Out of Control

My colleague Joel Schwartz responded to the story on EPA grantmaking to environmental groups (blogged here yesterday) with this insightful comment:

The irony is that the AP story gets the conflict of interest backwards. AP makes the mistake of thinking that NRDC and other activist groups might not want criticize EPA's policies because they're receiving money from EPA. In fact, EPA intends that much of the money they give to activists will be used to criticize or sue the agency for being too lax, with the intended result that EPA's power will be increased. The article suggests that environmental groups have a conflict of interest in their fiduciary obligation to EPA. But the conflict of interest is that EPA funds activist groups to do PR and file lawsuits that help maintain and enhance EPA's power and maintain the public fear necessary for continued public support for the regulatory-activist complex. A related conflict of interest, not addressed here, is that EPA (and state regulators) provide much of the funding for the health effects research that is then used to justify the need for EPA and state regulators.

- Joel

Looks like GAO is ringing in the New Year with a performance-based pay system:

The New Year brings a new pay system for employees at the Government Accountability Office.

GAO, which has been a leader in federal personnel reform and holds an exemption from most civil service rules, is introducing market sensitivity to its pay scale. The audit agency hired the global consulting firm Watson Wyatt to conduct a study of compensation for analysts and is making several changes based on those findings.

This year, the GAO is guaranteeing that all employees with a "meets expectation" or higher rating will receive at least a 2.6 percent salary adjustment, as long as their pay falls within a competitive market range. All pay hikes beyond that will be tied directly to performance ratings. Watson Wyatt found that comparable employers were raising pay 2.6 percent this year.

Pay day loans. To some, evil incarnate, a sugar trap for the sappy poor. Others recognize that no one is holding a gun to borrower's heads, and in fact this is a service the overwhelming majority of user's want and need and use responsibly. A good look at the issue here.

A new twist comes from Oregon, where credit unions are responding to the competitive pressur of payday loans by offering short term loans. A great example of competitive pressure leading to new services.

Of course, established lending institutions, like credit unions, are the most vociferous critics of pay day loans. Notice how in the Oregonian article this is all for the salvation of the customers. They are not about to admit they have been failing their customers by not offering such loans and the pay day loan outfits are just meeting the demand.

It's an old story that the incredible profits created by banning something so many people wants makes the war on drugs a machine for corrupting law enforcement personnel.

But the old story plays on, as in Arizona ". . . more than 40 soldiers, airmen, border guards and correctional officers took bribes from FBI agents posing as cocaine smugglers."

Pat Schneider, the top federal criminal prosecutor in Arizona, said he doesn't know whether government corruption is getting worse or it just seems that way because more public servants are getting caught.

That's reassuring! Just like the Tulia, TX story from a couple years ago (see the book).

Though I like to make a clear distinction between design-minded advocates of New Urbanism and the almost fanatical social engineer disciples of Smart Growth, there are still a lot of folks that equate the two. I found a great example today, and it's one that should rattle you if you (a) live in the suburbs and like it; (b) understand that older, inner-ring suburbs have become thriving melting pots and destinations for newly arrived immigrant populations; (c) understand that suburbs have been making tremendous strides in creating cultural amenities over the last couple of decades.

Here it goes...it's a rewrite of the Congress of New Urbanism charter from a snarky, anti-sprawl slant:

The Congress for the Continuation of Sprawl views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society's built heritage as the preferred method of development in America.

We stand for the deterioration of existing urban centers and towns within incoherent metropolitan regions, the continuation of sprawling suburbs as opposed to communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the destruction of natural environments, and the collapse of our built legacy.

We recognize that our physical solutions may not solve social and economic problems; neither do we promise long lasting economic vitality, community stability, and environmental health.We advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles:

neighborhoods should be ethnocentric in use and population; communities should be designed with the automobile in mind, with a lesser emphasis on the pedestrian; cities and towns should be shaped by laissez faire growth and amenities should be sufficiently separated, so as to facilitate reliance on the automobile; sub-urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that disregards local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.

We represent a broad-based citizenry, composed of public and private sector leaders, and multidisciplinary professionals, who are reaping the temporary benefits of sub-urban sprawl.

We are committed to clear-cutting forests and replacing them with asphalt and standardized "big box" buildings, despite the loss of local identity and community.

We dedicate ourselves to the decline of our homes, blocks, streets, parks, neighborhoods, districts, towns, cities, regions, and environment.

What condescending drivel... For a dose of reality on suburbia, check out this post.

Supporters of a water tax on Maine's largest bottlers fell roughly 1,400 signatures short of the number needed to place the proposal on the November 2006 ballot. Supporters were seeking a 20-cent tax on every gallon of water. Poland Spring, the world's third largest bottlers, was facing upwards of $100 million in new taxes.

Dick Dyer, a spokesman for the tax hike group suggested that it has "never been our intention to drive any of the water companies out of the state."

Too bad that's what would have happened. Maine already has a very fragile economy that suffers from the nations highest state and local tax burden. In addition, Poland Springs officials already plan on discussing the business climate with state officials before moving forward with plans to open a third bottling facility. They also noted that had the tax passed, they likely would have left the state.

Fox News hits on an old story--EPA gives millions a year in grants to enviro groups to fund their political activities.

EPA conducts about half of its work, or $4.3 billion in 2004, through grants, mostly to state, local and tribal governments. Non-profits account for about 7 percent of the total, including many ordered by Congress. Besides the environmental groups, many recipients are agriculture and industry allies with keen interest in EPA regulatory policies, along with academic, civic and other groups that advocate on health, the elderly and consumer issues.

Overall, the inspector general has cited grant oversight as an EPA weakness.

Put all the spin on this you may want to, using tax dollars to fund policy advocacy groups is crazy. Not only does it violate common sense, it undermines the decision process of the grant making organization--EPA/fed government. It also perverts the groups receiving the grants, which should be facing the market test for their advocacy and ideas by relying on support from people who share their views, not taxpayer funds. Ahh, but redistribution is so sweet when you are on the upside of it.

And by this I mean a new low, even by municipal wireless standards.

On Dec. 22, San Francisco released its RFP for its TechConnect citywide network. No matter how you feel about municipal wireless—it amounts to the most cynical attempt yet by a city administration to extract media attention from the muni wireless craze while making as little commitment as possible.

Flawed as they may be, municipal networks until recently have been sparked by genuine attempts to get quality, economical broadband access to those still unserved. Lately, however, municipal wireless has become a way to score some easy political points. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin managed to take some heat off his failure to get the necessary funding to rebuild and reinforce the city’s levees by proposing free broadband instead. And it worked.

In San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s call for free wireless, answered with a vague but provocative proposal from Google, was good for weeks of favorable coverage about San Francisco’s (read Newsom’s) ambitious plan to become a “unwired city” (even though Frisco already has more WiFi hotspots than any other U.S. city).

