1. Houston decides they’re going to be installing red light cameras inside the city limits.

2. Citizens get angry and organize, holding a referendum.

3. Referendum passes, program defunded.

4. Since the program was contracted, the company the contract was with sued the city.

5. Since the city would benefit financially from not winning, citizens who organized referendum petitioned the court to join the case to keep the city from “throwing” the case.

6. Lower court says they can’t.

7. Appeals court says they can.

Amazing story, no?

More on it here, with relevant links included.

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Why aren’t we viable any longer? Simple; we simply do not have the production capacity to do what China can do.

Most of the “save American jobs” folks who argue we should be doing everything we can in our power to save blue collar factory jobs will argue that the reason China and the rest of Asia have become such powerhouses in manufacturing jobs is because of the costs of labor, and while that sounds good on paper, it’s simply not born out by actual numbers. If the cost of labor was the motivator in manufacturing locations, the United States would have a gulf state manufacturing boom. States like Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, and Louisiana have the lowest labor costs in the entire country, and yet we don’t see jobs going there.

And while conservatives will also argue that environmental regulations, tax regulations, and other regulations are strangling businesses (something I do agree with), I think the real answer is a much simpler one and it’s explored in this article.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

The impact of such advantages became obvious as soon as Mr. Jobs demanded glass screens in 2007.

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

The reality is that there is nowhere in the United States where this nimbleness exists. In China, things move quickly, and manufacturing districts give companies one stop shopping for all their parts and supplies, not to mention a ready supply of labor (not just cheap labor, but large quantities of labor).

How do we compete with that?

We can’t.

The article is really good and a worthwhile read if you’re into this sort of thing.

And the story he mentioned about Gingrich? Well hell, that’s really interesting. Gingrich worked in the same “industry” Romney did with Bain. Here’s the relevant part of the story:

Mitt Romney isn’t the only presidential candidate with leveraged buyouts on his resume.

Newt Gingrich has spent the past several days assailing Mitt Romney’s business background, suggesting that the former private equity executive “looted” companies and “left people unemployed.”

But here’s an interesting note Gingrich doesn’t mention: Upon leaving Congress in 1999, the former Speaker joined private equity firm Forstmann Little & Co. as a member of its advisory board.

It is unclear how long Gingrich served on the advisory board, or how much he was paid. The campaign has not yet responded to a request for comment.

And then Fortune does us a favor and reminds us of how Gingrich doesn’t love companies that do what Bain did…

During Saturday night’s GOP primary debate in New Hampshire, Gingrich said: “I’m not nearly as enamored of a Wall Street model where you can flip companies, you can go in and have leveraged buyouts, you can basically take out all the money, leaving behind the workers.”

Nice. Comment Newt?

Yeah. I didn’t think so.

We’ve accepted this dogmatic belief for so long that it’s almost unquestioned, and yet it would seem that the only people who think it’s true are those in the inequality industry.

You can read more about Beeber’s cause here. I heard him talk to Jason Lewis a few months ago; very interesting guy and amazing story behind how little LA got out of the program both in terms of money and safety.

I’d add one thing.  When he says that investing in government debt isn’t productive, it’s not (necessarily) because the investment itself isn’t productive, it’s because you lose access to that liquidity for the time period of the bond’s maturity.

If investors flock to 10-year T-bills, what happens to the stock market or other investments?  It necessarily lowers simply because the capital that could’ve been used for other investments is now tied up for ten years in government debt.  If the private sector gets an investment, the investor loses the liquidity, but the business now has the liquidity it needs to buy new equipment, hire new staff, etc.

Government is empowered to spend money on certain things, but at the same time, if you want to see true economic growth, you don’t need to increase spending, you need to increase productivity.  Investing in the government by buying its debt in the form of bonds does nothing to increase productivity (since the government is incapable of actually producing anything) and instead crowds out the investment of capital in better and more productive enterprises.

That’s not necessarily true.

It was with great admiration that I watched Rick Santorum (who I usually find repugnant) answer the question of whether his view on abortion was too extreme for mainstream America.

Whether or not you agree that a woman who’s the victim of a horrible situation should carry the child to term, you can’t argue that Santorum’s view isn’t consistent. In fact, it’s the most rational consistent view you can have if you’re pro-life. If you believe that abortion takes a life, you can’t reconcile that with taking a life over the circumstances of conception.

