tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40740479260504636612024-03-18T20:00:37.536-07:00Five Cent Thinking My blogs have evolved over time from commentary about the state of society to comments about my forthcoming memoir - which is about family, life and ideas. Of Course It's True, Except for a Couple of Lies. (Expected to be in Print in Fall 2022)drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.comBlogger50125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-70158020540452741532023-05-28T14:49:00.003-07:002023-05-28T14:49:32.892-07:00<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi13BCG8_oFGdc_AXh6U4_EbQToiW706fgGeHvqwOx15MEiCOrayJsh7sz3GVuTsUwRP2tsd03IviOpEecN7sQJc5jPwyK6Y9Kl4FvIUAoaMcNYEgX26-hHkjeq3Q3loeuH7Zk8OgTI2tnKdPEftET-HKqrrOJOmhGb6Hi_-27XqEBHjNPWfb5EKl-tTw/s2582/IMG_0084.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2582" data-original-width="1952" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi13BCG8_oFGdc_AXh6U4_EbQToiW706fgGeHvqwOx15MEiCOrayJsh7sz3GVuTsUwRP2tsd03IviOpEecN7sQJc5jPwyK6Y9Kl4FvIUAoaMcNYEgX26-hHkjeq3Q3loeuH7Zk8OgTI2tnKdPEftET-HKqrrOJOmhGb6Hi_-27XqEBHjNPWfb5EKl-tTw/w231-h305/IMG_0084.jpeg" width="231" /></a></div><p></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #e6000e;"><b>Are the Words It’s about time appropriate….</b></span>. On May 8 the book was finally placed on several sites. (AMAZON, BARNES and NOBLE, BOOKS A MILLION, ARCHWAY (My publisher) and even Waterston’s (A British book dealer) and SAXO (Danish)</p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">It comes in hardcover and paperback and will soon have an E-Book (Kindle) edition. (More on that later)</p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">My advice should you want to land a copy is to go to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Course-True-Except-Couple-Lies/dp/1665738596/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1684175629&sr=8-1">Amazon</a> or <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/of-course-its-true-except-for-a-couple-of-lies-jonathan-brown/1143464073?ean=9781665738590">Barnes and Noble</a>. (You can click on either name and get right to the site) This book is a print on demand book - and that is the simplest way to get it. When I ordered my first copy it took about a day to get it to me from Amazon. As I test I ordered from Archway and the book has yet to arrive.</p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">The E-book issue is a bit odd. They say it takes a couple of weeks to get the file formatted to an E-book or Kindle or iPad version. Who’d a thunk it.</p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">If you indeed to order it, I would appreciate a review on the site - that helps build traffic - I would love to rise above current rankings.</p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #0d0e0e; font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 5.5px; text-align: left;"><b>AMAZON Best Sellers Rank: </b>#845,679 in Books (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ref=pd_zg_ts_books"><span style="color: #0c5e72;">See Top 100 in Books</span></a>)</p><ul style="list-style-type: circle;">
<li style="color: #0c5e72; font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 5.5px; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #0d0e0e;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0e0e;">#2,498 in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/2575/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_books"><span style="color: #0c5e72;">Job Hunting & Career Guides</span></a></span></li>
<li style="color: #0c5e72; font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 5.5px; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #0d0e0e;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0e0e;">#22,621 in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/11019/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_books"><span style="color: #0c5e72;">Philosophy (Books)</span></a></span></li>
<li style="color: #0c5e72; font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 5.5px; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #0d0e0e;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0d0e0e;">#32,235 in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/20/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_books"><span style="color: #0c5e72;">Parenting & Relationships (Books)</span></a></span></li>