The San Francisco RFP, however, asks little from the get-go, setting the lowest possible bar for basic free service while offering what could be a wireless broadband coup to any company willing to cozy up with city officials.

Don’t take my word for it. San Francisco’s municipal wireless supporters are outraged. Just check out this article from the Bay Guardian or this posting from Webnetic.

As for me, I hate to say I told you so. No, wait a minute. I love to say I told you so. A comment I wrote for the Heartland Institute warns that TechConnect stands to turn into a franchise bid offering political fringe benefits.

...Groups like Media Alliance and CTFC say contracting with private companies to build and operate muni networks might allow political motivations rather than the public interest to dictate who wins the contract and has access to the new network. But this is no argument for city ownership of broadband networks, which would politicize network administration even more. Rather, it suggests cities should not be involved at all.

Today's Chicago Sun-Times includes a review of Robert Bruegmann's popular new book Sprawl that includes some interesting summaries of themes in the book that run counter to the "conventional wisdom" on urban sprawl. For example (emphases mine):

Among the suburban sprawl presumptions:

Sprawl leads to excessive energy consumption caused by long commutes: "The problem isn't private transportation," Bruegmann insists. "The problem is that we have an old-fashioned 19th-century technology, the internal combustion engine using fossil fuels. Let's solve that problem -- maybe by creating small, fuel-efficient vehicles -- and stop talking about putting the city back into its 19th-century state to make mass transit work. Instead, let's see what people want to do, then see how the city can be built around them."

Sprawl causes loss of farmland: "Despite all of the scare tactics that we've had for 200 years about population inevitably outstripping agricultural production, agriculture is on the rise throughout the globe, except in those places where people are killing each other in civil wars," Bruegmann says. "In the U.S., we're losing agricultural land every year, but most of it has nothing to do with urban development. Most of it's just because you don't need the land. The amount of land we have for agriculture is so great that about 50 percent of the annual income of farmers in the U.S. is government subsidy, because we just don't need all of that food."

Sprawl is bad for the environment: "What the farmer will do is take the land and strip off the native, natural vegetation, expose the land to all the elements, plant it with a monoculture and then douse it with chemicals," he says. "It's hard for me to see how that's a particularly environmentally sensitive use of the land. By comparison, low-density suburban or exurban development will have much greater biomass, much greater species diversity, and much less impact on the land."

Sprawl is ugly: "Most people are so sure that strip malls and big-box retail are bad, but what we find ugly today, we may not in the future," Bruegmann says. "Exactly the same criticism was made about fast food joints and service stations 50 years ago. Now, if you have a service station that's over 50 years old, or you have an intact McDonald's, it's so interesting, it's novel, it's quaint. You might not call it beautiful, but you're likely not to call it ugly anymore."

Sprawl is racist: In many Southern cities, it's true, whites fled city centers in the 1960s, but the pattern of out-migration in cities with minimal African-American populations, such as Minneapolis, was exactly the same, Bruegmann says. What's more, he adds, "Blacks move out of the city the same way whites do, when they have the chance, because nobody wants to be in neighborhoods with crime and bad schools. Those are problems that need to be fixed, but I simply don't believe that forcing people back into the city is the answer."

Overall, Bruegmann contends, sprawl is a natural, historic, worldwide process of decentralization that's been going on at least since ancient Rome and China, when the wealthy got away from the bustle and noise of city centers by building homes in outlying areas. More recently in the United States, he says, sprawl is essentially democratic. "Sprawl is largely the result of people of the middle class and even the working class getting what once only the wealthy had: single-family houses and private transportation."

Read the whole thing. And if you needed one more reason to pick up this book, here it is:

Still, the early critical response to Bruegmann's book has been mostly positive, with reviewers such as Witold Rybczynski, the architecture critic of the online magazine Slate, lauding Sprawl as an "iconoclastic little book" that "demonstrates that sprawl is not the anomalous result of American zoning laws, or mortgage interest tax deduction, or cheap gas, or subsidized highway construction, or cultural antipathy toward cities."

Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman is equally enthusiastic.

"The intellectual perception of sprawl is a snobbish one that says it's all crap, and Bob points out that it just ain't that way," Tigerman says.

I should have had this book on my Christmas list...thank goodness for gift cards...

(hat tip: Instapundit)

Cliff Slater argues that big oil's excess profits are good for us.

There is something breathtakingly audacious about politicians taking oil companies to task for “excessive profits” and considering a special “excess profits” tax. In other words, telling companies like Exxon Mobil that they have been taking more of our money than they should. This is especially droll coming from politicians who — always and incessantly — do precisely that with taxes.

Besides that, 35 percent of Exxon’s profits already go in taxes.[i] So, if the profits are excessive, so are the taxes on those profits, but we do not hear of any politicians calling for a “windfall taxes” rebate to us motorists.

. . .

However, if you still believe that Exxon is excessively profitable, then go buy some shares. A caveat though: In March of this year, when oil was $40 a barrel and before any hurricanes, you could have bought Exxon Mobil shares for $62. Today, with oil up to $55 a barrel, hurricanes galore, and sky-high gas prices, you can buy Exxon shares for $55 — a 10 percent decline.[v] You might want to figure that one out.

The always top-notch Tom Hazlitt looks at the lessons from AT&T's life and times.

Today, entrepreneurs, investors, and network operators around the globe yearn to learn from the AT&T experience. They will find four simple bewares: (a) of high-priced acquisitions; (b) of cheap credit; (c) of market boundaries defined by history; (d) of business models scripted by regulators.

North Texas stands to be a competitive hotbed for broadband services by this time next year. I’ve already reported on the Verizon’s plans to introduce its FiOS fiber-to-the-home service in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area as well as its other service areas, largely scattered in northeast and panhandle regions of the Lone Star State, thanks much to a state law passed last summer that authorized the state to grant blanket video franchises (See entry Dec. 14).

Now comes word that TXU Corp. will begin the largest roll-out of Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) service to date—aiming to cover its north Texas territory consisting of 2 million customers. As a broadband player, it will go up against AT&T (formerly SBC), Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications.

At this grand broadband soiree, BPL has been something of the celebrity invitee with a temperamental personality--the kind who can generate whispers of excitement and anticipation among other guests although no one’s sure if he’s going to show up.

But BPL finally might be finally making an entrance, further weakening the central case for government-owned networks—that the market can only support only one underlying infrastructure.

If TXU and its broadband partner, Current Communications, hold true to their schedule, communities in north Texas could have as many as five broadband access networks competing for business, all on different platforms.

There will be the cable company – using hybrid fiber/coax, migrating to fiber-to-the-home.
There will be the local phone company using DSL and fiber-to-the-node, also moving to fiber-to-the-home.
There will be the cell phone companies, providing data connections
There will be WiFi providers
There will be BPL.

What’s also notable is that each technology has its own particular strengths. Fiber-to-the-home may cost more, but it yields more value. Wireless connections may be a bit cumbersome for broadcast quality video, but they still can provide robust connections to the Internet and easily support integrated voice, email and Web surfing at a lower price.

