Five Years Later

Just checking back, a bit over five years since the last post.

Some of my postings I thought were clear, now seem not-so-clear.  Need to work on that.

The Jena 6

We're suffering from some missing information.

Did these guys engage in thuggery or not?

If so, lock 'em up.

If not, make that clear.

Opportunity for job hunting suicide

So midway through the interview you're asked, "can you tell me about a situation where you were right and your boss was wrong?"

The first thing to realize is that this question is a set up for you to commit job-hunting suicide. A great answer can be a little positive, but give a bad answer and you're not going to get the job no matter how well the rest of the interview goes.

Worst case: tell the story of when you got your boss fired.
Second worst: tell the story of when you forced your boss to admit that he was wrong.

This question is neither a request nor an opportunity for you to explain how smart you are. It's an inquiry about how well you respect your bosses. They're looking for someone who respects the boss, believe me.

Your good answer has to be built on the concept of working with the boss. It's not important that the boss ever comes to agree with you or not. It's all about your respect for the boss, remember?

Blackwater

What Blackwater did was what the US military should do more of: kill the enemy, and kill everyone who is close to the enemy. When that's the expected result of shooting at a convoy, people will stop shooting at convoys....and if they set up to do it anyway, someone local will shoot them first.

Mike Nifong

One of the more troubling aspects of the Duke non-rape case is the remedy which is available to society when someone in a position of great authority abuses that authority.

You might think that knowingly prosecuting a case where you knew the defendant was not guilty would itself be a crime. The FBI would come after you.

Turns out not to be true. There is no law against abusive prosecution. If the prosecutor decides he doesn't like you, and lies to the grand jury, and then lies to the jury, no law has been violated. The rules of the bar have been violated, to be sure. But the maximum remedy for such a violation is to be disbarred.

Sure, there are secondary kinds of laws, such as denying someone their civil rights. The problem with this kind of remedy is that it is dependent on political whim: if the sitting president and the sitting attorney general feel like it, they can act. If they don't feel like it, they are under no obligation to act. It's not like they're failing to enforce the law if they just look the other way.

Hopefully Nifong will come to a long prison term, but even more hopefully, we need to be making progress toward a state of affairs which more explicitly criminalizes what Nifong did: deliberately prosecute three young men he knew were not guilty, while denying them exculpatory evidence.

Continuing to misunderstand what might work.

So Hammas gets tired of the corrupt tinhorns who claim to be the authorities in Gaza, and summarily removes them from power.

The tinhorns in the west bank, having abandoned their friends in Gaza, start to take the threat personally. For one, they have this governmental problem. They lack a majority in parliament. No problem for a tinhorn: you arrest the opposition politicians.

And the US rushes to the aid of the tinhorns.

I mean, are we not democrats?

No, we're not, and we never were, but the problem with US policy with respect to the Palestinian issue is that we lack the will to hold the Palestinians responsible for their own choices. If they want Hammas, then by God they should have Hammas.

And if Hammas is a threat beyond their own borders, Hammas, and those who elected them, should face the consequences of that threat being suppressed.

To allow the Palestinians to be an "ongoing humanitarian crisis" while they continue to select terrorists as their leaders just doesn't work. It perpetuates the problem.

dw out.

When it matters, you do what it takes.

The interesting thing about what is going on in Lebanon these days is how the Lebanese feel about "enemy civilians".

They don't give a damn.

Enemy civilians are the kind of thing which you worry about when you aren't, yourself, suffering.

AP story on current Lebanese conflict.

Escrow Perils

You might think that an escrow company would be reliable.
You might also think that they all charge about the same.
You might think they have no need to be ethically challenged.
But you would be wrong, based on my experience.

The first story involves the payment of taxes. In this story, the taxes which were nearly due were paid into the escrow, with the escrow company responsible for paying them to the county.

A couple of months later I received a notice of past due taxes from the county. A call to the escrow company yielded a report that the taxes had been recently paid, but not as yet recorded by the county. I moved on.

Two months later, another notice, and a demand for an ominous penalty if not paid soon. More calls to the escrow company. Same story, it's as if they had a stock answer for people who called up with this complaint. "We paid it, but the county hasn't recorded it as yet". Concerned, I called the county. No record of payment. Escrow company stuck with their story. Week went by, and another exact iteration. Very concerned, I called my realtor/loan broker friend who had selected this escrow company in the first place. He got involved, the escrow company paid the taxes and the penalty, and I went "whew".