</ul><p style="background-color: white; color: #010203; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 5.5px; text-align: justify;">How in the hell I got included in Parenting and Relationships or in Job Hunting, I have no idea. </p><p style="background-color: white; color: #010203; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 5.5px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #010203; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 5.5px; text-align: justify;">One final comment - a good friend in Costa Rica is in the process of translating the book into Spanish. I have worked with him over the last couple of weeks on this process. Let me offer one example of the intricacies of translating a book. My namesake, Jonathan Archer, came to California in 1849 by sailing “around the horn” (alrededor del cuerno) but as we talked about it and I asked some friends in Mexico - the term is not common. One Mexican friend commented that Mexicans, when wanting to go from East to West, don’t think about sailing to the tip of South America. So we added a description of the term (Navegando del Atlántico al Pacífico). I am not sure when the Spanish version is coming and I am pretty sure I am not getting it translated into Danish</p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-3658669670180900742023-04-12T15:15:00.001-07:002023-04-12T15:15:58.996-07:00<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ8XZlRpseCzP9cpeOklhIpxcCpZ7Q1qJJTZMoKrCQTobfGej3qg7x9lu3AwsygLsLS-xkNEc5fkLRqOhczvmMr9vSDUFNFO_8HKZQubHFshr8GFRdCPXdo3ofdzBWVnbCALbfhET9pQvrhh5ql8olUz1yY75qNaSJDrCM4DASa9RPGLgI45UoT4DH9Q/s3885/IMG_0214.HEIC" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3885" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ8XZlRpseCzP9cpeOklhIpxcCpZ7Q1qJJTZMoKrCQTobfGej3qg7x9lu3AwsygLsLS-xkNEc5fkLRqOhczvmMr9vSDUFNFO_8HKZQubHFshr8GFRdCPXdo3ofdzBWVnbCALbfhET9pQvrhh5ql8olUz1yY75qNaSJDrCM4DASa9RPGLgI45UoT4DH9Q/s320/IMG_0214.HEIC" width="249" /></a></div><br /> <b style="color: red;">At Last the Story Can Be Told</b> - Today, I got the third set of blue lines from my publisher to review. A blue line is a complete copy of a manuscript which the author (ME) gets to mark up. I mention that this is the third one because even though I have probably read this manuscript a couple of hundred times, these last three required me to nit-pick and to read what has already become very familiar with a great deal of care. I had the constant notion in the back of my head of two images. First, in one of the big pieces of legislation that I worked on - the actual enrolled version included the following lines in statute "Senator Moynihan, please call XXX-XXX-XXXX" (When that bill went to the printer some stray paper got scooped up and became momentarily part of the Internal Revenue Code. But then I had a second image of two tombstones I found in an old cemetery which had typos. I hope my images were merely author's caution and not forecasts.<p></p><p>There are fourth additional announcements and one clarification. First, if the publisher keeps to the schedule all three versions (Hard Bound, Paperback and E-Book) will be on every possible book outlet (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, Kobo) - in about a month. I will send an email when I have been notified of the publication date.</p><p>Second, if you would like a copy of the last Blue line sent to you please send me an email and I will send you one. I hope that if you accept this version that a) you will offer comments - either directly to me or to a site when the book comes up - and b) that you will consider buying one of the editions. Unfortunately I do not have any control over the price.</p><p>Third, I am considering having a friend translate the book into Spanish. There are some complications in doing that but I have had a good friend offer to do the translation. And I know his Spanish is great because he is my tutor.</p><p>Fourth, I am moving this blog and my main website from the <a href="https://drtaxsacto.com" target="_blank">current one</a> to a new one titled FIVECENTTHINKING (which is in the process of being built in Mexico). That transition may happen by summer. I may keep the old domain or simply supplant it.</p><p>A Clarification - one of the key issues for this book has been whether I should include pictures. I had one good friend who is a successful author argue persuasively that I should cut the pictures to speed the process. While I understood the advice, I chose to ignore it and include 70+ pictures and illustrations (all in B/W because color photos are a pain to print). The picture above is one which did not make the cut. It is from 1964 - the gent with the Ode Banjo(Left) and shades you may recognize is me - the gent in the middle is the Reverend Gary Davis - it was taken for the Sat. Evening Post but never used. Davis was a superb blind guitar player and as a group of us were jamming on a plaza at UCLA's folk festival he came up and asked "Do you boys mind if I join in?" You'll notice that my arms are folded over my banjo -while we had done a couple of tunes together at that time we were all listening in awe as he riffed off the chimes on campus and then improvised.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNIgemEzvrta2EqBMRWjg2Thp73AANL-zaY8DodT5RpYbiSpxtE5vl-tpw6iA62SyMrY78GP-mN2vvAqe1PYOv1lKbjqY3Qm5_PJ97yavvaqcQ4b7A95MAJDEg2BFZZjwe0JzYnU0LKwhijFcZ2SBepP9R6YRAwOpTw8GQIgMOqAejGmjqPDsJFRI5mQ/s648/Cover%20Shot.