Quotulatiousness

May 2, 2015

A revolutionary fix for California’s water problems – pricing

Filed under: Economics, Environment, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Last month, Megan McArdle pointed out that the state of California is reacting to the water shortages in one of the least effective ways by mandating rationing, rather than addressing the absurd under-pricing of the resource:

I’ve seen a lot of apocalyptic writing about California only having a year of water left (not true), and I’ve heard some idle talk about whether California can continue to grow. But California’s problem is not that it doesn’t have enough water to support its population. Rather, the problem is that its population uses more water than it has to. And the reason people do this is that water in California is seriously underpriced, as Marginal Revolution‘s Alex Tabarrok notes. While the new emergency rules do include provisions for local utilities to raise rates, that would still leave water in the state ludicrously mispriced. According to Tabarrok, the average household in San Diego pays less than 80 cents a day for the 150 gallons of water it uses. This is less than my two-person household pays for considerably less water usage, in an area where rainfall is so plentiful that the neighborhood next door to me has a recurrent flooding problem.

Artificially cheap water encourages people to install lush, green lawns that need lots of watering instead of native plants more appropriate to the local climate. It means they don’t even look for information about the water efficiency of their fixtures and appliances. They take long showers and let the tap run while they’re on the phone with Mom. In a thousand ways, it creates demand far in excess of supply.

Having artificially goosed demand, the government then tries to curb it by mandating efficiency levels and outlawing water-hogging landscaping. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work nearly as well as pricing water properly, then letting people figure out how they want to conserve it. For one thing, you can only affect large and visible targets, such as appliance manufacturers or lawns. For another, people will often try to evade your regulations — my low-flow showerhead came with handy instructions on how to remove the flow restrictor. And, perhaps most important, you limit the potential conservation to the caps. So people have an efficient dishwasher but don’t consider doing small loads by hand; they have a low-flow showerhead but don’t consider taking shorter showers. In short, no one is looking for ways to conserve more than whatever you’ve mandated. This may be enough to temporarily manage the current crisis, but it does nothing to set California’s water usage on a more sustainable path.

May 1, 2015

Statistical myths in California’s water shortage

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Environment, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Devin Nunes debunks the common claim that California’s farmers use “80 percent” of the available water in the state:

As the San Joaquin Valley undergoes its third decade of government-induced water shortages, the media suddenly took notice of the California water crisis after Governor Jerry Brown announced statewide water restrictions. In much of the coverage, supposedly powerful farmers were blamed for contributing to the problem by using too much water.

“Agriculture consumes a staggering 80 percent of California’s developed water, even as it accounts for only 2 percent of the state’s gross domestic product,” exclaimed Daily Beast writer Mark Hertsgaard in a piece titled “How Growers Gamed California’s Drought.” That 80-percent statistic was repeated in a Sacramento Bee article titled, “California agriculture, largely spared in new water restrictions, wields huge clout,” and in an ABC News article titled “California’s Drought Plan Mostly Lays Off Agriculture, Oil Industries.” Likewise, the New York Times dutifully reported, “The [State Water Resources Control Board] signaled that it was also about to further restrict water supplies to the agriculture industry, which consumes 80 percent of the water used in the state.”

This is a textbook example of how the media perpetuates a false narrative based on a phony statistic. Farmers do not use 80 percent of California’s water. In reality, 50 percent of the water that is captured by the state’s dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, and other infrastructure is diverted for environmental causes. Farmers, in fact, use 40 percent of the water supply. Environmentalists have manufactured the 80 percent statistic by deliberately excluding environmental diversions from their calculations. Furthermore, in many years there are additional millions of acre-feet of water that are simply flushed into the ocean due to a lack of storage capacity — a situation partly explained by environmental groups’ opposition to new water-storage projects.

April 30, 2015

The rise of “administrative law” in the United States

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In City Journal, Myron Magnet reviews a new book by Philip Hamburger on the rise and rise of the regulatory state:

We conservatives like to complain about overregulation and point to this or that destructive rule, but few of us go so far as Philip Hamburger does in his immensely important Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, published last year. A Columbia law professor, Hamburger indicts the entire structure of executive-agency rulemaking as illegitimate. It’s not just the regulations that have to go but the regulators as well, since their job is to fling down the Constitution and dance on it.