Second story. Different loan broker, a family friend, selected the escrow company. The cost for the escrow itself turned out to be approximately 1.5 times what it would have been with the escrow company selected by my friend.

Third story, same broker as #2. Lesson: never use a remote escrow company. Or at least if you do, pick an ethical one. The weakness is that the remote escrow company has the option of doing a good job of getting all the paperwork signed in a timely fashion, or doing a poor job. Guess which one pays better? The shoddy job. They get to keep the money, interest free, until the paperwork is completed. And a random remote escrow company will do that for a week or longer. Observe that a local escrow company might do this too, but the usual signing event gets all paperwork signed, and makes screwups more obviously bogus.

Secondarily, can a remote escrow company actually get the work done? Sure. Does that cost more? You bet.

Summary. Like in the auto repair business, it pays to not allow one's escrow company to charge as much as they like. It's good to develop a relationship with someone who will recommend an escrow company, and appropriately pressure the recommended escrow company to charge reasonably and behave ethically and competently.

Why we're losing the war

Why we're losing the war

It's been a while since I posted here, but sometimes you read something just becomes such a concise statement of the problem.

In this story, a marine unit stands accused of being overly defensive after a car bomber attacked them, causing the deaths of civilians. Discussion includes the potential that some marines will be prosecuted for homicide.

This is an outrageous burden to place upon our young people in harms way. They were attacked, and during that attack, they are required to be careful about who they kill. That, my friends, is not a path to victory.

If the marines had killed ever single Afghani within 500 meters, that might have been in some abstract sense unnecessary, but if such a reaction decreased their chance of death, it's an option they should have available. It's an option which American troops had available to them during WWII, a war we were intent on winning. That it is the difference between winning a war and losing a war.

Definitions

We see terms used in the media from time to time, terms which strongly hint whether we should like something or not, but the hint is political bias. I'll try to add new ones as I see them used.

1. land reform (positive)
   Land reform is the appropriation of land, by the state. The theory is that the land once belonged to indigenous people, and thus still does. The intent is to "give the land back to the people".
   
   The net result of land reform is almost always the same. Successful commercial agriculture is replaced by people who occupy the land, but no commercial activity. The indigenous people end up more poor, because the multiple jobs which existed in the commercial agriculture are gone. Further, the government has poisoned the well of investment, by demonstrating that successful operations will be appropriated, golden goose like.
   
   
2. extremist (negative)
   An extremist is a person who advocates strongly conservative or libertarian values. Someone like Tom McClintock in California. Curiously, the term tends to not be used on actual right wing extremists, such Alan Keyes. It's also never used on left wing extremists, such as Barbara Lee. Left wing extremists are portrayed as highly principled.
   

If only they'd....

So we come to the deadliest day since the active war ended.

Sunnis kill 200 odd Shias.

And what's the analysis? "They should stop doing that".

And we should assume they're going to stop doing that? Why? Because it's all we can do?

Doesn't make it likely to happen, and it's really irritating to hear politicians willing to spout such nonsense in public.

A clue: they ain't gonna stop.

There's more Shia than Sunni, and they have the oil. Unlike us, they know how to win a war. You kill enough of the enemy that the survivors feel lucky to remain alive. The Shia are going to do that. The Sunni will fight back until enough of them are dead. Then they lose.

This ending was visible to Bush Sr.

Start killing people or get out

More of the same is going to get more of the same result.

The problem with the whole plan was that it involved a "kind" war, a war without killing very many people. A war with the loser liking us. Like Japan in WWII.

What we forget is what it took to win that war: the death of millions of Japanese, and the threat to kill all of them if they didn't surrender.

We remember the peace, but we forget what got us there.

The Iraqi stratgey was doomed from the moment someone said "we can't just shoot looters". Totally doomed. It had nothing to do with troop count. It had to do with killing people.

We can still win the war in Iraq...if we want to. What would work is to exterminate every force working against our authority. By killing a hundred "innocents" as a side effect of killing each real bad guys. Once we started doing that, the bad guys would straighten up in a hurry, and the good guys would start cooperating, not wanting to be one of the side effects. If we really care about the ordinary Iraqis who just want a job in peace, this is exactly what we should do.

But we don't want to do that. Not our style of war. We'd rather lose than win, if that's what it takes to win.

So we should leave. Who cares what happens? Who cares if they kill each other? Not me. I care a bit that those ordinary Iraqi citizens will die because we disrupted the macabre stability which existed in Saddam's era, but five more years of the same followed by that result is even worse.

