Quotulatiousness

July 14, 2015

Washington’s streetcars

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

Warren Meyer isn’t a fan of streetcars in general, but he views the Washington DC streetcar project as being particularly deserving of scorn:

I am increasingly convinced that the appeal of streetcars and light rail has everything to do with class. From any rational perspective, these systems make no sense — they are 10-100x more expensive than buses and lack the flexibility that buses have to adjust to shifting demand patterns over time. A single extra lane of highway adds more capacity than any light rail line.

Streetcar’s single, solitary advantage is that middle and upper class whites who would not be caught dead on a bus seem to be willing to ride streetcars. I don’t know if this is because of some feature of the streetcars (they are shiny and painted pretty) or if it is some sort of self-segregation (the upper classes want to ride on something that is not filled with “riffraff”).

He also points out that even Vox.com can’t make the case for streetcars particularly well:

The arguments are:

  • Tourists like them, because you can’t get lost like you can on buses. My response is, “so what.” Unless you are one of a very few unique cities, tourists are a trivial percentage of transit riders anyway. Why build a huge system just to serve out-of-town visitors? I would add that many of these same cities (e.g. Las Vegas) considering streetcars are the same ones banning Uber, which tourists REALLY love.
  • Developers like them. Ahh, now we are getting somewhere. So they are corporate welfare? But not so fast, they are not even very good corporate welfare. Because most of the studies they cite are total BS, of the same quality as studies that say sports stadium construction spurs all sorts of business. In fact, most cities have linked huge tax abatement and subsidy programs to their streetcars, such that the development you get with the subsidy and the streetcar is about what you would expect from the subsidies alone. Reminds me of the old joke that mimicked cereal commercials: “As part of a breakfast with juice, toast, and milk, Trix cereal has all the nutrition of juice, toast, and milk.”
  • Good for the environment. But even Vox asks, “as compared to what.” Since they are generally an alternative buses, as compared to buses that have little environmental advantage and often are worse (they have a lot more weight to drag around when empty).
  • The Obama Administration likes them. LOL, that’s a recommendation? When you read the text, what they actually say is that mayors like the fact that the Obama Administration likes them, for it means the Feds will throw lots of Federal money at these projects to help mayors look good using other peoples’ money.
  • Jobs. This is hilarious Keynesianism, trying to make the fact that streetcars are 10-100x more expensive than buses some sort of positive. Because they are more inefficient, they employ more people! One could make the exact same argument for banning mechanical harvesters and going back to scythes. Left unquestioned, as Bastiat would tell us, is how many people that money would have employed if it had not been seized by the government for streetcar use.
  • Je ne sais quoi. I kid you not, that is their final argument, that streetcars add that special something to a neighborhood. In my mind, this is Vox’s way of saying the same thing I did the other day — that the streetcar’s appeal is primarily based on class, in that middle and upper class folks don’t want to ride on a bus with the masses. The streetcar feels more upscale than buses. The poor of course, for whom public transit is most vital, don’t want to pay 10 times more for sexiness.

Every argument I have ever been in on streetcars always boils down to something like “well, all the cool kids like them.”

July 4, 2015

Reason.tv – The Secret Scam of Streetcars

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

Published on 1 Jul 2015

Meet the Thighmaster of urban public policy: Streetcars.

Municipal politicians all across the country have convinced themselves that this costly, clunky hardware can revitalize their flabby downtown economies.

That includes the fearless leaders of America’s capital city. The DC government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last decade trying to erect a streetcar line in the up-and-coming neighborhood of H Street. The project has been an epic disaster, perfectly demonstrating how ill-suited streetcars are to modern urban life.

Watch the full video above, or click below for downloadable versions. And subscribe to Reason TV’s YouTube channel for daily content like this.

June 13, 2015

QotD: Washington DC summer weather and swamp dogs

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve been doing weather updates on Twitter lately. You know, stuff like “Today’s DC heat-humidity index is: Saigon brothel early in the morning, warming up to Alabama chain gang hot box this afternoon.” Or, “DC heat humidity index: Cool Hand Luke with a chance of Barton Fink.”

