Out of Control

Given the volume of the demands for network neutrality, especially in the context of Voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP), there has been a surprising lack of coverage of a decision by the European Center for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials as CERN, to ban Skype from its network.

CERN, as every ’Net geek knows, invented the World Wide Web. Based in Geneva, this physics laboratory has done much to institutionalize the democratic and decentralized way the Internet operates. We are all better for it.

So when CERN takes issue with Skype, whose disruptive business model and cyberpunkish founders elevated the company to the modern pantheon of übercool Internet start-ups, it gives pause.

As reported by Bruno Giussani in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, CERN has deep reservations about the way Skype service usurps the processing resources of user PCs in the routing and switching of phone calls. Plus, CERN says Skype violates its own computing rules by bypassing firewall protections.

CERN, Giussani reports, is not the only organization to ban Skype, but it certainly is the most visible and, in terms of ’Net culture, the most significant and hardest to dismiss.

CERN’s decision is a facet of the larger debate of network neutrality. Among the worries of the network neutrality set is that, if not enforced, carriers who control broadband access, namely the telephone and cable companies, may block or prevent access to VoIP services, like Skype. This was attempted only once (and not against Skype) by a small rural phone company, which was promptly chastised by the FCC and forced to stop.

Yet CERN itself, by its own actions, suggest there may be legitimate reasons to block certain services out of concern for the affect they have on their own computers and network integrity. The Skype business model is built on the notion of using computers it does not own as “supernodes” to support the VoIP service it sells. “Not with our computers, you don’t!” CERN said.

CERN, remember, is one of the “good guys.” That it chose to block Skype speaks volumes about the real debate behind network neutrality, which has little to do with blocking web sites and everything to do with whether conventions about open, cooperative Internet should change when parties wish to use them for private profit.

Used to be that a “disruptive” Internet business model was just that – it used the Internet to drive out costs, compress and globalize supply chains, and take advantage of open access and architecture. Today, it’s in danger of devolving into “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.”

Skype makes money by hijacking computers. At first its founders thought its service would demand so little processing that it would hardly be noticed. They were wrong. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have made no secret that they aim to profit from hogging bandwidth owned by others, yet take umbrage at demands that they pay the cost of managing and partitioning this bandwidth.

Let the record note that it was not AT&T, Comcast, Verizon or Cox – those demons of the techie set—that were among the first to aggressively defend ownership of their corner of the World Wide Web, but CERN, the Web’s very creator.

[T]he San Francisco County Transportation Authority soon will receive $1.04 million from the Federal Highway Administration -- and add $260,000 in local funding -- to study how to implement a program similar to London's 3-year-old system of charging a flat fee to drive downtown during business hours.

That's $1.3 million to figure out how to collect millions from drivers willing to pay the freight to give a financial boost to public transit systems and perhaps curb traffic congestion.

And that's how, not if.

Article here.

Related: Privatization Watch cover story: Coming to America? A Cautionary View on Importing London-Style Congestion Pricing

It’s the Murray Plan:

Instead of sending taxes to Washington, straining them through bureaucracies and converting what remains into a muddle of services, subsidies, in-kind support and cash hedged with restrictions and exceptions, just collect the taxes, divide them up, and send the money back in cash grants to all American adults. Make the grant large enough so that the poor won't be poor, everyone will have enough for a comfortable retirement, and everyone will be able to afford health care. We're rich enough to do it.

…

I call it simply "the Plan" for want of a catchier label--makes a $10,000 annual grant to all American citizens who are not incarcerated, beginning at age 21, of which $3,000 a year must be used for health care. Everyone gets a monthly check, deposited electronically to a bank account. If we implemented the Plan tomorrow, it would cost about $355 billion more than the current system. The projected costs of the Plan cross the projected costs of the current system in 2011. By 2020, the Plan would cost about half a trillion dollars less per year than conservative projections of the cost of the current system. By 2028, that difference would be a trillion dollars per year.

Article here.

Putting new items on the shelf this year, from organic-cotton baby clothes to ocean fish caught in ways that don't harm the environment, is part of a broader green policy launched last year to meet consumer demand, cut costs for things like energy and packaging and burnish a battered reputation.

Article here.

Related: Would you eat sushi at Wal-Mart?

With the confirmation of reports that Lucent Technologies is in merger talks with France’s Alcatel, the telecom industry is girding itself for an attack from the same “patriotic protectionists” who derailed the Dubai Ports World deal. “With protectionist sentiment growing in both the U.S. and Europe, a merger could prove a critical test of cross-border cooperation for the French and U.S. governments,” Lucent CEO Patricia Russo summed up in a quote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal.

Before opportunistic legislators begin to raise alarms about the national telecom infrastructure falling into foreign hands, they would do well to remember that Alcatel has been supplying U.S. companies for two decades. In North America alone, the company had of €1.8 billion ($2.2 billion) in sales in 2004 and has more than €2.2 billion ($2.6 billion) in assets. It is the leading supplier of DSL equipment in the U.S. and among the worldwide leaders in fiber optic and Internet Protocol networking technology.

Meanwhile Lucent, while a major U.S. supplier, has struggled to establish itself in international markets where Alcatel has thrived. Consolidation with Alcatel would open China, Europe and the Middle East to U.S. manufactured products.

If completed, a Lucent-Alcatel merger would be good for investors and workers in the U.S. telecom industry, as well as improving U.S. technological competitiveness in the global market.

Anyone interested in the health or future of public transit should read this article in the New York Times.

The good news is transit is finally beginning to provide services that meet the needs of its riders.

The bad news is it took them 20 years to make any change at all!

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin strongly endorsed video franchise reform Wednesday at TelecomNext, the telecom industry’s major annual trade show.

Citing that rates for cable television have steadily grown higher since the 1996 Telecommunications Act has been in place, while the rates in every other area of telecommunications have declined, Martin said the commission will try to address ways to reduce barriers to entry, with “some reasonable limitations” that could be put around what “local franchising authorities can require as new competitors” try to enter new towns or cities across the country, Multichannel News reports.

Martin said he hopes the FCC will address what those “limitations” might be sometime this year. “Trying to make sure that competitive barriers are lowered and that new service providers can come in and provide a competitive alternative is critical and is one of the most important things that the commission can do,” he added.

He specifically cited telephone companies, which could get into the provision of multichannel-video services “by the advent of new technologies like IPTV,” the Internet-protocol-based type of television services AT&T is implementing nationwide.

Congress is considering legislation that would create a national video franchise scheme, as are many states. The aim is to speed competition in multichannel video services by standardizing the process as well as eliminate many of the arbitrary demands that local communities place on franchisees.

As a rogue member of the American Planning Association (APA), I often scratch my head at some of the policy positions that they advocate. Today, I received their latest domestic policy missive on current state efforts to address eminent domain abuse and regulatory takings.

Of course, planners by-and-large vehemently reject any meaningful eminent domain or regulatory takings reform, as limits on physical or regulatory takings would threaten their ability to fully implement their growth management and urban development schemes. Put simply, the more that private property rights are protected, the less power and influence planners have.

Back to the APA policy article...here's the link (free registration required). A couple of choice little nuggets:

The American property system is arguably the best in the history of the world. It has many benefits. But it is also very complex, having evolved for more than a thousand years. There are those, however, who seek to radically change this system.

For context, "those" equals "property rights advocates." Given that urban planning has basically been around for only a century, is it really the property rights advocates who are trying to radically change the system? Isn't it more accurate to say that municipal zoning was the first radical departure, followed by the dismal legacy of urban renewal in the post-WWII years, comprehensive growth management efforts like those arising in Oregon in the 1970's, and the nationwide push for smart growth now? Aren't property rights advocates just trying to rebalance the equation after a century of assault on private property rights by planners and bureaucrats?