Traffic Ticketing Cameras

There are two different kinds of traffic ticketing cameras. Speed and red light.

They're widely despised, but I don't think the reason has been well analyzed. It's not that we have that much sympathy for either speeders or red light runners. Rather, it's because the cameras have been used to establish traps for good drivers.

Good drivers don't run red lights...but they can be induced to. Just put up a short yellow at a long intersection, and you'll get lots of good drivers running the red light. Once. They learn. But writing them a red light running ticket as part of this bogus education is unfair, and we all know it.

Good drivers don't speed...but they can be induced to. By setting the speed limit to something totally counter intuitive to the conditions, and then enforcing it strictly, you can trap a lot of good drivers. When you issue them tickets, that's unfair.

I support the use of both forms of cameras, but:
1. Red light ticketing cameras must never be used with a short yellow, and should only be used to ticket drivers who enter the intersection facing a red.
2. The speed limit must be intuitively fair.

The speed limit thing is contentious, because we've come to a strange dynamic: lots of places have unfairly low speed limits, but they enforce a more reasonable speed limit. Nevada has a 75MPH limit on rural interstates, but enforces something more like 91. CA has 70 in most places, and enforces more like 86.

What we should do is make all speed limits reasonbly high, and THEN enforce speed limit+5 using cameras. Nevada could have a speed limit of 85. CA could have 80. But no traps. That would get the support of those of us who enjoy seeing bad drivers picketed, but abhor seeing good drivers trapped.

So what, exactly, should moderate Muslims do?

The pope suggests that Muslims are violent.

Muslims protest by murdering a nun.

I have no doubt whatsoever that most Muslims reacted about the way I did. Killing a nun is not the solution to any problem.

Islam is plagued by not having a pope, by having every nut who was born into Islamic culture having legitimate claim to calling himself a Muslim.

But then, so does protestant Christianity. There are some lessons non-violent Islam could learn from modern Christianity, and indeed, Judiaism.

1. Force a wedge between yourself and the violent ones. Don't be confused, this is your problem, not the observers' problem. The observers see a nun being murdered by Muslims. They see silent Muslims. They draw a connection. That kind of connection is what gets us through life.
2. Drop separatist symbols. The veil in particular.
   
3. Establish women as participants of society. Your relationships at home are your own business, but when you keep women home, that's scary to the rest of us. We want to know Muslim women personally. To talk to them, to understand our shared time on earth.
4. Create a distinguishing name. The word "reform" has worked for some Jews in a vaguely analogous context, but perhaps "the religion of the crescent". Something which when we look into it, we find leadership saying "we're the peaceful, civilized ones".
5. Call the police. Nutty Christians don't get far, because even right wing Christians don't want to be associated with them. Christians call the police when they think a member of their church is out committing violent crime.
   

torment

Let's imaging there are a bunch of people who would like to kill us. Occasionally they succeed on a small scale, but we hold total military command of the situation. However, their successes represent a failure of our responsibility to our own citizens.

Let's consider some action choices:
1. Kill them all.
2. Establish a siege which threatens to starve them if they don't calm down.
3. Establish a siege. Give them plenty of food and water, so that they can feel the pain. Torment them as a punishment for their attempts to kill us.
4. Kill enough of them that they come to understand that if they persist in trying to kill us, they'll all end up dead.

Why anyone would imagine (3) as a sensible choice eludes me.

If you really, really want to make someone hate you, what might you do?

How about, put him in a cage, keep him alive, and poke him with a stick every time he spits at you, which he does every day, for year after year after year.

Suppression of ideas by the media

When I first read of the fact that newspapers had sat on evidence that Mr. Foley was interested in young boys, it occurred to me: Foley is gay, and the newspaper knew it. If Foley had been married, the story would have broken on the spot.

There are some kinds of ideas which the press is very careful not to appear to support.

One of those ideas is that there is a relationship between gay men and pedophilia. Now I don't know if there is such a relationship or not, but I do find it troublesome that even the discussion is suppressed.

I do know there is a relationship between having been molested as a young man (ca 13) and becoming a molester. Male homosexual molestation propogates as a virus, the young man being infected via his first sexual experiences at 13, and in seeking to vicariously re-experience those early, intense experiences, he selfishly seeks to infect others, propogating the virus.

Do such victims also become gay men with high frequency? I don't know, but I don't see any evidence.
Would gay men, having otherwise acquired their gayness, fixate on participating in a 13 year old's early sex life? Again, I see no evidence. Is there a relationship between gays who seek relationships with 16 year olds and those who seek relationships with 12/13 year olds? Again, seems different to me, one inappropriately focused on youth, the other engaged in advancing the homesexual pedophile virus.

