America was built on the principle that a man could make choices about his own life. This has been a complete failure. You remember when pioneers set out by themselves into the untamed frontier? And you remember what happened to them? That’s right: They all died. Lacking a government to tell them how much soda to drink or salt to eat, they became too obese to run away from bears and mountain lions. It’s a sad chapter in our history, but luckily when people headed out west the next time, they brought lots and lots of government with them and founded California. And thanks to its huge amount of laws telling people what to do, that area has flourished (well, I haven’t read any news about California in a decade or so, but I assume it’s still doing pretty well).
Frank J. Fleming, “The Tyranny of Having Too Many Choices”, PJ Media, 2012-06-04
June 5, 2012
QotD: The settling of the west (revised edition)
May 22, 2012
Lucasfilm fires Parthian shot in “retreat”
In the New York Times, Norimitsu Onishi reports on recent developments (if you’ll pardon the expression) in Marin County, California:
In 1978, a year after “Star Wars” was released, George Lucas began building his movie production company far from Hollywood, in the quiet hills and valley of Marin County here just north of San Francisco. Starting with Skywalker Ranch, the various pieces of Lucasfilm came together over the decades behind the large trees on his 6,100-acre property, invisible from the single two-lane road that snakes through the area.
And even as his fame grew, Mr. Lucas earned his neighbors’ respect through his discretion. Marin, one of America’s richest counties, liked it that way.
But after spending years and millions of dollars, Mr. Lucas abruptly canceled plans recently for the third, and most likely last, major expansion, citing community opposition. An emotional statement posted online said Lucasfilm would build instead in a place “that sees us as a creative asset, not as an evil empire.”
If the announcement took Marin by surprise, it was nothing compared with what came next. Mr. Lucas said he would sell the land to a developer to bring “low income housing” here.
“It’s inciting class warfare,” said Carolyn Lenert, head of the North San Rafael Coalition of Residents.
It’s lovely to see NIMBY-ism spiked on its own hypocritical underpinnings. Just the threat of allowing “the other” into their lovely 1% outpost will be enough to rattle cages and upset the (self-nominated) “great and the good”:
Whatever Mr. Lucas’s intentions, his announcement has unsettled a county whose famously liberal politics often sits uncomfortably with the issue of low-cost housing and where battles have been fought over such construction before. His proposal has pitted neighbor against neighbor, who, after failed peacemaking efforts over local artisanal cheese and wine, traded accusations in the local newspaper.
The staunchest opponents of Lucasfilm’s expansion are now being accused of driving away the filmmaker and opening the door to a low-income housing development. That has created an atmosphere that one opponent, who asked not to be identified, saying she feared for her safety, described as “sheer terror” and likened to “Syria.”
Update: Jesse Walker comments at Hit and Run:
Lucas hasn’t always been a force for good in land-rights fights: His same statement that complains about the barriers to building on his property also complains that he wasn’t able to put up similar barriers himself when a developer built a neighborhood nearby. But that’s forgiven now. You have to appreciate a move that will simultaneously achieve four worthy goals: making housing more affordable for the poor, showing up the hypocrisies of the local limousine liberals, taking revenge (whether or not Lucas wants to call it that) on the people who restricted his property rights, and setting off a reaction that promises to be far more entertaining than any of the director’s recent movies.
April 20, 2012
Building High Speed Rail won’t do much to cut carbon dioxide emissions
Brad Plumer at the Washington Post on the latest straw that high speed rail enthusiasts have been grabbing to justify their expensive toys:
… Brown’s administration has proposed using money raised by California’s new climate law. Under the state’s cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, power plants and factories will have to buy permits to pollute. Brown has suggested diverting this money into high-speed rail. But there are two problems here. For one, this might be illegal, as the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office concluded on Tuesday. But second — and more broadly — high-speed rail turns out not to be the most effective use of money that’s meant to combat global warming.
