Prop 19

I guess we're not Portugal

".....the Portuguese decriminalization did not lead to major increases in drug use. Indeed, evidence indicates reductions in problematic use, drug-related harms and criminal justice overcrowding...."

In my discussions, it seems pretty clear there's a question about "when is it appropriate for government to act". One step I'd suggest is that when government has established a regulation which has significant negative externalities, that regulation should be abolished by the people or the government. In this case, the drug war policies have had significant negative externalities (harms to individuals, foreign policy ripples, etc) and should be abolished. In cases like our regulations and controls on contraceptives, again, negative externalities abound in STD transmission rates and rates of teens seeking abortions (teen pregnancy itself is probably a less clear negative externality and more a potential individual harm).

I have some support when there's a significant negative externality that can be averted through collective government action, say with pollution or crimes violating individuals and their property rights, or a positive externality that can be captured like with some infrastructure or with education, but there are often some flaws in the implementation. Schools for instance I'm comfortable forcing people to pay for education because of free rider problems and a significant positive externality. But not for whatever school the government says their money should go to. I'm comfortable paying for roads, but I think that controlled access roads can be built or maintained privately or paid for with congestion priced tolls to reduce pollution and congestion as the natural and undesirable outcomes of having more roads. In other words, we tax things we want, income as a method of wealth creation or jobs, and we subsidize things we don't, bad and failing school systems, corn syrup, coal and oil. This is an idiotic system of governance as a consequence. We get too much stuff we don't want (fattening foods, congested roads, gas guzzling cars spewing pollutants), and less of what we might want (income mobility, educational opportunities and innovations)

There's a lot of public choice theory problems explaining why we're getting these inefficient government policy outcomes and some proposed solutions to the problem of having to have a government in the first place that might make it a little less silly. But basically anytime it invades homes and businesses for no apparent reason and violates private property rights and private associations, it better have a damn good reason (like a warrant), and not a counter-productive one like "we're looking for consensual adults selling or producing or consuming narcotic substances".

So ready for robots...

to drive my car




I'll settle for robots parking for a start.

Or they could park like this...

Things I get to say I told you so about

Toyota edition

I guess those floor mats were a bad idea, but since Toyota is still rated very highly as a manufacturer of very safe cars and this whole rash of incidents mirrored previous "death trap out of control" panics on the part of the general public, I'm going to file this whole under the "not a story stories" that it belonged in months ago. The problem is that it wasn't a not a story story months ago. So it'll take a while for people to figure that out.

Meanwhile, in other good news from a long, long time ago (as these things go with investigations and court proceedings). Fox actually did something useful. For now anyway. Sooner or later the FCC will decide to define more specifically what "patently offensive" means (it meant what ever they said before). I'd still like to know how "fuck" has an inherently sexual connotation in all its many, many uses and how that decision was reached, but whatever.

well,

that's one way to look at it

I say get us some automatic robot cars. Get rid of the driver entirely. People love roller coasters, I don't see what the difference would be when you're going 80 mph and literally right behind another car for the generation of people who were raised on driving themselves.

Still, it's funny to see how a safety feature immediately can be found as an exploit by the end user. "Hey, you know when this would be great? When I'm hammered and driving home!" Uhm. Not so much really. Possibly weaving across lanes involuntarily is only one of your problems then.

meanwhile back in the real world

When we're busy trying to tax soda, there's this other thing out there that is taxed, is accepted as a taxable excise product already, and we could probably tax more. It's not income or sugar.

It's booze. Sorry. It doesn't seem like it actually cuts back on people consuming adult beverages for the good news. Ireland and Germany and France are notorious for drinking. They all have higher taxes on it. Probably with good reason given the externality effects (fights/assaults/domestic abuses, additional costs for police and criminal detention, late night phone incoherent calls, and car accidents).

But the big one is DUIs and injuries or deaths related to alcohol involved crashes. And it's clear that a tax on alcohol is not necessarily going to banish that problem (or be politically possible to pass a tax high enough to account for it in the first place). Smart cars are my bet to resolve that problem. But of course, we have to get there first.

Do try looking up the actual article and the prospect of capturing public externality harms and costs through taxation, and the probability of doing so instead of taxing something genuinely useful like, I don't know, income or food.