However, I realize that I'd have to look real hard to find such evidence, because political correctness seeks to suppress it. Foley, if an example of a broader trend showing real connections between gay men and pedophilia, had easy complicity from the media in suppressing that evidence.

Santana Row the Future of Silicon valley?

If you haven't been there, you might like it more than you thought.

Santana Row is a collection of shops and apartments, as high as seven stories. In a word, "upscale". Brooks Brothers, for example. I went a long time without setting foot on the place. Kind of missed the old Chinese buffet they tore down.

But lately, two recommendations.

1. Maggiano's is a winner. Excellent food, excellent bread, excellent dessert, all you can eat (but not literally a buffet).
2. Pizza Antica. Really good thin crust pizza, meaning you might be able to eat a medium all by yourself, but it's good stuff.

Both have excellent service. You pay more, but you come away believing that the price/performance ratio was pretty good.

Rosie McCanns Irish Pub and Restaurant offered some of the worst service I've ever encountered while paying $5/beer, but it saved us money. A lot of money. We went home.

But restaurant reviews aren't the topic here. Do we expect more Santana Rows? Would you like to live in Santana Row? Would it be like living in San Francisco or Manhattan?

First off, what it's not: well connected to trains/BART/etc. What it does have is ample free parking. You're expected to arrive by automobile.

Some point out that it's a phoney city. Fully agreed, it's phoney. But it's not that different than some parts of San Francisco, parts with no low rent buildings within a block. So if your followup to "so what" is "I miss the economic diversity", or "I like to have people of all kinds around", then observe that real cities have places you'll find that, and places you won't much find that.

Prices are much like SF prices. For $1M you get a nice pad. Couple of bedrooms, couple of baths.

But the real question here is "are we seeing a vision of the future". I think we are. I think we will see more Santana Rows. Not all the same, some a bit more down to earth, but all stretching 60-70 feet into the air. Making intense use of real estate. Ground floors retail, everything above that residential.

But not so fast. In an era of automobiles and Walmart, who needs all that retail? Sure, an area the size of Santana Row can support 25 odd restaurants and bars (if you can call them bars). But one wonders: is Brooks Bros. really making it? What about those other boutiquey things? You can bet that even if they weren't making it, FRT (the REIT which owns Santana Row) would be slow to show them the door and try to fill the store with, um, what?

Lots of local retail is based on one thing alone: local convenience. Local convenience is maximized when people can live their lives without an automobile, and spend the money they would otherwise spend on an automobile on local convenience.

So I predict that the isolated, eventually connecting islands of 70 foot development will represent the future of Silicon Valley, the transition will be slow, and may well be still in its infancy twenty years from now.

Evolution in Action

Surely anyone dumb enough to voluntarily enter an area saturated with uncontained gasoline is volunteering to not reproduce?

Iraq: the basic equation

The basic Iraqi equation is pretty simple.

There is a minority of Sunni who have oppressed the majority Shia for a few decades now. They enforced this oppression by killing any Shiite who opposed them.
The Sunni are out of power.
The Americans are in power, but as soon as they leave, the Shia will be in power.
The Shia fully intend to rid Iraq of Sunnis, by starting to kill them while allowing most to move to Syria. That this intent would be realized seems the most likely of several possible outcomes of the US ceding power in Iraq.

It's not clear that this is a good thing, a bad thing, nor a goal worthy of a war.

It does seem clear that both the Sunni and the Shia understand what it takes to end the violence, while the US continues to refuse to accept reality. One or the other side must be in control, this sharing stuff is fiction, and both of them know it.

Steele's insight

Dr. Helen reviews White Guilt, here.

Here's the quote which caught my eye:

Oppression, says Steele, does not push people to rage or revolution. "Anger is acted out by the oppressed only when real weakness is perceived in the oppressor. Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, not to injustice." This makes sense: people who act out angrily usually do so when there is no threat of being punished and every indication that their anger will get them what they want. This is not always such a bad thing, of course, but black anger and the responding white guilt is not the psychological dynamic of freedom. It is a deal between the power hungry left and black leaders who care more about being thrown a bone and offering fake opportunity to their followers than they care about freedom, autonomy and excellence.

This is truly insightful, independent of the rest of Steele's thesis.