APA is launching a campaign to help counter new, aggressive efforts by the self-proclaimed property rights movement to enact troubling legislation and pass bad ballot measures. APA's effort is dubbed the "property fairness campaign." Among the elements of this campaign will be a new property fairness website to provide a clearinghouse of legislative and policy information, useful case studies, tools for activists, and communications resources. [..] APA also is preparing a property fairness toolkit specifically designed to assist chapters in state-level advocacy. In addition, the campaign will include direct technical assistance and other projects and resources.

This "property fairness campaign" has doublespeak quality reminiscent of China's "Great Leap Forward," which was anything but. Given the APA's own stated public positions on takings issues, "fairness" apparently means that property owners should be OK with having their land stolen by government and given to private developers, as well as being OK with having their properties devalued through zoning and land use restrictions.

It is clear we face an organized, very well-financed, and aggressive multistate campaign waged by ideologues who seek to undermine the ability of citizens to make collective decisions. They seek to limit the rights of all except the most powerful to have secure property rights. These groups are trying to push legislators to pass the most sweeping bills possible and often to use the ballot box to advance their agenda. However, we have an opportunity — as more moderate proposals win some support — to offer acceptable, even positive alternatives. Let's protect our property rights system so that it continues to provide benefits to all Americans. That's the genius of the system. We must raise our voices and lend our time and talents to the cause of community building through good planning.

"They seek to limit the rights of all except the most powerful to have secure property rights"???? The hypocrisy here is laughable! If this is their position, then why wasn't the APA front and center defending Suzette Kelo, et al. or Dorothy English in Oregon? It's obvious that the APA is most interested in defending the power of the political elite to adopt policies or approve government actions that will effectively curtail private property rights.

And once again we get a glimpse into the collectivist and oligarchic mind of the planner. They believe that communities are built through "good planning," when economics and experience tells us that communities are really built incrementally through the complex interactions among individuals and families.

I've always wished that professors of planning theory and history would have their students read some Hayek. He highlighted the most devastating critique of planning to date -- that in centrally-planned economies an individual (or a select group) must determine the correct distribution of resources, but that planners will never have enough information to carry out this allocation reliably. The free market -- via the price mechanism and voluntary, individual action -- offers the most efficient method of exchanging and utilizing society's resources. Wikipedia puts it well...the price mechanism "serves to share and synchronize local and personal knowledge, allowing citizens to achieve diverse, complicated ends through a principle of spontaneous self-organization."

Of course, this idea of spontaneous order and societal self-organization, guided by what Adam Smith famously termed the "invisible hand," is anathema to planners because it is premised on the notion that order comes through human action, not conscious design.

And this fundamental misunderstanding of societal organization leads to the misguided notion among planners that it is they, not property owners, who are in the best position to make decisions about the use of land. And planners also know that government will never have enough money to offer landowners compensation to cover the real costs of implementing the planning schemes they devise, so they have to rely on regulation and political decisionmaking to achieve their planning goals. Hence, it's no wonder that planners see the property rights movement -- which wants to shift the balance of power back to individual property owners -- as the greatest threat to their social engineering agenda.

Louisiana legislators are apparently serious about taking on eminent domain abuse:

Louisiana lawmakers have filed at least 22 bills — more than on any other issue — seeking to forbid government agencies from taking private property to further economic development.

The legislation, prompted by a U.S. Supreme Court decision, would reverse a recent trend toward giving public-private partnerships the power to take a person’s home or property, then turn it over to a business that promises to increase tax revenues or create jobs.

It’s called expropriation or eminent domain. The Legislature has specifically granted that power to 39 agencies since 2000.

“Maybe we did go overboard … and grant too many expropriations,” said Rep. Peppi Bruneau, R-New Orleans, who sponsored one of the measures to limit taking property.

You know that your local zoning ordinance is too complicated if you need a separate handbook to explain it to citizens. From the Big Apple:

[The differences between the City's zoning districts] are hard to extract from the arcane Zoning Resolution, the document that governs land use in New York City. But they are made graphically clear in the Zoning Handbook, which the Department of City Planning released last week. It is the first new edition of the handbook in 16 years.

"The multivolume Zoning Resolution is like hieroglyphics, known only to the priests of zoning," said Prof. Ross Sandler, director of the Center for New York City Law at the New York Law School in Manhattan. "Opening the Zoning Handbook is like discovering the Rosetta Stone."

The handbook is an abundantly illustrated gazetteer of the city's zoning districts: residential (R), commercial (C) and manufacturing (M). It shows what those mysterious letters and numbers mean in three-dimensional form, using diagrams and color photographs of actual buildings, from single-family homes perched on ample front yards (R1-1) to the densely packed canyon of Lexington Avenue (C6-6).

A handbook like this certainly makes things easier for those of us who prefer to process visual information over text. But just a cursory look at the handbook makes it clear just how micromanaged land use is in NYC. Check out the R2A residential zoning district, for example; it specifies minimum lot width, minimum lot area, floor-area ratio, maximum lot coverage, front and rear yard minimum depths, minimum side yard widths, minimum driveway length, max building height, max perimeter wall height, and minimum parking requirements. Imagine yourself as an architect or builder...once you shape your design to fit all of those mandatory specifications, how much room is left for innovative design? Creativity is micromanaged away by zoning in favor of stale conformity.

To be fair, most local zoning and subdivision ordinances in the U.S. are just as specific and cumbersome as NYC's, it's just that they often lack the visual component to help people easily understand just how regulated they are.

An interesting article in Sunday's Boston Globe explored the thinking behind the massive taxpayer subsidization of major league sports teams and stadiums, despite an abundance of evidence that such efforts fail to create jobs or spur economic growth:

For a decade and a half, the belief that sports teams were economic drivers helped persuade cities and states to shower billions of dollars on major league sports teams, most of it to build state-of-the-art stadiums like the Detroit Tigers' Comerica Park, the Seattle Seahawks' Qwest Field, and perhaps most famously the Baltimore Orioles' Camden Yards-the 1992 ballpark that set the standard not only for how ballparks would look, but how they would be built and paid for. "Build the Stadium," went a 1997 slogan for a new San Francisco football stadium, "Create the Jobs!"

But Menino isn't the only one to have had second thoughts in recent years about the wisdom of such largesse. Bitter public disputes have broken out in a few other sports cities over whether to give public funds to the local team. The most recent ballpark to be built, St. Louis's new Busch Stadium, was paid for almost entirely by the Cardinals after city and state officials refused to commit public funds. A proposed Manhattan stadium for the New York Jets died last year when the state government refused to chip in the asked-for $300 million. The political battle over the funding of Miller Park, in Milwaukee, was so vitriolic that former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson refused to set foot in it for years after it was built.

This new skepticism of public sports team funding is thanks in part to a small community of economists who have taken up and methodically rejected many of the claims made about the economic benefits of major league sports teams: that they create jobs or bring money to local businesses or otherwise spur economic growth. "Generally speaking," says Andrew Zimbalist, a professor at Smith College and a leading sports economist, "the independent research suggests that we can't anticipate any economic impact" from sports teams and stadiums.

. . . .

As for new jobs, sports teams and their stadiums do create them, but remarkably inefficiently, according to Roger Noll, an economics professor at Stanford University and co-editor, with Zimbalist, of "Sports, Jobs, and Taxes" (1997), one of the most comprehensive works on the public funding of sports. In Baltimore, he says, the cost per job created by Camden Yards was $125,000, whereas for the city's other urban redevelopment programs it was $6,000 per job. And $125,000, according to Noll, is actually pretty efficient for a sports stadium.

University of Chicago economist Allen Sanderson puts it another way. "Cities would be better off," he says, "if the mayor were to go up in a helicopter and dump out $100,000."