Now, you might think this is all about the jocularity, but it’s not. You can’t really get a sense of my rage in these tweets. I hate DC in the summer. Hate. Yes, yes, as a Goldberg I am descended from a desert people, but we like a dry heat. This place is so hot, fetid and humid — actually moist is a better word — that it feels like I’m a homunculus walking around the crotchal region of Al Sharpton’s tracksuit circa 1989 (Yes, you’ll have that image to carry around for the rest of your life. You’re welcome).

Unfortunately, if I were to express my real feelings about the weather on Twitter, it would read like Alistair Cooke walking into a backyard full of garden rakes; just one ear-shattering obscenity after another. Right now I could f-bomb Dresden.

Because both my wife and daughter are out of town, my only companion in all of this misery is my wing-dingo, Zoë. There’s just one hitch, she’s a swamp dog. Every time we go outside into the cloying miasma of aerosolized muck, the look on her face reminds me of the special crossover issue where Godzilla goes back in time to meet Devil Dinosaur. For the tiny number of you who didn’t immediately get the reference, Godzilla really dug the hot sulfuric climate in Dinosaur World. And Zoë loves this climate. It’s like she gets extra energy from it. The deer poop stays fresh longer, the squirrels are more likely to lose a step as they flee her wrath.

I went on Amazon and bought at least a dozen dog toys just to keep her occupied when I am trying to work or sleep. How’d that work out? Well, you know that cliché in the movies where the rookie cop visits his first gruesome crime scene and barfs at the horror? Well, if I were from a planet of sentient plush toys, I would be that rookie cop pretty much every morning. I come downstairs in the grey light of dawn every day to find a “living” room that looks like Charles Manson’s clan declared Helter Skelter on plush toys. It’s a dog-toy abattoir in here; Faux-felt moose and pigs are splayed across furniture in unnatural positions, their viscera scattered about.

Jonah Goldberg, “Tales from the Homefront”, The Goldberg File email “news”letter, 2014-07-11.

December 14, 2014

Jonah Goldberg on the Gruber hearings

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

In this week’s Goldberg File, Jonah Goldberg talks about the show Jonathan Gruber put on in front of some Washington political types:

I learned from Twitter this morning that Gustave Flaubert, born this day in 1821, said, “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” So, as Jay-Z says every morning he enters a music studio and as Joe Biden says every time President Obama gives him a fresh 64-pack of crayons, “Let’s make some art, bitches.”

Let’s start with Jonathan Gruber. I have to say I was disappointed by the hearings. Oh, sure, it was good theater-as-human sacrifice of the sort Washington does so well (though I am glad they stopped short of rectal rehydration).

But this was one of those moments where they really could have put the system on trial. Gruber’s consistent answer was that he’s a shabby, shallow, little man who belittles others, including the American people, to make himself look good. “I tried to make myself seem smarter by demeaning others.”

In almost every exchange, Gruber fell back on language you’d expect from a stockbroker tied up in an S&M dungeon. I did it because I am a flea! A worm! I am no master of the universe, I am nothing! Punnnniissshhh meee!

All that was missing were some riding-crop and melted-candle-wax welts, and maybe a shorn scrotum. But, hey man, it’s a defense.

But it’s not a good one. You can blame your arrogance for calling the American voters stupid, but you can’t blame your arrogance for claiming that the bill was designed to hide taxes and deceive the public. If I stab someone 34 times, the jury might want to hear about my arrogance, but whether I’m arrogant or humble, it doesn’t change what I did — and apologizing for it doesn’t clarify where the body is buried.

Gruber’s strategy of emotional self-abasement was very clever because it distracted from the central arguments of fact.

[…]

As for Gruber, he said this week that he wasn’t an architect of Obamacare. And yet, for several years he let the New York Times, The New Republic, PBS, and countless other media outlets describe him as exactly that. That label was of great financial value to him. But it was probably of greater social, psychological, and professional value. And that is probably why he seems to have not once taken the time to ask them to stop calling him that. Gruber is of a class of people who take great satisfaction from the belief that they are not only smarter and better than normal Americans, but that their superiority entitles them to manipulate the public and system in whatever way they think necessary.

There’s another reason Gruber never corrected anybody when they described him as an architect of Obamacare: Because it’s true!

Which leads to another important point: Gruber’s a huge, monumental, Brobdingnagian liar.

To believe his testimony before Congress is to believe that on one occasion after another, he baldly lied over and over again to his peers, colleagues, students, and friends. Darrell Issa sort of gets at this here at the end of Gowdy’s interrogation when he asks Gruber, “Did anybody come up to you and tell you that what you were saying was inappropriate?”