For over 400 pages of a 511-page, doorstopper-weight text, Hamburger counts the ways in which the slithery Medusa’s head of executive-branch agencies — from the Interstate Commerce Commission and the National Labor Relations Board to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, all spitting out the venom of administrative law — constitutes a flagrant affront to the Constitution. For starters, the Constitution lodges all legislative power in Congress, which therefore cannot delegate its lawmaking function. So it’s forbidden for Congress to pass a law creating an executive-branch agency that writes rules legally binding on citizens — for example, to set up an agency charged with making a clean environment and then to let it make rules with the force of law to accomplish that end as it sees fit. “The power of the legislative,” as the Founding Fathers’ tutelary political philosopher, John Locke, wrote, is “only to make laws and not to make legislators.” And if Congress can’t delegate the legislative power that the Constitution gives it, it certainly cannot delegate power that the Constitution doesn’t give it — namely, the power to hand out selective exemptions from its laws, which is what agencies do when they grant waivers.

Second, Constitution architect James Madison, following political theorist Baron de Montesquieu, saw the separation of powers as an essential bulwark of American liberty. But administrative agencies, which make rules, carry them out, and adjudge and punish infractions of them, blend together legislative, executive, and judicial powers in one giant anti-constitutional Cuisinart. Moreover, judicial power is as undelegatable as legislative power, since the Constitution lodges all of it in the judicial branch. So third, while administrative judges may look “just like real judges,” says Hamburger, they are no such thing — and not only because the Constitution makes it impossible for them to be so but also because, unlike real judges, their sole duty, rather than using their independent and expert judgment to carry out the law of the land, is to carry out the policy of their agency, as set and overseen by their department chief or the relevant cabinet secretary who in turn oversees him. As Justice William Howard Taft pronounced, an administrative tribunal is “miscalled a court.”

Organic wines as mere marketing buzz and gimickry

Filed under: Business, Health, Science, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At VinePair, Kathleen Willcox explains why the “organic” label on your wine may be little more than a marketing ploy:

A lot of the buzz and imagery about organics appears to be just that – empty sound bites and gimmicks created by folks eager to cash in on the increasingly lucrative organic market. Where does that leave us? Not in an easy place.

Falling for marketers’ ploys is practically a full-time occupation in America (I’m not the only one who’s bought multiple cartons of fat-free ice cream hoping, this time, to finally find “creamy fat-free vanilla bliss” right?). Consumers’ perception of what organic agriculture is vs. the reality, and the halo of virtue with which it is bequeathed (and conventional agriculture’s implicit pair of devil’s horns) is, arguably, one of the biggest boondoggles in our culture today. More than half of Americans (55%) go organic because they believe it’s healthier. Meanwhile, there is really no evidence to back that assumption up. And even organic farmers use pesticides (sorry random lady at the bar). They just happen to be “natural.”

It’s never been a better time for organic marketers and companies. The market for organic food and beverages worldwide was estimated to be $80.4 billion in 2013 and is set to reach $161.5 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of 15% per year. North America has the biggest market share, and will be responsible for roughly $66.2 billion by 2018.

But in the rush to get organic products out the door (and fulfill the public’s desire for healthier, more environmentally responsible products), some producers are often doing little more than following the letter of the USDA law to earn the “organic” label, consequences to the environment and our overall health be damned. In fact, from what producers and studies revealed, it may actually be worse for the environment and your body to buy organic wine from a large manufacturer instead of buying wine produced from grapes on a smaller vineyard sprayed judiciously with synthetic pesticides by a hands-on farmer.

April 10, 2015

QotD: Zoning hurts the poor

Filed under: Economics, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One kind of regulation that was actually intended to harm the poor, and especially poor minorities, was zoning. The ostensible reason for zoning was to address unhealthy conditions in cities by functionally separating land uses, which is called “exclusionary zoning.” But prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, some municipalities had race-based exclusionary land-use regulations. Early in the 20th century, several California cities masked their racist intent by specifically excluding laundry businesses, predominantly Chinese owned, from certain areas of the cities.

Today, of course, explicitly race-based, exclusionary zoning policies are illegal. But some zoning regulations nevertheless price certain demographics out of particular neighborhoods by forbidding multifamily dwellings, which are more affordable to low- or middle-income individuals. When the government artificially separates land uses and forbids building certain kinds of residences in entire districts, it restricts the supply of housing and increases the cost of the land, and the price of housing reflects those restrictions.