According to the article, there are several reasons that cities still fork over gargantuan sums for stadia, despite the paucity of economic justification for them:

• Monpolistic major league sports organizations limit the supply of teams, driving up the "price" cities are willing to pay to have them (e.g., subsidies, land deals, stadium lease deals);
• Politicians see major league sports teams and shiny new stadia as status symbols worthy of public funding;
• Though they're financial losers, stadiums can serve as catalysts for urban redevelopment and revitalization; and
• Many people simply like sports and value them in a way that transcends traditional cost/benefit analyses.

It's great to see the Globe take on this topic, as taxpayers in numerous cities have been sold a bill of goods over the last two decades. For more on the folly of taxpayer-subsidized stadiums in specific cities, check out Sam's op-ed on Indianapolis' proposed football stadium and convention center expansion, as well as Adam's op-ed and Jacob's article on D.C.'s baseball stadium.

Despite the best efforts of planners to promote compact, high-density urban development and "smart growth," the general public still isn't buying in to the concept:

America's fastest growing counties are suburban, rural or a mixture of both as more people seek big yards and open spaces, even if that means a long commute.

New Census Bureau estimates show the nation's population shifting south and west, to the distant suburbs of metropolitan areas stretching from Florida to Utah.

"I think low density is the attraction," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "People would rather make a long commute and have a big yard and a big house."

Planners are obviously slow to get the message that they're putting a great deal of energy into social engineering schemes that run completely counter to mainstream consumer preferences and lifestyle choices. It would be "smarter" for them to embrace a market-oriented planning system designed to address the tangible impacts of growth while allowing the market to dynamically respond to changing consumer preferences, not the utopian, dehumanized visions of social engineers.

One way WM is trying to boost its recent lackluster performance is to go upscale. Will it work?

Wal-Mart Stores has overcome its rural roots and downscale image to attract affluent shoppers in places like suburban Dallas.

But executives admit many of those well-heeled consumers come only for cheap groceries and steer clear of the other merchandise.

The nation's largest retailer is opening a new store tomorrow -- in Plano -- with an expanded selection of high-end electronics.

The store also will feature more fine jewelry, hundreds of types of wine ranging up to 500 dollars per bottle -- and even a sushi bar.

Arkansas-based Wal-Mart says it won't duplicate this format anywhere else.

Article here.

Related: Wal-Mart Chic

When Wal-Mart wanted to come to Inglewood and Chicago, that familiar coalition of activists and religious leaders beat it back. It happens all the time in urban areas and now WM has turned to a long-time civil rights activist for help:

When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to present the case for civil rights to the white establishment, he turned to Andrew Young.

Forty years later, Young, a silver-tongued civil rights leader who represented striking sanitation workers in Tennessee and helped draft the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has been recruited to promote Wal-Mart as a company that serves the poor.

Young announced last month that he would be chairman of the national steering committee for Working Families for Wal-Mart — a new group funded by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to counter criticism of the company's treatment of employees and effect on local communities.

In two weeks WM will open its first store inside Atlanta’s freeway loop. Sure the city has its share of fist-shakers who rail against WM, but other activists and religious leaders are welcoming the biggest box:

The Gresham Road store is in a struggling, predominantly African American community not far from gentrifying neighborhoods.

"We're trusting and hoping that Wal-Mart revitalizes the area," said James McWhorter, church administrator of the Greater Piney Grove Baptist Church, which acted as a pre-hiring center for the new store. Nearly 5,000 people applied for 450 jobs.

…

Joseph Beasley, the Southern regional director for the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, said many mom-and-pop stores had taken advantage of poor African Americans.

"Many residents would love to have a Wal-Mart come in," said Beasley, who works in a poor northwest Atlanta community where, he said, small stores often charge high prices for spoiling meat and vegetables and impose 2% fees for cashing checks.
…
Last year, Black Enterprise magazine listed Wal-Mart as one of its "30 Best Companies for Diversity," based on the basis of what it called significant representation of blacks and other minorities.

Article here.

Sonia Arrison, Director of Technology Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, puts it all together in a piece looking at how the fight against franchise reform at local level hinders the very broadband competition these same communities say they want so badly.

Moreover, “local control” has nothing do with PEG channels or “must-carry” and everything to do with squeezing as much as possible from the companies attempting to finance the most expensive part of the network—the last mile. These concessions become abusive and detrimental to investment to both the cable and phone companies.

That local elected officials would take advantage of their power to grant exclusive rights to service a cable area is perhaps not surprising, but it is wrong nevertheless. For instance, one city requested that, in addition to other requirements, Verizon turn over a parking lot for use as free parking for a library.

Another city requested free television for every "house of worship" and a 10 percent video discount for select customers. Yet another asked for a new recreation center and pool. Cable bills were shooting up every year partly because of these abuses of power, and now that it has been exposed, it's time for serious reform.

Read all of Arrison’s column here.

Every once in awhile, I'm surprised when I gain a fresh perspective on a topic that I think I already know well after reading an introductory article on that subject. This article on zoning from the Mises Institute's blog is one such example. Specifically, it details the argument that zoning is theft and is well worth a read from anyone unfamiliar with the economics of zoning, a ubiquitous, but often inconspicuous, type of land use regulation that affects the vast majority of people in the U.S. Here's an excerpt:

Zoning restricts current landowners based on the local power brokers. In the zoning process, someone gets hurt. Had the farmers of a township wanted to keep the area as farmland, they could have signed restrictive covenants guaranteeing crops instead of homes. Property rights, and the laws that purport to protect those rights, allow individuals to act in their own best interest. Zoning, collective decision-making, use the coercive power of government to restrict usage based on the whims of those in power.

The farmer who owns this land now has his potential property rights bounded within a specific range; future use is restricted to residential developments that have no more than one house per acre. The farmer may vote, and may have voted for some of those elected, but he never agreed to the change in proposed land usage. He was robbed, and there is no means for him to restore his rights and land value; they are gone with the stroke of a pen.

A few states have recently taken steps to address this "theft via zoning" (a subset of what is more commonly known as regulatory 'takings'). Most prominently, Oregon voters passed Measure 37 in 2004, which either: (1) offers compensation to landowners whose properties have been devalued by the three-decades-old statewide system of land use regulation that mandates strict local planning and zoning; or (2) waives the enforcement of those land use regulations. (see here, here, and here for more on Measure 37)

South Carolina may be the next state to adopt regulatory takings reform. Last week, the state House passed two bills to restrict the use of eminent domain, one of which contains a regulatory takings provision along the lines of Measure 37:

By an overwhelming vote, the House approved eminent domain legislation - one of the legislative session's top priorities - with a controversial "takings" provision that local planning advocates and conservationists fear could hurt governments' ability to control growth. The provision requires local governments to reimburse landowners if a new regulation lessens property value. [. . .] [Rep. ] Hagood and Rep. Wallace Scarborough, R-Charleston, were successful in eliminating the takings clause from a companion constitutional amendment but couldn't muster the votes to strip it from the statutory bill.

Stay tuned for more on South Carolina's bills, and check out the South Carolina Landowners Association's website for more detailed info.

We're familiar with story of poor education systems driving the middle class from cities, but more and more attention is being paid to housing costs as an important factor as well as this Washington Post story shows. Even in San Francisco, which has implemented a voucher-type financing system for public schools to boost achievement, high housing costs are driving families away.

This raises two critical points. First, higher urban densities are associated with higher housing costs. We found this in our analysis of growth management laws in Washington, Florida, and Oregan. Urban living is expensive living.