That’s an interesting question and tells you a lot about the sovereign contempt the expert class has for the American people. But a better question would be, “Why didn’t anybody correct you on your factual claims? Or simply say ‘What you’re saying isn’t true’?” Gruber was on panels with other health-care experts. The audiences were full of people who were deeply informed about Obamacare and all its details. And yet no one said, “Hey, that’s not the way it happened.” Why? Because Gruber was telling the truth when he said they had to deceive the American people. And before you ask me what proof I have, I would like to direct you to the fact that Barack Obama deceived the American people over and over and over again when he said things like “You can keep your doctor” and “You can keep your insurance” etc. (and not one liberal journalist cheerleader for Obamacare ever felt compelled to push back on this obvious lie). Are we really so stunned that the same president might be willing to play accounting games with the CBO?

Sure maybe Gruber exaggerated his role or involvement. Maybe he embellished this or that. But you can’t exaggerate a lie; you can only exaggerate the truth. For years he told the truth to anyone who would listen, and now that it’s politically problematic he says it was all a lie.

So we’re forced to choose: Was he lying when talking to countless audiences full of peers, colleagues, and experts, or was he lying in front of Congress in order to save his team any further embarrassment and preserve a law he’s sincerely proud of (because he was an architect of it)? Personally, I think you’d have to be too stupid to beat Joe Biden at tic-tac-toe to think the “real” Gruber testified before Congress this week. But whichever side you come down on this question, one thing has been established: He’s a huge liar.

November 5, 2014

Alaska, Oregon, and Washington DC vote to legalize marijuana

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:24

Jacob Sullum on the success of two more state legalization campaigns (oh, and the imperial capital, too):

Yesterday Alaska became the fourth state to legalize marijuana for recreational use. With 74 percent of precincts reporting, 52 percent of voters favored legalization. Alaska joins Oregon and Washington, D.C., which legalized marijuana on the same day, and Colorado and Washington state, where voters approved legalization in 2012.

Alaska has taken a unique approach to marijuana since 1975, when the Alaska Supreme Court decided that the state constitution’s privacy clause allows people to possess small amounts of cannabis at home for personal use without fear of arrest or punishment. But that ruling raised an obvious question: Where are people supposed to get the pot they are allowed to use?

Measure 2 answers that question with a system similar to Colorado’s. It allows adults 21 or older to possess up to an ounce of marijuana at a time, grow up to six plants at home, and transfer up to an ounce at a time to other adults “without remuneration.” It authorizes state-licensed growers, cannabis product manufacturers, and retailers, to be regulated by Alaska’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board or a separate agency created by the state legislature.

August 24, 2014

200th anniversary of the only foreign occupation of Washington DC

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:14

In History Today, Graeme Garrard tells the tale of the burning of Washington in 1814:

When James Madison, fourth President of the United States and ‘Father of the Constitution’, signed a declaration of war against Britain on June 18th, 1812 he could scarcely have imagined that two years later he would be fleeing from his burning capital before the invading enemy. At the start of the ‘War of 1812’, the first the US had declared on another nation, his friend and predecessor as president, Thomas Jefferson, had smugly declared that the war against Britain’s colonies in what is today Canada would be ‘a mere matter of marching’. As Madison abandoned the White House on horseback with his entourage and raced towards Virginia on August 24th, 1814 he stopped and looked back as he beheld the ruined city of Washington. The smoke from flames that engulfed it could be seen as far away as Baltimore, Maryland. Although he left no personal account of his feelings about these shattering events, the normally imperturbable president must have been deeply shaken by the turn they had taken, as were most Americans. What his many domestic critics had derisively branded ‘Mr Madison’s War’ had led to the only foreign occupation of the US capital in its history. Soldiers and marines under Major-General Robert Ross and Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn put Washington’s public buildings, including the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Library of Congress, the Treasury building, the State and War Departments, the historic Navy Yard and the President’s House (as the White House was then known), to the torch. Exactly two centuries later, few people in the United States or Britain are aware of this national humiliation, the ‘greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms’.

