Joe White: I'm not asking, I'm driving.

For all those who wish to give more power to the state.

From Ken White at Popehat:

Armando Saldate, Jr. had been adjudged to be a liar on four occasions and a lawbreaker on five others.

No rational person would accept his word as an adequate basis to do anything of importance — let alone as a basis to take a life.

But we do not speak of rational people today. We speak of the criminal justice system. And the criminal justice system is choked with people it has thoroughly captured — people irrationally convinced of, or indifferent to, the credibility of people like Armando Saldate, Jr.

That’s because Armando Saldate, Jr. was a police officer.

The State of Arizona, based on almost nothing but Saldate’s word, has been trying to kill Debra Jean Milke for nearly a quarter-century. Today the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said they can’t.

[From The Presumption of Truth]

Please, read the whole thing.

In recent weeks I (and my family and clients) have been exposed to a number of scams. I thought I should highlight them to help others avoid falling for them.

• Both sets of my in-laws received a call from (302) 464-5393. The caller, a male who spoke with a heavy Indian accent, claimed to be from Microsoft and stated that their machine had been hacked, but that they could repair it remotely. You can see reports of similar scam calls from this number at 800notes.com, callercenter.com, & whocallsme.com.
• A client was having issues with their ATT/Yahoo! email, and was trying to find a number for customer support. The number that they found, 888-307-9126, is for a company that is not related to AT&T or Yahoo, and may or may not be legitimate. The correct number for AT&T support is 877-722-3755 (or 800-288-2020 for U-verse).
• There was a young woman trolling our neighborhood stating her name as Angel Germain, claiming to be a neighbor and that she’s a mechanical engineering major at UT working on restoring a P51 Mustang. She said that her dad is making her get off her duff and raise funds so that she can go work with Boeing on the restoration. But “do to laws” she couldn’t fundraise directly, so was selling books that would be donated to Texas Children’s Hospital, and a portion of the proceeds would help her group (she then shows me the her laminated certificate with Angelica Germain on it…ooh, official!). When I told her we had a household policy of not donating at the door but asked her for a website for the group working on project, she stormed off in a huff, saying if I couldn’t help her the way she asked, then not to bother.

  Glad I had finished my remote clients early in order to play detective: https://local.nixle.com/alert/4868486/
  http://www.ripoffreport.com/directory/angel-germain.aspxI then drove around and found her at a neighbor’s house…too late to save them from giving her a couple of bucks, but while she was still at the door I asked the homeowner what name she had given…this time, it was Zimmerman. As she started to leave, I asked her for her actual address. “2005 Addison.” Doesn’t exist. She then started leaving in a hurry, saying I was harassing her. “On the contrary, you’re scamming my neighbors.” She was last seen walking west down Holcombe (to which I also advised the local constabulary). White female, ~5’5″, early-mid 20′s, skinny, glasses, two long braids in fabric wrappers.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there…keep your wits about you.

I wish I had a tenth of his letter-writing skills.

Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:

Have you noticed the enormous increase in greedy speculation in the northeast over the past two days? It’s quite something! In advance of hurricane Sandy, consumers are now artificially increasing the scarcity today of the likes of bottled water, canned goods, batteries, and medicines by stocking up on these goods.

And all of this self-interested speculation – done merely in anticipation of staple goods being much more scarce after Sandy strikes than they are today – is applauded and even encouraged by the news media and government leaders!

What gives? Many of the same people who today publicly encourage us to speculate (“Make sure your family has ample supplies of batteries!”) are among the loudest critics of speculation at other times and in other markets.

But in fact the oil speculator who, say, buys oil today in anticipation of oil becoming more scarce tomorrow does just what a consumer does today in a supermarket in anticipation of a disruptive storm: both persons usefully transfer resources across time. They both stock up on resources that are today relatively abundant in order to preserve these resources for consumption at a time when they are relatively more scarce (and, hence, more precious). Both persons transfer resources from today – when the consumption of any one bottle of water or gallon of gasoline provides relatively less benefit – to tomorrow when the consumption of that same bottle of water or gallon of gasoline will provide relatively more benefit.