Paul Druce at Reason & Rail offered up a few numbers on this topic last year. The California High Speed Rail Authority claims that by 2030, if the train ran entirely on renewable energy, then it would reduce the state’s carbon emissions by about 5.4 million metric tons a year. If you ignore all the energy used to build the system, that means the rail network would reduce California’s emissions at a cost of $12,506 per metric ton of carbon dioxide.
That’s a pricey way to cut carbon. To put this in perspective, research has suggested that you could plant 100 million acres of trees and reforest the United States for a cost of about $21 to $91 per ton of carbon dioxide. Alternatively, a study by Dan Kammen of UC Berkeley found that it would cost somewhere between $59 and $87 per ton of carbon dioxide to phase out coal power in the Western United States and replace it with solar, wind and geothermal. If reducing greenhouse gases is your goal, then there are much more cost-effective ways to do it than building a bullet train.
April 16, 2012
“This sort of investment pays for itself ten-fold over a very short period of time”
You see? This is what’s wrong with private enterprise, especially in California. Those wimps aren’t willing to invest in something that will “pay for itself” ten times over in a “very short period of time”. That’s why all the greatest economic advances have come from over-aged students, business council speechifiers, bureaucrats, and career apparatchiks!
If you believe calling your opponents names is a sign that you have lost the argument, then this new high-speed rail commercial from the California Alliance for Jobs — in which unexpectedly macho proponents of the
$41 billion,$110 billion,$98.5 billion, $68.4 billion high-speed rail project deride skeptics as “wimps” — is pretty much the end of the line […]What reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of the high-speed rail project is not the insults but that what is supposed to be a rousing propaganda piece comes off like an orientation video for new hires at a failing company.
The video’s cast includes
hacksrespected citizens from Operating Engineers Local 3, including Alliance for Jobs Executive Director Jim Earp, along with leaders from what’s usually referred to as the “business community” whose skill sets cluster around serving on business councils rather than doing any actual business. There’s also a career apparatchik and the founder of the “I Will Ride” Student Coalition, who is apparently a UC Merced senior but looks at least a decade too old.[. . .]
Again, why not just claim the Fresno-Bakersfield line will end up carrying 38 million people, the entire population of California, every day? It would be no less accurate than the current claims, which have been made with no data on ticket costs, no comparative studies of existing bullet-train ridership, or anything else that can reasonably pass for due diligence.
Oh, and nobody actually knows where the bullet train will go to or from. (Past, present and possibly future candidates include Corcoran, Borden, Fresno, Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and some guy named Dave’s rec room.) You wouldn’t build a patio with the amount of planning that’s gone into the high-speed rail project.
To put the headline into a bit of perspective, note that only one high speed rail line in the world is profitable. This is an old hobby horse of mine and I’ve posted about High Speed Railways a few times before.
Update: And to answer the question about why parts of Europe, Japan, and China have high speed rail systems and neither Canada nor the United States do, here’s a brief overview I wrote last year:
The best place to build a high speed rail system for the US would be the Boston-New York-Washington corridor (aka “Bosnywash”, for the assumed urban agglomeration that would occur as the cities reach toward one another). It has the necessary population density to potentially turn an HSR system into a practical, possibly even profitable, part of the transportation solution. The problem is that without an enormous eminent domain land-grab to cheat every land-owner of the fair value of their property, it just can’t be done. Buying enough contiguous sections of land to connect these cities would be so expensive that scrapping and replacing the entire navy every year would be a bargain in comparison.
The American railway system is built around freight: passenger traffic is a tiny sliver of the whole picture. Ordinary passenger trains cause traffic and scheduling difficulties because they travel at higher speeds, but require more frequent stops than freight trains, and their schedules have to be adjusted to passenger needs (passenger traffic peaks early to mid-morning and early to mid-evening). The frequency of passenger trains can “crowd out” the freight traffic the railway actually earns money on.
Most railway companies prefer to avoid having the complications of carrying passengers at all — that’s why Amtrak (and VIA Rail in Canada) was set up in the first place, to take the burden of money-losing passenger services off the shoulders of deeply indebted railways. Even after the new entity lopped off huge numbers of passenger trains from its schedule, it couldn’t turn a profit on the scaled-down services it was offering.
