gearshift indicator at the bottom of the dial--I was going "R"). Still, initial build guality wasn't impressive--the fit of body panels was slapdash, and the gap between hood and fenders suggested that someone really didn't care. My 1978 Camaro Z28 was far worse on initial quality--I had a multipage list of either mechanical defects or bad build problems within three days of purchasing it. Then the crankshaft broke at 7800 miles. (Okay, I was going 117 at the time--but the dealer did agree it was defective, and fixed it under warranty.) If you had asked me in 1980 if GM would ever get within scratching distance of the Japanese in build quality, I would have laughed. I liked GM cars, but it wasn't for how well they were built, but in spite of how well they were built. So far, the wife's 2005 Chevrolet Equinox has been flawless--not a single thing wrong or misaligned. It is about at the quality that I used to expect from Japanese makers. Now, if only GM could resolve the problem of health care costs.... Machine Tools: What Bargains! A reader told me that because the Chinese are pretty much driving American manufacturing jobs into the ground, that in the Midwest you can get incredible bargains on vertical mills and engine lathes. I thought this sounded a little hard to believe--but looking at eBay, I am astonished I what I am finding. In some cases, pretty serious pieces of machining technology are available for pocket change (and the ability to move these rather heavy pieces of equipment). This South Bend 10" x 30" engine lathe--current bid is $380. It wouldn't fit in my garage. This Husky 10" x 20" lathe has a current bid of $9.50. It wouldn't fit in my garage--and I would have to drive to California to pick it up. In many cases, benchtop minilathes are selling for comparable amounts or more because they can be shipped easily. The Bush Theory of Infectious Democracy This Washington Post report suggests that it is working: DAMASCUS, Syria, May 17 -- Beset by U.S. attempts to isolate his country and facing popular expectations of change, Syrian President Bashar Assad will move to begin legalizing political parties, purge the ruling Baath Party, sponsor free municipal elections in 2007 and formally endorse a market economy, according to officials, diplomats and analysts.Doubtless, leftists everywhere will be crying in their soup over this latest loss of control by thugs. Blogging vs. Journalism Michael Williams points out that Reuters management, in justifying outsourcing its journalists to India, demonstrates that Reuters' definition of journalism sounds suspiciously like blogging. MP George Galloway: He Has Something To Hide An acquaintance in Europe who thinks it was a bad idea to overthrow Saddam Hussein's rapeocracy called to crow about how George Galloway made fools of the Senate committee investigating the bribes distributed by the Iraqi government. Oddly enough, British newspapers didn't see it that way. From the Scotsman: From the Telegraph: Their questioning was calm at first. But it soon became heated when, to their evident irritation, Mr Galloway refused to answer direct questions.Even the Guardian, among the most left-wing of British newspapers that don't have naked breasts on page 3, wasn't prepared to call what happened a vindication: And yet for all his anti-establishment credentials, Mr Galloway is as practised as any of his New Labour enemies at squirming away from awkward questions. Under scrutiny by Senator Levin, he deployed a classic example of the bait-and-switch technique that is the government minister's best defence in difficult questioning. The Los Angeles Times! Supports Abolition of the Filibuster You could have knocked me over with a feather. See this editorial, where they point out that filibuster has a sleazy history behind, blocking civil rights legislation. Tuesday, May 17, 2005
How Not To Be Poor This isn't news, but Professor Walter Williams reminds us that avoiding poverty isn't that difficult: Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And, finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior. If you graduate from high school today with a B or C average, in most places in our country there's a low-cost or financially assisted post-high-school education program available to increase your skills.In other places, I have read that 90% of poor people are in that predicament because they failed one or more of those steps. Certainly, what I have seen over the years leads me to believe that with a few relatively rare exceptions (a physical or mental disability being by far the most common), adult poverty is self-imposed. Poor children, unfortunately, have the misfortune to be born to people who failed one or more of those behavioral tests. Sowell also points out that when you compare white and black kids growing up in equivalent homes (by the criteria above), poverty rates are pretty consistent: In 1999, the Bureau of the Census reported that 33.1 percent of black children lived in poverty compared with 13.5 percent of white children. It turns out that race per se has little to do with the difference. Instead, it's welfare and single parenthood. When black children are compared to white children living in identical circumstances, mainly in a two-parent household, both children will have the same probability of being poor.This is why Bill Cosby's efforts of late to promote black self-reliance and responsibility are so important. I suspect also that the accusations against him that appeared only after he started his crusade are probably connected to that--the poverty pimps are absolutely terrified of the prospect of black Americans becoming like Italian-Americans, Greek-Americans, and all the other ethnic groups that have blended in so well that we don't think of them as "different." Victims needs leaders the same way that prostitutes need pimps. Thomas Sowell On Judge Saad's Background Report You are probably aware that Senator Reid (D-NV) said something on the floor of the Senate