The photo was taken by Art Diamond at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo, at about 6:00 PM on Weds., July 18, 2007. (It was ‘Member’s Day’ and there were signs posted that 6:00 PM was a feeding time for the bears.)
Nanny State Skewered by Libertarian
Source of book image: http://www.amazon.com/Nanny-State-Teetotaling-Do-Gooders-Bureaucrats/dp/0767924320/ref=sr_1_4/104-5167922-0145505?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194215374&sr=1-4
I have not read the Nanny State, but it looks promising in arguing that we would be better off if we reduced our expectation that the government can and should protect us against all undesriable outcomes.
Reference to book:
Harsanyi, David. Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America into a Nation of Children. New York, NY: Broadway Books, 2007.
Nozick (and Bush) Think it is Fair for You to Keep More of What You Earn
Source of table: online version of the NYT commentary quoted and cited below.
(p. 4) DO the rich pay their fair share in taxes? This is likely to become a defining question during the presidential campaign.
. . .
Fairness is not an economic concept. If you want to talk fairness, you have to leave the department of economics and head over to philosophy.
. . .
In his 1974 book, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” Professor Nozick wrote: “We are not in the position of children who have been given portions of pie by someone who now makes last-minute adjustments to rectify careless cutting. There is no central distribution, no person or group entitled to control all the resources, jointly deciding how they are to be doled out. What each person gets, he gets from others who give to him in exchange for something, or as a gift. In a free society, diverse persons control different resources, and new holdings arise out of the voluntary exchanges and actions of persons.”
To libertarians like Professor Nozick, requiring the rich to pay more just because they are rich is little more than officially sanctioned theft.
There is no easy way to bridge this philosophical divide, but the political process will, inevitably, try to forge a practical compromise among those with wildly divergent views. At the 2000 Republican National Convention, the candidate George W. Bush made clear where he stood: “On principle, no one in America should have to pay more than a third of their income to the federal government.” As judged by the C.B.O. data, he has accomplished his goal.
A question for any political candidate today is whether he or she agrees with the Bush tax ceiling. If not, how high above a third is he or she willing to go?
For the full commentary, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
Professor Dowling’s Defense of the University Against Big-Time Spectator Sports
Professor William C. Dowling. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.
(p. C15) For more than a decade at Rutgers, Dr. Dowling has stood as an idealistic absolutist, an intellectual convinced that the thunder of big-time athletics was crumbling the ivory tower of academe.
He has been the conscience, the Cassandra, the crank, the nag, the pain, infuriating opponents and, at times, exasperating allies. Enough years of being the whistle-blower, after all, can make even a tuneful musician sound shrill.
But now, just as Rutgers’s recent triumphs in football and basketball might seem to have justified the university’s investment of tens of millions of dollars, Dr. Dowling has answered in his own subversive way. His memoir of the decade-long campaign against high-stakes athletics at Rutgers, “Confessions of a Spoilsport,” has just been published by Penn State University Press. It is his valediction, and its tone, far from mournful, is defiant.
“I wanted this book to be a monument,” Dr. Dowling, 62, said after class. “I wanted it to be a monument to the kids and the faculty who rallied around this issue. We tried to take on the monster of commercialized sports, even if it swallowed us up and passed us out the other end. Someone should know that we fought the good fight. And because I believe in literature as a form of symbolic action, I want readers to see the possibility of another way. Think about the impact of a book like ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ on slavery.”
. . .
Dartmouth . . . instilled in Dr. Dowling an appreciation for what he calls now “participatory sports” — sports without scholarships, separate dorms, team tutors, product endorsements, television contracts, reduced admissions standards, easy classes and so many other tropes of Division I-A sports.
Rutgers, in turn, provided a striking example of before and after. For more than 100 years after playing Princeton in the first intercollegiate football game in 1869, Rutgers had competed against schools like Lafayette and Colgate with which it shared academic standards. Then, in 1991, Rutgers joined the Big East Conference, making it a peer of ethically challenged football factories like Miami.