Moreover, when cities implement zoning rules that make it difficult to secure permits to build new housing, land that is already developed becomes more valuable because you no longer need a permit. The demand for such developed land is therefore artificially higher, and that again raises its price.

Sandy Ikeda, “Shut Out: How Land-Use Regulations Hurt the Poor”, The Freeman, 2015-02-05.

April 7, 2015

Regulating the US railroads

Filed under: Business, Government, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander recently reviewed David Friedman’s latest revision to his 1973 book, The Machinery of Freedom (sometimes called The Machinery of Friedman by libertarian wags). Scott wasn’t totally sold on Friedman’s proposals, but he posted several highlights from the book, including this discussion of how the US government was persuaded to regulate the railroad industry and then the airlines:

One of the most effective arguments against unregulated laissez faire has been that it invariably leads to monopoly. As George Orwell put it, “The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.” It is thus argued that government must intervene to prevent the formation of monopolies or, once formed, to control them. This is the usual justification for antitrust laws and such regulatory agencies as the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Civil Aeronautics Board.

The best historical refutation of this thesis is in two books by socialist historian Gabriel Kolko: The Triumph of Conservatism and Railroads and Regulation. He argues that at the end of the last century businessmen believed the future was with bigness, with conglomerates and cartels, but were wrong. The organizations they formed to control markets and reduce costs were almost invariably failures, returning lower profits than their smaller competitors, unable to fix prices, and controlling a steadily shrinking share of the market.

The regulatory commissions supposedly were formed to restrain monopolistic businessmen. Actually, Kolko argues, they were formed at the request of unsuccessful monopolists to prevent the competition which had frustrated their efforts.

[…]

It was in 1884 that railroad men in large numbers realized the advantages to them of federal control; it took 34 years to get the government to set their rates for them. The airline industry was born in a period more friendly to regulation. In 1938 the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), initially called the Civil Aeronautics Administration, was formed. It was given the power to regulate airline fares, to allocate routes among airlines, and to control the entry of new firms into the airline business. From that day until the deregulation of the industry in the late 1970s, no new trunk line — no major, scheduled, interstate passenger carrier — was started.

The CAB had one limitation: it could only regulate interstate airlines. There was one major intrastate route in the country — between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Pacific Southwest Airlines, which operated on that route, had no interstate operations and was therefore not subject to CAB rate fixing. Prior to deregulation, the fare between San Francisco and Los Angeles on PSA was about half that of any comparable interstate trip anywhere in the country. That gives us a good measure of the effect of the CAB on prices; it maintained them at about twice their competitive level.

In this complicated world it is rare that a political argument can be proved with evidence readily accessible to everyone, but until deregulation the airline industry provided one such case. If you did not believe that the effect of government regulation of transportation was to drive prices up, you could call any reliable travel agent and ask whether all interstate airline fares were the same, how PSA’s fare between San Francisco and Los Angeles compared with the fare charged by the major airlines, and how that fare compared with the fare on other major intercity routes of comparable length. If you do not believe that the ICC and the CAB are on the side of the industries they regulate, figure out why they set minimum as well as maximum fares.

April 6, 2015

When the Precautionary Principle meets wine corks

Filed under: Europe, Health, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Reason, Baylen Linnekin talks about wine corks and over-cautious would-be regulators:

We flew into Lisbon and drove across the Spanish border to San Vicente de Alcantara, near Caceres, where DIAM makes many of its corks. Once there, our daylong activities included a detailed tour of the DIAM factory and a visit to the nearby cork forest where DIAM obtains cork, which is made from the bark of the eponymous tree.

As I learned on the DIAM tour, the company’s agglomerated corks are made from natural cork that’s first pulverized. The impurities are then removed. Finally, the pure cork that remains is glued back together into the familiar wine cork shape.

Agglomerated corks have two key benefits over competing corks. First, they cost less than natural corks. Second, they eliminate the problem of cork “taint,” a musty taste caused by the presence of a substance found in cork, TCA, that often ruins wines before they’re ever opened.

Sounds great. Still, concern was raised by a wine writer last month, who suggested, quite wrongly in my opinion, that agglomerated corks may be illegal.

How’s that?

The writer, Lewis Purdue of Wine Industry Insight, suggested that the binding agent used by agglomerated cork makers could be leeching into wine. That agent, TDI, is listed as a potential carcinogen. If it were to migrate from cork to wine, that would be bad.

