RAWbservations http://www.raw360.com en-us Nucleus CMS v3.2 © Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.raw360.com/nucleus/nucleus2.gif RAWbservations http://www.raw360.com Introducing the New Ten Second News! http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3635

Shortly after I closed shop on this blog, I got into a conversation with Kevin Whited about what, if anything, I'd do next. As it turned out, both of us have had similar ideas knocking around in the back of our minds for a while: A link-dominant blog with concise commentary similar to Reductio ad Absurdum, Kevin's old site where I used to contribute, the old Ten Second News, the mini-blog that used to appear to the left of RAWbservations, and our respective FURL sites. Over the months since we've talked about it loosely while I've gotten rested up enough to pursue another project. Last week we finally began posting full-time on the new Ten Second News. You can get a better idea of what we're aiming for here.

It will have a different feel than RAW360. It will focus more on politics and culture than personal anecdotes. Though we disagree on whole host of issues, Kevin and I on the whole share the same sort of ownership conservatism as an alternative to big government liberalism, intangible libertarianism, and conservatism of the more paleoconservative and red-meat variety.

Right now we have the main page, a comment section (registration is required as is civility), and a headlines only page for those that simply want to follow the links. In the future we plan to have a separate section for more thorough commentary and somewhere down the line we might even try a podcast. Blog News http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3635 Thu, 18 Oct 2007 23:25:52 -0500 Thanks, Alex http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3628 I'd like to express my sincere thanks to Mr. Whitlock for letting me post here, and for his friendship over the past few years. I will indeed be returning to The Stone City, though the next few weeks will be slow even by my standards. Readers and commenters will always be welcome; it's not as if I'm overwhelmed with feedback. Blog News http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3628 Wed, 06 Jun 2007 05:46:18 -0500 The End of RAW360 http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3627 I had intended to write this on 6/1, but I haven't really had the time or energy. That, in a nutshell, is why it's past time that I am officially pulling the plug on RAW360.

It's become apparent to me that I have neither the time nor energy to get this site to the place I would like it to be and my attempts at compensating for that have been insufficient. The result has been a sporadic, discordant site without a core purpose or mission. Eventually I found myself writing on this blog simply because it is here and it's something that I've built. Once that was my only motivation, I found myself writing to it less and less.

I doubt that this is the end of my blogging career as a whole, but if I do start blogging again it will be in another capacity and it probably won't be really soon (though one never knows for sure). Seeing as how I used this blog to propose to my wife Camille, I doubt that I will ever take this site down completely, but I will no longer be updating it and if I start blogging again it won't be here.

I would really like to thank Kevin Whited for helping me get set up on Nucleus, Mike Ahlf for generously hosting the website (and all of the technical support involved with that), and Art Sammler for his contributions both as a reader and a writer. And thanks to everyone that made it a point to stop by long after I was updating regularly. Heck, thanks to those who stopped dropping by because it made this decision easier!

I'm sure that Sammler will keep writing over at Stone City. If either Mike or I start our own blog again, we will provide a link here.

Thanks again for everything. Blog News http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3627 Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:51:28 -0500 Positive Education Discrimination http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3626 One of Sammler's chief issues (the issue on which we originally crossed paths, interestingly enough) is his staunch belief that we're wasting our time sending so many kids to college.

It looks like he may have found an unlikely ally in Hillary Clinton:
Clinton spoke at the Manchester School of Technology, which trains high school students for careers in the construction, automotive, graphic arts and other industries. The school highlighted one of the nine goals she outlined: increasing support for alternative schools and community colleges.

"We have sent a message to our young people that if you don't go to college ... that you're thought less of in America. We have to stop this," she said.

Well, it's not exactly the same argument, but variations on a similar theme. One that I agree with. I much prefer this route than the more typical policy of expanding college education to an ever-increasing pool of Americans.

While I'm not sure that there is much that can be done about the number of kids attending college, I do believe that there is a lot that states can do to help guide kids towards more economically useful courses of study. One thing that I would advocate is actually increasing college tuitions a great deal, but then offsetting it with scholarships in areas of study that are geared towards jobs.

Most majors I can think of fall into one of three categories:

Vocational - These are degrees that would leave people ready to enter the workforce in a specific line of work. Examples: Engineering, computers, education, medicine, finance, and so on.
Generalist - These are degrees that would leave graduates well-educated and ready to enter the workforce in a number of ways, sort of like a current business degree except more classical or scientific in nature. Examples: Physics, biology, philosophy, political science, language communication, and so on.
Academic - These are more narrow degrees that further the cause of intellectual inquiry but are not immediately appliable to the workforce: Regional history (American history, British history, Russian history, etc), literature, theology, women's studies, ethnic studies, and so on.