Dr. Dowling grew convinced that the shift was degrading the caliber of students, indeed the entire communal culture. . . . And while he enjoyed teaching many members of the track, swimming and crew teams in his courses, he vociferously resisted the notion that athletic scholarships offered opportunity to low-income, minority students.
“If you were giving the scholarship to an intellectually brilliant kid who happens to play a sport, that’s fine,” he said. “But they give it to a functional illiterate who can’t read a cereal box, and then make him spend 50 hours a week on physical skills. That’s not opportunity. If you want to give financial help to minorities, go find the ones who are at the library after school.”
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
Here is the description of Dowling’s book that appears on Amazon:
"Universities exist to transmit understanding and ideals and values to students . . . not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes. . . . When I entered a much smaller Rutgers sixty years ago, athletics were an important but strictly minor aspect of Rutgers education. I trust that today’s much larger Rutgers will honor this tradition from which I benefited so much." –Milton Friedman, Rutgers ’32, Nobel Prize in Economics, 1976
In 1998, Milton Friedman’s statement drew national attention to Rutgers 1000, a campaign in which students, faculty, and alumni were resisting the takeover of their university by commercialized Division IA athletics. Subsequently, the movement received extensive coverage in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sports Illustrated, and other publications.
Today, "big-time" college athletics remains a hotly debated issue at Rutgers. Why did an old eastern university that had long competed against such institutions as Colgate, Columbia, Lafayette, and Princeton, choose, by joining the Big East conference in 1994, to plunge into the world of such TV-revenue-driven extravaganzas as "March Madness" and the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl? What is the moral for universities where big-time college sports have already become the primary source of institutional identity?
Confessions of a Spoilsport is the story of an English professor who, having seen the University of New Mexico sink academically in the period of a major basketball scandal, was galvanized into action when Rutgers joined the Big East. It is also the story of the Rutgers 1000 students and alumni who set out against enormous odds to resist the decline of their university–eviscerated academic programs, cancellation of minor sports, loss of the "best and brightest" in-state students to the nearby College of New Jersey–while tens of millions of dollars were being lavished on Division IA athletics. Ultimately, however, the story of Rutgers 1000 is what the New York Times called it when Milton Friedman issued his ringing statement: a struggle for the soul of a major university.
The reference to Dowling’s book, is:
Dowling, William C. Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.
Source of book image: http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Spoilsport-Fighting-Corruption-University/dp/0271032936/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196229303&sr=1-1
U.P.S. Spends More than $1 Billion for Technology Research to Increase Efficiency
"The U.P.S. hub at Louisville International Airport covers four million square feet." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.
(p. C1) LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Worldport, the United Parcel Service hub at the airport here, gives new meaning to the phrase “hub of activity.” On a peak night, workers have less than four hours to process more than a million packages from at least 100 planes and probably 160 trucks.
Yes, the ubiquitous brown trucks, with their brown-clad drivers, are the face that U.P.S. presents to the world. But increasingly, it is the researchers at its Atlanta headquarters, its technology center in Mahwah, N.J., and its huge four-million-square-foot Louisville hub who are asking the questions that will drive the company’s future.
What if the package contains medicine that could turn from palliative to poison if the temperature wavers? What if it is moving from Bangkok to Bangor and back to Bangkok, and if customs rules differ on each end? And what if the package is going to a big company that insists on receiving all its packages, no matter who ships them, at the same time each day?
Increasingly, it is the search for high-tech answers to such questions that is occupying the entire package delivery industry. U.P.S. and FedEx are each pumping more than $1 billion a year into research, while also looking for new ways to cut costs. “When you handle millions of packages, a minute’s delay can cost a fortune,” said John Kartsonas, an analyst with Citigroup. “Information technology has become essential.”
Customers of both FedEx and U.P.S. can now print out shipping labels that are easily scannable by computers. Meteorologists at both companies routinely outguess official Weather Service forecasts. And both are working with the Federal Aviation Administration to improve air safety and scheduling.