Second, and perhaps more important, cities need to find a better was to accomodate growth and change in the housing market. While the planning profession continues to pin its hopes on a highly politicized zoning and plannig process, the solution is more likely to be found in a market-oriented system that respects property rights, is more open ended for land use, and focused on identifying (and mitigating when appropriate) tangible impacts. This more flexible system has the greatest potential for increasing the supply of housing (and putting downward pressure on housing prices) while safeguarding public interests and externalities.

That’s how Jon Logsdon of the Space Policy Institute describes what a trip into suborbital space will feel like. Tourists could be catapulted into space as early as next year and Futron, a Bethesda, Md.-based aerospace consulting firm, estimates that revenues in the space tourism industry could exceed $1 billion a year by 2021.

Who will be taking us into space? We’ve heard a lot about the Rutan-Branson team behind Virgin Galactic, but there will be other companies too:

Oklahoma-based Rocketplane Kistler is one of Virgin Galactic's biggest competitors. Rocketplane Kistler, whose main investor is American businessman George French, hopes to start test flights next January and fly commercially by next summer. French owns several businesses including a space education company in Wisconsin.

The company is building a souped-up, 42-foot-long suborbital Lear jet that can seat three passengers and a pilot. Unlike SpaceShipTwo, which would piggyback atop a mothership to a certain height, the Rocketplane XP would take off and land like an airplane using turbojets and rockets.
…
Space Adventures, a Virginia-based space travel agency best known for brokering three tourists to the international space station, is the latest entrant.

Last month, Space Adventures announced a partnership with members of the Ansari family — the major funders of the $10 million X Prize won by SpaceShipOne — to develop Russian-designed suborbital rockets that would launch from a proposed spaceport in the United Arab Emirates by 2008.
…
PlanetSpace, backed by American businessman Chirinjeev Kathuria, is building a 54-foot-long, three-seat suborbital rocket that would launch from somewhere in the Great Lakes region and re-enter Earth by splashing into the water. It hopes to fly 2,000 passengers in the first five years, beginning in 2008.

Article here.

Thanks to Don for the tip.

Related: My interview with Burt Rutan.

A city wants to force a family to sell its land because officials say they need it for a water reclamation project. Family members spend thousands in attorney’s fees fighting the city and say the battle contributed to the death of their patriarch, who was battling prostate cancer.

Eleven years pass and the city does nothing with the land. The family tries to buy it back, but the city decides to sell it to a developer instead.

Why? The family didn’t offer enough money. The mayor even accused the family of not playing fair:

City officials [in Escondido, California] have ended dealings with a family that was trying to buy back land it was forced to sell to the city 11 years ago, and plan to sell it to a developer next week instead. Negotiations between the Redding family and the city ended yesterday after City Attorney Jeffrey Epp sent Jane Redding a letter at her home in Nebraska.

“The primary difference between the city's offer to you and your counteroffer is the fact you are refusing to return the city's money with any interest earnings whatsoever,” Epp wrote in the letter, dated March 16.

Read the whole sad story here.

Related: Negotiating at Gunpoint

Related: Seizing a Private Golf Course to Make it Public

And some good news from the other side of the nation:

By a vote of 105-8 the [South Carolina] House passed the comprehensive property rights bill H. 4503. The bill restricts the ability of local governments to delegate their eminent domain powers to private developers, tightens up the definition of “public use,” restricts the number of government agencies that can have eminent domain powers and provides just compensation for regulatory takings.

Thanks to the South Carolina Land Owners Association for the heads-up.

For more good news, go here, here, and here.

My pal Todd Seavey on the new Wachowski brothers flick:

It might look like just another violent sci-fi film from the ads, but "V for Vendetta," opening in theaters across the country today, is the first superhero movie that's explicitly anarchist. Larry and Andy Wachowski, the producers, also brought us "The Matrix"--which ended, as you'll recall, with Neo's memorable anarchic warning to humanity's captors that he was going to "show them . . . a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries" and spark a revolution. The Wachowskis are now apparently trying something even more radical in adapting this comic-book story.

OpinionJournal piece here.

To many ears it’s nearly the same as addressing the benefits of cancer. Yet Matthew Kahn thinks there’s much to like about sprawl:

Today, most Americans who live in metropolitan areas live in single detached homes and commute to work by automobile. New York City is America’s sole urban center where a significant fraction of the population lives in apartment buildings, works downtown and commutes by public transit. As transportation costs continue to decline and household incomes rise, we are choosing sprawl as we live and work in the suburbs.

The conventional wisdom is that this trend imposes major social costs relative to its benefits. An advanced Google search reveals that there are 39,500 entries for the exact phrase “costs of sprawl” while there are only 455 entries for the exact phrase “benefits of sprawl”. The beneficiaries of sprawl may be a “silent majority” who are not as politically active as center city boosters, environmentalists and the urban poor’s advocates in voicing their views on the merits of the ongoing decentralization of jobs and people taking place across cities in the United States.

This paper seeks to address this intellectual imbalance by presenting original empirical work documenting some of the benefits of living in a sprawled metropolitan area.

More here.

Also check out this NYT mag profile of Kahn collaborator Ed Glaeser.

Some who gripe about sprawl seem to have their terms confused. In a Denver survey from 2000, the Pew Center highlighted this quotation from a resident:

"Urban sprawl is creating more problems than anything else right now: Too many people crammed too close together."

Too many people crammed too close together? That sounds an awful lot like sprawl's antithesis, smart growth.

Although overall support has slipped in recent years …

The majority of British drivers support a road pricing scheme whereby motorists are charged according to their use of the roads, rather than the current system of car taxation and fuel tax, according to the latest research by the RAC Foundation.

Such a scheme allows for differential charging according to whether motorists are driving on congested roads, for example. The survey found that 62% of the drivers questioned said they thought such a system would be fairer, up from 60% in 2002. Young drivers (aged 17-24) in particular are in favour of a road-charging scheme.

Most motorists - 71% - agreed that road tolling would be acceptable if other motoring taxes fell, with 60% saying that tolls would be acceptable if it could be guaranteed that they would have a better journey. Tolls would be acceptable to 61% if there was a complete package of better roads, better traffic management and improved public transport alternatives.

More here.

Related: Congestion Charge to Cover More of London

Cabbies use shortcuts and when he drives in Chicago, Austan Goolsbee uses them too. Yet bus drivers just sit in gridlock:

You might think at first that the problem is that the drivers aren't paid enough to strategize. But Chicago bus drivers are the seventh-highest paid in the nation; full-timers earned more than $23 an hour, according to a November 2004 survey. The problem may have to do not with how much they are paid, but how they are paid. At least, that's the implication of a new study of Chilean bus drivers by Ryan Johnson and David Reiley of the University of Arizona and Juan Carlos Muñoz of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Companies in Chile pay bus drivers one of two ways: either by the hour or by the passenger. Paying by the passenger leads to significantly shorter delays. Give them incentives, and drivers start acting like regular people do. They take shortcuts when the traffic is bad. They take shorter meal breaks and bathroom breaks. They want to get on the road and pick up more passengers as quickly as they can. In short, their productivity increases.

They also create new markets. At the bus stops in Chile, people known as sapos (frogs) literally hop on and off the buses that arrive, gathering information on how many people are traveling and telling the driver how many people were on the previous bus and how many minutes ago it sat at the station. Drivers pay the sapos for the information because it helps them improve their performance.

Not everything about incentive pay is perfect, of course. When bus drivers start moving from place to place more quickly, they get in more accidents (just like the rest of us). Some passengers also complain that the rides make them nauseated because the drivers stomp on the gas as soon as the last passenger gets on the bus. Yet when given the choice, people overwhelmingly choose the bus companies that get them where they're going on time. More than 95 percent of the routes in Santiago use incentive pay.

Article here; via Dan Klein of EconJournalWatch.

In a rare decision to take a position in public policy debate, Cisco Systems, the world’s largest manufacturer of Internet routers, has asked Congress not to prevent carriers from charging Internet applications and content providers for improved network management and quality of service.