Why were the British so determined to burn the government buildings in Washington? Revenge for the Americans having done the same thing to York the previous year:

The Americans were as dejected and enraged as the British were elated by the effects of the occupation. The reserved and stoical Madison returned to Washington as soon as the British had departed. Unable to live in the President’s House, he took up residence at the home of his brother-in-law. His wife soon joined him, exclaiming when she saw the ruined capital: ‘Such destruction, such devastation!’ The secretary of state James Monroe, Madison’s successor as president, cursed the British troops as ‘all damn’d rascals from highest to lowest’ for torching the capital. He seems to have forgotten that American troops had done much the same in 1813 when they occupied the undefended city of York (now Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada (now the province of Ontario). Then they had burned the colony’s legislative and judicial buildings, plundered its public library and destroyed private property. Indeed, the Governor General and military Commander-in-Chief of British North America during the war, Lieutenant-General Sir George Prévost, wrote that, as a ‘just retribution, the proud capital at Washington has experienced a similar fate’. When the news reached London a month later of the British retaliation, guns outside Parliament and the Tower of London boomed a joyous salute, a reaction echoed throughout the colonies of British North America, particularly in York.

June 2, 2014

Still no answers in the Miriam Carey case

Filed under: Government, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

Scott Greenfield at the Simple Justice blog wonders why there are still no answers to the questions about what happened at the south gate to the White House that day in 2013. The lawyer for Miriam Carey’s family is exasperated with the delay:

“It’s just bizarre. What’s so complex about this incident? It’s a police shooting. You know who the parties are. You know who discharged their weapons. I mean, c’mon, it’s not complex. We should have known within in a week or two. I don’t understand what’s taking so long,”

DC Metro police say the incident is still under investigation, and won’t answer any questions about it. Why is the story being withheld from the public?

That’s an excellent question, as the answer appears to be that Carey, with her daughter in the back seat, made a wrong turn into the south gate of the White House, panicked, u-turned and drove away. And so the police started firing.

When Mike Paar sent me a link to this story, it was because this otherwise “insignificant” story was curious, as it was now eight months old and there were no answers. But for the World Net Daily article, which billed the killing as “fascinating,” it would have easily fallen into obscurity, a one-day wonder story.

When it was included in a post here, it didn’t warrant any particular scrutiny. The ramming of a barricade was still the explanation du jour, and its interest was found in the need to shoot the fleeing car. Because they need to shoot at fleeing cars, which the Supreme Court says is fine.

Once the story is stripped of its ramming the barricade myth, however, there is no justification under Tennessee v. Garner as there was no fleeing felon. There was only an embarrassed dental hygienist. With her one-year-old in the back seat.

Now knowing that there was no barricade ramming, no drugs, no mental illness, the story of Miriam Carey’s death becomes even less interesting, and yet more a story of importance. If, as believed, this was an overreaction by police to a woman who made a wrong turn, who then shot her to death and is now burying their mistake by invoking excuse number 4, and no one cares, we’ve got another problem.

January 19, 2014

QotD: Ethics in Washington D.C.

Filed under: Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:02

I came across a very fine quote from a retired Marine COL Doug R., “In the perverse environment that is Washington the degrees of unethical behavior make the mere liar the most honorable man in the room. Some of the whores think they are nuns.”

Allen B. West, “Robert Gates and ‘whores who think they are nuns'”, AllenBWest.com, 2014-01-18

September 21, 2013

Big government – “smart guys rob taxpayers because that’s where the big money is”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:18

Mark Steyn on the quick route to banana republic status:

As the old saying goes, bank robbers rob banks because that’s where the money is. But the smart guys rob taxpayers because that’s where the big money is. According to the Census Bureau’s latest “American Community Survey,” from 2000-12, the nation’s median household income dropped 6.6 percent. Yet, in the District of Columbia median household income rose 23.3 percent. According to a 2010 survey, seven of the nation’s 10 wealthiest counties are in the Washington commuter belt. Many capital cities have prosperous suburbs — London, Paris, Rome — because those cities are also the capitals of enterprise, finance, and showbiz. But Washington does nothing but government, and it gets richer even as Americans get poorer. That’s very banana republic, too: Proximity to state power is now the best way to make money. Once upon a time, Americans found fast-running brooks and there built mills to access the water that kept the wheels turning. But today the ambitious man finds a big money-no-object bureaucracy that likes to splash the cash around and there builds his lobbying group or consultancy or social media optimization strategy group.