I've considered that it's unlikely we'll reduce less useful taxation and this will therefore be simply another tax levied. But I would also like the deficit to close and I don't think spending cuts on social welfare are very likely at all under any administration, this one or a GOP one, at any time soon enough to make such cuts useful and less painful. Even though I fully support very drastic cuts to much government spending and many useless programs, the reality is that taxes are going to have to go up somewhere. People like me are going to lose the debate over cutting spending in a sane manner. A fallback position is needed to prevent catastrophe or at least more drastic and structurally hazardous methods.

May as well be taxing some things that capture externality costs and cover harms: alcohol, tobacco, carbon/gasoline, traffic congestion, pot, etc, instead of just hiking the marginal income tax rates in order to push the conversation in a direction that does less harm overall and helps achieve a sensible public policy goal (marginal reduction in harms caused by alcohol abuse and a marginal decrease in federal or state government deficits).

Non-amusing frustrations

Car version

So replacing a headlight is pretty easy. Apart from the parts in the way of the lamp assembly and lack of leverage to get them out of the way, when it's the driver side one on my car. Still, it's a modular thing now and is basically like plugging a new video card in or some such. Once you get down to it.

But it's a lot more annoying when the hood latch breaks and the hood won't close properly afterward. And you've driven a car where the hood once became possessed by the demons of the wind and air turbulence flows of high speeds and was propelled into the open position while driving on the highway under the very similar circumstances where the latch itself was jammed or frozen solid. Rather than stuck open for the prosaic reasons that a spring or cable has snapped somewhere. And thus did this rude action rather violently and jarringly to the memory. And with other cars around while moving at high speed.

It can be an unpleasant frustration at that point.

lines of the week

"This vehicle may speed dangerously out of control and kill me without warning?" they say. "OK, but I'm not paying sticker."

So we need a government mandate to put a black box in all cars now? What exactly does that accomplish? (Other than increase a disparity in driver safety between richer people who could afford the higher sticker price or the modification, and poorer people, who would simply continue buying cheaper older used cars that don't have such things AND which may require higher maintenance costs to keep them safe and running)

Speaking of useless mandates: So we need a sprinkler system in our homes now?

And then of course this was classic Black.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Back in Black - Glenn Beck's Nazi Tourette's
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

I've been thinking about perspectives. It occurs to me that I can imagine how Glenn Beck's mind operates: find something shocking to say, make a random comparison to something...odd and frightening from something much less hideous, possibly even innocuous. What I cannot follow is how someone could watch him work and come away...agreeing to those conclusions. Look, I listen to a fair amount of sports talk radio (once in a while). Typically the reporters and podcasts I listen to are sane, making reasonable points and observations, maybe with some local or personal biases, but even there making critical analysis over their favourite players and teams or sports. But the talk radio hosts are often morons, making insane points in order to stir up the shit. Glenn Beck does the same damn thing. It gets ratings and attention. It does not matter that some of the attention is negative, from people thinking he is insane, because he pockets money hand over fist anyway as people call in to complain or watch to see what outrage he will commit next.

What does matter, I think anyway, is that some of the people listening take this kabuki theatre show going as real and serious.

the war on the elderly continues

It's a stealth war.

And we're losing. The only good news is that those old folks don't do a lot of driving. And start to become less numerous around the point where they start getting very dangerous. But we still don't do anything more than a bloody eye test in this state, despite statistical reasons to be looking for reasons to vacate old people's driving licenses.

I'm also a bit confused why Hyundai is running an ad campaign that presumably targets one of its demographics: younger people who will have cheaper cars. Those old people will be driving tanks and battleships. It's the whippersnappers who do all the driving who will buy up all the little economy cars that Hyundai sells.

A meditation on the practice of driving long distances

Opportunity costs of driving

This has long been my criticism of driving. Other than listening to music and podcasts, there is very little I can functionally "do" while driving. I can compose my thoughts into long form essays for later use. But I prefer doing that right before I commit them to the digital world, in ways like thinking while I shower or run or some such, rather than when I am on my way to perform other tasks (such as work or exercise) because it is more useful to have the fresh impressions nagging me into to actually committing to the work.