Ordinary passenger trains can, at a stretch, share rail with freight traffic, but high speed trains cannot. At higher speeds, the actual construction of the track has to change to deal with the physical problem of safely guiding the fast passenger trains along the rail. Signalling must also change to suit the far-higher speeds — and the matching far-longer safe braking distances. High speed rail lines cannot be interrupted with grade crossings, for the safety of passengers and bystanders, so additional bridges and tunnels must be built to avoid bringing road vehicles and pedestrians too close to the trains.
In other words, a high speed railway line is far from being just a faster version of what we already have: it would have to be built separately, to much higher standards of construction.
Getting back to the California HSR line; it goes from A to B on this map:
Okay, you think, at least Fresno will get some snazzy slick rail service . . . except this section will be built but not operated until further connecting sections are built . . . at a later date. Maybe. It will be the track, including elevated sections through Fresno, and the physical right-of-way, but no electrical system to power the trains; but that’s fine, because the budget doesn’t include any actual trains.
February 25, 2012
Reason.tv: Banning drugs, banning same-sex marriage, and banning fun
December 14, 2011
November 30, 2011
Reason.tv: California vs. The Feds on medical marijuana
November 9, 2011
Federalism does not mean “do what the Feds say”
The US government is actively undermining California law when it comes to medical marijuana:
When you get a new car, you start noticing the same model all over the highway. It’s the same way when you figure out what California’s marijuana dispensaries look like — green crosses and signage about “medicine” and “420” start popping up all over the City of Angels: On your commute to work, in your neighborhood, around the corner from your favorite restaurant. To put it bluntly, it’s not hard to find weed in California.
But that all might be about to change. The state’s four U.S. Attorneys are gamely trying to alter the broadly popular status quo with arrests and threats of prosecution and property seizure for landlords who rent to dispensaries, a campaign announced in a rare joint press conference in October. Medical marijuana advocates call it an “intense crackdown” and have launched a lawsuit claiming the federal attorneys’ tactics violate California’s tenth amendment rights (Rick Perry, call your office).
State and local officials, meanwhile, are divided in their reactions to the influx of dispensaries in California, but many say that overly eager federal intervention is undermining the state-regulated medical marijuana system that they have taken pains to set up. In other words, as long as the federal crackdown contained itself to targeting egregious offenders of state law, it was hard for anyone to object; many applauded. But by raising the prospect of a federal assault on city mayors and town councils, Obama’s Department of Justice could be making more enemies than friends in California.
November 4, 2011
The Kangaroo Family Court
The headline says it all: “Sexual Assault Victim Must Pay Her Attacker Spousal Support”
A San Diego judge ordered Crystal Harris to pay $1,000 a month in spousal support to her ex-husband — just as soon as he finishes up his six year prison sentence for sexually assaulting her. As 10News reports, “The entire assault was caught on tape and what it captured was enough to convict Shawn Harris of a felony — forced oral copulation.”
So why is a victim being forced to pay her attacker? According to Judge Gregory Pollock, it’s because Crystal Harris brought home six figures worth of bacon while Shawn Harris was unemployed.
“I can’t look at a 12-year marriage where one side is making $400 a month, the other side is making over $11,000 and say no spousal support,” Pollock said in court. “That would be an abuse of discretion.”
It sounds like a miscarriage of justice, but the law is written so that it only excludes attempted murderers from the right to receive spousal support. Another case of a bad law forcing a bad judgement (or a judge unwilling to exercise his discretion in a case that cries out for it).
October 23, 2011
California Democrats in sudden financial crisis
No, I’m not talking about the plight of the state itself, but the plight of hundreds of individual Democratic candidates whose political campaign funds may have been drained by the state campaign treasurer:
Stunning accusations that a top California Democratic campaign treasurer looted the war chests of her big-name clients have left candidates across the state scrambling to raise more money as election season looms.
Kinde Durkee, who controlled the funds of roughly 400 candidates and groups, ranging from Senator Dianne Feinstein to local Democratic youth clubs, was arrested in September and charged with fraud.
