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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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Amitai Etzioni's Blog
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Michael Williams -- Master of None
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A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
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Promoting children being raised by their own parents
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Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
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Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
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Improving on the LED Conversion
I mentioned yesterday that I was going to try and enlarge the hole in the standard Mini-Maglite reflector to see if I could combine the advantages of the LED (which is too large to fit through the light bulb hole of the standard reflector) with the paraboloid's ability to produce a tightly focused beam.
To accomplish this end, I needed to enlarge the hole on the standard reflector to .40" diameter, large enough to admit the LED assembly. (Okay, I overdid this--I chucked up the reflector on the lathe to make a very precisely centered hole. The difficulty is that once you have enlarged the hole that much--you've lost much of the bottom of the reflector--and the LED is below the bottom of the reflector, still. Perhaps if I could find a small two prong extension--something that fits into the Mini-Maglite, and into which the LED plugs, adding about .25" of height. That might give me the best of both worlds.
Joyeux Noel (2005)
This international film production is about a real event--the Christmas Truce of 1914--but with some pretty serious artistic license. On Christmas Eve, German soldiers could be heard singing "Silent Night" (in German, of course) and soon British soldiers joined in singing in English. This soon led to a completely unofficial stop to the fighting for a day or two, and soldiers on both sides came together to celebrate Christmas, bury the dead that were lying in no man's land, and in general, behave like civilized persons.
Joyeux Noel dramatizes the event with an implausible story about a German opera singer, his Danish girl friend, and a Scots Catholic priest reciting Mass at midnight before German, Scots, and French Catholics. These parts, as near as I can tell, are complete fabrication--but I think the screenwriter was trying to make a point that it was not just a common humanity that made this truce possible, but a common religious heritage. Unlike World War II--and certainly unlike today--soldiers from throughout Western Europe were still Christians.
One fascinating subplot involves two Scots soldiers who are, shall we say, a bit closer than comrades. The way that one of them responds to the Christmas truce injects a little bit of reality into what was starting to feel too much like a parable.
This is a beautiful film, as long as you don't forget that this common set of values does not exist with our current enemies. It doesn't even exist today in Europe, as near as I can tell. If this film had been made in 1970, it might well have been something of a pacifist work, but in post-Christian Europe, it is painful to realize how much they have lost.
LED Replacement for Mini-Maglites
I mentioned last week that I ordered some of these. They arrived today. A full test will have to wait until my wife gets home, so that I can put fresh batteries in both, and do a side-by-side comparison, but less, this is very obviously brighter and whiter of a light than the standard bulb. In fact, it took almost three minutes for the afterimage that the LED produced to go away! I shudder to think what my seven D cell Maglite will do when similarly upgraded--I'll be able to signal Mars!
UPDATE: My wife got home, and I was able to do side-by-side comparison of the standard Mini-Maglite and one upgraded with the TerraLUX "Universal LED Lighting Kit." The kit includes:
Why does it use a different reflector? At first I though it might be because there was more than one LED, and it needed an non-parabolic reflector to get a concentrated beam, but it was a simpler explanation: the LED is a bit larger diameter than the standard bulb, and there isn't enough clearance with the standard reflector.
Just to make the comparison fair, I replaced the batteries in both flashlights with brand new AA batteries from the same package. It clear that the LED is much brighter than the standard bulb--but it doesn't have a great deal more range. I have a very dark hillside to aim both of them up, and the standard bulb illuminated about the same distance, but much less area.
I wondered about this for a second, but then figured out why. Mini-Maglites, as you may be aware, have a clever combination of focus and on/off switch. You turn the head of the flashlight, and it turns on, with a fairly broad beam of light. You turn the head a bit farther, and the beam narrows down.
How does it do this? As you turn the head, the reflector rotates forward, while the bulb remains stationary. The reflector is a paraboloid (I think), and so moving the bulb closer to the non-infinite focal point aims the light towards infinity--which is to say, all the rays of light are trying to head out parallel to each other--and thus a tighter beam.
TerraLUX's reflector is noticeably shallower than the Mini-Maglite reflector--probably not even a paraboloid. This means that even with the LED at the bottom of the TerraLUX reflector, the light pattern will be more diffuse. It occurs to me that I could combine the best of both worlds--the brightness of an LED with the sharp focus on the Mini-Maglite--by enlarging the standard Mini-Maglite reflector bulb hole so that it can be used with the LED. Maybe an experiment for tomorrow!