BPL’s biggest selling point may not be consumer services at all (although TXU definitely want to go there). Much of BPL’s early business case is built around machine-to-machine communications, something that usually is overlooked when the discussion turns to broadband via fiber, coax or copper. But BPL begins with the notion that just about all remotely managed equipment, from ATMs to soda machines, are plugged into to the electric grid and therefore can transmit information as to their status without need of a second network.

Hence there are immediate commercial applications that owners can take advantage of without the expense of a separate high-bandwidth connection or waiting for wireless. And unlike fiber or DSL, build-out is not dependent on high average revenue per user (ARPU). Indeed, TXU’s 10-year, $150-million agreement with Current will begin with internal applications. According to the Wall Street Journal, TXU will use Current’s BPL technology to get instantaneous alerts about outages and to gather information about its electrical system. The technology eventually could be used to read meters and even to remotely shut off or turn on power.

Ultimately, TXU wants to move into consumer broadband, an opportunity that the state of Texas makes easier because it allows power companies to set up independent business units that can make investments and retain profits. In other states, regulations often require that profits made from outside ventures, including telecom, be distributed to ratepayers, even if the initial investment came from other sources. It’s another way regulators, while clamoring for broadband competition and investment, foul it up.

But I digress. In Cincinnati, Current and Cinergy operate the nation’s largest commercial BPL service deployment to-date, covering approximately 50,000 homes with plans for expansion. Current also has ongoing trials with Southern California Edison, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Potomac Electric Power Company near its Maryland headquarters and Hawaiian Electric Company in Honolulu

As a privately-held start-up attracting eager investors, Current Communications also counters the repeated claim that unless government gets involved as a competitor, service will be dominated by the “duopoly” phone and cable companies. Google, Goldman Sachs and Hearst have invested a total of $100 million in the Current. That came in addition to some $70 million raised from Cinergy, EnerTech Capital and Liberty Associated Partners, a unit of Liberty Media. With this kind of capital flowing to what still amounts to an expensive and unproven technology, it’s hard to argue that the cable and telephone companies have locked up the market.

It is also why market-driven innovation loses out when government chooses to subsidize services. True, BPL might be a bust. But if turns out to be an inexpensive and better alternative, communities that have gone into hock to fund wireless or fiber systems will loose this competitive benefit. You can’t expect municipal electric utilities, when they’ve got millions of dollars tied up in one technology, to undermine it with another, even if it would provide their users with a truly cheaper alternative.

Far from conceding the future to telephone and cable, the growing broadband supply chain wants alternatives, too. Only it is willing to risk its own capital. Each day’s news offers more evidence that cities and towns need not pick taxpayer pockets to create broadband competition.

In the wake of the possible end of the NYC transit strike, Geoff Segal will discuss transit privatization on Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo today at 4:05 pm ET.

There is no question that the economy is doing much better. And no surprise, state coffers are lined with cash...and spending measures will soon be debated in states around the country.

Scott Pattison, the executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers is right on when he notes that the memory of the recent downturn and the deficits remains strong in many states and that they should act as a brake for new programs.

Unfortunately, states' don't have a strong track record here - that's why state spending limits are so important.

The Digital Age Communications Act (DACA) of 2005, introduced last week by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), represents Congress’ best and soundest approach to federal and state telecom policy reform so far.

Rather than attempt to shoehorn regulations designed for era of monopoly phone service to fit a competitive market for integrated broadband services, DACA is a ground-up restructuring of the regulatory regime. It calls for a “single, unified, minimally pervasive” approach to telecom regulation. The bill has a great starting point—it does not create a lengthy glossary of service provider categories. The legislation simply addresses providers of “electronic communications networks.” No more, no less.

Just as it recognizes the reality of the new competitive industry, the DACA legislation also recognizes that a competition serves consumers best. It seeks to end price regulation, discriminatory taxation and unnecessary subsidies that support obsolete business models and prevent new investment to take root. At the forefront of this is the bill’s dramatic new plan for universal service, built on the principles of affordability, efficiency, technological neutrality and transparency.

DACA is by far the boldest among the telecommunications bills introduced in Congress. Yet ironically, it is also the simplest. It seeks neither to shackle service providers nor coddle them. The bill respects market forces and does not assume that, to create opportunities for one group, the government needs to penalize others.

Instead DACA provides the industry as a whole with the necessary freedom and flexibility that is desperately needed to move forward toward creating an environment of rich, affordable and ubiquitous service.

The DACA bill draws heavily from work spearheaded by the Progress & Freedom Foundation, which in its course sought input from a number of policy analysts, including myself, at free market think tanks across the country. Much of that work, as well as analysis, comments and blogging, can be found here.

Might the NYC transit strike at least get more people to take a closer look at telecommuting?

The Partnership for New York, a business consortium, estimated that 20 percent of the city's work force in its major corporations did not show up for work today, although many may have been telecommuting.

Article here.

Ands, as I point out in this recent TCS Daily piece, telecommuting makes a rather nice gift.

New York's Taylor Law made transit strikes illegal, but as we’re seeing now, it's not so great at preventing strikes from happening.

Here’s Wendell Cox:

The Taylor Law was enacted because the state leadership realized how important transit is to New York City. There are no close parallels anywhere else in North America. But laws are of little use if they are not followed and of even less use if they are not enforced.

Cox notes that at least more New York-area commuters have strike insurance:

But crippling New York and Manhattan is no longer enough to cripple the New York metropolitan area. Now, nearly two thirds of the population and 60 percent of the jobs are in the suburbs, outside New York City. Residents of Mount Vernon commute to their Stamford jobs, in confidence that Interstate 95 is not on strike. And no one needs to fear that the entrances to Interstate 287 in New Jersey or the Cross-Westchester will be closed.

Transit commuters in cities like London, where all subway and bus lines are contracted out, enjoy another kind of strike insurance. The NY Sun editorial staff thinks it’s time for the Big Apple to break the MTA’s monopoly. Competing companies, after all, don’t have the luxury of captive customers. If they strike, they lose business:

And rather than every subway line in the city being shut down in a strike, there would be an alternate route. It's one reason that instead of a Metropolitan Car Rental Authority we have Hertz and Avis and Thrifty and Budget and Dollar and Alamo and National and Enterprise. Competition results in better pricing and service and reliability.

John Avlon (no link) notes another way to get strike insurance:

Already, trains in Paris, Cairo, and Calcutta operate with computerized or automated systems [London too]. In Paris, the Meteor Project was launched in 1998, with an automatic piloting system that controls the train line's traffic, regulates speed, manages alarm devices, and allows for traffic of automatic and traditional conductor trains on the same line. There have been no serious accidents reported since this system deployed in the late 1990s, and more than a billion people have been transported. Computers make the trains run on time and they don't threaten to walk off the job.