Most significantly, I have often taken to using my car to travel moderate distances, interstate voyages on the logic that I can usually use my car to get around more easily once at my destination to attain to daily tasks like eating or recreation, rather than using public transit to cover these distances in the form of airplanes or trains or a bus and then having to choose only those destinations that offer modest public transit once at the location (which is inconveniently rare in the US. Largely limited to NYC and Chicago, both fun places to go, but not where you need to go all the time for a trip).

There's a tremendous opportunity cost in that these long travels forgo far more important things like sleep or working on intellectual problems or conversing amicably with any travel companions. If the car were thus capable, as it should easily be, of navigating over highways to my destinations, it would be easy enough to do these things. The most pressing argument at the moment of a smart car navigation system is the shifting and uncertain patterns of city driving. Highways, by contrast, are best characterized by a great deal of predictable events; traffic will congest near common exits and on-ramps, most drivers will maintain a relative speed with the flow of traffic, and will, for the most part, maintain their lane so long as this occurs, few people brake unpredictably (those that do should be punished as their actions have snake effects far out of proportion to their brake lights at a sudden miscalculation of distance and personal comfort), and there aren't generally erratic turns required. A highway ought to be a perfect place for such a system to work on existing vehicles in the short term.

The long term solutions to things like traffic congestion, which offers more extreme opportunity costs owing to lack of movement and hence wasted fuel costs, is probably congestion pricing models for parking and controlled access roads like highways, but if we can improve the driving experience for people who find it mind-numbingly dull, I imagine we'd be a lot happier drivers and more productive citizens as a result even without removing the waste and inefficiency of traffic and parking.

Toyota didn't do it?

This is getting worse

As the story goes about. I guess I have two problems.

1) I can write this off as more and further proof that people are morons. Especially the homicidal elderly driving population.

2) I can assume there was some minute flaw with Toyotas they needed to address. That is that moronic people figured out ways to misuse their cars.

random thoughts of the month

Why is there not more attention paid to the collection of guys being rounded up in Pakistan? Good news is that the attention being paid to the "al-Qaeda 7" brouhaha is mostly negative and directed at the morons who ran the campaign against them rather than against the lawyers who did their jobs.

Why is there so much attention paid to Toyota having a minor safety defect that they are attempting to correct at great expense? It was funny for a couple nights on late night jokes, but it got old rather quickly. The biggest culprit for safety problems in cars is the driver. (full disclosure: I say this not because I have a Toyota outside of the safety recall period. I could care less what brand of car I owned or sought to buy in the future).

Why do people pay so much attention to glamour and glitz surrounding the Oscars? It's bad enough that I end up knowing who wins the damned awards (and often coming away wondering what the hell they were thinking). I don't need to know what they looked like doing it. I prefer only paying attention to actors and actresses and directors when they're acting and directing for my entertainment and competing for my entertainment dollar. Thanks. While we're at it, why don't they change the format. Instead of men's and women's awards for best actor/supporting actors, spread it into genres of film. Comedies, musicals, drama, and action/sci-fi are all sort of different kinds of roles. There doesn't seem to me to be a real distinction between the qualify of men and women at acting generally, at least not enough to justify the gender separation on how the awards are done. Or directing (though at least there, there's a gap of the number of women directing).

Since I'm busy being annoyingly sexist or something, I'm also confused about the gender gaps in sports. Women play poker at the same tables as men. They can play golf at a roughly competitive level with men (other than driving the tee shots). Anything sport or competitively related that doesn't involve a physical gap in athletic performance should be integrated. Baseball is probably the only major team sport that I could see getting gender integration in my lifetime (I could not see women playing football at all and I'm rather skeptical about the ability of women to play at the same level of men because of the immense amount of athletic requirement). Maybe soccer. The problem and the reason this would be less likely is that there's a competitive disadvantage. Women are filtered into softball early on and don't play baseball against the boys for years, depriving the probable body of qualified candidates. But as far as I can tell women ought to be able to hit major league level pitching if they get enough practice against it. Jeanne Finch is just as hard for major league hitters to hit against (she routinely struck them out in exhibitions). I don't foresee a 30 home run season out of a woman anytime in the near future, but there's no physical reason they couldn't hit the ball out of the park once in a while either.

economic updates

Statistics on the cash for clunkers

Buy Japanese

Looks perfectly fine to me too. I don't think this is actually worked as well as its supporters claim (it looks like it condensed months of car buying into a couple frenetic weeks), but it also shouldn't bother anyone that it results in people trading out of American cars and into Japanese/Korean ones. The interesting thing about it isn't the money running out, as many of these impromptu teabagger part deuce demonstrators would have us believe. It's that it's basically an attempt to jump start global trade. Since that's not what it was passed to do, this is one of those rare occasions of a good unintended consequences, but it's one that
1) won't be recognized that way
2) will be abandoned once people figure out how it's working. Other than Ford, the other big two are still getting hammered by this deal. They won't need to manufacture replacement parts for example for thousands of cars.