A reader sent me the data sheet for the Philips LED that is probably what I have in this unit, and it indicates that it can't handle more than 350 mA--and he says that these are designed to operate with about one watt of power--suggesting that much more than two alkaline batteries are going to be produce more energy than this LED can use without being damaged by the heat. He asks:An LED insert that would handle seven cells must have internal current limiting circuitry to protect the LED from that extra voltage. You would essentially be wasting four cells since just three cells are enough to overdrive the LED.
An interesting question. I had this...impression, more than anything, that the larger versions of this for the big D cell Maglites were arrays of LEDs. I can see a way that might make sense, with perhaps one LED pointing forward and another pointing back, with the reflector using the light of both to construct a reasonably parallel beam. Worth investigating, that's for sure!
UPDATE 2: I see that Maglite now makes both LED versions of the Minimaglite and sells an upgrade kit for the 2, 3, and 4 cell Maglites.
Podcasting
If you have an iPod or something similar that lets you download MP3 files--you can listen to the promo for the upcoming book here. The sound quality isn't great, because the interview was done by phone.
Circumcisions Reduces Risk Of Catching AIDS
During childbirth education classes that my wife and I went through for our two children, the question came up about whether circumcision was a good idea or not. One of the doctors involved with these classes said that when he was in military service in Vietnam, he noticed that uncircumcised soldiers seemed to be at higher risk of various genital infections. He didn't identify which types of infections, but the results of this study give some reason to suspect that he was right:Circumcising African men may cut their risk of catching AIDS in half, the National Institutes of Health said today as it stopped two clinical trials in Africa, when preliminary results suggested that circumcision worked so well that it would be unethical not to offer it to uncircumcised men in the trials.
This isn't the first study that has shown circumcision has some protective advantages, but this seems to be the first to demonstrate that it isn't a coincidence, caused by other cultural factors.
AIDS experts immediately hailed the result, saying it gave the world a new way to fight the spread of AIDS, and the directors of the two largest funds for fighting the disease said they would now consider paying for circumcisions.
“This is very exciting news,” said Daniel Halperin, an H.I.V. specialist at Harvard’s Center for Population and Development, who has argued in scientific journals for years that circumcision slows the spread of AIDS in the parts of Africa where it is practiced.
In an interview from Zimbabwe, Mr. Halperin added: “I have no doubt that, as word of this gets around, millions of African men will want to get circumcised and that will save many lives.”
But experts also cautioned that circumcision is no cure-all. It only lessens the chances that a man will catch the virus, it is expensive compared to condoms, abstinence or other methods, and the surgery has serious risks if performed by folk healers using dirty blades, as often happens in rural Africa.
Sex education messages to young men need to make it clear that “this does not mean that you have an absolute protection,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, an AIDS researcher and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which sponsored the trials. Circumcision should be added to other prevention methods, not replace them, he said.
The two trials were carried out among nearly 3,000 men in Kisumu, Kenya, and nearly 5,000 men in Rakai, Uganda. None were infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS; they were divided into circumcised and uncircumcised groups. They were given safe sex advice — although many presumably did not take it — and retested regularly.
The trials were stopped by the National Institutes of Health’s Data Safety and Monitoring Board this week after data showed that the Kenyan men had a 53 percent reduction in new H.I.V. cases and the Ugandan men a 48 percent reduction.
In Kenya, 22 of the 1,393 circumcised young men in the study caught the disease, compared with 47 of the 1,391 uncircumcised men.
I will be curious to hear what the "circumcision is child abuse" crowd (yes, there's a rather loud bunch that screams this) has to say.
Machining Fun
I'm building the largest caster assembly yet, for the Meade Giant Field Tripod--and I am reaching what I suspect is the largest piece that I should try to make with the lathe that I have. The difficulty is that the piece of Delrin that I start with is 5.011" long and a nominal 3" in diameter. The length of it means that when I start the process by facing the ends (to make them smooth and square), any significant drag creates enough leverage to pull the workpiece right out of the chuck jaws.
Next, I need to make a 2.33" deep and 2.52" diameter hole in one end. I do this by using a drill press and a 2 3/8" Forstner bit to rough out a hole, then use a boring bit on the lathe to enlarge the hole, make it precisely centered, and make it smooth. But again, the length of the workpiece means that any significant drag will grab the workpiece right out of the lathe.
Unfortunately, lathe chucks for this size of lathe have very shallow jaws, so there is only about a 1/4" of metal grabbing the end of the workpiece. Especially with a somewhat slippery material like Delrin, that's not much holding on to the workpiece!
At one point in the process I end up drilling and tapping a 3/8"-16 hole in one end, and perhaps I need to build an adapter that screws into that, and screws on to the lathe in place of the chuck. That doesn't solve the facing problem, but it should solve the boring problem.