In letters last week from CEO John Chambers to Sen. Ted Stevens (R, AK) and Rep. Joe Barton (R, TX), who are steering telecom reform legislation through their respective committees in the Senate and the House, as well as in a statement released Wednesday, Cisco stressed the need to ensure users have the right to access the legal Web sites of their choice and run applications of their choice. Consumers should also be allowed to connect any compatible Internet Protocol device to the network.

When it came to network management issues, however, Cisco advised Congress regulate only if problems occur, not before. It also said network management teiring has a proper place in a competitive broadband market and will likely do more to improve the overall broadband experience for all.
Cisco’s statement hit all the right notes:

Innovation inside the network is just as important as innovation in services and devices connected to the Internet. As the Internet becomes better, faster and more integral to our economy and personal lives, it is necessary for broadband Internet access providers to use innovative technology to manage their networks to provide quality of service and new features and services to meet evolving consumer needs. Cisco supports the use of network management tools by Internet access providers to improve the Internet experience as long as there is no anticompetitive effect. Specifically, Cisco supports:

• Broadband Internet access service providers should remain free to engage in pro-competitive network management techniques to alleviate congestion, ameliorate capacity constraints, and enable new services.

• Broadband Internet access service providers should remain free to offer additional services to supplement broadband Internet access, including bandwidth tiers, quality of service, security, anti-virus and anti-spam services, network management services, as well as to enter into commercially negotiated agreements with unaffiliated parties for the provision of such additional services.

Cisco, whose routers handle steer two-thirds of the world’s Internet traffic, has $24.8 billion in sales in 2005, its best year since 2001. Much of its growth has been from incumbent phone companies that have begun upgrading their networks.

Don’t be quick to cheer anti-WM legislation, because the next generation of these laws might target you:

Now that Wal-Mart is required under Maryland law to spend at least eight percent of its payroll for employee health benefits, some state lawmakers want smaller businesses to pay up, too.

Legislation introduced Wednesday in Annapolis would require all businesses to spend 4.5 percent of their payrolls on health care for both full and part-time employees. As with the larger employer law, the money would either have to be use for company-provided insurance or paid to the state.

The bill's sponsors says the 800,000 Marylanders without health insurance could benefit from the proposal. Small business owners say it will cost them too much, but Prince George's County Delegate James Hubbards says the legislation will include grants for some businesses to offset the cost.

Article here.

Related: Proposed WM Store Stirs Monterey

And this piece about WM equipping its trailers with satellite tracking technology is a good reminder of an aspect of WM’s success that’s often overlooked: WM is head-and-shoulders above most of its competitors in inventory management.

I have a piece in today’s TCSDaily:

Not enough people paying attention to your pet issue? Just compare it to terrorism. That's what our nation's surgeon general did recently. Dr. Richard Carmona warned that unless we do something about obesity "the magnitude of the dilemma will dwarf 9/11 or any other terrorist attempt."

If obesity really is that threatening then maybe we should step up the fight against suburban sprawl. After all, politicians and activists are always telling us that suburbia makes us fat and at first glance it seems like they might be right. Suburbanites drive everywhere — to work, the grocery store, even the mailbox. If you drive everywhere, it's easy to see how you could become flabbier. And yet a new study challenges our intuition.

Continue reading here.

Otis White notes that homicides are on the rise in Oakland and Boston and he predicts this will prompt more mayors to adopt “broken window” approaches to crime control. This approach is often credited with New York’s dramatic drop in crime.

Yet:

Several sets of academics have looked again at broken windows, and they're not convinced that it's the cure-all Bratton says it is. Latest to weigh in: Bernard Harcourt, a University of Chicago law professor, and Jens Ludwig, a public policy professor at Georgetown. In an article scheduled for publication soon, they write that crime in New York was destined to fall. Reason: The precincts where broken-windows strategies appeared to have the greatest impact were places that were suffering in the 1980s from the crack cocaine epidemic. For reasons unconnected with police strategies, they write, the crack epidemic eased in the 1990s. Bottom line: Bratton arrived as the enemy was beginning its retreat and promptly declared victory. (To download an early version of Harcourt and Ludwig's paper, click here.)

What caused the crack epidemic to ease? The price came down, and dealers were less inclined to risk their lives battling over it, Harcourt and Ludwig say.

More evidence that drugs aren’t as dangerous as drug prohibition.

Writing in Crack in America, Goldstein et al point out that the “vast bulk of crack-related homicides occurred between dealers or between dealers and users.”

Back to White:

[Harcourt and Ludwig] point to another study that seems to contradict the idea that orderly neighborhoods are an antidote to crime. It was a study of public-housing residents who were relocated from their high-crime high-rises to more affluent, orderly neighborhoods. The result: little change in the crime rates among the transplanted families. "...Moving people to communities with less social or physical disorder - the key intervening factor in the original Wilson and Kelling broken-windows hypothesis—on balance does not lead to reductions in their criminal behavior," Harcourt and Ludwig write.

Employees tend to like telecommuting, but our nation's bosses have been harder to win over. That's beginning to change:

44 percent of U.S. companies offered at least some telecommuting options last year, up from 32 percent in 2001, according to a survey of 1,043 large employers by Mercer Human Resources Consulting.

In the post-9/11 era, corporate America views a work force that can function remotely as a strategic advantage, experts say. "The reason I think it's gaining momentum is because of natural-disaster preparedness," said Ellen Galinsky, president of the New York-based Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit that researches work force trends for corporations. Ms. Galinsky said it was the less centralized companies that were up and running fastest in the days following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Article here.

Related: here, here, here, and here.

Congress may yet put the brakes on the rush to enshrine network neutrality into law. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, suggested that a provision mandating that carriers treat all Internet traffic equally may not make it into the final draft of a new telecom law.

The New York Times reports that while Stevens says he supports the idea in principle, seems to be reconsidering after an afternoon of hearings where a number of Wall Street analysts expressed reservations whether the provision was necessary, or even desirable. In addition, Cisco Systems, the leading manufacturer of Internet routers, asked Congress not to impose the requirement.

Stevens’ position contrasts with that of his counterpart in the House, Joe Barton (R, TX), who, as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, reported has agreed to a network neutrality provision as part of a rumored compromise on legislation that would create a national video franchise structure.

Elsewhere, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), has introduced legislation to mandate network neutrality. Wyden, however, is not a member of Stevens’ committee.

Meanwhile, in something of a surprise, the Washington Post this week editorialized against the network neutrality concept, hitting all the right reasons it is an ill-conceived idea.

DC's new baseball stadium. DC council Chairman Linda W. Cropp had this to say "Major League Baseball did not get an open checkbook" refering to the $611 million "investment" spending cap.

The Economists’ breezy overview of Wal-Mart studies.

An essay by David Schmidtz.

Related: Inequality Smackdown!

Toyota Motors Corp. and Kia Motors Corp. unveiled plans to build up to 400,000 more vehicles in factories in Indiana and Georgia.

South Korea-based Kia said it would build a $1.2 billion factory in West Point, Ga., its first in the U.S., while Toyota announced it would begin building Camry sedans at a Subaru plant in Lafayette, Ind., shifting production from a factory in Japan.

Related: Remembering Insourcing

Related: “America Doesn’t Make Anything Anymore” Part II

Related: Globalization Tales

And an interesting nugget from the book, Cities in the International Marketplace:

[Airbus] is the product of a European high-tech face-off with America. At the same time it buys products from its American nemesis, Boeing, and 40 percent of Airbus components are made in the United States.

Hosted by the Progressive Policy Institute

Featuring:

Robert Bruegmann, Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago, and author of the new book, Sprawl: A Compact History.