U.P.S. specifically is collaborating with the F.A.A. on a system — formally, Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast, but usually just called A.D.S.B. — that may (p. C4) make conventional radar obsolete. “We want to make A.D.S.B. the backbone of our future air traffic system,” said Vincent Capezzuto, the manager of the program for the F.A.A.
The research at U.P.S. is paying off. Last year, it cut 28 million miles from truck routes — saving roughly three million gallons of fuel — in good part by mapping routes that minimize left turns. This year, U.P.S. began offering customers a self-service system for redirecting packages that are en route.
And now the U.P.S. researchers are working on sensors that can track temperatures of packages, on software that can make customs checks more uniform worldwide and on scheduling processes that accommodate the needs of recipients as well as shippers. “Recipients do not pay U.P.S., but they sure influence which carriers their suppliers use,” David A. Barnes, the chief information officer, said.
For the full story, see:
U.P.S. employee Jeffrey Sarver tracks the weather. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.
How “El Loco” Cut Argentine Inflation in Half
Source of graphic: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.
(p. A1) BUENOS AIRES — Argentina has had plenty of anti-inflation plans over the years. The current one may be the first that rests heavily on a public servant whom some executives and politicians have nicknamed "El Loco," or the Crazy Man.
The official, Guillermo Moreno, is Argentina’s Secretary of Internal Commerce, the government’s price policeman. His mission is limiting price markups in the red-hot economy — at least until the leftist Cristina Kirchner, the wife of the current president, Néstor Kirchner, can win her own bid for president. Elections are scheduled for this Sunday, and she’s heavily favored to win.
With the Kirchners’ blessing, Mr. Moreno has hammered out price-control agreements with industry, doled out subsidies and imposed export restrictions to keep the domestic market awash in goods. He has also threatened uncooperative businesses with prosecution under a recently resurrected 33-year law against hoarding goods. When none of that worked to restrain prices, a prosecutor has alleged, Mr. Moreno ousted the government statisticians who prepared the consumer price index and installed his own people to massage the numbers. Mr. Moreno denies that; a judge is reviewing the case.
. . .
(p. A18) As Argentina’s governing faction tries to prolong the country’s roaring economic recovery — and maintain its grip on power — it is waging an increasingly desperate battle to contain inflation. The government’s tainted figures put the annual figure at 8%, while most independent economists peg it around twice that high.
For the full story, see:
(Note: eillipsis added.)
“Hit ’em Where They Ain’t”
Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article cited below.
The key to business success is usually thought to be to beat the competition. An alternative sketched by Clayton Christensen, and in the book Blue Ocean Strategy, is to do something that the competition isn’t doing. As a once-famous, old-time baseball player once said: "Hit ’em where they ain’t."
MILPITAS, Calif. — Erik Soule had been waiting 15 months for this moment. The semiconductor engineer was about to launch a new chip, and he needed his pricing approved. In a conference room at Linear Technology Corp., Mr. Soule anxiously explained why his amplifier chip is so advanced that it should sell for $1.68, a third more than its rivals.
His bosses’ reaction: Charge even more. The chip is 30 times better than the competition, they asserted, and high-end customers will crave it on any terms. Why not boost the $1.68 list price by 10 cents? Mr. Soule was nervous. "I can live with that," he guardedly replied, "but what does that accomplish?"
"It’s a dime!" declared Linear’s chairman and founder, Robert Swanson. "And those dimes add up."
For many U.S. companies, such exuberant pricing power vanished long ago. They now struggle to deliver more at lower prices, amid intense global competition. But Linear has built one of the world’s strongest profit fortresses by staying strictly at the fringes, where competition is low and margins are still high.
Away from the semiconductor industry’s frenzied center stage, this midsize company makes 7,500 arcane, unglamorous products that solve real-world problems for a long list of customers. Instead of the better-known digital chips that power the brains of the world’s computers and bring in 85% of the industry’s revenue, Linear makes so-called analog chips that are too cheap for customers to haggle over, but perform chores too important to ignore.