But testing by DIAM and others has shown no detectable level of TDI in wine, meaning there’s no evidence the substance migrates from cork to wine. DIAM also says, firmly, that no such migration occurs.

“Of course we guarantee there’s no TDI migration,” said François Margot, a sales manager with DIAM, told Wine Business writer Cyril Penn.

In that case, there’s no problem, says the FDA. As the FDA explains, agency rules generally permit food packaging to come into contact with food so long as it’s not “reasonably expected to result in substances becoming components of” food.

Why any fuss over agglomerated corks? It stems not from any FDA interest but, rather, from a push by competitors of agglomerated cork makers.

I dislike the kind of composite corks produced by companies like DIAM, but they’re still better than the plastic or other non-cork wine bottle closures a lot of American wineries are using these days.

March 31, 2015

Megan McArdle on the “Great Truth About Cable Bundling”

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the past (when I watched more TV than I do today), I often wished for cable services to be unbundled, so I could just access the channels showing things I wanted to watch. The bundles always seemed to be carefully constructed so that I had to select multiples to get each of the channels I liked. It seemed obvious that my cable bill would be much lower on that basis. But, I was probably wrong then, as Megan McArdle points out:

Here’s the truth: You don’t want your cable to be unbundled. You just want to pay less for it.

Seriously, guys, you like bundling. You know how I know this? You seek it out in your consumer products. You want your hotel to give you free Wi-Fi and you don’t want it to charge you by the towel. Many of you go on all-inclusive vacations and cruises. You buy mobile-phone contracts to get a “free” phone rather than pay by the minute. You are constantly — and I mean constantly — complaining that your health insurance is not more comprehensive, even though this would just mean you’d pay more for the insurance. And I won’t even get started on your agonized wails when airlines started charging you to check a bag and stopped providing a “free” plate of congealed mystery meat. You buy books and subscribe to magazines rather than pay by the article or the chapter. You love bundles. What you hate is the size of your cable bill.

Why do you like bundling? Because you don’t want to have to think about it. Oh, sure, there are people who would like to spend their days obsessively managing their minutes, reading and towels in order to save 5 percent, but the rest of us would rather not spend our time worrying about blowing the Wi-Fi budget. So we go for the all-inclusive package.

[…]

Now think about cable bundling. The Great Unbundling Fallacy is the belief that if you pay $150 now for 1,000 channels, you ought to be able to pay, say, $25 a month for the channels that you watch. Unfortunately, as with our hotel example, it doesn’t work that way.

In our example, right now you’re paying $150 a month for a large array of cable channels but only watch, say, 15 to 20 of them on a regular basis. In our simplified example, we’ll say that 100 million other subscribers are also paying $150 a month for a large array of channels, of which they each only watch 15 to 20, though not the same 15 to 20 as you. Let’s assume that revenue is distributed to channel operators roughly according to the number of eyeballs they attract, which is basically true — ESPN gets much higher fees than some crafting channel, because many people will subscribe to cable to get ESPN, while few will do so to watch a knitting program.

So what happens when you unbundle? How much do you have to pay for your channels?

That’s right: $150. You aren’t cross-subsidizing the channels you don’t watch, but all those other people aren’t cross-subsidizing all the channels they don’t watch, so you have to make up for that lost revenue. The price for each channel goes up until you’re paying about what you were before. By one estimate, average savings from unbundling would be about 35 cents a month. [PDF]

Update: Fixed link.

March 30, 2015

QotD: Political beliefs and reality

Filed under: Environment, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Political beliefs affect what one wants to be true. People are pretty good at persuading themselves that what they want to be true is true.

That works in both directions in the context of arguments about climate change. People who share my political views are suspicious of government regulation, CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) provides an argument in favor of more government regulation and is used as such an argument at present, so we naturally want to look for arguments against CAGW.

On the other side, it’s my experience that people who think global warming is a terrible problem that must be dealt with are also, by some odd coincidence, people who think the things that need to be done to deal with it are things most of which ought to be done anyway, that the real cost is low or negative. They are likely to put that point in terms of creating a cleaner, more sustainable world. From their standpoint, CAGW provides arguments to persuade people to do things they want done, so they naturally want to look for arguments in favor of CAGW.

David D. Friedman, “Global Warming and Wishful Thinking”, Ideas, 2014-06-09.

March 17, 2015

The drones in the FAA don’t want you posting drone footage to YouTube

Filed under: Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Take it away, Tamara:

The FAA says no posting of drone footage on YouTube?