recently about one of President Bush's judicial nominees, alluding to material in the FBI's background report. I knew that this was considered improper behavior--but until I read Thomas Sowell's column, I had no idea how improper. Sowell has some experience being on the receiving end of this sort of thing: a far worse remark by Senator Dirty Harry is that Michigan judge and federal judicial nominee Henry Saad has some things in his FBI file that should give Senators pause before confirming him. Wal-Mart & Preparing For War With China Matthew Yglesias discusses recent published reports in which a Chinese general discusses how, in the inevitable conflict with the U.S. over "reunification" with Taiwan, sinking a U.S. aircraft carrier would cause us to lose the political will to fight for Taiwanese independence: Chinese Major General Huang Bin explained the reasoning: “Once we decide to use force against Taiwan, we definitely will consider an intervention by the United States. The United States likes vain glory; if one of its aircraft carriers should be attacked and destroyed, people in the United States would begin to complain and quarrel loudly, and the U.S. president would find the going harder and harder.” China has equipped its advanced Sovremenny-class destroyers with Sunburn supersonic anti-ship missiles -- missiles designed to sink large vessels such as aircraft carriers.Chinese generals have made not very veiled threats before. During the Clinton years, one of them told a U.S. counterpart during talks that he couldn't believe that we would be willing to sacrifice Los Angeles to defend Taiwan. Ideally, of course, the Chinese government would not risk going to war with the United States over Taiwan. It would be irrational. But wars aren't always fought for rational reasons. World War I, for example, started at least partly because some of the combatants started mobilization of reserves as a form of threat--but once started, it was impossible for other powers to figure out if this was simply saber-rattling or actual preparation for war. Why did the military dictatorship of Argentina invade the Falklands? It was an attempt to distract the masses from certain bad habits of the government (like torturing and murdering dissidents--hence the widespread leftist support for Argentina over Britain). Doubtless, the dictators thought that Britain was a toothless lion, and would respond with a lot of screeching but a negotiated settlement. I could see if China's population became sufficiently restive that it might be tempting to turn that upset outward, by invading Taiwan. (Think of Saddam Hussein's war on Iran, and his invasion of Kuwait.) This is not a trivial or remote concern. I think that there is at least a 1 in 10 chance that we will go to war with China in the next 25 years. They have nuclear weapons, and methods of delivering them to the U.S. I could see both sides keeping the war conventional in a fight over Taiwanese independence--unless the Chinese government perceived that it was losing, or was in danger of a widespread popular uprising. In that case, the leadership might decide that while firing nuclear weapons at the U.S. would lead to a devastating retaliation, that it was better than being executed by a new Chinese government. The U.S. government might engage in a first strike if it believed that the Chinese were preparing to launch ICBMs. So what does this have to do with Wal-Mart? Everytime you buy Chinese goods, you are putting money (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) into the hands of the Chinese government. I've seen the claim that 70% of the goods that Wal-Mart sells are Chinese. I have shopped there enough to find that a plausible claim. At least at Target, while some of the merchandise comes from China, the rest comes from an enormous range of countries (some, even from the United States)--none of which are making belligerent remarks about going to war with us. Don't buy Chinese goods! This is quite painful for me because Harbor Freight Tools sells cheap (in both price and quality) Chinese machine tools--and I have to resist the urge. If you buy at Wal-Mart, don't buy Chinese goods. This may get the message across to the CEO that Americans are willing to pay a little more for goods from countries that aren't threatening war. Oh yes, it is entertaining to read the comments on Matthew Yglesias' posting--a reminder of how much of the left-wing of the Democratic Party would rather see a fascist kleptocracy (the current Chinese "Communist" Party) running Taiwan, instead of a democracy. Treasury Yield Curve Flattening If you look at the graph of Treasury bond yield plotted against maturity, you will notice that the yield curve has dramatically flattened compared to a year ago. Ordinarily, flattening of the yield curve means that big investors are expressing confidence that the prospect for long term inflation is quite low. Indeed, if you get what is called a "Treasury yield curve inversion," where long-term bonds have lower yields than short-term bonds, it means that investors have decided that long-term inflation is not a problem, and they are piling on to buy long-term bonds. This drives up the price of the bonds, and because bond prices and yields to maturity are inversely related, the massive buying of long-term bonds drives the yield down. Of course, there are other reasons why investors are piling on to buy long-term Treasury bonds. As I have mentioned previously, central banks of other countries may buy Treasury bonds as a way to prop up the value of the dollar, so that they can continue to sell their goods to us cheaply. But this article indicates that the private sector is part of the frenzy: Commentary: The Treasury International Capital (TIC) System report for March showed that foreigners increased their holdings of U.S. financial assets by $45.7 billion, substantially less than in the two previous months. Much of the drop in net foreign purchases resulted from sales of