Pick apart a medical ultrasound machine, a hybrid car battery or thousands of other costly devices, and somewhere inside is a Linear chip that helps monitor power consumption or guard against voltage surges. It’s a backwater of high tech well-suited to Linear’s engineer-driven culture, where quirky developers shop for old part testers at flea markets to keep costs down. Many of Linear’s chips cost less than 50 cents to build and sell for three to four times as much, but customers seldom complain about the markup.
Linear made a 39% profit on its $1.1 billion in sales in calendar 2006 — more than five times the average for U.S. industrial companies. Linear easily outpaced even the tech industry’s best-known profit powerhouses, Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc., which earned profits of 26% and 24% of sales for the same period.
For the full story, see:
CEO of Linear Technology Corp. Source of image: online version of the WSJ article cited above.
Omaha Government Displays Pretentious Concrete Donuts: Is Dog Poop Next?
The city of Omaha is forcing its citizens to endure four concrete donuts that are sometimes called "Sounding Stones" and sometimes called "art." Source of photo: online version of Dane Stickney. "ART MOVEMENT; Some neighbors don’t want sculpture in Elmwood Park." Omaha World-Herald (Sat., Nov. 17, 2007): B1.
I believe that all art should be private art. But if the government is going to force art on us, at least they should commission art that most find enjoyable to look at.
Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word skewered the pretension of modern "artists" whose "art" is not intended to please, but is intended to make some obscure philosophical point.
If somebody wants to privately finance such activity, fine. But don’t force the rest of us to finance it through taxation.
(p. 1B) “So is this where they’re putting Stonehenge?”
Stan Hille was walking his dog through Elmwood Park when he stopped to ask me the question. He thought I was a city employee.
“Yes, it is,” I said as I stood near one of the gravel pads awaiting Leslie Iwai’s gigantic five-piece sculpture “Sounding Stones .” “But you don’t sound excited.”
“Well, I guess I’m not,” he said, stopping to contemplate art. “This thing just reminds me of that old question: ‘When is art not art?’ ” Hmm. Great question. Ancient question. I suggested it might not be art until people, especially a commission of people, tells you it’s art. Or, if it’s big, it’s art. Or, if you make something and then say there’s some meaning to it, then maybe it’s art.
As we pondered, Hille’s dog defecated.
“Perhaps if I can find some meaning in this poop, then maybe it’s art,” I told him as I rubbed my chin.
The retired UNO professor and Dundee resident absorbed my genius. “Perhaps,” he responded, rubbing his chin also.
But, alas, I could find no meaning. “Perhaps its lack of meaning is its meaning,” I then argued, sounding not unlike French philosopher Jacques Derrida. “It’s post-postmodern ironic poop.”. . .
For Hille and others around Elmwood Park, the bigger question seems to be aesthetics.
Elmwood Park is a quiet forest setting. Is this really the place for large chunks of concrete, no matter what they mean?
“It just doesn’t seem to fit,” Hille said.
I’m with him on that. “Sounding Stones ” might make more sense, or at least be better received, in the midst of, say, modern architecture, not nature.
You know, perhaps put it downtown, where it could look like it fell off the old Union Pacific building.
But if “Sounding Stones ” does end up in Elmwood Park, whichit most likely will, I’m guessing it still will end up being a positive move.
Because, as with Hille and me, it’s going to get people thinking and talking about art.
And even when you’re looking at dog droppings, taking time out of the day to contemplate art can’t be a completely bad thing.
Yes, Robert, it can be "a completely bad thing" if you have alternative uses for your time.
For the full commentary, see:
Robert Nelson. "Rocky art may lead to heavy thoughts." Omaha World-Herald (Nov. 21, 2007): 1B.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
USDA Sugar Allocations and Tariff System “Keeps the Price at a Fairly High Level”
Sugar beats unloaded in Scottsbluff, Nebraska at Western Sugar in 1999. Source of photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article cited below.
In the article excerpted below, why does Chet Mullin of the Omaha World-Herald care only about beat growers, but not about sugar consumers?