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

That’s a good one, Canute. Have fun with that.

Anyone want to start a betting pool on how long before we have a drone footage on YouTube of another drone hovering along with a Guy Fawkes mask over its camera?

March 9, 2015

Net neutering … now it’s time to repent at leisure

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Matt Walsh has a message for all those net neutrality warriors doing their fist-bumps of triumph:

Dear Net Neutrality Proponents,

You dear, sweet buffoons.

I know you’re quite impressed that the Federal Communications Commission just passed a sweeping set of regulations granting themselves control over the Internet. President Barack Obama considers this a glorious victory. Liberals and Democrats across the land are delighted. Even some corners of cyber space — the ones populated by masochists and nincompoops — are cheering loudly, excited to finally be under the jurisdiction of an enormous federal bureaucracy. Hallelujah!

Now, Gullible Americans, I realize that you think you’ve just been once again liberated from the shackles of the free market and whisked away to a fanciful land where Father Government makes sure everything is nice and fair and everyone is sharing their toys like good boys and girls. I know you are under this impression. I mean, I can’t blame you. It’s right there in the title. They call it “Net Neutrality,” for goodness sake! It’s neutral! Neutral means fair! Fair Internet! Who can quibble with a fair Internet! Only big bad corporations and their right wing minions, you think. Fox News and the Koch Brothers and Lex Luthor and other scary names.

The FCC tells us that Net Neutrality will give us a free and open Internet by granting them the power to regulate it under laws that were written 60 years before the Internet existed as a common household service. Consumers need to be protected from the possibility that Internet providers will block traffic to certain sites, or set up paid prioritization systems for consumers or web services who pay more. That’s what this is all about, you think. The FCC is looking out for the little guy again.

Good old FCC, always fighting for truth, justice, and bureaucratic control.

But, see, this is where I need you to stop and think, Gullible Americans. It’s too late now, but I need you to finally try to learn something here. The government is not the knight in shining armor you think it is — even when it’s run by Democrats.

March 4, 2015

The FCC is merely a symptom

Filed under: Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Taxicab Depressions, Taxi Hack offers a few thoughts on current events:

If you have read my post The Pig Trap, you know of my absolute bewilderment at the current state of our country. Our government is utterly lawless, just making shit up as they go along, creating regulations and executive edicts to bypass the Congress and the Constitution, committing crimes in the furtherance of those goals, and nobody ever gets in trouble, unless he screwing someone he shouldn’t be, and nobody ever loses their job or goes before a judge, and most importantly, nobody seems to give a fuck. Everything is just fucking dandy, as long as we can binge-watch Girls and Entourage on HBO GO and Katy Perry’s next single doesn’t suck and that hot chick from Club Plush texts me next week…

I wake up every day around two or three in the afternoon, make a cup of coffee and turn on the news, just waiting for the day when it finally happens, the day that something finally snaps, and I am listening to Sheppard Smith breathlessly trying to describe shaky video of a mob of 500,000 or 800,000 pissed off taxpayers that has invaded Washington and are lining every street in D.C., armed to the teeth, and erecting scaffolding on the National Mall.

Actually, that’s not how I think it is going to go, but I promise you… what can not go on, will NOT go on.

A couple days ago, a five member panel of unelected bureaucrats called the FCC voted 3 to 2 to seize control of the internet for the Federal government, without so much as a “by your leave” to the Congress. It’s not like your Congressman or Senator did this, these were three UNELECTED political appointees, all DEMOCRATS, which I think is worthy of mention, and they just decided that they have the power to regulate what you say and what you view on the internet, without asking you what YOU think about that. They came up with a big fat Rule Book For The Internet that they would not show to the public before the vote, and now that they have deemed they have the authority to do this and voted to institute their new Rule Book For The Internet, they STILL won’t show the public their new Rule Book For The Internet.

How is that not a Joe Biden-sized Big Fucking Deal for you? THREE PEOPLE you never heard of and certainly never voted for just took over control of the internet for the government, and they are not showing the public what the new rules will be. Does that mean websites will have to get a government “license”, like radio stations? And will they have a list of bad things they can’t say, or they will be fined and maybe even LOSE their license? Nobody knows, because they will not show the public the rules they are creating.