Start with the basic principle underlying Steele's point, which is not dependent on any distinction between "civilization" and "oppression". Or "good parenting", for that matter.

Both civilization and oppression constrain behavior. People don't like constraints on their behavior (they like constraints on everyone else's behavior). If and when the authority behind such constraints is perceived as weak, violence occurs. Violence against oppression, or violence against civilization, all the same.

Bush left of center, losing support

GW Bush has positioned himself left of center, causing a massive loss of support.

On issue after issue after issue:

1. immigration
2. deficit spending
3. budget control
4. the drug war

GW Bush has adopted the leftist/anti-libertarian position.

The country simply isn't with him any longer.

Just what is the ideal marginal tax rate?

In this column, Charles Whelan takes on the notion that decreasing tax rates can result in more revenue for the government.

His argument goes like this: if taxes were 99%, or even 70%, or maybe even 50%, the theory would be good, but since the marginal tax rate is 36%, that's already low enough that lowering it any lower does not much expand the tax base.

Whelan offers no analysis whatsoever that 36% is low enough, rather he appeals to the fact that it's not 99%, or as high as other places, as being proof that 36% is plenty low. Bogus logic.

Well Mr. Whelan, I'd like to suggest that the ideal marginal income tax rate, the rate which will maximize government income, is around 25%. Somewhere short of 30%. That's the rate at which industrious people will attempt to maximize their income regardless of taxes. Do I have proof? Not. But as a taxpayer, this is how I feel, and I'm generalizing my feelings to other productive people.

That's more proof than Mr. Whelan offered.

$5 Gasoline vs the Riff Raff

Given a choice of $5 gasoline and a 25% reduction in traffic, as compared to $2 gasoline and a slighe increase in traffic, my natural thought is to take the convenience. After all, the increase in gasoline price doesn't really affect me. It would at $10 I suppose, but pretty much anything short of $5 or $6 won't make much difference either in how much I drive, or my standard of living.

Given the wailing I read, I suspect that there are people who would drive less given $5 gasoline. With them gone, more space on the highway for those of us remaining. Good.

But back to the core of economics. Prosperity, ultimately the prosperity of all of us, is derived from ongoing transactions. Traffic is, to a huge extent, people travelling to those transactions. Fewer transactions, less prosperity.

$5 gasoline AND a loss of prosperity, that's not what we need.

Pensions and the government

Yet again, we're discussing bailing out deficient pension plans.

Someone's missing the fundamentals here. If a company can
make labor peace today by committing the government to
spend money down the line, we can bet they'll do that in
spades.

The idea of a guaranteed pension funded by ongoing business
activity is flawed from the start. It's a pyramid scheme which
cannot hold together, despite abstract potential to be a
counter-example.

Check history. Companies have a cycle. They rise, and eventually
they fall. Common sense dictates that pension promises must
be funded now, not later.

The solution is not to make unsustainable pension promises
illegal, despite their scam nature. The solution is to stop
backing them up with taxpayer money.

Making money from blogs

From a blog which might average one hit per day, how might I know anything at all about the economics of blogging?

Start here: the Wall St. Journal has a piece suggesting that blogging is more economically tempting than some of us might understand.

The problem with this story is that it imagines that advertising is something one sells simply on traffic alone. The idea of "$10/RPM", or $10 per 1000 pages viewed on your blog, is simply bogus. It's bogus because no one is going to pay for it.

There are two important aspects to advertising:

• Name Recognition
• Immediate sales

If you're selling high margin products, such as beer, you're willing to buy a lot of advertising to establish your brand. You're creating an image, and you're buying brand loyalty by keeping your brand in front of people who consume your beer.

But the internet in general, and blogs in particular, are bad vehicles for carrying brand advertising. Television, with its claim to all of your attention for at least a few moments, works far better.

Give it to Google for sorting out what internet advertising, blogs in particular, is all about. Immediate sales. Customer clicks on ad, goes to advertiser's store, and buys something.

One thing we can observe about such advertising immediately is that it is trackable. The clickthru is tracked, and sales from that clickthru are tracked. The merchant can do the arithmetic, did the ad make money?

Ah, but there's repeat sales. Customers who come back with no advertising. Yes there are, but typically this is a minor subsidy to the immediate affect of the ad. Brand loyalty on the internet is weak indeed.

So if blog ads are to make money, they have to move product.

One more thing about moving product on the internet by advertising. You can't just raise the price to cover the advertising. With regular advertising, you can flood the market with ads offering 40% off on immediate purchases without explaining that you increased the price 60% to cover the program. On the internet, whatever it is you're selling, there are ten more people selling it too, and price comparison is easy.