Oftentimes anti-abortion folks (myself included) are chided for our “inconsistencies” on the issue. As personally offensive as I find Santorum, you can’t argue that he doesn’t truly believe what he says he believes.

In 8 years of President Bush, the debt ceiling increased $5.35 trillion.

In 3 years of Obama, the debt ceiling (if raised to the level of $16.5 trillion) will have been raised $5.185 trillion.

In other words, in 3 years of Obama, he’s doubled raised the debt ceiling by as much as Bush did in 8 years.

Does that give you any confidence that this will stop at some point?

Here’s another interesting stat.

The National Debt:

2001: $5.8tn
2002: $6.2tn *
2003: $6.7tn *
2004: $7.3tn *
2005: $7.9tn
2006: $8.5tn *
2007: $9.0tn *
2008: $10.0tn **
2009: $11.9tn **
2010: $13.5tn *
Current: $14.3tn *(proposed to $16.5tn)

The * denotes years in which the debt ceiling was raised, the ** indicates two raises in one year.

What do those numbers tell you? That increasing the debt is a never-ending cycle. In 10 years, the debt ceiling has been raised 10 times, and in 2008 and 2009 it was raised twice.

What about spending?

2001: $1.9tn
2002: $2.0tn *
2003: $2.2tn *
2004: $2.3tn *
2005: $2.4tn
2006: $2.7tn *
2007: $2.8tn *
2008: $2.9tn **
2009: $3.1tn **
2010: $3.6tn *
Current: $3.8tn *(proposed)

Notice what it didn’t do? That’s right! It never went down!

One more stat.

Spending as a percentage of our GDP since 2001:

2001 18.11
2002 18.9
2003 19.39
2004 19.32
2005 19.56
2006 19.82
2007 19.41
2008 20.76
2009 24.91
2010 23.82
2011 25.32 Estimated

What do you notice? That each year, spending has become an increasing part of the GDP.

So here are some questions for the “just raise the debt ceiling” crowd:

1. When in the past ten years has raising the debt ceiling resulted in a lowering of spending?

2. When has the debt ceiling increase not resulted in increased spending that actually required pushing the debt ceiling higher in a subsequent (or in some cases, in the same) year?

3. When has a debt ceiling increase resulted in anything but an increase in debt?

4. How does incurring more debt help us get out of debt?

If you can’t answer those four questions, you may have just realized how stupid the idea of increasing the amount we can borrow to lessen the amount we need to borrow really is.

And if you’re going to argue that this chart doesn’t represent reality, tell me where the data is flawed. If your only argument is that correlation isn’t causation, don’t bother.

In the past years we have begun to realise the flaws in this zero-risk logic. The constant stream of jaw-dropping anecdotes – children arrested for building a tree house, teachers having to complete reams of paperwork to take classes to the local church, schools banning chase games – has brought home an insight that should have been obvious from our childhoods: children need challenge. They need adventure. They need uncertainty. And they need risk.

Children learn a great deal from their own efforts, and from their mistakes. If we try too hard to keep them safe, we starve them of the very experiences that they need if they are to learn how to deal with the everyday ups and downs of life. What is more, children themselves recognise this.

Taking a balanced, thoughtful approach to risk is not easy. It means making value judgments when the outcomes are by definition uncertain. This is a complex process that simply cannot be reduced to guidelines, procedures and checklists.

via The end of zero risk in childhood? | Tim Gill | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Rick’s objections seem to be primarily theological, and I respect that. As a pronounced agnostic, I respect the Bible as a good source of wisdom, but I don’t accept it as authoritative. And I think that it’s OK for our laws to use the Bible as one source for inspiration (Several of the Ten Commandments are also enforced by law), it in no way should be used as the sole basis. Rick’s absolutely entitled to his beliefs, and the law should never be imposed on any religious body where it conflicts with their tenets, but personally, I’m glad New York has followed the lead of such states as…. well, New Hampshire.