While the extent of the losses isn’t yet clear, the coffers of dozens of Democratic politicians have been frozen, prompting the crippled campaigns to ask the California Fair Political Practices Commission to permit further donations from contributors who have already given the maximum.
Feinstein, seeking re-election in 2012, has been forced to start from “square one” to raise campaign money, said Bill Carrick, political strategist and consultant to the Senator.
But a commission official said it wasn’t that simple.
“It’s quite clear that we can’t just say ‘the contribution limit is set aside’,” California Fair Political Practices Commission chair Ann Ravel said, adding that the commission’s legal team was researching what options were permissible by law.
September 4, 2011
California is apparently not in deep enough trouble
Otherwise, there’s no explanation for yet another extension of the state’s regulatory reach into the lives of everyday citizens. The most recent example is a bill that (at least on first look) appears to mandate workers’ compensation coverage, detailed pay slips (with all deductions clearly indicated), and paid vacation time for babysitters. Coyote Blog would like to see even more of this kind of thing:
I know this is exactly the kind of thing you would expect me to oppose, but I have decided this is exactly the kind of thing California needs. I am tired of average citizens passing crazy requirements on business without any concept of the costs and injustices they are proposing, and then scratch their head later wonder why job creation is stagnant.
I want to propose that California do MORE in this same vein. Here are some suggestions:
- Every household will have to register for a license to conduct any type of commerce, a license to occupy their house, and a license to hire any employees. Homeowner will as a minimum have to register to withhold income taxes, pay social security taxes, pay unemployment insurance, pay disability insurance, and pay workers comp insurance.
- Households should have to file a 1099 for every payment they make to contractors
- All requirements of Obamacare must be followed for any household labor, including payment of penalties for even part-time labor for which the homeowner does not provide medical insurance
- No alcohol may be purchased by any individual without first applying for and receiving a state liquor license
- No cigarettes may be purchased by any individual without first applying for and receiving a state cigarette license
- No over the counter drugs may be purchased by any individual without first applying for and receiving a state over the counter drug license
And the list goes on. But they’re not just being randomly generated: they’re all things that ordinary businesses in California already have to do.
June 2, 2011
Man succeeds in suicide attempt over an hour, as police and fire rescue watch
A hard-to-believe story from Alameda, California:
Fire crews and police could only watch after a man waded into San Francisco Bay, stood up to his neck and waited. They wanted to do something, but a policy tied to earlier budget cuts strictly forbade them from trying to save the 50-year-old, officials said.
A witness finally pulled the apparently suicidal man’s lifeless body from the 54-degree water.
The San Jose Mercury News reported that the man, later identified as Raymond Zack, spent nearly an hour in the water before he drowned.
Perhaps they assumed that the suicidal man would get too cold and come back to shore, but it’s hard to understand how they could stand around for an hour and not do anything.
May 20, 2011
Only one high speed rail line in the world is profitable
Babbage looks at the economics of the various high speed railway lines both in service and planned:
Of all the high-speed train services around the world, only one really makes economic sense — the 550km (350-mile) Shinkansen route that connects the 30m people in greater Tokyo to the 20m residents of the Kansai cluster of cities comprising Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto and Nara. At peak times, up to 16 bullet trains an hour travel each way along the densely populated coastal plain that is home to over half of Japan’s 128m people.
Having worked for many years in Tokyo, with family in Osaka, your correspondent has made the two-and-a-half hour journey on the Tokaido bullet-train many times. It is clean, fast and highly civilised, though far from cheap. It beats flying, which is unbearably cramped by comparison, just as pricey, and dumps you an hour from downtown at either end.
The sole reason why Shinkansen plying the Tokaido route make money is the sheer density — and affluence — of the customers they serve. All the other Shinkansen routes in Japan lose cart-loads of cash, as high-speed trains do elsewhere in the world. Only indirect subsidies, creative accounting, political patronage and national chest-thumping keep them rolling.