More interesting of late has been discussions over China's stimulus. I'm still watching to see what it did. But it looks like they stripped out a bunch of the dumb stuff from the New Deal thinking and just gave people spending cards for domestic injections of cash. That covers and bridges over the shortfall of foreign demand and prevents plant closures (though it has the opposite globalizing effect of trade). We on the other hand put in place a bunch of emergency spending for governments and some tax breaks (for this year). Tax breaks are horrible at stimulus. Thanks GOP, and the rest is a short-term solution that doesn't address the plunge in domestic demand at all. Neither did the bank bailouts since they started paying extra on excess reserves, effectively curbing available funds for loans, and didn't make specific requirements on loans out of the dollars contributed, effectively meaning they'd not be used and multiplied as was the intention to keep afloat the economy.

Sometimes having a totalitarian system run by technocrats looks appealing by contrast to a bureaucratic system run by morons.

Wake me when they're dead

GM isn't dead yet?

While I wasn't all that keen on the economic bailout package for Wall St/banking sectors, there are pointy-head economic reasons to do some of what was done. I can think of no reasons to bailout the automobile industry. The supposition is that those companies will fail and millions will lose their jobs (or at least hundreds of thousands). The reality is that they will file for bankruptcy protections, cancel their egregious union contracts and have to reorganize by closing unproductive factories. Some thousands of jobs would be lost, others would receive paycuts or lose benefits. Those are bad things. Giving money to the companies that caused that necessity to happen by running themselves into the ground, much worse.

The statement made by GM's CEO: "we were well on the road to turning our North American business around." is not factually accurate. Outside of SUVs or trucks, there are no GM cars in the top 10 of sales for last year, and naturally SUVs/trucks tanked last year during a gasoline price crunch. In other words, the credit crunch isn't what is killing GM as they claim, but rather the lack of marketable products. Toyota has been gaining at a prodigious rate by selling marketable products (and making them in America). The assumption seems to be still a hangover of 'what's good for Detroit is good for America'. The reality is that Detroit no longer matters all that much as "the Big Three" only account for 50% of US domestic automobile manufacturing, and less than that in sales. Let them declare bankruptcy if they have to (GM and Chrysler seem to be in this boat, Ford is a bit more stable somehow), and they won't cease to exist. If anything they'll have a better shot at becoming viable companies again. They are not going to 'fail' or cease to exist out of this. That's not how bankruptcy works in this country.

What I did see is that the amount of money they're supposedly in need of is already available through a capital goods loan for fuel-efficient vehicle manufacture. Why this money is no good to Democratic leaders is unclear. I'm not sure that money should exist either, but I can't imagine why it has to be a separate issue. Obama has already proposed billions of dollars for fuel-efficiency improvements or alternative energy. I'm pretty sure that 25B is coming back if it has to be used in the short term.

and we're done here too

so the point is what?

Not sure what they're doing here. Combining two companies that are poorly run and without sufficient capital to advance new and desirable products during an economic collapse makes..perfect sense? Not really. The story even points out, it's really quite stupid to combine when both companies are struggling. But considering the manner that the two ended up in this predicament, I can't rule it out. Stupidity doesn't end, it reproduces.

driving in la la land

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/traffic

I've always concluded that people in SUVs and trucks drive like assholes because they feel the large size of their vehicle makes them impervious to a general accident.
But the generally unregarded fatalism that the only thing that really matters to predicting traffic accidents is the number of cars on a road is wise beyond any measure. Paradoxically it is the sheer volume of cars that demands our attentions and makes us individually drive more 'safely' that contributes to the amount of accidents.