UPDATE: It turned out that the piece that was giving me so much trouble wasn't quite square at the end in the chuck, so it was wobbling. I'm not surprised that the boring operation wasn't going well. I resquared it, and the problem went away.
This Is America; Get Over It
Look, if this rule had been created specifically to discourage Muslim women from keeping their faces covered, it would be clearly unconstitutional. But it wasn't. It was created because there are legitimate security concerns when you can't identify someone in a public place:GRAND RAPIDS -- The Rapid bus system announced today it has rescinded its rule that prevented people with face coverings from boarding public transit vehicles, after a woman wearing traditional Islamic dress was turned away.
I would not be happy if this rule was abolished just to satisfy Muslim concerns; I would also not be happy if they decided to make an exemption to satisfy Muslim concerns, because that would effectively give Muslims a veto over rules intended to protect public safety.
The passenger, who was not identified by Rapid officials, reported the incident; system administrators investigated, determining it was an isolated refusal. The woman, who was told by a driver that she would have to uncover her face to ride, was able to board another bus that same day, and had ridden on other vehicles previously, transit officials said.
Rapid spokeswoman Jennifer Kalczuk said the original order, issued early this year, was a security issue and that religious dress or other coverings were not considered. Kalczuk said the rule was made so that an on-board camera system could help identify riders in the event of a disturbance.
But it does seem as though this country is intent on going down the path of dhimmitude, where Muslims will have rights that others do not.
There Are People Who Insist That 9/11 and Iraq Are Connected
But not the people you think:An ethnic studies professor from the University of Colorado, Ward Churchill, received a standing ovation last night from a crowd of more than 200 New School students after blaming the 2001 World Trade Center attacks on America's support of Israel and its sanctions against Iraq in 1996.
But wait! I thought it was a matter of leftist dogma that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11.
Is This The Best Democrat Pelosi Could Find?
It is very fashionable in academic circles to decry the Republicans as ignorant knuckle-draggers--as compared to the Democrats, the party of the intellectuals. And then you have examples like this, Pelosi's new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee:Reyes stumbled when I asked him a simple question about al Qaeda at the end of a 40-minute interview in his office last week. Members of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East.
If you stopped 20 people on the street at random, I would expect that at least two or three would be able to answer these questions more correctly than the new chairman of the House Stupidity Committee.
We warmed up with a long discussion about intelligence issues and Iraq. And then we veered into terrorism’s major players.
To me, it’s like asking about Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: Who’s on what side?
The dialogue went like this:
Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?
“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”
“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.
That’s because the extremist Sunnis who make up a l Qaeda consider all Shiites to be heretics.
Al Qaeda’s Sunni roots account for its very existence. Osama bin Laden and his followers believe the Saudi Royal family besmirched the true faith through their corruption and alliance with the United States, particularly allowing U.S. troops on Saudi soil.
It’s been five years since these Muslim extremists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center.
Is it too much to ask that our intelligence overseers know who they are?
Civil War
And Hezbollah? I asked him. What are they?
“Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah...”
He laughed again, shifting in his seat.
“Why do you ask me these questions at five o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?”
“Poquito,” I said—a little.
“Poquito?! “ He laughed again.
“Go ahead,” I said, talk to me about Sunnis and Shia in Spanish.
Reyes: “Well, I, uh....”
I apologized for putting him “on the spot a little.” But I reminded him that the people who have killed thousands of Americans on U.S. soil and in the Middle East have been front page news for a long time now.
It’s been 23 years since a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed over 200 U.S. military personnel in Beirut, mostly Marines.
Hezbollah, a creature of Iran, is close to taking over in Lebanon. Reports say they are helping train Iraqi Shiites to kill Sunnis in the spiralling civil war.
“Yeah,” Reyes said, rightly observing, “but . . . it’s not like the Hatfields and the McCoys. It’s a heck of a lot more complex.
“And I agree with you — we ought to expend some effort into understanding them. But speaking only for myself, it’s hard to keep things in perspective and in the categories.”
Shipping Containers
I've updated this entry here with lots more information, some of it quite amusing. Would you believe that there is a blog titled "Honeymoon in Iraq" and this is an accurate description of what this couple is doing?
Oh, and I love this novel use for shipping containers from Sun Microsystems. I kept looking for an April 1st date on this, somewhere, but I couldn't find it. Especially when you see pictures like these of how to deploy it.
Good Ways and Bad Ways to Help Poor People
There are a variety of methods by which the government can assist the poor--and some methods are better than others. When I say, "better" I mean: more effective; more targeted to help those who need it most; less likely to produce unintended and even counterproductive results.