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="648" data-original-width="432" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNIgemEzvrta2EqBMRWjg2Thp73AANL-zaY8DodT5RpYbiSpxtE5vl-tpw6iA62SyMrY78GP-mN2vvAqe1PYOv1lKbjqY3Qm5_PJ97yavvaqcQ4b7A95MAJDEg2BFZZjwe0JzYnU0LKwhijFcZ2SBepP9R6YRAwOpTw8GQIgMOqAejGmjqPDsJFRI5mQ/s320/Cover%20Shot.jpeg" width="213" /></a></div><p>Before the book gets in final print I want to thank each of you who read this blog and chapters over the last couple of years - I have been amazed by both the comments and the patience from each of you.</p><p><br /></p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-58102037429294220172023-03-07T11:43:00.000-08:002023-03-07T11:43:12.960-08:00<p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQhjoeHvrjuf2vDHKNzgXkhW10HwMLcd9Ic05L6ZDAG0kIBb7ZiKL3A91VzRbpsSCXWs9EHA6aakN7pxuEhLfak6Gfuoh0k2VW8Fr5ntQCKJh5cbFEqoHaxtutuc5c5gexiamRfdu-86dM3ZNbYQ37pCz9DndUqEaWAOM44aTDLdWJK3sWLfI5mV8TUg/s648/Cover%20Shot.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="648" data-original-width="432" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQhjoeHvrjuf2vDHKNzgXkhW10HwMLcd9Ic05L6ZDAG0kIBb7ZiKL3A91VzRbpsSCXWs9EHA6aakN7pxuEhLfak6Gfuoh0k2VW8Fr5ntQCKJh5cbFEqoHaxtutuc5c5gexiamRfdu-86dM3ZNbYQ37pCz9DndUqEaWAOM44aTDLdWJK3sWLfI5mV8TUg/s320/Cover%20Shot.jpeg" width="213" /></a></div><b style="color: red;">Godot has arrived....</b>In late September I did the last post for this blog. You may have thought I had abandoned the book. Not so. A friend who worked in publishing suggested to me that once the manuscript is accepted there is a lag time if you are using a large publishing house. The warning was correct. I've spent the last few months using my skills and my patience in working through the path that my publisher (Archway - an imprint of Simon and Schuster) has established.<p></p><p>But this morning my concierge sent me what in the legislative business were called mark up copies. So it looks like we are near the end of getting this in print. I will need to take some time to mark up the copy and submit my edits. I think I am going to print the manuscript out because in this case I think I can work with it more efficiently than on a screen. After those edits are completed I will send them in, Archway will then do their "magic" and Of Course It's True, Except for a Couple of Lies will be in print on all major platforms. (Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, etc.). It will come in three flavors Hardbound, Soft Cover and Ebook. But here are five things I can tell you now.</p><p><span style="color: red;">#1 Pricing of the Hardcover is beyond my control </span>- the publisher sets the price based on page count and a couple of other factors. Assuming that the book comes out close to the size it is now (375 pages) - the price will be $39.95.</p><p><span style="color: red;">#2 - The Soft Cover Edition </span>- the softcover version will be $22.95.</p><p><span style="color: red;">#3 - The Ebook Edition </span>- This is where I get to set the price. The default price is $3.99 but it can go from $2.99 to $9.99. I am inclined to set the price in the $5.99 range. </p><p><span style="color: red;">#4 - Spanish Language Edition </span>- In December I gave a speech in Mexico City at a conference on Integral Formation in the Digital World - I was able to reconnect with a college from a University where I taught and he expressed interest in me going there some time in the fall and presenting the book to a convocation. My Spanish tutor has volunteered to translate the manuscript. That will be published under another imprint (not sure which one) but because of my work in Mexico "Of Course It's True Except for a Couple of Lies will become Por Supuesto es Verdad, Excepto por un par de Mentiras." I think that will be primarily released as an Ebook or Soft Cover.</p><p><span style="color: red;">#5 - Release Date and publicity </span>- Based on my schedule and some other factors I think the book will be available on all platforms by sometime in June. I have spoken with a couple of knowledgable people about how to increase visibility of the book which will include some unique things like the convocations at Universities where I have taught or worked. I have also thought about some very specific events with groups where I have been involved which would offer the proceeds from all sales to that group.</p><p>The Sequel - I am mulling doing a sequel to the book which would be a historical novel, tentatively called "In Pursuit of Happiness" which would be a story about one of the inspirations of the book (my namesake Jonathan Archer - who came to California in 1849 but died soon after arriving) and his younger brother Oliver Hazard Perry Archer who stayed in New York and became a very successful entrepreneur who among other things was a part of the group which dumped Jay Gould from the Erie Railroad board in 1872. As I was researching this book I found a lot of evidence that Jonathan and OHP were good buddies and wondered what might have happened had Jonathan lived and thrived in California. It would be based on that set of assumptions and would be considerably shorter that OCITEFACOL. I am convinced that despite family lore about Jonathan's motives for coming to Sacramento during the Gold Rush - his real motive was Brannonesque (Sam Brannon was a merchant who quipped the way to make money in the gold was was not to pan for gold but to sell supplies to the miners.