California’s planned 800-mile high speed rail route cannot possibly earn a profit, for many reasons (not least of which is that the first segment of the network won’t even run high speed trains until the entire system is built). It’s going to cost an eye-watering amount of money even to build that first section:
Between them, the federal government, municipals along the proposed route and an assortment of private investors are being asked to chip in $30 billion. A further $10 billion is to be raised by a bond issue that Californian voters approved in 2008. Anything left unfunded will have to be met by taxpayers. They could be dunned for a lot. A study carried out in 2008 by the Reason Foundation and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association put the final cost of the complete 800-mile network at $81 billion.That is probably not far off the mark. Last week, the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office came out with a damning indictment of the project’s unrealistic cost estimates and poor management. The bill this legislative watchdog put on the first phase of the high-speed rail project alone is $67 billion — and higher still if the project runs into trouble gaining route approval in urban areas.
If the latter number is correct, then the first phase of the system is clocking in at nearly $1 billion per mile. And this is the “cheap” section running through mostly thinly populated farming areas. If, somehow, the more expensive sections of the planned network don’t cost much more, the total construction bill will top $800 billion. The original plan had the entire system costing $43 billion.
Cost overruns are an expected part of major government construction projects, but that’s insane.
March 18, 2011
West coast earthquake zones
According to an article in The Economist, the well-known San Andreas fault in California is not the most likely to cause an earthquake of the magnitude of last week’s quake in Japan. The most likely source is the Cascadia subduction zone:
The most likely megaquake on the West Coast would be much further north — in fact, 50 miles off the coast between Cape Mendocino in northern California and Vancouver Island in southern British Columbia. This 680-mile strip of seabed is home to the Cascadia subduction zone, where oceanic crust known as the Juan de Fuca plate is forced under the ancient North American plate that forms the continent. For much of its length, the two sides of this huge subduction zone are locked together, accumulating stresses that are capable of triggering megaquakes in excess of magnitude 9.0 when they eventually slip. As such, Cascadia is more than a match for anything off the coast of Japan.
What makes Cascadia such a monster is not just its length, but also the shallowness of the angle with which the encroaching tectonic plate dives under the continental mass. The descending plate has to travel 40 miles down the incline before it softens enough from the Earth’s internal heat to slide without accumulating further frictional stresses. Could the fault unzip from end to end and trigger a megaquake — along with the mother of all tsunamis? You bet. By one account, it has done so at least seven times over the past 3,500 years. Another study suggests there have been around 20 such events over the past 10,000 years. Whatever, the “return time” would seem to be within 200 to 600 years.
And the last time Cascadia let go? Just 311 years ago.
Cascadia subduction zone image from wikimedia.org.
December 6, 2010
What happens when a “hoarder” is also an explosives buff
Julie Watson reports on the “largest amount of homemade explosives ever found in one location in the U.S.”
Now authorities face the risky task of getting rid of the explosives. The property is so dangerous and volatile that that they have no choice but to burn the home to the ground this week in a highly controlled operation involving dozens of firefighters, scientists and hazardous material and pollution experts.
[. . .]
Bomb experts pulled out about nine pounds of explosive material and detonated it, but they soon realized it was too dangerous to continue given the quantity of hazardous substances. A bomb-disposing robot was ruled out because of the obstacle of all the junk Jakubec hoarded.
[. . .]
“This is a truly unknown situation,” said Neal Langerman, the top scientist at the safety consulting firm, Advanced Chemical Safety in San Diego. “They’ve got a very good inventory of what’s in there. Do I anticipate something going wrong? No. But even in a controlled burn, things occasionally go wrong.”
He said the burning of the house would provide “an amazing textbook study” for bomb technicians in the future.
San Diego County authorities plan to burn the home Wednesday but need near perfect weather, with no rain, no fog, and only light winds blowing toward the east, away from the city. They have warned residents in the danger zone that they will be given less than 24 hours notice to evacuate their homes for a day, and that nearby Interstate 15, connecting the area to San Diego, will be closed.
Update, 8 December: Controlled burn has been delayed until better weather conditions prevail.