One of the reasons that I am so hostile to minimum wage laws is the same reason that I am hostile to maximum wage laws (and those of us who grew up in the Nixon Administration remember those days): market prices contain important information--a subject that I will examine in more detail later in this post.
If you want to help the poor, almost any strategy you can imagine that leaves wages and prices unregulated is better. For example: direct financial payments to poor people, either in cash or in kind, can provide relief from poverty without interfering with the vitally important information contained in market pricing. Food Stamps and WIC, for example, especially as the method by which these are redeemed as been tightened up to avoid corruption and abuse, are good. This puts money directly into a poor person's pocket, without the vague and imprecise method of helping them out by telling a third party what they must pay to have a job done.
There are a number of regressive payroll taxes, such as Social Security's Old Age & Survivors Insurance deduction (5.3%), Disability Insurance deduction (0.9%), and the Hospital Insurance or Medicare deduction (1.45%). The OASI and DI components are regressive because when you bust through a certain income level for the year ($94,200 for 2006), you stop paying them. Thus, the guy who makes a million dollars a year pays 0.58% of his income for those taxes; most people pay 6.2% for those taxes. (Many workers never bust through the OASI and DI ceiling.) Especially for people at the very bottom of the economy--the ones making minimum wage--this combined 7.65% of their income (and a matching 7.65% that their employer has to pay) is often larger than all other payroll taxes combined. Making Social Security taxes a flat percentage of your income--regardless of whether you make $10,000 or $10,000,000 a year--would allow a lower rate for those at the very bottom--and without interfering with the information that comes from free market pricing.
So why is leaving pricing information alone so important? Milton & Rose Friedman's Free to Choose does a good job of explaining it, but I'll try as well. The price of any commodity (and that includes labor) is a form of signalling. It says, "This is in short supply" or "We've got all we need." During the 1973 Mideast War, certain nations in that part of the world shut off sales of petroleum for a while. We had wage and price controls in the U.S.--and as a result, no one could raise the price of petroleum products. As a result, Americans continued driving big gas guzzling cars. Yes, we all knew that gasoline was in short supply--but we didn't really know it until we start paying higher prices. Until it affected individuals directly, asking them to think of their fellow Americans and not waste gasoline had no real impact. Higher prices were signalling information: gasoline was in short supply, use it wisely.
Pricing information doesn't just signal that something is either scarce or common, and thus encourage appropriate behavior with the scarce commodity. High prices also encourage production of the item needed. Let's say that the government set the wages for all jobs the same. Regardless of whether you were a plumber, a secretary, a teacher, or a brain surgeon, you would receive the same pay: $15 per hour.
Teachers may not want to believe this, but there's a reason that plumbers get paid better than teachers. Teachers don't climb around under houses, in the dark, fighting with spiders, loosening and tightening the pipes coming out of your toilet. I've done just enough of this work when I was young that if I had the choice of being a plumber, a teacher, a software engineer, or a lifeguard, all for the same pay--well, let's just say that not many people would be lining up to be a plumber. The line to be a lifeguard or a teacher would run all the way around the block and perhaps into the next county.
Labor rates are a way of adjusting supply and demand to reflect fluctuating needs. If plumbers are in short supply, in a free market, wages will rise to reflect that scarcity. If the wages get high enough, people will become plumbers. If the supply of plumbers start to exceed the number of jobs, wages will drop, and send those who aren't keen on spiders and sewage into other jobs.
Teachers get paid pretty poorly for their education, not because, as some teachers like to think, "No one respects what we do," but because teachers seldom die or lose fingers on the job (except maybe in the Los Angeles school district). (One of my sisters fell off a desk in her classroom once, and eventually had to retire on disability because of her injuries, but that's really exceptional for a teacher.) If teachers were paid as well as plumbers, teachers would be a lot happier, no doubt, but there would be ten people applying for every teaching job.
Minimum wage laws have much the same problem as other methods of wage regulation: they destroy information that helps the rest of the economy operate. There are an enormous number of people out there in their first year of employment--often teenagers who have not sufficiently matured to do even unskilled jobs reliably. Their labor is often worth surprisingly little to an employer. (And no surprise, minimum wage workers are disproportionately teenagers.) If one of these new workers is worth $6 an hour to an employer, and the minimum wage is $7 per hour, an employer is going to lose money by hiring an unskilled or immature worker. They may still hire such workers, but they can't afford to hire a lot of them.