Anticipating the future and taking actions to allocate goods and services from times of relative abundance to times of relatively greater scarcity is an immensely useful activity. And we all perform such speculation whether or not we are popularly identified as “speculators.”

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

[From Speculators Storm Safeway!]

I love the Journal of Improbable Research

Seventeenth century opera houses produced more than just music, a reality brought forth in this study:

‘Pots, Privies and WCs: Crapping at the Opera in London before 1830‘, Michael Burden. Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 23, nos. 1-2, July 2011), pp 27-50.

Author Michael Burden [pictured here] is Tutor in Music, Dean, Chattels and Pictures Fellow and Professor of Opera Studies at New College, University of Oxford. His study contains the following indication, perhaps for multiple reasons: ”This article was conceived while working at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California on an Andrew Mellon Fellowship.”

Here’s the abstract of this lavishly detailed study:

What was the interplay between plumbing and the routines of audience behaviour at London’s eighteenth-century opera house? A simple question, perhaps, but it proves to be a subject with scarce evidence, and even scarcer commentary. This article sets out to document as far as possible the developments in plumbing in the London theatres, moving from the chamber pot to the privy to the installation of the first water-closets, addressing questions of the audience’s general behaviour, the beginnings in London of a ‘listening’ audience, and the performance of music between the acts. It concludes that the bills were performed without intervals, and that in an evening that frequently ran to four hours in length, audience members moved around the auditorium, and came and went much as they pleased (to the pot, privy or WC), demonstrating that singers would have had to contend throughout their performances with a large quantity of low-level noise.

(Thanks to investigator Susan DeFelice for bringing this to our attention.)

[From “Crapping at the Opera in London before 1830? [study]]

Full study here.

Al Dugan is doing a New Years show in honor of Jerry & Norma on Friday, December 30th, at 9am. He interviewed David and me for the show (and David did one of the station ID announcements). In addition to broadcasting on 91.3 in Beaumont, you can listen online by following the links at

http://dept.lamar.edu/kvlu/listen.html

It will be rebroadcast at 9am on New Year’s Day.

Insomnia, so what better time to repost something and break my silence?

Last night on “60 Minutes” (HT IndianaJim) President Obama said to interviewer Steve Croft about tax cuts:

Steve, the math is the math. You can’t lower rates and raise revenue, unless you’re getting revenue from someplace else.

This answer reveals a deplorable understanding of either economics or math or both.

Revenues are the product of the “price” per unit (for example, the tax rate on a dollar of income) multiplied by the number of units for which that price is paid. If the percentage cut in the price per unit is smaller than a corresponding percentage increase in the number of units for which the now-lower price is paid, revenues don’t fall; they rise. The math, indeed, is the math.

Obama’s math works only in a bizzaro economic world – a world where changes in prices have no, or never more than a de minimis, effect on people’s behavior.

In that bizzaro world producers would never lower prices. (Why do so if lowering prices won’t result in a larger sales volume and higher revenues?) In that bizzaro world McDonald’s would charge $1,000 for each Big Mac. (Why not, if prices don’t affect people’s consumption choices?) In that bizzaro world no one would propose taxing cigarettes to discourage smoking. (Why do so if higher prices don’t affect behavior?) And in that bizzaro world no one would ever call for higher tariffs to protect domestic producers from foreign competition. (Why do so if raising tariffs does not reduce the number of imports that people buy?)

It’s one thing to question a claim’s empirical relevance; it’s quite another to dismiss it categorically as being an alleged violation of the laws of mathematics.

What sorry testimony about the “reality-based” political community that the current President of the United States believes it to be simply a matter of “math” that lower tax rates necessarily result in lower tax revenues.

[From Obama’s Math Works Only in BizzaroEcon World]