Bruce Katz, Director, Metropolitan Studies Program, The Brookings Institution

Moderated by Robert Atkinson, Director, PPI’s Technology & New Economy Project

Friday, March 17, 2006
9:30 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Progressive Policy Institute
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RSVP: PPIEvents[AT]ppionline.org

From the results of a recent SonicWALL survey

While about 39% of respondents of both sexes said they wear sweats while working from home, 12% of males and 7% of females wear nothing at all.

Men are also less likely to shower:

In matters of cleanliness, the difference between the sexes was more pointed: 44% of women surveyed said they showered on work-at-home days, as opposed to men, who were slightly more likely to shave (33%) than wash (30%).

More here; via Adam Gaffin.

A better title for this commentary by law professor Michael Lewyn might have been: Where can Smart Growth advocates and free market advocates agree? Well worth a read.

India watchers and those depressed by the Dubai Port fiasco may be interested in the oped by Condoleezza Rice in the Washington Post today. Much of the news surrounding Bush's trip has focused on the nuclear pact his Administration brokered.

In the oped, Rice talks about the normal stuff about stopping nuclear proliferation and energy secuity, but she only glances on a far more important reason Bush's trip may be important for world peace: free trade.

She throws a sliver of an economic bone in this direction when she writes:

"Our agreement is good for American jobs, because it opens the door to civilian nuclar trade and cooperation between our nations."

She's a little closer to the truth when she says the agreement is "an essential step toward our goal of transforming America's partnership with India." But, the key benefit is not the so-called partnership. This is diplomacy speak that seriously underestimate a far more important relationship that could emerge from the agreement. It's not just about "new opportunities" arising for a "partnershuip between out two great democracies." It's about (or should be about) unleashing unprecedented opportunities for investment and entrepreneurship independent of diplomacy.

Long term, the more important effect of these new agreements will be to lay the groundwork for embracing India as economic juggarnaut it will become if it continues to embrace free trade and entrepreneurship. It's not about a governmental partnership, or governments brokering deals. It's about creating an environment in which entrepreneurship, investment, and job creation can finally reach a critical level, synergized by an undestanding of mutual benefit (not dependence), and capital and human resources are allowed flow more freely between the U.S. and India, making them both more productive.

This is more than political negotiation, or finding the "right partner". Democratic nations with free economies tend to avoid war, not seek it out. The best way to ensure global peace is to make sure a robust trade exists among them. Through trade, they recognize the costs of going to war and the absurdity of foreign policies that look at human and economic relationships as a zero-sum game--the spoils of which can be negotiated over a nice dinner.

Rather than looking at free trade as fostering economic dependence, we should think of it as an investment in world peace. To the extent the nuclear agreement with India begins to open this door further, the world (and the U.S. in particular) will benefit. The folks at Dubai Ports probably understand this, even if Congress doesn't.

The Philadelphia City Council has delayed a vote on what turns out to be four contracts involved in the EarthLink deal to build a 135-square mile wireless network in the City of Brotherly Love, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported Sunday.

The delay is a major setback for the Philadelphia project, which has been closely watched by municipal wireless advocates as a model for other cities to follow.

From the Inquirer:

[Mayor John Street’s] administration had hoped Council members would approve the effort in a committee vote yesterday, which would have cleared the way for a final vote as early as March 23. But the meeting adjourned without a vote after legislators said they needed more time to read the convoluted series of agreements involving the city, the quasi-independent Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development, the city-created nonprofit known as Wireless Philadelphia, and the Atlanta-based Internet firm EarthLink, which is to build and operate the network.

The contracts reportedly number in the hundreds of pages and the council says it needs time to review them all. The earliest a vote will come is April 13. Wireless Philadelphia originally had hoped to get the deal approved last December. Although delays on other municipal broadband initiatives have been blamed on interference from incumbents phone companies, no such political countermeasures are apparent here. It seems the wireless project, which until now has enjoyed good momentum, has run smack into the machinery of the city bureaucracy.

The situation points toward the inherent problem of getting things done efficiently in government. It just doesn’t happen. The contract now faces scrutiny of 17 council members each with his or her own constituent agenda. EarthLink has the right to terminate the deal if it is not approved by the council’s summer adjournment. While no taxpayer money is at direct risk, the project is beginning to take up a lot of city resources while it essentially remains stuck in one place.

Until now, the implication has been that there was a single overarching contract between the city and EarthLink, which will fund, build and operate the network. Sunday’s report revealed that there are, in fact, four separate pacts that need to be approved.

• A deal between the city and Wireless Philadelphia to have the nonprofit manage the initiative and administer social programs aimed at helping low-income people access the Internet.

• A deal between Wireless Philadelphia and EarthLink under which EarthLink would build, operate, and own the wireless network and promise the nonprofit a share of its proceeds.

• A deal between the city and the industrial development authority that lets the authority rent access to city-owned lightposts to EarthLink for use in mounting the network's 4,000 wireless transceivers.

• A deal between the authority and EarthLink under which EarthLink would rent lightpost access for roughly $74 per lightpost per year.

Yet another contract, between Wireless Philadelphia and Peco Energy to provide electric power to the transceivers, is still being negotiated.

I have looked at a lot of legislation and efforts around the country to limit eminent domain abuse. Most of them are laudable. But the effort of Missouri Citizens for Property Rights stands out from the crowd. Not only are they meticulous about changing the law to confine eminent domain to true public uses, they put real effort into discussing alternatives to eminent domain for cities dealing with blight and economic development challenges. I am impressed by how they combine a hard line on property rights with an effort to address the public policy consequences.

TelCoa has just released a big survey of employers and telecommuting:

The study, sponsored by Intel, looked at how these large organizations addressed and overcame obstacles and objections to create successful programs that benefit both the organization and its employees through reduced real estate costs, increased employee retention, and a much higher rate of employee satisfaction.

Press release here.

Executive summary here.

Because it's getting hard to keep track of all the places where you're not allowed to smoke, the city council of Calabasas, California, decided to start over from scratch and make things simple. "Smoking is prohibited everywhere in the city," says a Calabasas ordinance that takes effect on March 17, "except as otherwise provided."

The exceptions are private residences, up to 20 percent of hotel rooms, "smokers' outposts" in shopping center parking lots, and "any outdoor area in which no non-smoker is present and...it is not reasonable to expect another person to arrive." The smoke-free areas, a.k.a. "everywhere else," include sidewalks, streets, bus stops, parks, the outdoor seating of bars and restaurants, and apartment balconies near common areas such as pools or laundry rooms.

Read Jacob Sullum’s column here.

Update: City Has No Plans to Jail Smokers—Yet

Related: Cigarrette Sales Hit 55 Year Low

Related: Smoking Bans Reach Another Disturbing Milestone

Related: No Smoking in NYC Bars and Outdoor Smoking Bans in San Francisco

Related: Good News—No Wait, Scratch That

[Maya] Ramirez is blind, yet she and dozens of other visually impaired sophomores in Chicago's public school system are required to pass a written rules-of-the-road exam in order to graduate...

Article here; via Fark.

This fall I gave my students grades for the first time. Of course, my students have received grades from me before, but I was always of the philosophy that those grades should be the ones they had earned.

This semester, that changed. I began giving A's like gifts. Why? I need to get tenure.

Interesting tale here.

Hollywood movie ticket sales around the world dropped by 7.9 percent last year to 23 billion dollars, with the US box office accounting for nearly 40 percent of the haul, a study showed.

Movie ticket receipts in North America dipped by six percent in 2005 to nine billion dollars, according to a study by the ratings statistics firm Nielsen Entertainment/NRG that comes as movie-goers increasingly stay out of cinemas.