The net effect of raising the minimum wage above the market wage will be to reduce demand for these starting workers. Economists--even fairly liberal economists--have long argued that minimum wage laws have played a role in causing structural unemployment among blacks. In the late 1940s, black teenaged unemployment rates were actually lower than white teenaged unemployment rates. As minimum wage rises, it increases the risk that potential workers who, for whatever reason, are less valuable (or are perceived as less valuable) will not be able to get their first job. If this problem stretches out for several years, this becomes not just a bummer to the kid who can't get a job at 16, or 17, or 18--but it can become a serious social problem when that kid can't get a job at 20, or 22.
There is a place for the government to take steps to assist the poor. But interfering with wages and prices is not one of the better approaches. Direct subsidies or reducing the burden of taxation on the poor can assist those at the bottom of the society without blocking the important signalling function of free market prices.
Another Acronym You Need to Learn
Along with AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming--that which is caused by man's actions) we now have BGW: Bovigenic Global Warming, that which is caused by cows. Michael Williams points to this new report:Meet the world's top destroyer of the environment. It is not the car, or the plane,or even George Bush: it is the cow.
Michael points out that the report complains about growing beef consumption:
A United Nations report has identified the world's rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife. And they are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs.
The 400-page report by the Food and Agricultural Organisation, entitled Livestock's Long Shadow, also surveys the damage done by sheep, chickens, pigs and goats. But in almost every case, the world's 1.5 billion cattle are most to blame. Livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together.
Burning fuel to produce fertiliser to grow feed, to produce meat and to transport it - and clearing vegetation for grazing - produces 9 per cent of all emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas. And their wind and manure emit more than one third of emissions of another, methane, which warms the world 20 times faster than carbon dioxide.And why is demand for meat increasing? Because of "Where's the beef?" commercials? No, because the world is getting wealthier. Not just "the rich getting richer", however, because even a billionaire can only eat so much beef. In fact, the poor are getting a lot richer and audaciously expecting to eat just as well as their betters!
Ah, but there is good news! Power and Control points to a preview of the forthcoming IPCC report about global warming:
The world's poor need to learn to accept the station in life the environmentalists have damned them to: dirty, disease-infested villages quaint, charming rural settlements that allow them to live in harmony with nature. Instead of eating beef at McDonald's, they should spend ten hours a day digging up grubs and foraging for berries, like Gaia intended.Mankind has had less effect on global warming than previously supposed, a United Nations report on climate change will claim next year.
Gee, if they have reduced man's influence by 25%, what's the rest of it? Cows and other livestock? Or is someone about to admit that maybe that big bright object in the sky might be causing global warming both on Earth and on Mars?
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there can be little doubt that humans are responsible for warming the planet, but the organisation has reduced its overall estimate of this effect by 25 per cent.
In a final draft of its fourth assessment report, to be published in February, the panel reports that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has accelerated in the past five years. It also predicts that temperatures will rise by up to 4.5 C during the next 100 years, bringing more frequent heat waves and storms.
The panel, however, has lowered predictions of how much sea levels will rise in comparison with its last report in 2001.
Climate change sceptics are expected to seize on the revised figures as evidence that action to combat global warming is less urgent.
Scientists insist that the lower estimates for sea levels and the human impact on global warming are simply a refinement due to better data on how climate works rather than a reduction in the risk posed by global warming.
Maybe Chinese Exchange Rates Aren't the Explanation
I've blogged in the past about the yuan being undervalued, and how this is giving an unfair advantage to Chinese manufacturers--not just relative to the United States, but almost every other country. This isn't protectionism; no other Third World country seems to have such an extraordinary and unfair economic advantage.
Let me give you an example. I bought a Chinese made floor drill press recently for $199. This isn't a cheesy bench drill press; this is a reasonably high quality, fairly precise machine tool made up of about 170 pounds of steel, copper, and plastic that I bought for something over a dollar a pound. Even if the labor to make this was almost free, the raw materials and the transport should cost a big chunk of what I paid for it.
Over at Honest Things there is an extraordinarily interesting (and somewhat too long) discussion of something rather curious. Perhaps it isn't that the yuan is artificially cheap, but the shipping containers:There's a lot of talk about what enabled China to become the industrial supplier to the world. Low labor costs are first on that list - but any third world nation will have low labor costs. The thing that really enabled China to fit into that slot was something we miss. It was the really low costs of shipping goods from there to here and Europe. Shipping costs have always been the natural barrier to "world" trade. Were it otherwise, Henry Ford I would have said, "I need to build a plant in Argentina, India or China." George Westinghouse would have said the same. They'd have just shopped the world for the cheapest labor. All cars, motors and TVs would have always been built somewhere else.