February 25, 2015

Net Neutrality, Title II Proponents “Assume Nothing Has Changed” Since 1995: Daniel Berninger

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Law, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 23 Feb 2015

“All the logic that we are seeing in the Net Neutrality debate is assuming that nothing has changed; it’s assuming that it’s 1995. What’s actually happened is that people get more and more service, year in and year out,” says Daniel Berninger, a telecom activist who was involved in the early days of internet-phone service of Vonage.

Net Neutrality proponents, including President Obama, argue that internet-service providers (ISPs) need to be regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in order to keep the internet “free and open.”

Berninger heads up VCXC, a nonprofit that is pushing for regulatory and policy changes to speed up the transition to IP-based networks for voice and data sharing. He’s an unsparing critic of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s plan to implement Net Neutrality by regulating broadband network operators under Title II or “common carrier” provisions of federal law.

Title II has historically applied to telephone companies, which were regulated as public utilities and subject to government scrutiny regarding every aspect of service, including pricing and universal service obligations. Since the mid-1990s, the internet has been classified as an “information service,” which is subject to much less regulation under Title I of the relevant federal law.

“Title II regulation has been around for 80 years,” says Berninger, “and we know exactly what it can accomplish and what it can’t accomplish … in all the things that it touched, it essentially destroyed innovation.” In 1956, he explains, as part of a consent decree involving ATT, phone service was regulated by the FCC under Title II while “information services” were essentially unregulated. “We split communications and computing and treated them entirely different — essentially as a twin experiment. Well, one twin prospered and one twin did not do very well.” Berninger argues that virtually all the problems that proponents of Title II regulation and Net Neutrality worry over — such as the blocking of specific websites and the deliberate slowing of traffic — haven’t occurred precisely because ISPs are subject to market competition and must constantly innovate to keep customers happy. FCC regulation would hamper that.

The FCC will vote on Wheeler’s proposal later this week and is widely expected to endorse it. The FCC has lost two previous attempts to assert regulatory control over the internet.

February 24, 2015

The “Little Free Libraries” and their enemies

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf talks about the charming origins of the Little Free Library movement … and its potential demise at the hands of greyfaces everywhere:

Three years ago, The Los Angeles Times published a feel-good story on the Little Free Library movement. The idea is simple: A book lover puts a box or shelf or crate of books in their front yard. Neighbors browse, take one, and return later with a replacement. A 76-year-old in Sherman Oaks, California, felt that his little library, roughly the size of a dollhouse, “turned strangers into friends and a sometimes-impersonal neighborhood into a community,” the reporter observed. The man knew he was onto something “when a 9-year-old boy knocked on his door one morning to say how much he liked the little library.” He went on to explain, “I met more neighbors in the first three weeks than in the previous 30 years.”

Since 2009, when a Wisconsin man built a little, free library to honor his late mother, who loved books, copycats inspired by his example have put thousands of Little Free Libraries all over the U.S. and beyond. Many are displayed on this online map. In Venice, where I live, I know of at least three Little Free Libraries, and have witnessed chance encounters where folks in the neighborhood chat about a book.

I wish that I was writing merely to extol this trend. Alas, a subset of Americans are determined to regulate every last aspect of community life. Due to selection bias, they are overrepresented among local politicians and bureaucrats. And so they have power, despite their small-mindedness, inflexibility, and lack of common sense so extreme that they’ve taken to cracking down on Little Free Libraries, of all things.

Last summer in Kansas, a 9-year-old was loving his Little Free Library until at least two residents proved that some people will complain about anything no matter how harmless and city officials pushed the boundaries of literal-mindedness:

    The Leawood City Council said it had received a couple of complaints about Spencer Collins’ Little Free Library. They dubbed it an “illegal detached structure” and told the Collins’ they would face a fine if they did not remove the Little Free Library from their yard by June 19.

Scattered stories like these have appeared in various local news outlets. The L.A. Times followed up last week with a trend story that got things just about right. “Crime, homelessness and crumbling infrastructure are still a problem in almost every part of America, but two cities have recently cracked down on one of the country’s biggest problems: small-community libraries where residents can share books,” Michael Schaub wrote. “Officials in Los Angeles and Shreveport, Louisiana, have told the owners of homemade lending libraries that they’re in violation of city codes, and asked them to remove or relocate their small book collections.”