My own personal driving habits may be regarded as reckless or eccentric, but I've generally ignored or bypassed traffic signals and signs, instead relying on more of an instinctive reaction to traffic conditions to tell me how fast to drive or when to come to a complete stop at an intersection. Obviously I still feel compelled to stop at red lights, but I often find ways to bypass them..especially when I'm not carrying passengers. Stop signs in most residential neighbourhoods seem completely arbitrary and often pointless. Because there's so rarely the traffic in place to justify it in hours other than rush hour commutes, why should we then have to stop when there is no one there? It wastes time and fuel. So I don't.

Of the more obvious complaints of drivers are the preponderance of speed limits and (as the article shows) the arbitrary changes we make to them. Speed limits as I understand them used to be determined by estimating the average speed at which a driver would use on a given road. People naturally drive slower in residential areas with houses and driveways right on the road because there are other variables besides cars (children, pets, and the elderly) to consider. By contrast a highway or large-wide thoroughfare has a few controlled entrances and exits and allows for more controlled and maintained speed over long distances.. speed which most people take advantage of (excepting fuel considerations). But these are the roads which arbitrarily change speeds so frequently as to make it impossible to determine at times what is the appropriate speed legally speaking as opposed to the actual flow of traffic speed as determined by the comfort and adaptation of the driver to actual traffic and road conditions. Granting driving really doesn't take that much attention, the average person is not as attentive as they believe themselves to be (perhaps including myself from time to time). They're constantly missing turns or exits, forgetting to signal, stopping or braking abruptly when following other cars, and so on. Taking further attention away from such fragile consciousness is virtually guaranteed to cause mayhem and disorder on the freeway.

More amusing still is this point: "traffic signs in the U.K. are often on the road itself, where the driver should be looking." Rarely are stop signs still indicated in the manner of a stop bar painted on the road itself because people are trained to look for the sign. The move toward putting information on HUDs in luxury vehicles (eventually the rest) makes it possible to feed drivers useful information on which to make driving decisions...but why are the roads themselves not used in the same manner? Why must we look off to the side to decide how to drive?

One element the article does not expound on is that Americans drive a LOT more than other countries. And in general traffic congestion is more uniformly bad (while it is more dense and confused in say Europe, it's busy virtually everywhere there's a road in America). I'm not sure that either of these two factors are necessarily contributing to the relative safety as much as our obsession with legal disclaimers on how to drive in general rather than merely making presumptions about how to do so ourselves based on the objective conditions we're presented with at the time, but they do need to be accounted for before anything would change.

congestion gasoline

I had an idea when considering oil prices, driving, and general problems therein with things like congestion and so forth.

There are a number of toll roads around the world that have moved to congestion pricing. In other words, if you want to use the road at rush hour it will cost more. The idea actually works to reduce congestion and spread out commutes more naturally (the road is used more or less evenly throughout the day).

Couldn't the same thing be applied to gas prices? Gas is a fixed commodity true, but why couldn't it cost more around rush hour to encourage people to commute at different times on public roads. Quasi-privatizing all public roads is never going to work in America because there are so many roads and so many small neighborhoods from which we commute. Perhaps major highways and beltways will be eventually all 'smart' toll roads and that may have some impact on general congestion (though cheap people just take major side streets instead and crowd them up instead).

Why not take the next step and charge gas prices differently based on demand pricing. When most people get gas, make it cost more (it already sort of does this by increasing every summer, but that's only a seasonal adjustment, not a congestion adjustment). Make it cost more in the mornings and around quittin' time, less in the wee hours and mid afternoons/late evenings and I think we'd see people spreading out their commutes and evening entertainments where gas is needed. I suspect this is just as impractical (eventually people would think it is the same as price gouging). But I have to think that some gas stations do this anyway already, to the extent they can legally. It is true that gasoline costs them the same, but they could (and probably would) offer the gas at a true loss in competitive markets when there is little to no demand (and don't think people won't line up in those before bed trips to save several dollars a tank). Most gas prices at the pump are actually at a break-even point or a very thin profit margin at best. If this is slowly distributed and allowed to adjust in a some test markets I think we would see some progress on spreading out driving habits somewhat or people would stop driving as much in general. I'm not advocating as extreme a price margin as these toll roads operate on. Even 20-30 cent adjustments in price over the course of one day gets people's attention, so it wouldn't need to be something major. Perhaps an upper limit of 50 cents surcharges during rush hours?