Back to Cox, who has some thoughts on those without strike insurance:

There is a sad lesson, both for transit and those who enjoy New York's unique urban lifestyle. It is the lesson of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. Those who suffered most in New Orleans were dependent upon transit to get out of town, because, generally for want of income, they did not have the cars that provided the avenue of escape for almost everyone else. This large population of the forgotten poor learned that their incompetent city administration was not there when they most needed it. Throughout the New Orleans area, it was those fortunate enough to own their own cars that got out.

It is similar, with a twist, in New York. Of course, there are many households with insufficient income to have cars and, like in New Orleans, they are dependent upon transit. However, unlike anywhere else in the United States, New York has a large number of households choosing not to have a car even though they can afford it. They enjoy a high-quality urban life, at least in part, because of the service provided by the New York City Transit Authority. But today they, like less affluent transit riders, have been abandoned by a local transit labor movement out of control.

Early this morning 33,700 New York City subway and bus workers went on strike. Nice time for a strike: 20-degree weather and the height of the retail season.

"If it goes the full week," said Burt P. Flickinger III, a retail industry analyst, referring to the strike, "sales could be off 50 percent or more this week," which would translate to the loss of 5 to 10 percent of the entire year's profits. "In terms of lost operating income for New York-based retailers, it could be a quarter to half a billion dollars if they lose the entire week."

What’s at the heart of the matter is hardly surprising:

The [MTA] dropped its demand to raise the retirement age for a full pension to 62 for new employees, up from 55 for current employees. But the authority proposed that all future transit workers pay 6 percent of their wages toward their pensions for their first 10 years of employment, up from the 2 percent that current workers pay. Roger Toussaint, president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, announcing the strike at a 3 a.m. news conference, tried to portray the action as part of a broader effort for social justice and workplace rights.

"New Yorkers, this is a fight over whether hard work will be rewarded with a decent retirement," he said. "This is a fight over the erosion, or the eventual elimination, of health-benefits coverage for working people in New York. This is a fight over dignity and respect on the job, a concept that is very alien to the M.T.A."

Retiring at age 55 with a full pension, not having to contribute to health insurance—many private sector workers would love to be disrespected that way.

Article here.

Addressing regulatory issues from a narrow perspective has dangers, Carol Wilson, editor-at-large at Telephony, reminds readers in an on-line perspective this week. Wilson, has covered the industry for some 20 years (and, in the interest of full disclosure, is a former colleague of mine) and has reported on policy through numerous political cycles.

Wilson does not always come down on the free market side, but she has consistently urged regulators to see the big picture and to be careful about forcing the industry to maintain service frameworks that market forces are aggressively breaking down. Her latest e-mail commentary from Telephony OnLine looks at the outcry over a la carte programming, and she gives several reasons, including trends in the advertising market, to argue that long-term, the concept will be a non-starter.

But although consumers view a la carte programming as a way to pay only for what they want and not for what can seem to be an overwhelming amount of programming, I think in the end, they will wind up paying more for less.

And less is not where the video entertainment industry is headed--with the growth of video-on-demand titles moving into the thousands from cable companies and from Verizon via its FiOS TV, a dumbed down cable offering hardly seems to be the ticket.

In the meantime, the fundamental means of support we've all taken for granted during years of viewing high-quality programming at low cost--advertising--is under attack from all sides. As TiVo-like services such as digital video recorders gain popularity, fewer consumers actually view ads, choosing instead to view programming when they choose to, rather than when it is broadcast. The delivery of TV programming to iPods, cell phones and other devices creates additional means of revenue, but it's not clear that these will replace billions in ads.

At the same time all this is happening, advertising revenue for Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo! is on a sharp incline and is expected to overtake basic cable ad dollars.

Rather than try to address one piece of the puzzle, it would make more sense to view the big picture. A la carte cable offerings and family tiers are likely to be a short-term option that is more politically correct than market friendly.

The Falcon rocket will accomplish quite a bit more than just getting to space:

• It will be the first privately developed, liquid fueled rocket to reach orbit and the world's first all new orbital rocket in over a decade.
• The main engine of Falcon 1 (Merlin) will be the first all new American hydrocarbon engine for an orbital booster to be flown in forty years and only the second new American booster engine of any kind in twenty-five years.
• The Falcon 1 is the only rocket flying 21st century avionics, which require a small fraction of the power and mass of other systems.
• It will be the world's only semi-reusable orbital rocket apart from the Shuttle.
• Most importantly, Falcon 1, priced at $6.7 million, will provide the lowest cost per flight to orbit of any launch vehicle in the world, despite receiving a design reliability rating equivalent to that of the best launch vehicles currently flying in the United States.

More, including launch updates, here.

In a Dec. 15 column , Jonathan Krim of the Washington Post nailed the network neutrality issue as being all about validating property rights for content and applications on the Internet.

The trouble is that Krim sees this as a bad thing. As I noted a few days ago, I think we’ve pretty much reaching the limit as broadband penetration can go as a plain vanilla service. And trying to enforce a common baseline best-effort Internet through network neutrality, far from being a spark for broadband, is downright counterproductive.

What horrifies Krim about a world without net neutrality?

“In this world, if the travel site Orbitz pays the freight, it will work faster and better on your computer than Travelocity. And of course any service provided by the network carrier itself will go to the head of the line,” he writes.

This is another way of saying that a carefully crafted business relationship between Orbitz and a network carrier could make the online travel purchasing even simpler and easier than it is now.

Explain to me why this is so bad? Explain to me where this hurts consumers? Most of all, explain to me how this will hurt broadband uptake in the U.S.?

Krim confuses democracy with mediocrity. He compunds the error when he repeats some conventional but incorrect assumptions. For starters, he states matter-of-factly the common belief that the Internet is unowned. The Internet is indeed owned—-all the routers, PCs, servers and content out there, somewhere along the line were purchased (or, in the case of content, created) by someone. What gives the Internet its unique power is that numerous devices can easily connect to each other, and that the Net’s central components—processing power, bandwidth and storage are cheap.

Second, he says with the current Internet, “the sky’s the limit.” Certainly today’s Internet is incredibly versatile, but still leaves a lot to be desired. Spam, viruses, deliberate attacks are all to common. Porting access and applications across devices is still difficult. A better, more user-friendly Internet requires tighter integration between the way different software and software applets can automatically combine and work together. Network neutrality would slam the door on this because it would prevent two or more parties from getting together to make their part of the Internet work together better than best effort.

Without the boost this kind of differentiation provides, the market will continue to underachieve and investment in infrastructure will continue to sluggish. Rather than fear a clarification of property rights on the Internet, a more appropriate response is, “It’s about time!”

Infrastructure providers need a reason to invest. That means they need be able to garner revenue through leveraging their assets.

What Krim at the end, is advocating is that we are better off with a mediocre, best effort Internet experience rather than allow any to partner or experiment in ways that might create very rich and useful value propositions.

Our compadres at Reason Magazine with their blog Hit and Run were voted the best group blog of the year.

Congrats!