The CEO of Panera Bread, as some kind of do-gooder awareness-raising shtick, is currently attempting to live on food stamps, and not finding it easy. But being dependent on government handouts isn’t supposed to be easy. Instead of trying life at the bottom, why doesn’t he try life in the middle? In 2012, the top 10 percent were taking home 50.4 percent of the nation’s income. That’s an all-time record, beating out the 49 percent they were taking just before the 1929 market crash. With government redistributing more money than ever before, we’ve mysteriously wound up with greater income inequality than ever before. Across the country, “middle-class” Americans have accumulated a trillion dollars in college debt in order to live a less-comfortable life than their high school-educated parents and grandparents did in the Fifties and Sixties. That’s banana republic, too: no middle class, but only a government elite and its cronies, and a big dysfunctional mass underneath, with very little social mobility between the two.

Like to change that? Maybe advocate for less government spending? Hey, Lois Lerner’s IRS has got an audit with your name on it. The tax collectors of the United States treat you differently according to your political beliefs. That’s pure banana republic, but no one seems to mind very much. This week it emerged that senior Treasury officials, up to and including Turbotax Timmy Geithner, knew what was going on at least as early as spring 2012. But no one seems to mind very much. In the words of an insouciant headline writer at Government Executive, “the magazine for senior federal bureaucrats” (seriously), back in May:

“The Vast Majority of IRS Employees Aren’t Corrupt”

So, if the vast majority aren’t, what proportion is corrupt? Thirty-eight percent? Thirty-three? Twenty-seven? And that’s the good news? The IRS is not only institutionally corrupt; it’s corrupt in the service of one political party. That’s Banana Republic 101.

August 8, 2012

The economy is booming in Parasite City, DC

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

Gene Healy points out that while the rest of the US is still in the doldrums, there’s one bright spot: the one place that is booming, because it’s almost purely tax dollars feeding the growth.

Have you seen the latest jobs report? Major buzzkill: creeping unemployment, anemic growth, and the recovery’s totally stalled.

But not here: The District is booming! “Washington may have the healthiest economy of any major metropolitan area in the country,” says New York Times D.C. bureau chief David Leonhardt in Sunday’s Gray Lady. “You can actually see the prosperity”!

Yes we can! Construction cranes dominate the downtown skyline, and your average homeless guy can barely grab a stretch of sidewalk before yet another boutique store pops up to bounce his bedroll.

True, if you venture outside the Death Star’s orbit to visit the colonies for Thanksgiving or Christmas, you’ll see a lot of boarded-up storefronts. You might even feel a twinge of shame when Matt Drudge feeds you headlines like “D.C. Leads List of Most Shopaholic Cities in America.”

Whatever: Guilt is for losers! The main lesson the rest of the country should take from the capital’s prosperity is, per Leonhardt, that “education matters.”

D.C.’s “high-skill” economy boasts more college degrees than any other major metropolitan area in America. “If you wanted to imagine what the economy might look like if the country were much better educated,” Leonhardt writes, “you can look at Washington.”

Hey, you people out there in flyover country: We’re eating your lunch because we’re “smarter” than you! Hit the books, rubes: We built this!

July 7, 2012

Deregulating a “natural monopoly”

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

Arnold Kling is a Pepco customer. Pepco is one of the regulated electricity providers in Washington DC and surrounding area. He suggests that there may be a better way to deliver electricity to customers:

A recent storm in the Washington, D.C. area left many households without power for days. Customers served by one company, Pepco, appeared to suffer the worst. Pepco had the slowest rate of power restoration of all the area’s electricity suppliers.

As an economist and a Pepco customer, I am concerned by two factors that insulate Pepco from facing market discipline concerning reliability. The first is that Pepco is a regulated monopoly. The second is that there is no price indicating the benefits of reliability.

The fact that Pepco is a monopoly means that its incentive to improve its operations is limited. Regulators may cajole and threaten, but ultimately Pepco is like an employee with tenure — no matter how badly it performs, it can never be fired.

The fact that there is no market price for reliability makes matters even worse. The amount that Pepco invests in ensuring reliable provision of electricity does not have to bear any relationship whatsoever to the value that consumers place on reliability.