The study, released by the powerful lobby group of the major Hollywood studios, the Motion Picture Association of America, however gave the industry some reason for hope amid sliding ticket receipts, the MPAA maintained.
Most movie-goers were satisfied with their recent experiences at the movies and felt the movies were a "good investment of their time and money," the Nielsen study reported.

Article here.

Related: Double Oscar-winner Directs from Hospital Bed

Related: Don't Cry for Hollywood

March 19-21
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For more info and online registration, go here.

And it still isn’t true:

It would seem like a "help wanted" sign in a factory is as much a thing of the past as 50-cent gasoline, 25-cent pizza or black and white televisions.

But experts say that the outlook for hiring in manufacturing isn't nearly as bleak as the recent headlines would suggest.

Despite the growth in imports, there are still powerful incentives to keep some manufacturing here, close to the world's largest consumer market in a just-in-time delivery world.

That's part of the reason Asian and European automakers have been building so many U.S. plants -- to serve growing demand from U.S. consumers for their products.

Several experts say that the steep decline in the nation's manufacturing base in earlier decades is probably behind us, that the remaining jobs are more competitive and productive, and thus more secure.

"We might still be seeing some small declines in manufacturing overall, but even that's a mix," said Ken Goldstein, labor economist at the Conference Board, a business research group. "This year you'll see more hiring in nondurable manufacturing sectors such as in chemicals, in rubber, in plastics, in paper."
…

The most recent survey [by the Institute for Supply Management]found that 22 percent of manufacturing executives are planning to add jobs, and another 65 percent plan to keep staffing at current levels.
…
[A] survey by the National Association of Manufacturers and Deloitte Consulting last fall found that more than half of manufacturers reported that 10 percent or more of their positions are empty for lack of the right candidates. In addition, 81 percent face "moderate" or "severe" shortages of qualified workers that constrain output.

Article here.

Related: America Doesn’t Make Anything Anymore! Part I

The Village of North Hills in Long Island is considering using eminent domain to seize a private country club and golf course in order to open it up to the public.

City staff are arguing that having a public golf course would increase community property values and thus justify the takeover. Must be good drugs out there. When is the last time you saw higher property values near a municipal golf course than you saw near a private country club?

Worse than being wrong, though, is being evil. For no other public purpose than raising property values, they want to seize people's property? By that logic, each state in the nation should use eminent domain to seize 25% of all existing housing, and all vacant land, then raze the homes and not develop the rest of the land. Property values would sky rocket for the remaining homes!

Perhaps most depressing, there is precedent for North Hills' evil:

Thomas Merrill, a Columbia University law professor, said legal precedents date to the 1880s, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the acquisition of land in Pennsylvania that is now the Gettysburg National Military Park. Examples closer to home include Hempstead's attainment of private Lido Beach clubs, said Allan Hyman, an attorney from East Meadow.

Congress has flashed its first signal on cable franchise reform, as members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee agreed in principle to create a national cable franchise structure for phone companies looking to offer video services. Under the agreement, reached Wednesday night, cable operators will continue to be bound by local franchising requirements until phone rivals have reached 15% local-video-market penetration.

This provision differs from franchise reform legislation under consideration at the state level, as well as in Texas, where legislation authorizing statewide franchising has passed. Under these statutes, cable companies can seek statewide franchising when their current local franchising agreements expire.

The details of the Congressional version have yet to be clarified, although it seems regulators would still wield a heavy hand on dictating the pricing packages cable companies could offer in comeptitive response. But as the Multichannel News report emphasizes, legislative language has yet to be written.

The Wall Street Journal Online asked economists Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Russell Roberts of George Mason University to debate to what degree inequality exists, and just how much it matters for the economy and society.

Read it all here.

Another idea I’ll throw into the mix is that many people actually choose to earn less than they could. Most of our grandparents probably took whatever job paid the most and today’s jobseekers certainly want big paychecks too. But they also seek other things (flexibility, more free time, less stress, greater personal fulfillment).

Jobseekers are always making tradeoffs that involve these and other factors and since it’s easier than ever before to meet our basic needs, we can probably expect more people to forego some income for other thing that are important to them.

Related: Previous smackdowns on eminent domain, privatizing social security, and outsourcing.

Every once in a while, I’ve added examples to the Wal-Mart Foe Hyperbole Watch (bottom of post).

Now comes one act of hyperbole that will be tough to top:

[Charles] Smith had wanted to make a point by comparing the giant retail company to the Nazis. So he created slogans playing off the Bentonville, Ark., firm's familiar logo, including "I {heart} WAL*OCAUST. They have family values and their alcohol, tobacco and firearms are 20% off."

Let’s see, selling cheap stuff versus rounding up millions of innocent people and murdering them.

It’s unlikely that such self-righteous pap will win over many people to the anti WM side. WM's efforts to try to stop Smith from selling his shirts are stupid and wrong. The man should have the right to sell his silly shirts, but stuff like this probably helps the critics of WM critics make the point that many foes of the biggest box have completely lost it.

Article here.

Related: A preacher who says WM offers slave jobs and the jobseekers who disagree with him.

Related: Wal-Mart, a Progressive Success Story, here and here.

Earlier this year, I asked: "Has the Supreme Court Killed Capitalism?" At the time, I thought my tone might have been a bit too emotional. Reading today's issue of Newsday suggests I wasn't. The highly affluent Village of North Hills on Long Island is considering seizing the ritzy and private Deepdale Country Club to convert it to a municipal golf course.

According to Newsday: "North Hills Mayor Marvin Natiss said the village has not yet decided to pursue the condemnation, but instead it is only gathering information, including appraisals and environmental impact statements, so it can make an informed decision. Natiss said condemning Deepdale would be lawful: "I consider a village golf course and recreational facility for residents a public use."

As long as the seizure of private property is part of a development plan, nothing in Kelo or other Supreme Court decisions would prevent this blatant exercise in municipal socialism.

To add insult to injury, the country club claims the village is using money extracted for infrastructure improvements from private developers on another project to fund the taking of the country club!

According to a new CDW-G survey of federal IT workers:

Forty-one percent of the employees surveyed said they had worked off site in some capacity in 2005, and that is double from the year before. Of those, 43 percent said they started teleworking in the last year.

Article here.

Related: Foot-dragging Feds Beginning to Embrace Telecommuting

Yesterday Paul Haggis, writer-director of Crash, won Oscars for best original screenplay and best picture.

His is another example to add to the long and growing list of things that can be done almost anywhere. Haggis suffered a heart attack while filming Crash. While he was getting well he decided against hiring a fill-in (after all this was his baby). He had monitors brought into his hospital room and finished directing his film from his bed. What was perhaps even more impressive is that he did it while whacked out on medication.

Related: Telecollege (?) gets a boost

And a milestone for a telecommuting-friendly company:

Eighty percent of JetBlue's reservation agents work from home. And as the airline just passed its six-year anniversary of allowing its agents to telecommute, the company reports that the move has not only saved them money and expensive office space... it's also increased productivity. …

Six year ago, when the company first got off the ground and telecommuting was first offered to the reservation agents, JetBlue had 40 agents, seven supervisors and four support staff people. Today, there are 1,500 agents and 1,200 of them have opted to telecommute.

Having so many workers telecommuting gives the company the flexibility it needs to compete in what can be a turbulent industry. Miller says it's much easier to ask workers to jump on their computers when the company needs extra agents manning the phones and dealing with a flood of customer calls than it would be to ask them to jump in their cars and head out to the office.
…

Gartner, Inc., an industry analyst firm, reports that this commingling of roles will continue to increase this year.
A January report out of Gartner shows that analysts there expect telecommuting, buoyed by concerns about fuel consumption and the growing availability of broadband Internet access at home, will increase by 9 percent this year. That growth rate is predicted to be 8 percent between 2004 and 2008.