Most scholarships would be given to vocational studies. Economically speaking, it would be the default. Part of me doesn't like this because I would prefer that more people get generalist degrees, but for a generalist degree to be useful it requires a degree of intelligence and dedication missing from a lot of today's college students. So the default would be vocational and someone trying to get that sort of degree would be paying the least.

There would be fewer scholarships given for generalist degrees in order to try to select the best and brightest, those that will likely turn their philosophy degree into a law degree down the line or some other line of post-graduate study like medical ethics, social development study, and so on. Competition to get into these schools would not necessarily be horrendous, so those that might not make the grade but are dedicated enough to save for it (or more likely have rich parents) can do it if they want, but they will get little help from the state.

Also difficult to get a scholarship in would be academic study. Some would be more difficult than others. For instance, a degree in history may not be as expensive because they can be translated into teaching jobs (whether teaching jobs would be given to this group or the education vocational group is up for discussion), but others have limited opportunity so there would be limited scholarship slots available. As with generalist degrees, they can be got without the scholarship, but they would be discouraged.

As time progresses the the government would review which degrees are leaving people either jobless, outside their field of expertise, or in jobs for which they should be overqualified, and these degree programs would have their scholarships cut back. Then the government would look at shortages and apply more scholarships there. It would be important to use a time horizon long enough to account for natural fluctuations in the market. Just because environmental engineering jobs are down this year from last does not mean that they won't be up again next year.

There would naturally be a lot of young people that wouldn't fit into this arrangement. They'd be uninterested in a vocational major but not have the grades or money for one of the other options. I consider this a feature rather than a bug. They would be forced to make the tough decisions before all the money is spent. They would have a number of options:

1) Some people excel at the college level and don't do quite as well at the high school level. I would make scholarships dependent on more than just a high school transcript. If the GPA isn't good enough, I'd like to see some scholarship exams that would allow people to prove their dedication and intelligence by studying and learning independently. This would also give opportunities to people that goofed off until they hit the real world and then learned why school matters. There would be an opening here for people to "game the system", but that's more a matter of designing the right test as much as anything. The downside is that writing and administering these tests would not be inexpensive.

2) They can forego higher education and enter a career path that does not require any formal education past high school.

3) They can get jobs and save up money so that they don't need the state's help.

4) They can try to get a loan. This is not desirable and could become an arms race in itself, but as long as there are students in need of money for college there will be student loans. I would think that private loan companies would take into account the student's need for the money is closely related to poor academic performance and/or choosing an uneconomical major. Both of which would suggest that they are a potential default risk.

Part of me doesn't like this plan because it puts an awful lot of social power in the hands of the government. Degree programs would be encouraged or discouraged for political rather than market-based reasons. On the other hand, this is a form of government accountability. Not so much telling people what they can and cannot do but rather economically looking at how it allocates its limited resources.

Not that it really matters because this model is something of a pipe dream. The government hates telling middle class kids "No!" and in a way that's what this would probably come across as doing. There is also a significant faction among those whose opinion matters that almost all higher education is good education. Nonetheless, in my little perfect world, this is how I would likely go about it. Academia http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3626 Thu, 31 May 2007 19:49:42 -0500 Betas http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3625 Via Q&O, we find this depressing news:
The study [of 48 news outlets, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism] also found that nine out of 10 stories focused on campaign tactics or the relative popularity of the candidates.

This is truly contemptible. This distribution of stories partly reflects the media's bias toward easily researched, simple stories with a patina of spurious cleverness, like analysis of a publicly visible advertising campaign; but such an extreme result must also be driven largely by demand. Media consumers have demonstrated an insatiable appetite for stories with little more content than "My candidate can beat up your candidate."

The only plausible explanation I can see is that most people are natural betas, who are more interested in watching the alphas struggle with one another than in trying to understand or influence the issues behind the personalities.
Unsorted http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3625 Thu, 31 May 2007 11:04:19 -0500 Moral Duty http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3624 It has been suggested that George Bush's determination to increase immigration and access to American citizenship is morally motivated: he values the welfare of non-Americans as well as of Americans, and the benefits to the former may greatly outweigh the harm to some of the latter.