He goes on to explain that if the Chinese government were directly subsidizing shipping, this would be noticeable pretty quickly, and the various trade agreements would get brought into play to stop this. Instead, he suggests, the Chinese government subsidized the making of these huge steel shipping containers so dramatically that Chinese exporters can afford to effectively throw away these containers.
Obviously, the shipping costs obviated such a thought from minds back then.
What changed? Really, what has changed since the 1970s?
Best I can tell it's the use of shipping containers, those big steel boxes that'll ride on a boat, a train car or a truck trailer. That's how everything sold at Wal-Mart gets here from China.
It costs about $2000 to ship one from Shanghai to the west coast, Oakland or Seattle. I figure that it costs another $1000, minimum to get it from there to, say Kansas, by train and then truck.
Here's what inspired my thinking about those containers. I was talking to a guy who imports after-market auto parts for pick-up trucks, lots of fancy wheels and other gizmos. They all come from China. He told me that his shipper was having troubles making timely deliveries because their storage yard was packed with the containers. According to him, for every three that come here, only one ever carries anything away. So the shipping yard is packed and stacked full of "empties."
There are only a half dozen shipping companies in the world that own all of these containers. I was stunned to discover that there are 18 million of these boxes! There's enough cubic feet in 18 million 8 by 8 by 20 foot boxes that if one laid the whole human population end to end, then stacked them, we'd all fit! Yup, all 6.5 billion of us! If you lined the containers up, end to end, they'd circle the earth 2.7 times. Packed into one spot, corner to corner, side-by-side, they'd make a square with sides of 10 miles.
If a lot of the containers end up in a storage yard, never being recycled back to China for a new load, it's pretty logical that they'd need that many. But . . .
I build stuff for a living. Most of it's made of steel. I took a look at that big steel box and realized I'd want five figures to build one. In big time production mode, that would drop to $7500. There's that much welding involved. The steel costs alone, FOB a rolling mill in China, are over $2000. Even if I had laborers at 20 cents an hour and a factory 20 miles from the rolling mill, the overhead costs of the shop, 20 mile cartage, electricity, machine tool wear, welding rods, wastage on the steel plate, etc. would force me to a price of $6000. The box weighs 2.5 tons. $6000 ain't a bad number, given what's involved in building one. If I wanted to buy one for storage at my shop and got told, "It'll cost you $6000," I wouldn't even blink at the price.
Tumble the numbers with me. At $6000 each, three cost $18,000. The shipper made 3 x $2000, $6000, to send them to the US, full of Chinese made goods. Only one goes back for re-use. He's instantly down by $12,000, the logical result of a trade imbalance - and that doesn't even account for the fuel costs by the ship to get them here. Nobody is going to ship the empty containers by truck or rail back to a port. That would cost $1000, each. So, the shipper really ought to include the additional costs of $12,000, distributed into every three shipments. Instead of it costing $2000 to get a container full of goods from Shanghai to Seattle, it ought to cost $6000. $2000 + (1/3 x $12,000) = $6000. But even at that number he's just giving the container away at what it cost him - a very bad business practice - so the number has to be greater than $6000.
Something needs to be done--not so much to protect the interests of American workers and manufacturers, but because we are funding the building of a military that will probably fighting us within twenty years.
UPDATE: A number of readers are skeptical of this explanation, arguing that the ships are probably headed back to China empty, so they have room for the shipping containers. True enough, but shipping containers that have been transported to the middle of the continent still need to be hauled back to the coast to be loaded on the ships--and that's not cheap. Even empty, these things aren't light.
I suspect that there is a triangular trade going on here. I doubt that the ships are going straight back to China empty. They might be transporting cowhides or Losmandy telescope mounts to Japan or Singapore, and then transporting something from those countries to China. Alternatively, we might be shipping some low value bulk commodity to China. (How much wheat do we ship there? And I don't think the shipping containers get filled with food.)
UPDATE 2: Here's what to do with them!
UPDATE 3: Another reader tells me:
I don't think that many shipping containers go back. Two of my
I am reminded of Henry Ford's requirement that parts for the Model T had to be shipped in boxes of a certain quality of wood, because he then used the boxes to make the floorboards. Any wood that wasn't acceptable he sold to his cousin, who made charcoal from it. Why do think that brand of charcoal is "Kingsford"?
cousins, and some college buddies of theirs, are making a nice living
buying the containers from the shippers and selling them for storage
containers in the US. There are whole "Public Storage"-type places
which are just a big stack of shipping containers laid out for easy
access; I think my cousins run one or two of those, too.
They have the advantage that one of them spent quite a bit of time in
China, after the Army taught him Mandarin, and he has contacts that
allow him to get slightly better prices and more reliable delivery for
containers - I think they may buy the containers while still in China,
and pick them up after they've brought stuff over.