The bible is a book. A very important historical book, but a book. It’s also a book that is perfectly fine to refer to for spiritual guidance, but probably isn’t the best source of guidance for legal / political matters. I get nervous, as should anyone, when religion intersects politics. Not because I’m worried about this becoming a theocracy (too many checks and balances for that to happen anyway), but because I think that the constitution provides all the guidance one could need when making a decision about what to do as far as policy.

Our government is not empowered by the cross, it’s empowered by the people.

Source

The researchers collected dust — containing cockroach, mouse and cat allergens — from the upper half of the beds of 239 children, 7 or 8 years old, all from middle-income families in households widely scattered across the city, though not in the most affluent areas.

They found that children in high-asthma neighborhoods were more likely to have been exposed to cockroaches than those in low-asthma neighborhoods, and twice as likely to be allergic to them (23.7 percent vs. 10.8 percent).

Other studies have shown a link between cockroach exposure and asthma. But the Columbia study, published online in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, is the first to show that children in high-asthma neighborhoods have been more exposed to cockroaches than those in adjacent low-asthma neighborhoods, Matthew Perzanowski, senior author of the study, said Tuesday.

This is really interesting, and when you think about asthma rates in the Bronx, where roaches are a constant battle and asthma is the highest, it makes total sense.

But all is not lost in the battle against asthma…

The study may help explain, he said, why the prevalence of asthma among children entering school varies greatly by neighborhood, from 3 percent in Flushing, Queens, to almost 19 percent, in East Harlem.
Levels of mouse and cat allergens were also higher in the homes of high-asthma neighborhoods, but did not seem to have the same effect.

Dr. Perzanowski said this could be because children were exposed to mice in other places besides the home, like schools and subways. For cats, he said, “I think the jury is still out,” but there is some evidence that exposure to cats could actually protect people from developing asthma.

Honestly, at this point is there anything kitties can’t solve?

Alright fine; maybe they can’t solve everything.

Source

There’s almost too much common sense in this video for it to be real!

Good stuff from the smartest man in radio.

I don’t fancy myself an economic expert, but as most of you know, I tend to lean toward obvious and demonstrable solutions. I also tend to be really good at detecting bovine fecal matter in its many forms. The idea that we can “get the budget balanced” on the backs of the big earners simply doesn’t represent reality when looked at in terms of history.

Dept of Numbers, a very interesting site, had an analysis of tax revenues as a percentage of GDP that they did in 2010. The chart was very good, but at a glance, you couldn’t really see the whole picture, so I annotated it. The new annotated chart appears below.

The takeaway is pretty clear; raising tax rates will not increase revenue. Considering that the US has never been able to collect more than 20% of the GDP even when tax rates were 70% or more totally demolishes the argument that we have a revenue problem. We don’t. We have a spending problem, clearly. If you look closely at the graph, the sweet spot for tax rates to bring in the largest percentage of GDP was in 2000 when the top rate was 39.6%, not in 1970 when it was 71.75% or in 1950, 55, or 60 when it was 91%. If the argument that we could tax our way out of this problem were true, this graph wouldn’t look anything like it does.

That’s why we do research. The counterintuitive isn’t always wrong.

“What I’m about to say comes not from hatred, but love of it,” he said during a speech at the National Press Club. “I spent much of my youth around journalism and journalists.”

“The press release for this talk said I’m accusing the media of ‘myth making’ today. I’m actually saying something a bit different. Myths I think are manufactured out of whole cloth. What I’m calling a ‘template,’ is based on facts. Some facts. A partial collection. The first dusting. It then becomes adopted as ‘the narrative,’” Shearer said. “The mental doors lock shut, and no further facts are allowed in.”

Shearer visited Washington this week to debut his new film, “The Big Uneasy,” which takes a serious look at the devastation in New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — and sharply critiques the coverage the catastrophe received from national news outlets. Shearer lives in New Orleans, which he calls his “adopted” hometown.

He made the case, using coverage of Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War and Wikileaks as examples, that once a “template” is set, news practitioners have a hard time diverting from it.

A very smart man once spoke about the template. He did so on April 1, 2010.

I’d say there’s little doubt that what I said nearly a year ago is 100% true, seeing as other people are starting to warm to it today.

(Bonus! I even talked about the “health care target map,” and did so months before the Gabrielle Giffords shooting!)