There are two problems with this moral calculus. The first is that it opposes President Bush's duty to serve the interests of those who elected him, rather than of the whole world. The second is a simple question of efficacy: can the flame of freedom best improve the cold morass of human misery by being submerged in it? Unsorted http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3624 Thu, 31 May 2007 07:30:35 -0500 Name Games http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3623 I've mentioned in the past my disapproval of the tendency of some Republicans to emphasize the middle name of Democratic presidental contender Barack Hussein Obama. Like most presidential candidates, Obama does not go by all three names and few of them ever referred to Bill Clinton by William Jefferson Clinton. So I'm left to believe that some Republicans, conservatives, and Obama-haters have decided that it's supposed to be revealing to note that his middle name is what it is.

I would say that it reveals one of the more negative aspects of the Republican Party, but then I see Democrats doing something quite similar in my wife's home state.

Bobby Jindal, most likely the next governor of Louisiana, has run into a potential stumbling block:
WASHINGTON -- Mention the name "Bobby" in Louisiana political circles these days and most everyone will assume you are talking about Bobby Jindal, the popular second-term congressman now running at the top of the polls for governor.

But some Democrats would like to remind voters that Bobby Jindal has another name: Piyush.

In news releases, interviews and small talk, they frequently refer to Jindal by his Indian, given first name. Last week, "Piyush" popped out of the mouth of former Sen. John Breaux, D-La., who briefly considered running for governor.

Democrats say it's a way of throwing back the curtain on what they say is a "manufactured candidate" who has carefully crafted a public image that doesn't measure up to reality.

Jindal brushes it off as a "silly schoolyard tactic." Others, however, say it is a blatantly racist appeal that seeks to score political points by stoking biases many had hoped were on the wane in the Deep South.

"It's making fun of someone's name with a veiled reference to race," pollster Bernie Pinsonat said. "Republicans have played games with this. It's the first time I've ever seen Democrats resort to it."

Many believe that Jindal's heritage cost him the election in 2003. As the Fred Barnes outlined, a surprising number of generally Republican rural voters that went for David Duke several years back inexplicably crossed party lines to vote for Blanco in that contest. As went the Bubba vote, so goes the election.

So is that what they're trying to do here? Well, either they are or they are unfamiliar with how common it is for Americans of non-European heritage to often take on an "American" name. This is particular true of Indian Americans, and interestingly enough both of the examples that come to mind have taken to being called "Bob". I asked one of them about it recently and he said that there wasn't any tradition about using that name in particular, though. In any case, if you have a difficult to pronounce or foreign-sounding name, it makes a lot of sense going with something similar so that it doesn't become a sticking point when meeting people.

But, just as with emphasizing Obama's middle name, calling him Piyush is just slick enough that they can't be tacked outright racists.

Fortunately, whatever it is precisely that they're trying to do, it's unlikely to work. Louisiana http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3623 Tue, 29 May 2007 10:36:27 -0500 Lawsuits gone berserk http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3621 One of the oft-heard comments on American society is that lawsuits are overburdening it. I, for one, see both good and bad in this lawsuit.

The valid parts of the lawsuit:
- The bar should not have kept serving a drunk man, or at very least not allowed him to drive home knowing he was drunk.

The invalid parts:
- Suing the driver of a car that has stalled on the road: one would think that common sense indicates a stalled vehicle is difficult to move.
- Suing the tow truck operator who was in the process of removing that vehicle from the road: bad move in general.

First of all, you can do all the routine maintenance and preventative work on a vehicle you want, and there is still a chance it will stall. Parts break down.

Second - read this portion:
Police said Hargrove noticed the stalled vehicle and stopped to help. The report said he told officers he was there five to seven minutes before his truck was hit by Hancock's SUV. But Kantack said the tow truck may have been there up to 15 minutes, yet failed to get the stalled vehicle out of the way.

"Were the police contacted?" Kantack asked. "Why weren't flares put out? Why was the tow truck there for an exorbitant amount of time?"
Looking into the circumstances, we see a vehicle that was both spun out and stalled (not as easy to remove as a vehicle that simply has stalled: note that the tow truck was hit and not the vehicle, indicating it had spun at least sideways if not backwards). It takes time to hook up a tow truck (especially to load a vehicle onto a flatbed, as opposed to the more common two-wheel lifters).