Another reader, a civilian working in Afghanistan, tells me that:Over here at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan we use shipping containers pretty heavily for housing and other facilities.
You can see the "plywood palaces" that they are living in right now here. By the way, that website is pretty odd--it's called Honeymoon in Iraq, and that's not irony! They got married just in time to move to the Sandbox for his job!
...
The current generation of housing is being built from 40' containers stacked 2 high, a much needed improvement over our primary plywood housing. I don't have any pictures up at the moment, but I'll try and get some up in the next week. The tallest I've seen around Bagram are 3 stories, but the majority are 2 stories.
"Attention: Burglars: The Following Homes Have Handguns in Them"
My first reaction was not to link to this news story which includes a link to a government database of those with pistol permits in Westchester and Rockland County, New York. Talk about stupid! The government is telling criminals which homes are almost guaranteed to have a highly fenceable, compact, and valuable item worth stealing. There's no street addresses, but with zip code and first and last name, this wouldn't be much of a struggle.
But then I thought about it for a minute. If you were a burglar, would you want to be breaking into a home where you are guaranteed to be breaking in on someone who owns a pistol? Yes, you could wait until the house is empty...or at least, until you think the house is empty.
Nor is it particularly safe to assume that a person on this list only has a "premises permit." Once you get out of New York City, I understand that carry permits, while not easy to get, aren't impossible--and let's face it, there are probably a few people with "premises permits" who don't abide by the law exactly.
Thanks to Arms and the Law for the pointer.
Seven Deadly Sins & Skiing
The Catholic Church has some notion of dividing mortal sins (sometimes called popularly "the seven deadly sins") from venial sins--with the idea that the mortal sins turn one away from God, and therefore more serious than the venial sins, which don't.
Somehow, this is the sort of distinction makes me want to scream "Popery!" in the style of Monty Python--but at least the Catholic Church recognizes that sin is a serious matter. On the hand, guess who's having "Aspen Ski Week 2007" with this caption?Seven vices. Seven ways to celebrate.
I notice who the sponsors are--yet another reason why, "Friends don't let friends drink Budweiser."
Slavery Reparations
One of the mailing lists that I am on is H-SLAVERY, a scholarly discussion group about the history of slavery. Not surprisingly, the subject of slavery reparations comes up frequently--sometimes at a purely scholarly level: Did the U.S. ever impose a federal tax on slave imports? (No.) Other times, the discussion is a bit more impassioned. I responded to a recent argument that slavery reparations should be paid based on the benefits that whites enjoy from the slave labor system. My response is below.
Slavery had benefits to the slave owners, yes, but slavery also had substantial economic and political costs to American society as a whole. For example, slave labor was inefficient compared to free labor, and is generally agreed to have held the South back in economic development relative to the North. How much more economically advanced might the United States be if the South had nurtured industrial development at the same rate as the North?
The costs that slavery imposed on our political system were also substantial. The courts, especially in the South, had to reconcile the notion of "all men are created equal" with maintenance of the slave system and its close relation, the inequality of free blacks. There are a number of areas where this cognitive dissonance was very destructive, including the post-Civil War jurisprudence on gun control, and the use of race as a fundamental organizing principle of politics (and not just white against black).
Our legal system developed a series of distinctions concerning judicial oversight of legislative actions (strict scrutiny, heightened scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny) at least partly to deal with legislative misuse of power related to slavery's aftermath, and that the best lawyers often ended up working for the segregationists. The fine gradations of judicial scrutiny, while understandable as a method of dealing with these problems, certainly have complicated the division of legislative vs. judicial authority.
The Civil War, while not fought primarily about slavery [see clarification at UPDATE 2 below], would certainly not have happened without slavery. The costs were both direct (taxation on both sides to pay for the war, destruction of business assets) and indirect (reduction in trade, especially for the South, loss of 600,000 lives) and in some cases, indirect and hard to measure. If my great-great-great-grandfather had returned home to Indiana to continue teaching, what benefits might have accrued to Indiana's next generation of children? Not to mention the decline in economic status of his widow and children, when they sold the farm and moved into town.
Was slavery a net gain for the United States? This may be one of those lose-lose situations, where both slaves and the society in which they worked came out behind. Masters certainly came out ahead, but the destruction of many plantations, and the decline in land values after emancipation certainly destroyed some of the value that they had improperly obtained from their use of slave labor.