What really got me about the WSJ article was the detached nature of the analysis. The idea that one could create a blog purely with the goal of generating traffic, and expect to generate advertising revenue without giving a moment's thought to whether your blog would actually move product is just bogus.

Places like Dpreview.com have it right. Provide high value content on making decisions regarding which digital camera to buy, and you might move some digital cameras.

Instapundit also has it a bit right. Check out his ads, and you'll typically observe Glenn to be moving tee shirts with right wing sayings. And a few paintings which appeal to the boomers who read Instapundit (both of those being higher margin products, even on the internet). And of course, Glenn sells his book, An Army of Davids, which has its own cozy economics with respect to Instapundit.com.

But your basic blog, even if it were to somehow by magic go to tens of thousands of page hits per day, wouldn't move enough tee shirts to generate enough revenue for a good dinner, let along a living. If that's what someone might want from blogging, that's what to aim for, rather than aiming for a place to offer personal comment and solicit reaction.

Gay Rights

I'm a libertarian.

What that means is that I seldom see a need for the government to be involved.

It was easy to sort out the gay rights issue when gay rights meant "get the government out of the bedroom". Sign me up.

But as time passed, the government did get out of the bedroom. And we progressed to an era where "gay rights" meant "get the government to suppress anti-gay activity".

Count me out.

For sure, violence should be punished, and severely. There should be no quarter for thuggery of any kind, and it's the government's job to protect citizens from thuggery.

The essence of anti-gay thought is a claim that "homosexual activity is sinful".

A religious statement. A religious belief. Can't be proven or disproven.

I don't believe that for a moment, but I don't really have any beef with people who do. Any more than I have a beef with someone who disagrees with the rest of my religious analysis. It's a personal thing. Make up your own mind. I don't expect you to take to my religious beliefs seriously, and so long as you don't expect me to take yours seriously, we'll get along just fine.

But I'm not sympathetic to a request that the government force you to not speak your religious mind. If you want to declare homsexuality immoral from the sidewalk, fine by me.

Overpaying for low skilled jobs is not the solution.

P6 today has a blog regarding today's immigration discussion.

Here's a quote:

I sense your cynicism. "This Black partisan," you say to yourself, "is trying to foment internecine strife in the White Race." Nope. As I said, this is me anticipating your anger and making clear Black people are not the legitimate target of your anger. You see, just like you are getting set up, so are Black folks...but I don't like the contours of the plan so far. You see, now that your income and employment levels approach the level you associate with Black folks, others are already lobbying on your behalf. And their suggestions look remarkably like those Black folks have said were needed for decades.

The essence of P6's case seems to be that the various races and immigrants are in competition with each other over jobs. That hard working Mexicans will diminsh wages for white people the same way that wages have earlier been diminished for black people.

The problem is, you can't find where this has happened.

Oh, you can find where international competition has reduced pay for native born Americans of all races; don't look any further than the auto industry.

And you can find individual counter cases, like with any generalization. Some white guy who used to make $20/hr as a drywaller now can only make $15.

But what you can't find is that working white people or working black people are worse off than they were 25 years ago. It's just not true. Need proof? Home ownership is at an all time high despite the fact that real estate prices are also at an all time high, and construction codes are far more stringent than they historically were. Now could that have occurred while working people were becoming worse off? Not a chance.

So on the whole, we find that people working in America are not directly competitive with one another. Every instance of a person working and receiving a paycheck creates wealth in America, and the more wealth there is in America the better off Americans are. It does spread around. No, not equally, nor always fairly, but it spreads around in a way which results in working people buying their own house.

The '50s was an era when the US had a commanding portion of the world's manufacturing capacity. Manufacturing jobs paid extraordinarily well. Semi-skilled people did extraordinarily well. Some people came to believe that this mode was normal, and deviation was going in the wrong direction. They see foreign competition as eroding that vision. And they see Mexicans as being foreign competition.

But check out what has really occurred. Again, we are more wealthy in the 00's than they were in the '50s. Not only can we not go back there, we wouldn't want to if we could. So what happened to that semiskilled workforce? Not really a shocker, they became more highly skilled. And they make more money. Check out daily life as it intersects your path, and see what people do, people who, if they had been born 50 years earlier, might have built cars.