"This old concept that all of us are going to live in a three-bedroom home, you know, this 2,500 square feet, with a big front yard and a big backyard — well, that's an old concept."

Not a very big deal if some sprawl hating activist says this. It is a pretty big deal when it comes from the mouth of the mayor of Los Angeles.

More here.

Some good news from Michigan...next year, state voters will get the chance to approve a constitutional amendment restricting the exercise of eminent domain by state and local governments:

The Michigan Legislature today approved Senate Joint Resolution E, a proposed state constitutional amendment that would restrict state and municipal governments’ ability to use eminent domain to seize private property. The resolution was originally introduced in the Michigan Senate on Aug. 31, in the wake of citizen outrage over the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Kelo v. New London. The resolution's approval by the Legislature means the proposal will be placed before the state’s voters in 2006.

"The proposed amendment would significantly strengthen private property rights in Michigan," said Patrick J. Wright, a senior legal analyst at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a nonprofit research and educational organization based in Midland, Mich. "If approved by Michigan voters, this amendment will place the burden of proof on the government to show that a taking is for a genuine public use, specifically excluding the transfer of property to private individuals or businesses for purposes of 'economic development' or 'enhancement of tax revenues.' The amendment will also require that when government officials base a taking on 'blight,' they provide clear and convincing proof of blight on a property-by-property basis, thereby preventing them from casually condemning entire neighborhoods. Under this language, Michigan property owners will not be punished for the blighted property of their neighbors."

This is interesting:

[D]ecades of "green" regs have significantly dampened the growth of the American worker's real wages. To see why, it is helpful to review some economic history.

Economists have noted a slowdown in the growth of output in the U.S. economy from the early 1970s to the mid 1990s. After 1973, when the cool-off began, the annual increase in real GDP fell from 3.6 percent per year to 2.8 percent. In human terms, this meant that millions of Americans had to delay the purchase of a new home or car, buy cheaper quality clothing, and save less of their incomes than they would have had the economy remained vibrant. For those at the margins of our economy, slower growth meant a precarious existence between the Scylla of a dead-end job and the Charybdis of the welfare state.

According to the 2005 Economic Report of the President, the growth of real output declined because annual labor-productivity growth slowed from 2.5 percent (prior to 1973) to 1.5 percent (from 1973 to 1995). Consequently, real weekly earnings -- what workers took home in inflation-adjusted dollars -- actually decreased during much of the latter period.

Although the oil-supply shocks, stagflation and price controls of the 1970s have often been blamed for inaugurating the economic slowdown, environmental regulations -- particularly air- and water-pollution compliance -- also took a heavy toll. In a study published in the 1995 Yale Journal on Regulation, economist James C. Robinson (currently with U. C. Berkeley’s School of Public Health) found that between 1974 and 1986, manufacturers’ direct costs of complying with environmental regulations had increased to just over one percent of the value of manufactured goods. Furthermore, multifactor productivity -- the efficiency of labor, machinery, and other inputs working together -- had fallen about 11.4 percent short of where it would have been without the edicts of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

. . . .

In response to pressure to reduce environmental compliance costs, the EPA recently selected only 42 regulatory reforms to implement. These reforms were taken from a list of more than 700 suggested by the public, according to an agency official who testified at a congressional hearing on the issue last September. This may seem promising but is insufficient. Lawmakers should require the EPA to explain, case by case, why it rejected the vast majority of reforms suggested by the public. Making the agency more transparent would help make it more accountable, as well as facilitate needed reform. Similarly, state lawmakers should make state-level environmental agencies more transparent.

Good call. A reorientation towards transparency, accountability, and performance are the perfect recipe for reform in bureaucracy run amok.

One additional thought...I'd wager that the public's currently lukewarm support for environmental protection would drop off significantly if people really knew (1) what the true costs of regulation are, and (2) what the real world, bottom-line impacts on families are.

The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel has a great op-ed today using the current legal hubbub over Oregon's Measure 37 to launch a discussion about judicial activism and the need for greater diligence on the part of voters that ultimately decide the makeup of the bench:

Reformers, take note. There's a big lesson to be learned from this state's ongoing, bare-knuckle fight over property rights. Ballot initiatives are all well and good, but they are only half the equation. First, voters must boot judges who legislate from the bench.

Oregonians, like many others, have been fighting to force their state government to honor property rights. Like reformers in other states, residents here had seized upon the one tool more powerful than entrenched state politicians: the ballot initiative. In 2000 and again in 2004, voters passed measures to protect landowners from state regulations that reduced their property value.

Yet nothing has changed. This is because initiatives are only as powerful as the court system lets them be. Two separate judges struck down the property measures on embarrassing legal grounds. And voters can't count on a state Supreme Court that revels in meritless decisions to right things on appeal.

. . . .

Oregon judges can operate this way because they have near-foolproof job protection. The state still allows its judges to put an "i" (for "incumbent") next to their names on the ballot, which gives them a huge advantage in elections. Combine this with voters' traditionally apathetic approach to judicial elections, and it is no surprise that no judge in Oregon has lost a re-election for at least a decade, if not longer.

This may change. Already a local group is collecting signatures to recall Judge James. But more important, voters are pledging to make the judiciary their top priority in upcoming elections. In doing so, they join reformers across the country who in the past year have begun tossing out court incumbents, encouraging real judicial races, and demanding judicial elections be more fair.

In fact, 39 states hold some form of judicial elections. Good-governance types are already arguing that the new partisan focus on judicial candidates threatens the integrity of the courts, and that may be a debate worth having. But for now, the fact remains that it is voters who are tasked with filling the bench. And to that extent, they have a right to choose candidates who respect the law--and the wishes of citizens.

Full article here.

After mixed results in forays into consumer electronics over the years, Wal-Mart hit it big with a $398 laptop PC. The retail relationship it forged with Hewlett Packard is chronicled in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

The elevator summary is that Wal-Mart, which was losing electronics sales to big box discounters such as Best Buy and Circuit City, counterattacked by joining forces with HP, which itself was lagging in the PC market.

Wal-Mart had attempted computer retailing in the past, but with inconsistent results. This fall, however, the $398 HP Pavilions, with a 15-inch LCD screen, a 40-Gb hard drive and a CD-Rom, flew off the shelves. The Journal reports most stores sold out within minutes of opening the day after Thanksgiving. The low-price laptops are also out of stock on Wal-Mart.com.

Something’s happening that many, especially those who contend that government intervention is required to bridge the digital divide, said would not. Market mechanisms are driving PC prices down to where they now reach the low-end of the market.

City officials in Philadelphia, San Francisco and other cities say we need tax subsidies to get computers into low-income households. But can any city program beat $398? And the price point could even be lower by the time Philadelphia and other cities get their own programs going. And let’s not kid ourselves, no city can purchase at the volume Wal-Mart can. HP’s margins were cut to the bone; offset, according to the Journal, because it shipped 34 planeloads and 221 truckloads of PCs and accessories to Wal-Mart stores nationwide.