UPDATE: A reader sends an interesting tale of things observed:Some years ago, my wife and I visited Fayette, MI. It's a state park, a mostly-restored company town which used to make pig iron. It's on the Garden Peninsula of Michigan's upper peninsula. It could hardly be bettered for the purpose. For some reason, the Garden Peninsula had better soil than the rest of the U.P. and so grew hardwoods instead of pines. Snail Harbor, around which the town was built is about 300 degrees of a circle, and the opening to the pay points north toward land. The cliffs surrounding it are high and, get this, made of limestone.
UPDATE 2: It is true that the Southern states mentioned slavery as their reason for leaving--often the first reason for so doing (as I have mentioned before), but the war really starts because the Union refuses to accept the legitimacy of this secession. In a sense, the Civil War was about slavery to the South from the very start; for the North, it was about secession, and not about slavery until 1863.
The ore was barged over from Escanaba across Big Bay de Noc. The process required hardwood charcoal, limestone, and iron ore. What a location.
The town was apparently prosperous, boasting a ball team, a cornet band, a school, and doctor, and an opera hall. Seemed to have done well until the introduction of more modern technology, or perhaps bigger ore carriers, when iron and steel production moved down the lakes.
A year or so later, visting the Land Between The Lakes in west Kentucky and Tennesee, we came on a historical marker about a planned iron mill. The process was the same; ore, limestone, and hardwood charcoal. With the exception of almost supernaturally convenient water transportation, the location was almost as good as Fayette's.
The marker tells us the mill never went into production, due to a slave insurrection among the furnace crew.
There's a lesson there, someplace.
I did some math, once, consisting of compound interest on the presumed life incomes of the 300,000 Union dead and a presumed further 300,000 crippled who could not have been productive. I have no idea if the second number is correct, but it was the process that interested me. So pick a number for the value of the average estate left by those 600,000 who would never contribute a thing.
I had no way of figuring out the value of their year to year income and expenditure and the social benefit of having 600,000 healthy, intelligent men around for the next forty years. But one writer referred to "Boston Widows", a supposed euphemism for young women living together for lack of young men.
So I compounded the estate I guesstimated they would have left by 3% for each generation. It comes out to a pretty big number.
I don't recall what numbers are being used for reparations, but, net after my math, they might not have been all that impressive.
In addition, the slaves were fed and housed and clothed, however poorly. The cost of that was less than the cost of paying free labor, but not by much. Seems to me, if you want to make a material claim about a moral horror, other people are free to start doing their own math.
Anyway, it would seem reasonable to base reparations on the net difference between the slave's maintenance and prevailing wages for free labor doing the same kind of work. Scut labor didn't pay much more than bare survival in those days.
The lesson here is not to get greedy and start talking about reparations when the discussion should be about the the moral and ethical issues involved in slavery. If you get greedy, somebody may do the math for "the rest of the story" and present you with a bill.
The Online Garage Sale Continues
Amazingly enough, someone paid me $38 for the Kodak Z700 camera that won't power up. Someone bid $100 for the enormous stainless steel paperweight, which was a bit disappointing, but it is a rather esoteric gadget to buy. On the other hand, they haven't followed through with a payment....
I have finished transferring all my files over from my antique eMachines desktop, so I have put that up for sale on boise.craigslist.com for $60. I can't imagine that it would make sense to ship it anywhere; I'm assuming that someone who is very poor in Horseshoe Bend or Boise will buy it for their kids. If it doesn't sell by the end of the month, I'll donate it.
It turns out that getting rid of the eMachines antique greatly simplifies the cabling and power situation on my desk. I had plugged an external CD burner into the eMachines. At one point, the CD burner, the camera, and one other gadget (now forgotten) all needed a USB port--and the eMachines only had two of them, so I had to buy a Belkin USB hub. The external CD burner and the Belkin hub both had their external power supply plug, so I've freed up those two plugs and a bunch of wiring that went everywhere.
I also discovered that one of the Ethernet hubs salvaged from a discard bin at work was apparently only running at 10 Mb/second. I was using this as an excessively complicated Ethernet extension cord to connect one of the PCs and the laser printer to the rest of the home LAN. I only noticed this because I was trying to copy files from the eMachines antique to the new notebook through it--and I was wondering why it was taking so long. For most Internet activity, of course, the limiting factor was the wireless connection to my ISP--which was much slower than 10 Mb/second. With one less computer hooked up, I no longer need that hub. I suppose that I should verify that it was actually the bottleneck on performance before I throw it away. I suppose that I will start to see some improved printer throughput as well now, since everything is now talking to the printer through the 100 Mb/s Ethernet connector on the wireless router.
My wife has been complaining for some weeks that my office looks like a used computer store--and it just got worse! Within a few more days, this situation should improve dramatically.