marketable Treasures by foreign "official" institutions, which offset record purchases by private sector entities. Foreigners concentrated their purchases on Treasuries with private sector purchases totaling a record $42.8 billion, followed corporate bonds. The big drop in holding of "official" institutions may reflect the reported currency portfolio rebalancing of central banks. Nonetheless, the exceptional strength of private sector purchases for U.S. financial assets appears to have been an important source of strength in demand in the fixed income markets in the first part of 2005.Unlike foreign central banks, private sector investors might find themselves forced to unload these bonds by circumstances: for example, if interest rates started to rise suddenly, and the value of these bonds were to fall. If so, you could see a glut on the market produce a feedback loop driving yields up even more dramatically. There's A Market For Everything...No Matter How Stupid It reads like a Saturday Night Live sketch that the censors wouldn't allow: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A life-like prosthetic penis called the Whizzinator and other products promising to help illegal drug users pass urine tests provoked U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday to take legal action with subpoenas of manufacturers. Risk Factors Professor Volokh has been blogging the last few days about an FDA decision that homosexual men should not be allowed to donate to sperm banks, because of the much higher risk of AIDS. He points out today that this perception that homosexual men are at higher risk of being HIV+ is not a vicious stereotype, but based on reality: A reader kindly passed along to me what seems to be the most recent, albeit geographically limited, data on the subject, from Texas Department of Health. The data seems to be 2003 data, based on then-living people in Texas with known HIV infections.There's a similar, although not quite as dramatic difference in risk when it comes to child molestation. As I have pointed out in the past, homosexual men are at least 4-6x more likely to molest children than heterosexual men. Because nearly all sexual abuse of children is done by men, men of all orientations are almost twice as likely as women to sexually abuse children. Not surprisingly, our society (although not our laws) operate on prejudicial assumptions about men, and even more so, about homosexual men. Is this unfair to homosexual men, most of whom are not going to molest children? Sure. Is this unfair to straight men, most of whom are not going to molest children? Sure. But men are substantially more likely to be molesters, and homosexual men are even more substantially likely to be molesters. The risks to children are very high--and some hurt feelings or even limited vocational and avocational opportunities (you can't be a Scoutmaster) are a small price to pay. This prejudice extends to other areas as well. Some years ago, I was walking home from class one night, and a woman ahead of me on a lonely path near the university became visibly frightened of me, because I was overtaking her. (I was taller, and therefore my stride meant that I was moving more quickly than she was.) I was at first terribly offended by her prejudicial assumption that I was someone of whom she had to be afraid. The more I thought about her situation, the more I understood. 1. Effectively all forcible rapes are committed by men. 2. Men are about 49% of the population. 3. Men are therefore 2x more likely to be rapists than the "average" person. 4. She did not know whether I was a threat to her or not. If she wrongly assumed that I was not a threat, she was at risk of serious injury. If she rightly assumed that I was not a threat, she gained nothing by allowing me to overtake her. 5. Her reaction--to walk faster and faster, until she was practically running--was therefore a rational response to a rational prejudice. There are similar examples out there of what I call "rational prejudices." That is to say that because members of group A are disproportionately involved in a destructive or dangerous behavior, we are wise to avoid contact with members of group A unless we have some way of knowing the particular individuals with whom we are going to make contact. Don't take my word for this. Ask Jesse Jackson. "There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start to think about robbery and then look around and see it's somebody white and feel relieved. How humiliating." Jackson was quoted in Paul Glastris & Jeannye Thornton, "A New Civil Rights Frontier: After His Own Home and Neighborhood Were Invaded by Street Punks, Jesse Jackson Dedicated Himself to Battling Black-on-Black Crime," U.S. News & World Report, January 17, 1994, cited in Nelson Lund, "The Conservative Case Against Racial Profiling in the War on Terrorism," Albany Law Review 66:2 [2003] 329-43. Monday, May 16, 2005
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Don't bother. I just loved all four books--perhaps because I was young. I used to think the world of Woody Allen's movies, when I was in college. Hence the use of "sophomoric" as an insult. The movie didn't exactly follow the books, and in spite of a really game try, didn't manage to capture Douglas Adams' droll satire. I only found myself laughing about four or five times--and I am noted for how willing I am to laugh. Much of it was only cute, and in many places, not even that. If you have nothing better to do, once it comes out on video, there are worse ways to waste two hours. I was pleased to see that it was PG--no sex, no swearing, no vulgarity. But perhaps you can't go home again, and the joys of your youth can't be recaptured. "Newsweek Lied. People Died." A number of people are mocking the left's favorite bumper sticker slogan--people like Michael Williams, among others. As long as we remember that this is satire, we are okay. At this point, the evidence is not that Newsweek intentionally lied, b |