…
[Dave Foster, a research analyst with the Aberdeen Group] says this kind of flexible work arrangement is opening up a whole new pool of available talent for the company. ''They might be attracting people who might not want to go to an office -- a whole new market of people who would like to telecommute.''

And Miller says that's exactly what's happening.

''It was a popular and successful program because we had a lot of mothers who wanted to get back in the workforce but didn't particularly want to leave home,'' she adds. ''It's really worked for us.''

Article here.

Related: Homeshoring.

"Unless we do something about [obesity], the magnitude of the dilemma will dwarf 9/11 or any other terrorist attempt."

US Surgeon General Richard Carmona.

Article here.

We can only hope that some “what I meant to say” press conference is in the works.

I suppose the SG ignored this study.

The proposed AT&T-BellSouth merger is not, as many say, a return the old Bell System. Many forget that before divestiture, AT&T alone developed, manufactured and owned virtually the entire U.S. phone network as well as everything that connected to it.

Google, a company that did not exist at the time of divestiture, today is bigger than any of the four Baby Bells. Vonage, which revolutionized the cost of phone service by moving it to the Internet, is set for an IPO. Philadelphia has signed a ten-year, $25 million contract with EarthLink has to provide citywide wireless broadband services. Apple is bringing out a combined iPod and cell phone. These are just four of many reasons why it’s absurd to believe the monopoly-era AT&T can ever return.

Still, opponents of the merger have raised the same fears they have in the past of higher prices, poor service and an end to competition. Yet despite the consolidation among cable and phone companies that has occurred over the past ten years, broadband prices continue to decrease while usage grows. Start-ups like Skype and MetroFi continue to appear. New technologies like WiMax and IP video put constant pressure on complacent business models.

For BellSouth customers in particular, AT&T brings the promise of a new generation of video services, which it has begun to deploy in Texas and California. While Verizon, AT&T and the cable companies have advanced video technology strategies in place, BellSouth has lagged. The merger will automatically put BellSouth’s territory in line for the service upgrades and greater video competition other regions of the country are getting now.

The Department of Justice, the FCC and the state regulatory commissions should examine and approve this merger in the context of today’s market-driven telecom industry. They should beware of acting as if nothing has changed since 1984. Policymakers since then have rightly sought to give the free market a greater hand in the telecom industry. For the last 22 years, much of that has worked. Now, in 2006, a combined AT&T-BellSouth is the market’s way of responding to the need for faster rollout of broadband to more areas of the country and lower prices for consumers through greater economies of scale. It’s the right way to go.

Those who still believe that Smart Growth is sustainable should take a look at a revealing analysis of Santa Barbara, California in the Los Angeles Times. The average home price has risen to $1.1 million since 1969 when the county enacted strict environmental regulations and tough growth management laws. After 30 years, the city

*ranks among the least affordable in California
*has virtually stagnant population growth in the city of Santa Barbara
*is experiencing rapidly rising congestion
*is expeeriencing an exodus of businesses to more affordable areas

Some people may claim that this isn't necessarily Smart Growth. Santa Barbara is practicing "slow growth" (although in effect it's no growth). But this ignores the main point.

The reason Santa Barbara is experiencing shockingly high housing inflation and a commercial exodus of middle-class and non-retail business is not because of semantics. Its because Santa Barbara enacted policies that restricted housing supply and land development, driving prices up. Prices went up because land wasn't available for development, and development regulations imposed higher costs.

The result? Anyone except the those with household incomes in the top 6% have to live somewhere else. They clog the roads (which haven't been upgraded) trying to get to their jobs in Santa Barbara. They fuel housing development far away from the city because its the only way they can get it.

These effects are the consequence of strict growth management laws, not their intent. It doesn't matter whether we call it Smart Growth or just plain old growth management. If the approval process restricts supply or imposes higher construction costs, these results are inevitable. The Soviet Union and Cuba were not able to legislate away market dynamics, so we shouldn't expect city and county councils in the U.S. to do it either. Policies that result in higher housing costs are simply not sustainable as urban development policy.

As usual, Lynne Kiesling dials in on the essntials of good and bad thinking on electricity regulation.

The news that Wireless Philadelphia has finalized terms with EarthLink pre-empted this post yesterday, but I made an oblique reference to its source when I tossed out a comment about the buzz Philadelphia was getting as a model for municipal wireless.

Craig Settles, who dissects the process of the Wireless Philadelphia project in Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless, is one of the few municipal wireless consultants who is willing to talk about the hard facts of the task at hand. In a new paper, “What’s the Price of Free?” he has published the replies to a list of questions he sent to various analysts and municipal IT officers about the challenges of municipal WiFi, particularly free WiFi. It makes interesting reading for anyone following the municipal wireless trend.

The 13 respondents include Ben Gibson, director of wireless and mobility networking at Cisco Systems; Chuck Haas, CEO and Co-Founder of MetroFi; Kim Crossman, a municipal wireless activist with San Francisco’s Webnetic; Cindy Mullen, CIO of St. Paul, Minn.; and Berge Ayvazian, executive vice president of wireless mobile technologies at the Yankee Group.

The 33-page document amounts to a virtual roundtable on the experience municipalities have had with wireless to date. While difficult to boil down to a sound bite, most participants agree that cities begin these projects with unrealistically high expectations, basically about cost of the technology and the willingness of vendors and service provider partners to provide equipment and services for free or at extreme discounts.

Want to improve your chances of surviving a car accident? Then get a bit flabby.

A new study finds that men with some flab are more likely to survive accidents than men who are very fat or very thin:

The results suggest that a moderate layer of fat -- such as that found in overweight but not obese people -- provides a "cushioning" effect during a crash, [said lead author Dr. Shankuan Zhu, an assistant professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin.]

But the cushion effect may vanish in males who are obese because their medical problems -- such as cardiovascular diseases and high-blood pressure -- could make them more vulnerable to dying from the effects of a crash, said Zhu.

The same might be true for thin males, who may have medical problems that exacerbate their ability to survive a crash, said Dr. Saman Arbabi, director of trauma surgery research at the University of Michigan. He co-authored a similar study that found nearly identical results.

Yet for women researchers found no safety benefits of flab. Why?

Arbabi suggested that it may have something to do with the physics of car accidents and the way that fat appears on the body. Overweight men tend to look like apples, with weight around their bellies, while overweight women look like pears, with fat around their hips and buttocks.

Article here.

More on highway safety here.

Imagine filling your bathtub and watching 41 percent of the water leak onto your bathroom floor.

That's what happens every day beneath the streets of Buffalo, according to a first-of-a-kind study that examines leaks in the aging water system.

The city pumps 29.6 billion gallons of water each year. But nearly 12 billion gallons goes down the proverbial drain. Most of the water is lost through leaks and bursts in the city's 900-mile maze of pipes...

Another jolting discovery is that Buffalo only collects revenue for 46 percent of the water it pumps … Another 600 million gallons is stolen by water pirates who tamper with meters and take extreme measures to restore service after water has been turned off for nonpayment.

This same water system has raised rates for metered customers by 64 percent in the past four years and increased flat-rate bills by 55 percent.

More here.

The Associated Press is reporting the details that have emerged about the Wireless Philadelphia as its contract with EarthLink moves to the Philadelphia City Council for approval.

EarthLink essentially will be granted a 10-year franchise as the city’s wireless network provider. Philadelphia will migrate an undisclosed, but reportedly substantial, portion, of its telecom spending to EarthLink, but will receive 3,000 free or discounted WiFi accounts plus further discounts on 700 T-1 accounts. EarthLink will pay Philadelphia $74 annually in rent per light post, for a total of $300,000 a year. EarthLink will also pay five percent of its revenues from wireless service provision to Wireless Philadelphia. These funds will be used for digital divide pr