Nothing’s been said yet about WiFi or Internet connectivity, but the resounding success of the Wal-Mart-HP holiday tie-up will get the attention of the industry, which itself has been cagey about predicting when the low-end would truly develop. Going into 2006, however, don’t expect Target, Best Buy and Circuit City to sit around slack-jawed. Someone’s going to up the ante.

Let’s also remember that HP was a finalist in Philadelphia Wireless’ municipal broadband bid. Although HP lost that contest to EarthLink, it is still seeking a wireless play. This makes HP’s choice of Wal-Mart as a retail channel is as provocative as it is promising.

If HP had won the bid in Philadelphia, would Wal-Mart have been in line to be a wireless retail partner?

Most cellular companies sell through big boxes, so the idea of bundling telecom equipment and service is not alien. For a service provider such as EarthLink, which is staking its future on wireless service, a big box alliance offers a national sales channel that is deep and wide. It certainly means less dependence on direct mail, free CDs, and expensive ties to PC vendors, whom they pay to pre-load introductory software and a display a desktop icon in hopes that someone, somewhere, will point and click.

Speculation aside, when a high-end technology company like HP teams with a discount retailer like Wal-Mart, it validates the free market approach to consumer IT and telecom. While municipalities waste time and taxpayer money trying to devise government programs to get cheap PCs into people’s hands, the market went and did it—faster than anyone thought.

Canadian auto regulators are testing a system that would enforce speed limits by making it harder to push down the car's gas pedal once the speed limit is passed …

More here.

Thanks to Chris Thompson for the link.

Municipal Broadband: Digging Beneath the Surface available here.

Digital Divisions, a report on the demographics of internet use here.

A whole bunch of Wal-Mart studies, from different points of view, here.

[R]esearchers at Duke University have determined that some of the most cited statistics on engineering graduates are inaccurate [study here].

Statistics that say the U.S. is producing 70,000 engineers a year vs. 350,000 from India and 600,000 from China aren't valid, the Duke team says. We're actually graduating more engineers than India, and the Chinese numbers aren't quite what they seem. In short, America is far ahead by almost any measure, and we're a long way from losing our edge.

Unfortunately, the message students are getting is that many engineering jobs will be outsourced and U.S. engineers have a bleak future of higher unemployment and lower remuneration. This could result in a self-fulfilling prophecy, as fearful young scholars stick to supposedly "outsourcing-proof" professions. In other words, we have more to fear from fear itself.

It’s interesting how much gets lost in translation:

The word "engineer" didn't translate well into different Chinese dialects and had no standard definition. We were told that reports received by the ministry from Chinese provinces didn't count degrees in a consistent way. A motor mechanic or a technician could be considered an engineer, for example. Also, the numbers included all degrees related to information technology and specialized fields such as shipbuilding.

There were also "short-cycle" degrees, which were typically completed in 2 or 3 years. These are equivalent to associate degrees in the U.S. Nearly half of China's reported degrees fell into this category.
…

We found that the U.S. was graduating 222,335 engineers, vs. 215,000 from India. The closest comparable number reported by China is 644,106, but it includes additional majors. Looking strictly at four-year degrees and without considering accreditation or quality, the U.S. graduated 137,437 engineers, vs. 112,000 from India. China reported 351,537 under a broader category. All of these numbers include information technology and related majors.

The author’s bottom line:

We hear repeatedly that America is in trouble and that the root cause lies with our education system. There's no doubt that K-12 science and math could be improved, and few will dispute that America needs to invest more in education and research.

However, our higher education system isn't in trouble -- in fact, it's still the world's best. We spend the most on research, produce the most patents…

But how important is spending or producing patents?

As MIT researcher Michael Schrage pointed out in a controversial op-ed piece in the Financial Times recently, there's no verifiable link between the number of patents granted and innovation. In fact, there's not even a verifiable link between corporate R&D spending and innovation:

"Any policymaker, chief executive or innovation champion who relies on R&D intensity and R&D budgets as a meaningful or usable metric to assess global competitiveness virtually guarantees shoddy analysis and distorted decisions. Few things reveal less about a company's ability to innovate cost-effectively than its R&D budget."

Moreover, a recent Booz Allen Hamilton research study pointed out companies have mistaken R&D spending as a proxy for innovation. It's just not possible to spend your way to innovation. The consulting firm analyzed the world's Top 1000 corporate R&D spenders and found no substantial evidence to corroborate the conventional wisdom that greater R&D spending leads to more innovation. In fact, there was no link whatsoever between R&D spending and key financial factors such as growth, profitability and shareholder return.

And yet the two articles (here and here) have much in common. Like the first, the second argues that the U.S. is doing better than gloomy reports suggest. Here the issue is innovation, but again much of the confusion is definitional in nature. It’s not really fair to measure innovation on the basis of patents because:

companies no longer produce patents and innovations in the same way that they produce widgets. Focusing on a metric like "number of patents granted" is simply not an intellectually honest way of calculating how innovative a nation is.

Despite glowing out-of-town notices in Philadelphia, San Francisco and New Orleans, municipal wireless advocates are concerned that the show might flop on Broadway. That’s why some of the most vocal proponents of municipal wireless, including Andrew Rasiej, a municipal technology consultant in New York, are urging city officials there to delay, or perhaps halt, any muni wireless plans.

“The worst thing that could happen is for the city to try to build one these networks and have it fail," Rasiej said. “It would set the whole muni Wi-Fi movement way back.”

In other words, failure on as visible a stage as the Big Apple would so shake the doctrinal foundation of the municipal wireless movement—that local governments can do a better job than the competitive market at delivering reliable, inexpensive broadband service--that it’s best if muni didn’t go there at all.

Speaking of Portland, looks like they can't afford to build new roads to help reduce congestion:

Although traffic congestion is hurting businesses throughout the Portland area, transportation officials say they have no money to begin building the new roads or additional lanes that could speed shipments and deliveries.

Approximately $630 million is spent on transportation projects and operations in the metropolitan region every year, split almost evenly between road and mass transit projects.

But, according to officials, the road money is not even enough to pay all maintenance needs, and most of the transit money cannot simply be shifted to roads because of transportation funding policies.

Randal O'Toole makes an astute observation on this:

Yet they seem to have money to build light-rail lines, streetcar lines, and other transit boondoggles. In 2003, transit carried just 2.3 percent of passenger travel in the Portland area, about 0.9 percent of which was rail and the rest bus. Of course, transit carried virtually none of the region's freight. Why should the region spend half its money on 2.3 percent of travelers?

Good question. Call me naive, but I believe that most taxpayers would find this a really compelling question with an obvious response -- "hmmmm...when you put it that way, spending gobs on transit seems like throwing money into a black hole."

O'Toole adds more:

Before seeking more money from taxpayers, planners should make sure the money they have is spent effectively. They should estimate the benefits and costs of all potential congestion-reducing projects and rank them, funding only those that reduce the most congestion per dollar. But this would rule out the rail lines that Portland planners love, many of which actually increase congestion because they occupy lanes formally open to autos.