The International Sugar Organization predicts a sizable global surplus of the sweet stuff this year. If the prediction comes true, will it hurt sugar beet growers like those in Nebraska’s Panhandle?
The answer is no, according to Paul Burgener, agricultural economic research analyst at the University of Nebraska’s Panhandle Research and Extension Center in Scottsbluff.
"We have allocations (for sugar production) and we also have a tariff system for imports, and between the two, the USDA manages supply and keeps the price at a fairly high level," Burgener said.
For the full story, see:
Omaha’s Westroads Mall Stops Good Guys From Shooting Back
John Lott earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in economics. What he says below is not popular, or politically correct, but it is probably true. And if it is true, and if we fail to act on its truth, then more good people will continue to be killed, who could have been saved.
The horrible tragedy at the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Neb. received a lot of attention Wednesday and Thursday. It should have. Eight people were killed, and five were wounded.
A Google news search using the phrase "Omaha Mall Shooting" finds an incredible 2,794 news stories worldwide for the last day. From India and Taiwan to Britain and Austria, there are probably few people in the world who haven’t heard about this tragedy.
But despite the massive news coverage, none of the media coverage, at least by 10 a.m. Thursday, mentioned this central fact: Yet another attack occurred in a gun-free zone.
Surely, with all the reporters who appear at these crime scenes and seemingly interview virtually everyone there, why didn’t one simply mention the signs that ban guns from the premises?
Nebraska allows people to carry permitted concealed handguns, but it allows property owners, such as the Westroads Mall, to post signs banning permit holders from legally carrying guns on their property.
. . .
The law-abiding, not criminals, are obeying the rules. Disarming the victims simply means that the killers have less to fear. As Wednesday’s attack demonstrated yet again, police are important, but they almost always arrive at the crime scene after the crime has occurred.
The longer it takes for someone to arrive on the scene with a gun, the more people who will be harmed by such an attack.
Most people understand that guns deter criminals. If a killer were stalking your family, would you feel safer putting a sign out front announcing, "This Home Is a Gun-Free Zone"? But that is what the Westroads Mall did.
For the full commentary, see:
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: I am grateful to Luis Locay, for forwarding me Lott’s commentary.)
Reducing Nickel Pollution is an Entrepreneurial “Business Opportunity” in Russia
Vladimir Stratyev in front of a lake containing nickel dust from the nickel factory in the background. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.
(p. A4) NORILSK, Russia — A former Siberian gulag with a population of about 210,000, this decrepit city has some of the worst air quality in the world. It is surrounded by dead trees, as far as the eye can see, poisoned by acid rain.
But to Vladimir M. Stratyev, the eye-stinging haze is an unalloyed blessing, for Mr. Stratyev is, in effect, a miner of air pollution. For him the smog of Norilsk is a mother lode.
The smelters here produce one-fifth of all the world’s nickel, a key alloy of stainless steel, while emitting 1.9 million tons of sulfur dioxide a year, more than the entire country of France. They also spew out 10,800 tons of heavy metal particulates.
. . .
Spotting a business opportunity, factory officials have brought in a contractor, Poligon, to extract the metals from one of these deposits, known euphemistically as “technogenic sources of ore.”
Mr. Stratyev, the supervisor of a mining crew, uses a dredge and bulldozer to scoop up the black sludge, rich in nickel that once fell from the sky. He gathers it in mighty piles from a large pond that lies directly downwind from the smelters and returns it to the factory from which it came.
“They should put a monument up to us,” Mr. Stratyev said, standing in front of the dredge he just used to mine air pollution from the bottom of a pond. “We’re solving an ecological problem.”
. . .
The pollution mining began five years ago, according to Aleksandr I. Korolev, a deputy chief engineer at the factory. “It’s a year-round operation,” Mr. Korolev said of the work, which has accelerated recently because of high metals prices. “The pond does not freeze,” he said, because of the chemicals and the inflow of warm effluent from the factory.
For the full story, see:
Source of map: online version of the NYT article cited above.