Update: Oops, forgot the hat-tip:

June 16, 2012

Explosion 1812: “one of the biggest explosions that had ever been witnessed in North America”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

I may have to make some time to watch TV tomorrow:

This month’s 200th anniversary of the start of the War of 1812 will be marked with a colossal bang: the television premiere of Explosion 1812, a new documentary that argues the intentional detonation of Upper Canada’s main ammunition supply at present-day Toronto in April 1813 — described as “one of the biggest explosions that had ever been witnessed in North America” — is a greatly underappreciated moment in history that was key to thwarting the U.S. conquest of Canada.

The two-hour, Canadian-made film — to be aired by History Television on June 17, the eve of the bicentennial of the formal U.S. declaration of war on June 18, 1812 — recounts how retreating British-Canadian troops at Fort York blew up the colony’s “grand magazine” along the Lake Ontario shore as American forces closed in on Upper Canada’s capital on April 27, 1813.

[. . .]

U.S. soldiers outraged at what they considered an act of extreme treachery — even a war crime because of their comrades’ fatal proximity to the explosion — went on a vengeful rampage in the captured capital, terrorizing the civilian population and pillaging residents’ property.Ê

Those actions, in turn, prompted a similar assault on Washington, D.C., in 1814, when the U.S. capital was stormed by British and Canadian troops who set fire to the White House.

Among the U.S. casualties at York was the famed commander of the invasion force, Gen. Zebulon Pike, an early explorer of the American West whose death — his chest crushed by falling rock from the blasted armoury — would be exploited to rally patriotic sentiment in the U.S. for the duration of the war.

November 14, 2011

Bullying is bad: banning bullying would be worse

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

Wendy Kaminer on the District of Columbia (DC) City Council’s proposed anti-bullying rules:

It started on college and university campuses, where repressive speech codes have been teaching generations of students that they have no right to offend someone, anyone, who can claim membership in a growing list of presumptively disadvantaged groups.

Now, this mindlessly censorious movement to force us to be nice to each other is encroaching on public life, off-campus: The District of Columbia (DC) City Council is considering banning the ‘harassment, intimidation, or bullying’ of students in public libraries and parks, as well as schools (including the District’s public university). Bureaucrats in charge of all relevant supervisory agencies are required to promulgate detailed policies that define bullying and harassment ‘no less inclusively’ than the City Council.

It would be difficult to define bullying more inclusively: according to the council bill, ‘harassment, intimidation or bullying’ is ‘any gesture or written, verbal or physical act, including electronic communication, that is reasonably perceived as being motivated either by any actual or perceived characteristic, such as race, colour, religion, ancestry, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, or a mental, physical or sensory handicap, or by any other distinguishing characteristic’, which a ‘reasonable person’ would foresee as effectively intimidating or harmful to students or their property, or as effectively ‘insulting or demeaning’ to any student or group of students so as to disrupt ‘the orderly operation of a school, university, recreational facility, or library’.

Don’t bother trying to figure out what this vague and verbose definition of bullying includes. Focus instead what it might exclude — not much. Virtually no speech or behaviour that a student self-conscious about any ‘distinguishing characteristic’ might consider hurtful or that a petty bureaucrat might find offensive is beyond the reach of this ban. Its scope is simply breathtaking; although, sad to say, the ‘inclusiveness’ of this bill doesn’t distinguish it from other state and local bullying laws or campus speech codes. It is, however, shamefully distinguished by its application outside of schools to public libraries and parks. Imposing a subjective sensitivity code on the general public, it displays an astonishing contempt for the most obvious and fundamental freedoms of speech and belief, as well as astonishing ignorance of constitutional rights.

March 15, 2011

DC residents get stiffed on their solar power subsidies

Filed under: Environment, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

David Nakamura reports on some Washington, DC folks who are feeling ripped off by their local government over solar panel reimbursements that were promised but never delivered:

It isn’t easy going green, and it may also prove costly.

Dozens of District residents who installed solar panels on their homes under a government grant program promoting renewable energy have been told they will not be reimbursed thousands of dollars as promised because the funds were diverted to help close a citywide budget gap.

In all, the city has reneged on a commitment of about $700,000 to 51 residents, according to the D.C. Department of the Environment. The agency has pledged to try to find money in next year’s budget, its director, Christophe Tulou, said.

“It just doesn’t seem fair to go through a process with them and have them make investments in solar panels under the assumption they would be reimbursed,” Tulou acknowledged. “It’s really sad we are having these economic woes when we are.”

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

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