Makes a ton of sense, but perhaps too much sense for the planners who've invested so much into smart growth and transit-oriented development. Basing spending on performance -- performance at reducing congestion, that is -- runs counter to the very core of their belief system: transit must be pursued at all costs (literally). For them, reducing congestion is far less important of a goal than reengineering society with the aim of getting citizens to make the "right" transportation choices.

Joel Kotkin had a great piece in Sunday's The Oregonian drawing an analogy between the Mecca of urban planning -- Portland, Oregon -- and Narcissus:

Portland is becoming what I call an Ephemeral City. What do ephemeral cities do? Not much by traditional standards. They don't create a lot of jobs for working or middle-class people. Instead they mostly exist to celebrate themselves and provide an attractive setting for visitors and would-be migrants.

But can a city survive -- and thrive -- primarily as a marketer of an urban experience?

An ephemeral city doesn't compete with lesser places -- you know, those ugly cities with functional warehouses and factories, Wal-Marts and strip malls -- for jobs, companies or investors. An ephemeral city's economy relies largely on a high level of self-esteem among its residents.

Four decades ago, author Neil Morgan used the term "narcissus of the West" to describe an already self-indulgent San Francisco. Now it's time for the City by the Bay to move over -- the City of Roses wants to take its place in front of the mirror.

To some extent, this high regard, like that of any well-chiseled middle-age narcissist, reflects something of a Portland reality. Portland, as its boosters are forever telling everyone, is a physically attractive place. Parts of the city -- like the much ballyhooed Pearl District -- look very much like famed urbanist Jane Jacobs' idealized urban district.

Rhapsodizers often miss the differences between Portland today and Jacobs' gritty Manhattan neighborhoods of more than 40 years ago. Those New York areas were home to large numbers of families and immigrants; they boasted both real bohemians (those without money) as well people who worked with their hands. Most residents were there for employment and family; many hoped they'd move up into a nicer neighborhood someday.

. . . .

Even before Al Gore, looking out from one of his estates, discovered sprawl, Portland's planners declared war on single-family homes, backyards and insufficiently dense development. To stomp out such deviant behavior, the city -- to the hosannas of the planning profession -- proudly imposed tough restrictions, notably the urban growth boundary, on new development.

Unfortunately, Portland's green urbanism has produced some unexpected results. As regulation helped boost the housing prices in the close-in areas, the middle class has moved farther and farther out. It turns out that most families -- yes, they still exist -- usually opt not to raise their kids inside sardine cans if they can at all help it.

There's a lot more. Read the whole thing for an on-target assessment of Portland's past, present, and future.

In a testament to the positive effect of statewide franchising, Verizon began rolling out its FiOS fiber-optic based video service this week in six Texas communities, offering consumers in those areas their first opportunity for choice in terrestrial-based video, Internet and broadband services.

This initial deployment spearheads Verizon’s aggressive plan to roll-out FiOS, an integrated broadband service delivered via a fiber-optic connection to the home, in 16 cities and towns in north Texas. The company hopes to pass 400,000 homes and reach 1 million viewers by the end of 2006, according to a report at Telephony OnLine.

Thanks to a new law passed this summer by the Texas State Legislature, Verizon and AT&T (formerly SBC), along with some 60 other telephone companies in Texas, now have the right to apply for statewide franchises to offer video services. This changed the procedure whereby service providers had to negotiate franchise fees in each community, a process that would have slowed deployment of alternative broadband services by months or even years. Progress in Texas toward greater broadband competition is being watched closely in other states, many of which are mulling similar bills. At the federal level, Senate Bill 1504, the Ensign-McCain Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act, would replace local franchising with a national franchise authority.

Hey, mayors across America, have I got a proposition for you!

When civic pressures weigh heavy, never fear! Because Municipal WiFi is here!

I only half jest. Following the example of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who got reams of great press across the country for doing nothing but suggesting that municipal wireless was a civil right, mayors in cities large and small have seized on municipal WiFi as a way to attract breathless media and distract attention from more mundane administrative woes.

In a new column, Sam Staley says part of the blame for increased housing prices goes to outdated and unnecessary zoning laws:

"...only about 6 percent of the nation is developed. Two-thirds of New Jersey, the nation's most developed state, is open space. We have plenty of land to build homes - if politicians let them be built.".

Full column here.

Len Gilroy on the housing shortage here.

Reason's growth research and commentary here.

Big deal:

Asked to compare eight difficult periods of the nation’s history, 46 percent of the 354 professors who responded to a nationwide survey agreed the current era was the least trying. The Civil War, 55 percent said, was the toughest.

Researchers at the Siena Research Institute of Siena College came up with the survey after hearing students comment they felt today’s era was one of the most trying in America’s history.

‘‘It’s an issue of perspective,’’ said Thomas Kelly, a professor emeritus of history and American studies at Siena who helped conduct the survey, which was released Thursday.

‘‘With very few exceptions most generations have confronted enormous kinds of problems and have to greater or lesser degrees coped,’’ he said.

Next to the Civil War — which threatened the nation’s very existence and cost the lives of more than 600,000 people — the poll found the Revolutionary War and the Great Depression to be the most trying, followed by Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution, World War II, the Cold War, World War I and today.

Article here; via Fark.

I have telecommuting piece in the new-look, new-name TCSDaily.

The flexibility issue also comes up a lot in this Working Mother magazine examination of the top 10 worker friendly companies.

This from today's Washington Post:

These 21st-century traveling possibilities are the result of fast-moving efforts in Virginia and Maryland to build a network of express toll lanes -- roads on which tolls increase when traffic levels rise to manage demand and prevent jams -- that would parallel nearly every major route in the Washington area. The existing routes would remain free -- and packed.

The vision of a regionwide network of these highways has suddenly come into focus just a year after Virginia and Maryland first showed serious interest in the concept. Maryland plans to begin construction on its first express lanes next year, while Virginia plans to build them on a 14-mile stretch of the Beltway within five years.

The projects, many of which will be built and operated by private firms, represent a radical shift in the way highways are financed and operated and promise to transform the way drivers in the Washington area and the nation travel.

In addition, this Friday and Saturday a major conference will conviene in Richmond to discuss public-private partnerships, including a presentation from Reason Foundation.

Here’s Peter Gordon:

L.A. County now has five recently-completed fixed guideway lines in operation. They include a $4.7 billion subway that carries slightly over 115,000 riders each day, three light-rail lines that cost almost $1-billion each just to build and between them serve 125,000 riders per day, and a recently opened busway that cost upwards of $350-million to build and carries approximately 10,600 riders per day.

These are all pathetically low numbers. The county's population is 10-million and the average person takes about four trips per day

My students and I recently applied a standard cost-benefit template to the five projects mentioned and found that, all things considered -- including generous assumptions about auto trips diverted and externality costs avoided, these five lines have a net cost to society of $560 million per year.