In short, overpaying for a low skilled job is not the solution, period. Creation of high paid, high skill jobs works, and working people of all skills being fully employed maximizes such job creation. The more Mexicans operating shovels and hammers in America, the more highly paid jobs will exist for people who can speak English well and are willing to develop the necessary skill.

Monster & recruiters

You're a professional, looking for a job. You post your resume on Monster.

You're going to get some calls, and right away.

They'll be recruiters. Not company recruiters, but people who work for recruiting firms. They'll all say pretty much the same thing. They have jobs available for people with your qualifications, could you send them your resume?

First, how recruiters work. Companies looking to hire give job descriptions to recruiting firms. Sometimes exclusively (only one firm is working for the company at the time), sometimes promiscuously (they give listings to all recruiting firms who call up saying they have available applicants). The recruiting firm sends screened candidates by. If the company hires the candidate, the recruiting firm is paid a commission, typically 20% of the annual pay of the new employee.

There's nothing really wrong with that story, but there's a lot of grey area, none of it favorable to the candidate.

(If and) when the recruiter receives the resume, the recruiter will ask "what jobs have you applied for on your own?". What is going on here is that the recruiter is limiting the scope where no commission will be possible.

This is the primary game which must be played with recruiters. It's in your interest to limit the scope where the commission will be possible, and limit it to jobs which you would not otherwise have applied for.

Observe the aggression analysis in the story. You're willing to have the recruiter compensated for services rendered. You're unwilling to support a demand for compensation because you replied to some other solicitation by the hiring company. The recruiter is aggressively seeking to muddy the water, to establish a claim on a commission when you send your resume in response to some solicitation. This is not in your best interest, to say the least.

The first rule:

You'll send your resume to the recruiter when the recruiter can describe a job opening which you find attractive.

Now there are some real sleazebag recruiters who will lie at this point, but most won't. They'll either tell you about a real opening, or they'll rely on badgering you to send the resume anyway. Don't do it. Unless the recruiter has a job you're interested in, there is nothing good which can come from that recruiter having your resume.

The second rule:

The recruiter must agree not to send your resume to anyone except in response to a particular, described job opening which you approved of in advance.

Keep good track of that list, it won't be long.

What this accomplishes is pretty clear. If you reply to some solicitation, the recruiter has no chance to muddy the water by suggesting that he had sent your resume to that company, and the company was replying to you because of his contact. Believe me, hiring companies do prefer to hire candidates which don't require a commission to be paid. If you have been working with a recruiter who has sent your resume to this company in response to a different job opening, make it clear to the hiring manager that you have responded to the solicitation, and that the recruiter is not involved.

The third "rule" is derived from all that:

You will apply for other jobs without notifying the recruiter.

There's no reason why you should tell the recruiter, since the recruiter has agreed not to send your resume except to a particular job with your permission. In the unlikely, but possible case that the recruiter comes up with a job you have already applied for, you simply explain the situation. Do not come to believe that the recruiter has an important influence which can be used to get you hired, so long as you let the recruiter represent you. The cost of the commission is negative beyond any affect the recruiter might theoretically have.

Lastly, you can negotiate with the recruiter for a split of the commission if you're deciding to take a job where they will be paid a commission. You can probably pull this off if you're taking a salary cut, or if you're passing by a higher paid offer. For one, it can really make the difference in your decision. The other job might not be higher paid if you're getting back 25% of the commission. Don't accept a recruiter compensated job before you explore this negotiation.

Zillow: where it works, where it doesn't

Zillow's been around for less than two months now. It seems longer.

Here's some expectations regarding Zillow.

1. Zillow does better in some areas than others. They're quite good in urban California, and can be downright crappy in small towns. They somewhat acknowledge this, by the range they report. In small towns, the range can be over 1:1.5. This isn't a lot of information.

2. Zillow has no magic source of information. If you finished your basement, Zillow doesn't know that, and it won't be reflected in the value presented.

3. Zillow does worse in areas where the assessed value is erratic. This includes more places than you might think. In states with high real estate taxes, a lot of people are given a break on the assessed value, while others are not. Out of state landlords, not. Grannies, the max. This results in Grannie's house being underestimated.

4. An important portion of the data which Zillow bases its estimate on is flawed. It's usually not totally nuts, but there are a lot of little flaws. These flaws can easily affect the estimate by 10%, but often they're detectable. Two side by side houses, very similar, one estimates 10% higher than the other. But, whoa, that one shows 5% more square feet. Now if you know that they're the same size, you can adjust accordingly. Sometimes square footage was reported by overly exuberant realtors.