Add to this a drunken idiot with twice the legal blood-alcohol limit and marijuana in his vehicle, and I think the portion of the lawsuit against the tow truck driver and owner of the stalled vehicle ought to be laughed right out of court. Land of the Free http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3621 Thu, 24 May 2007 17:27:40 -0500 Copyright http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3620 To paraphrase the Bard: "To Limit, or Not to Limit, That is the Question."

If copyright were forever, I couldn't have just done that. Or at very least, doing that, I'd risk getting sued. Yet in the New York Times, Mark Helprin tries to make us think that copyright should live forever; that 500 years or more from now, someone looking to republish, or rewrite, or simply print and hand a copy of, say, a Hardy Boys novel should need to go get permission.

Helprin tries to equate this to property rights. I'll just quote him here, lest I be accused of twisting his words:

Once the state has dipped its enormous beak into the stream of your wealth and possessions they are allowed to flow from one generation to the next. Though they may be divided and diminished by inflation, imperfect investment, a proliferation of descendants and the government taking its share, they are not simply expropriated.

That is, unless you own a copyright. Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren.


Where he goes wrong is that copyright is not a physical object, or a business entity. If (for the sake of argument) you were to build a business on selling books, for right or wrong, you will eventually need new books to sell. A business that sells widgets must produce a new widget for each customer, and theoretically must periodically re-work and update their product. A house maintains "ownership", but if your heirs don't pay their property taxes or the government exercises its right of Eminent Domain, it will be taken away from them.

Copyright is not a physical object, nor a business entity. It is instead like the other system that operates, as Helprin quotes, "for limited Times". That other system is patent, and patent and copyright are very similar to each other.

The patent system is based upon a simple premise: that an invention is valuable, but that the value does not come solely from its maker, but from what the maker draws from society and the public domain. No invention is crafted simply by itself; the inventor has the input of previous inventors, be they of the wheel, or fire, or TNT, or smokeless gunpowder, or the process to extract propane from crude oil, or to extrude silicon into a form upon which a computer chip can be printed. In short, no matter what invention may be patented, it is not created alone, but rather built upon the building blocks of inventions that have passed previously to the public commons. It therefore makes sense that, after a certain period of time, any new invention should then be "paid back" to the commons, in order to encourage future inventors to improve upon it or add to it, or use it in a new and creative way that will itself be patentable and of improvement to society.

Helprin, of course, has a stake in this. As a writer, he wants to hold onto what he calls 'his", blind to the contribution and presence of the now-publicly-available work of others that is inevitably a part of his own. Philosophers and Doctorates of literature will tell you that there are only 6 archetypal stories, and that any more "complex' stories can always be reduced and analyzed to find that these six archetypes are merely inserted or overlaid upon each other.

Nowhere is this truer than in the "storytelling juggernaut" of the 20th century, the behemoth known as Disney. Take a look at the works of Disney, and what will you find? The vast majority of their stories are shamelessly culled from the public domain, appropriated, twisted a bit, and sold out - and yet the Disney corporation claims copyright over these, and even has been known to file frivolous lawsuits against other companies that produced material based on the same publicly-available stories. Sleeping Beauty, The Sword and the Stone, Pocahontas, pretty much the whole library of Disney works from the very beginning (Steamboat Willie's music comes from various then-public-domain sources such as the folk tune Turkey in the Straw).

Copyrighted and patented ideas are drawn from the public pool. It is in repayment of this debt to the public pool that they must necessarily be returned, so that others can improve and change them to bring new ideas to the next generation. That copyright has been extended to obscene extremes - at the behest of juggernauts like Disney that could afford to shamelessly bribe legislators - is a terrible loss to all of society. Culture http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3620 Wed, 23 May 2007 12:20:39 -0500 Corn Ethanol - the new Snake Oil http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3618 The CBC's got a great article on what Corn Ethanol is doing to the price of food worldwide.

It's amazing how many things have corn in them - cornstarch, corn protein, and so on. Either we've added corn to it, or it's been fed on corn in the case of pork, beef, and chicken.

What's worse? The verdict on whether Ethanol is actually helping things at all is in - and it's not good. The 10%-blended ethanol gasoline (destructive to engines and fuel injectors already) turns out to be, mile for mile, no more efficient and no less polluting than regular non-Ethanol gasoline.

But in Canada, just like in the US, the corn lobby are getting all sorts of subsidies based on false promises that Ethanol would somehow help stop people from needing gas. It's just shameful. Commerce http://www.raw360.com/index.php?itemid=3618 Tue, 22 May 2007 17:29:30 -0500