More here.

Old pork doesn't die, nor does it fade away. That's why the Transportation Department's inspector general is looking into the accounts of the Federal Highway Administration to see if it can uncover extra money to help reconstruct the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast.

Is there really any more need to look for pork? Finding it is easy (e.g, e.g.). Prying it away from Congress is what’s tough.

And sometimes members don’t even do anything with the pork the worked so hard to get:

[A] dirty little secret of earmarks -- pejoratively called "pork" by opponents of the practice -- is that, sometimes, the money never gets spent, or the projects never get done.

The money, however, ends up sitting around, trapped in federal coffers because "earmarked funds must be used only on the specifically designated project," Assistant Inspector General Kurt Hyde explained in a November 30 memorandum to the FHWA. Earmarked funds cannot be spent on other projects without an OK from Congress.

Hyde said that data from FHWA's financial management system shows that "significant" amounts of earmarked but unspent funds are in limbo, some designated as long ago as 1983. And that's just in the five Gulf Coast states -- Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas -- that are the target of the IG's initial review.

Can’t we at least adopt some kind of “use it or lose it” provision where members of Congress give up their right to the dough if they don’t use it after a certain amount of time? Who knows what dollar amount “significant” amounts of unused pork translates to, but whatever it is it seems like that’s the first place to go for Katrina relief funds.

Article here.

"It makes some of the Republican administrations across the country look bad, if the bastion of liberalness is taking the lead on this," [David Williams of Citizens Against Government Waste] said with a laugh.

San Francisco’s hipster Mayor, Gavin Newson, is taking aim at city spending. He’s targeting things like cars, cell phones and copiers:

[C]opying costs alone more than doubled from 2001 to 2002 from $7.4 million to $15.1 million.

Under the Newsom administration, San Francisco has trimmed its car fleet by 370 vehicles saving taxpayers $2.2 million, while cell phone use is $1.9 million under budget and copier- and print-related expenditures are down $1.8 million over last year, according to the Department of Administrative Services.

Article here; via the mayor’s own blog.

The NYT’s Christopher Elliot:

Unbelievable as it may sound, the only apparent law on the books that requires an aircraft to fly with a working restroom, the Air Carrier Access Act of 1986, applies to planes with more than one aisle that were delivered or refurbished after April 1992.

That's a huge loophole, given the number of jets that are older or have just one aisle.

That’s why there aren’t any johns on those old single-aisled planes!

Wait, that’s not right. They do have bathrooms. Even without a law. How did that happen?

More from Eliot:

Plus, federal law seems to be mum when it comes to the all-important passenger-to-toilet ratio on a plane....

A functioning toilet is such a basic necessity that the law appears to take it for granted. Perhaps it shouldn't.

Article here.

More potty politics here.

More seat belt law nonsense:

Washington State troopers have been posing as panhandlers (who skirt entrapment laws by allegedly neither asking for nor accepting money) in order to sidle up to the cars of unsuspecting motorists as part of an elaborate scheme to spy whether the operator is wearing a seatbelt. Those who aren't are then busted by another cop radioed by the "panhandler" -- who sometimes holds a "happy holidays" sign -- and given a ticket for $101 or worse. Some of the ticketed motorists have been so kind as to offer the "panhandler" money (which the officer -- again allegedly -- rejects).

More here; via Nick.

My take on seat belt laws here.

In The Wall Street Journal today, Reason's Shikha Dalmia and Lisa Snell detail how Rob Reiner's universal preschool initiative in California will devastate existing preschools and force current daycare teachers to make tough career choices.

Full column here.

Dalmia and Snell in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle on how Quebec's universal preschool plan has cost 33 times original projections - and yet isn't producing academic improvements - here.

Reason magazine's Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey is filing updates on the UN's Climate Change Conference in Montreal:

More than One Best Way on Global Warming

The Market Is Sending Signals on Climate Chage

After Kyoto - Now What?

Reason's environment research is here.

The new issue of Privatization Watch focuses on government accountability and reform trends and features a look at how Rudy Giuliani was able to implement 66 privatization initiatives as mayor of New York City. The issue is online here (.pdf).

The previous issue, on environmental policy, is here (.pdf).

And Privatization Watch's archives are here.

The Mackinac Center's Russ Harding asks Michigan citizens to demand limits on regulatory takings, similar to Oregon's Measure 37:

Regulatory takings differ from physical takings in that the government does not assume possession of the property. Rather, the owner’s use of the property is restricted by regulations — most commonly environmental prohibitions.

. . . .

The protection of constitutional rights needs to be reintroduced to the system of regulation. If the government deems it necessary to restrict the use of private property for environmental protection (or any other reason), landowners should be compensated. It is one thing to protect wetlands on property held in public trust; it is entirely something else to require private landowners to bear those costs without compensation.

Government officials, with the assistance of judges who have shown little regard for private property rights, have been able to take private property for politically popular causes without having to pay for it. As lawmakers work to protect property owners from government takings for economic development, they would be wise to also address the widespread problem of regulatory takings.

If the Legislature fails to protect private property, it will fall to citizens to address the issue through a ballot initiative. That is precisely what happened a year ago in Oregon, where voters handily passed a ballot initiative requiring state government to pay landowners for the loss of use of their property. The Oregon law specifies that if the government cannot afford to pay the landowner, or chooses not to, then the land use restrictions do not take effect.

A lower court subsequently declared the Oregon law to be unconstitutional, and issued an injunction barring its enforcement while the case is under appeal. Nevertheless, it is past time for Michigan property owners to be afforded the protections demanded by Oregon citizens and which are among the most fundamental of our constitutional rights.

Lake County, OH - the state's only recycling district with free curbside pickup - has decided to end its curbside recycling program, long cross-subsidized by a surplus funds generated from a local landfill:

County commissioners, citing the growing cost of subsidizing all or most of a curbside program for 73,000 homes, will announce its end today.

. . . .

Lake County had provided free curbside service to its residents since 1993, paying for it with a multimillion-dollar surplus accumulated from fees charged at the Kirtland landfill. The county paid $1 per household per month, while cities, villages and townships began to pay 69 cents per month in 2003.

That would have increased to $2.25 per household, per month next year, Hodges said. Most local officials told commissioners when polled that the amount would break their budget.

Two thoughts here. First, it makes you wonder what value the recycling program really has when it's only viable with generous subsidies. This happens all too often in government; see "Amtrak" for the classic case.

Second, this seems like a missed opportunity to explore a pay-as-you-throw waste management pricing system, which would create a consumer incentive to recycle and reduce waste and lower long-run system management costs. From Reason's study:

Variable-rate pricing, or “pay as you throw,” is a new strategy with a growing number of advocates. Under a variable-rate system, customers are provided an economic signal to reduce the waste they throw away because garbage bills increase with the volume or weight of waste they dispose. Variable-rate pricing is being adopted in thousands of communities to create inc