5. Real estate appraisal in illiquid markets is nearly impossible even for professionals. Zillow can't do it either. Illiquid markets come to exist in areas with very few bank financed sales, and none of those financed > about 70%. Some vacation markets are illiquid. Some rural markets are illiquid. Sales prices are all over the map in these markets. Shrewd cash buyers with no realtor involved can buy at under 50 cents on the dollar as compared to seller financed risky deals. How you going to appraise? Erratically. That's why the usual sources of financing avoid such areas.

6. Anone who thinks that the real estate industry earns $60k from the typical $1m house sale is on the receiving end of part of that $60k.

Another song about heroin.

Johnny Cash once said "drug abuse runs through this family like turkeys through a cornfield".

Perhaps that's why he was able to produce the second of great songs about drug addiction. The comparison with "just say no" is breathtaking.

The song was in my rotation, and after hearing it a few times, but not actually paying attention, my wife looked up, with a pained expression, and said "that just seems painful". "Of course", I replied.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails actually wrote and popularized the song.

And who put Johnny Cash together with a modern grungy rock song would be an interesting story.

But the masterpiece is Cash's, not Reznor's. Not that I have a beef with Reznor, but, for one, the NIN version of the song is hard to extract the lyrics from. Johnny Cash, as usual, focuses on delivery of the lyrics with precise articulation, with intense emotion.

The song of course is Hurt.

The powerful concept is that addiction drives one away from people. The awesome line:
You are someone else, I am still right here. captures it all. The pain is deep enough from the needle, but even deeper from the lack of socialization, the knowledge that the person here right now trying to help, or offering affection, will eventually leave, tired of abuse.

It's as bleak a vision of drug addiction as could be painted on any canvas, and intensified by the fact that it cannot be rejected as Reefer Madness hysteria.

Google Video Here

Update:
The Wikipedia entry for Hurt answers some of the questions.
A professor of theology at Baylor analyzes Johnny Cash's life during the time he recorded Hurt.
"If I were going to believe in God, it would be the God of Johnny Cash."

Near as I can tell, the internet video has been available for free only recently.

Heroin is beautiful

I'm a total believer in the truth. Let kids know the truth, and they're generally well equipped to survive the assutlt of drugs which they will encounter during highschool & college age.

Understanding why people do drugs is part of that truth.

For example, why, if it's so miserable, do people choose a life of heroin addiction?

Jim Morrison has the answer, encoded as a poem within The Crystal Ship.

Before you slip into unconsciousness, I'd like to have another kiss.

As we look deeper we find that heroin has a truly beautiful era; the song builds to the crescendo:

The crystal ship is being filled, a thousand girls, a thousand thrills, a million ways to spend your time...

(Recall that in the 1960s the rig, the syringe, was made of glass, crystal).

It's this era of beauty that heroin addicts bit on so long ago. An era which devolves into powerful rushes which last only a few seconds but are absolutely required to stave off tremendous pain. But an era, lasting 2-3 weeks, with uncompromised beauty.

We don't have to experience this for ourselves; Morrison has explained it with intensity.

Further, the girl's not going to rescue the impetuous boy this time. She's going to die too.

Answers from classic rock

Here's the answer, what was the question (answer in comment):

"When all the joy within you dies."


..yes, google would work.

But was she a Christian?

Christian minister's wife kills husband, runs off with kids.

A significant portion of Christians feel authorized to pronounce who is and who is not also a Christian.

Classic case is in response to P6's coverage of the story.
Quote:

I like to inform you that the poeple who protray them selfs as christians in comit these crimes are not christian. If it could be for people that would be able to see the true diffrence in these people and call them for what thay are and quit putting them in a place or labeling them with improper labels as to let other people think of what you inplay them to be.

I know that a true christian would not be able to comit to such things and a true christian would be able to know the differance between the two also.

The problem here is insecurity by "Tommy (not verified)". Tommy thinks that we can draw generalizations about Christians, and he would like to exclude, in an absolute sense, murder from those generalizations.

It's a classic case of misunderstanding generalizations. Generalizations aren't absolute, ever. They might not apply to the case in front of you right now.

I do believe we can make generalizations about Christians. I'm not a Christian myself, but I know many Christians, and know them well. Christians are not murders is an accurate generalization.

Let's go one more step: people are not murderers. It takes a person way off track to have the capability to pull the trigger. A person who can disregard the sick, painful feeling that blocks most of us from murder. But when someone does murder, it doesn't remove their humanity. Nor does it remove their Christianity, should they be Christian.