voluntaryXchange

Our New Senator

Can you imagine him sparking a fat one with Jake and Elwood and announcing that in 30 years he’d be in the Senate?

Technorati Tags: senator,franken,saturday,night,live

Bill O’Reilly – Beaten to the Punch by a 7 Year Old

A true story pasted from my wife’s Facebook page:

Scene opens: Quiet TV night at home, the new Carl's Jr. ad comes on. A girlie is rolling around in sand, a bikini, pretending to eat a burger. The boys are speechless, mouths agape, thin lines of saliva trickling out. I'm trying to gracefully get the remote and turn off the porn. And then we hear it. A small still voice out of the darkness. "HER TITTIES ARE GONNA FALL RIGHT OUTTA THERE MOMMY."

This scene happened towards the end of last week.

Last night, Foxnews.com had a clip of O’Reilly discussing the same commercial.

Technorati Tags: o'reilly,audrina,partridge

China, Green Dam, and Cyberwar

China wants all new PCs to include software called Green Dam-Youth Escort to control private individual’s access to ideas the government doesn’t like.

The Chinese government isn’t tech savvy enough to pull this off, so instead the government of China appears to have stolen this software from the U.S. company Solid Oak Software.

Now, after raising this point publicly, Solid Oak is reporting that it's servers are being attacked (here too).

The best coverage of this is on ZDNet Government.

The U.S. government has gotten involved in this as a trade issue (Go Obama!), and it seems to be working – the Chinese are at least backtracking on their requirement that this be on all new PCs starting tomorrow.

I wonder if the effectiveness of the U.S. policy – which is large compared to its publicity – is because the government takes this attack very seriously, and recognizes it clearly for what it is.

Technorati Tags: green,dam,solid,oak,china

More On Honduras

The New York Times reports this as the Obama White House’s justification for its position on Honduras:

“On the one instance, we’re talking about conducting a survey, a nonbinding survey; in the other instance, we’re talking about the forcible removal of a president from a country,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity during a teleconference call with reporters.

Let me get this right.

It was important enough for this guy to organize and lead a mob to break in to where the ballots were held prior to the election, and the White House calls this a “nonbinding survey”. Seems a bit extreme to me.

I submit that former Honduran president Zelaya knows something that our White House with pretensions of omnipotence does not.

I wonder if the legacy media will call him on this.

Technorati Tags: honduras,obama,white,house,election,survey

Matt Graff

The big local news over the last month has been the arrest of personal injury lawyer Matt Graff.

Graff stole clients’ money – including settlements from relatives of those who died in the August 22, 2008 plane crash in Moab in which a larger proportion of the local population was killed than in NYC on 9/11 (vX covered that here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

On arrest he was asked to surrender his law license and passport. He’s now been arrested a total of 3 times over the last 2 months (here are links to pieces on the 2nd and 3rd arrests). Piecing together the reports suggests that he spent 4 nights in Purgatory prison before making bail for the 3rd arrest.

Many people are surprised. I wonder about this: there have been credible rumors of malfeasance going back several years. This may be a case of “see no evil, hear no evil”.

Technorati Tags: matthew,graff,arrest,fraud,plane,crash,moab

Honduras

UPDATE: From the (AP):

President Barack Obama says the weekend ouster of Honduran leader Manuel Zelaya was a "not legal" coup and that he remains the country's president.

Obama spoke to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday after meetings with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. Obama said he wanted to be very clear that President Zelaya is the democratically elected president.

Obama pledged the U.S. to "stand on the side of democracy" and to work with other nations and international entities to resolve the matter peacefully.

I guess Obama’s thinking is that if you get elected, you’re entitled to lead a mob that steals the ballots prior to the referendum you’ve been told is illegal to hold.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady fills in the blanks left by the legacy media:

It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated …

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own …  The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself… 

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

Seems pretty clear to me that the forces of law and order are helping avoid a coup by another erstwhile caudillo.

Read the whole thing.

Technorati Tags: honduras,zelaya,chavez,castro

Interesting Business Networking Research

The pattern of e-mails sent at Enron changed around crises, and appears to be a leading indicator.

Basically, about a month before the s**t hits the fan, people start talking more to their clique of select contacts, the number of cliques increases, but the amount of communication outside the cliques goes down.

Interestingly, the researchers did not have access to the content of the messages: only to who was contacting whom.

Technorati Tags: enron,e-mail,clique,leading,indicator

Cluelessness of Self-Sufficiency

This picture is worth more than my thousand words.

Economists understand that self-sufficiency is generally not a good idea: it’s one of the first things we teach in microeconomics.

But … examples are hard to come by.

Thomas Thwaites has produced a tremendous one.

He’s built a toaster. Just one. From scratch. Zero used parts.

The photo is priceless:

Thwaites has an interesting site on which he discusses the construction in some detail. He’s getting  a masters in design from the Royal College of Art, which perhaps explains his perspective:

… Looking at toasters in relation to global industry, at a moment in time when the effects of our industry are no longer trivial compared to the insignificant when our, [sic] they seem unreasonable. I think our position is ambiguous - the scale of industry involved in making a toaster [etc.] is ridiculous but at the same time the chain of discoveries and small technological developments that occurred along the way make it entirely reasonable.

To an economist, this argument is fatuous (no matter how fascinating I find his project’s commentary).

Thwaites spent about $2000 (plus the unknown opportunity cost of his own labor). The toaster he emulated retails for about $7.

His point is that businesses incur internal costs and large negative externalities in the creation of consumer products. No doubt.

His point is also that consumer desire for the product at the retail price isn’t justifiable to society at large. This is only true if the externalities are large, since the consumer implicitly agrees that the internalized costs are worthwhile.

So, what’s the value of the negative externalities of creating a toaster? I can’t say for sure. Perhaps a buck, but I think probably quite a bit less than that.

For the toaster industry to be “bad”, it’s necessary to argue that the elimination of $2000 in per unit costs is outweighed by those negative externalities. You’d need to be rather blinkered to make that argument.

And note that I’m not counting the positive externalities of modern toasters. The value of homes not burned down because of improvements in toasters over the years is surely not an insignificant amount.

Via New Scientist.

Technorati Tags: toaster,externality,self-sufficiency

Excuse # 5: E-Mail Trouble

Not really sure what the root cause of my trouble was here, but I’ve been doing workarounds for about 2 months.

All I really know is that 1) all my filtering stopped working (not just spam), and 2) my e-mail server was sending things to my client more than once.

Bottom line: I had to deal with just under 5,000 extra e-mail messages since mid-April – many of them by hand.

Excuse #4: Vacation In Park City

Seven days in Park City.

Way too much rain. Family played nice with each other through it though.

Bad housekeeping service and unresponsive management at the Marriott Mountainside Resort.

Reef’s Kitchen is still a great restaurant, although they’ve move to the foot of Main Street.

Nick’s Greek Cafe was a new find: downscale, diner-like, definitely for locals, but with very good Greek dishes.