February 20, 2015

This is why you can’t find a good washer (or dishwasher, or toilet, or…)

Filed under: Business, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt recently bought a new washer, and realized something while being lectured about her choice by the salesperson:

Which is when I realized I was in the presence of a true believer whose mind would not be dented by facts. I let Dan lead her to the computer and make up the order, and older son has nicknamed me “She who makes washer saleswomen cry.”

So, what is the point of this? If it were just a funny story about buying a washer, I might still tell it, but it’s not.

Look, the problem is that we are being ruled (and yep, ruled, not governed) by a group of people who, like the saleswoman, think the intention is the thing.

We’ll leave aside for a moment the need or wisdom for water/electricity/etc. saving. First, in Colorado water is expensive so saving it is always a good idea. Second, that is not what their measures are achieving.

Take our first exposure to water saving toilets, twenty some years ago. We built a new bathroom and needed a toilet and the only ones for sale were “water saving.” What this meant in practical fact was that I acquired a new hobby: flushing the toilet.

The toilet worked (supposedly) with half the water, but it took four flushes to get anything, even a little bit of toilet paper, down. Do the math. I was expending twice as much water, and a lot of time and frustration. (We quickly switched to air assist. After the experience.)

In the same way, our current dishwasher complies with water and electricity saving measures. This means to achieve the same temperature, it has a thick coat of insulation ALL around. Which means it takes half the dishes at a time. Again, do the math. I have to run it for twice as long, which means no savings.

It has an additional unamusing quirk. Every time you wash, you have to select hot wash and sanitizing. Otherwise it just sloshes some water at the dishes and calls it done. We didn’t figure this out for five years which means for five years we conducted a study in epidemiology. I mean, guys, even in the village, when we were poor as Job, grandma boiled water for the final dish rinse to be as hot as possible. Otherwise you not only get not really clean dishes, you get to share the germs of everyone whose dishes go in the same water.

Then there’s the washer. The first we bought was the Neptune, years and years ago, which was so water saving it developed mold and mildew.

The current one recycles the water, so it washes better, but the rinses must happen, and the rinses, again, make it use the same water as anything else. All the low-water washers need a lot of rinses.

“But Sarah, you have a condition that makes you sensitive to detergent. Other people don’t.”

Granted. Which is why there hasn’t been an uprising with pitchforks, or at least washing mangles, yet. Because for the last five years I’ve been a slave to that washer and I’ve always been behind in the wash to the point that we ended up buying four times the clothes we needed, because the wash was bound to be backed up. When each load takes a minimum of two hours (the boys also react to detergent) and you have 14 or so loads a week (not counting cats peeing on Robert’s bed – yes, always his bed. Don’t know why) things slow to a crawl.

And the answer “Oh, you need to use less detergent.” BUT the cleaning went down in proportion to the detergent going down.

I’m not going to talk to other “eco friendly” measures or not extensively. I don’t have the personal experience to.

I do, however, know that the curly lightbulbs were a fiasco. I know that attempts to wish into existence energy by means other than fossil fuels are either failures or scams (Solyndra) and I know that the “enhanced” with “fillers” gas destroys cars, so that they have to be replaced sooner. Now, I’m not an expert, but I’d guess the manufacturing process causes more pollution than just burning regular gas.

So why do they keep passing ever more and more restrictive laws, demanding the thing we use for everyday living meet THEIR standards which as far as I can tell they pull from air?

I think it’s the arrogant certainty that if they keep whipping the dead horse it will get up and pull the load. Or in other words, they’re sure that the only reason they’re not getting what they want is that some mean person is holding it back from them, and if they demand it loud enough and now with more laws, it will eventually be given.

Think of them as the kid throwing himself to the floor in the candy isle and screaming for candy, refusing to hear his mother’s answer that she has no money. That’s about what they are: tyrannical, demanding, infantile and blind to reality.

And of course, when reality fails to comply with their dreams, they just scream louder. Or in this case, they pass laws which distort the simplest facts of daily living for the rest of us.

How long are we going to be hostage to brats who are unable to realize laws don’t cause reality to happen and words have no force to change facts of life?

How long till we get tired of being forced to do household chores inefficiently and paying for it in both time and money, without any appreciable benefit to anyone.

Eric Scheie over at Classical values, when I blogged there, had a post about there being a war on things that work.

He was right, though the intent is “creating a world where things work the way bureaucrats want them to” – which mostly means in defiance of scientific fact.

It is time to take back science, and common sense too.

And in the meantime, we can make washer saleswomen cry!

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