</p><p>Thanks for your patience on this project and for (those of you who still are!) your continued interest.</p><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><p></p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-25551563234412768822022-09-20T15:15:00.004-07:002022-09-20T15:32:13.821-07:00<h2 style="text-align: left;"> <span style="color: #e6000e;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: small;">The Tragedy of the Commons, revisited</span></span></h2>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv5jCi4FdSTlHFAcA8f43fB9-1V8yFvX1m00uLgIMvJSYKMSCPkEL0KOmPwy7rRZ3SIS_h9AVFx-YmnoS6nT4x6y6iipZj9Wd2mUupx_kKNRmXIKyzR0D1DrN7iGNZwLFIn1m7WbrUbt3ZSF1gNfn0rW3PBstHQXqZ3QhazrzmaQoVttzZt62HX-ecFA/s800/Disneyland-Warning-1941887357.jpeg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv5jCi4FdSTlHFAcA8f43fB9-1V8yFvX1m00uLgIMvJSYKMSCPkEL0KOmPwy7rRZ3SIS_h9AVFx-YmnoS6nT4x6y6iipZj9Wd2mUupx_kKNRmXIKyzR0D1DrN7iGNZwLFIn1m7WbrUbt3ZSF1gNfn0rW3PBstHQXqZ3QhazrzmaQoVttzZt62HX-ecFA/w173-h173/Disneyland-Warning-1941887357.jpeg" /></a></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">When I was in graduate school Garrett Hardin’s article called the “Tragedy of the Commons” was required reading. Although the idea came originally from an article by a British scholar named William Forster Lloyd in 1833; Hardin reintroduced the idea to a modern audience. Hardin, who was at the University of Washington, had originally proposed his revision as the “Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons”. He clearly was a fan of the rule of experts. The article can be reduced to a single phrase “if you allow a common resource to be unmanaged it will degrade.” </span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Lloyd’s article argued - "If a person puts more cattle into his own field, the amount of the subsistence which they consume is all deducted from that which was at the command, of his original stock; and if, before, there was no more than a sufficiency of pasture, he reaps no benefit from the additional cattle, what is gained in one way being lost in another. But if he puts more cattle on a common, the food which they consume forms a deduction which is shared between all the cattle, as well that of others as his own, in proportion to their number, and only a small part of it is taken from his own cattle. In an inclosed pasture, there is a point of saturation, if I may so call it, (by which, I mean a barrier depending on considerations of interest,) beyond which no prudent man will add to his stock. In a common, also, there is in like manner a point of saturation. But the position of the point in the two cases is obviously different. Were a number of adjoining pastures, already fully stocked, to be at once thrown open, and converted into one vast common, the position of the point of saturation would immediately be changed”.<span style="color: #092f9d; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><sup>[. </sup></span></span></div>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Hardin was more concise - “Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.” Both authors are making a comment about an economic concept called diminishing marginal utility - if you overuse something it becomes less useful. But there is a second unspoken assumption here - that is people are unable or unwilling to think about the common good. Hardin was a devotee of apocalyptic environmentalism. He was a modern Malthusian and like the founder of the movement believed that overpopulation was caused in part by welfare policies. His ideas ignored the effects of pricing and of regulation. Both authors also ignored the human tendency for humans to adapt. Hardin was not an economist but boy was his outlook dour. </span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">For me another contributor to this discussion was Elinor Ostrom, a University of Indiana economist, who thought a little more carefully about the issues on the commons and came to a very different conclusion - She argued that there are plenty of ways to adjust behaviors without top down regulation. She made that argument in a book called <i>Governing the Commons</i>, where she took Hardin’s paper and blew it out of the water with examples of alternative, less intrusive, regimes to reduce the problems of misallocation of resources. For that, she won the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Economics (the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences) in 2009. </span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">There is a good footnote on Ostrom who had to struggle to achieve her status. When she applied to UCLAs Economics program they rejected her because she lacked Trig. She eventually got on track, completed a doctorate and ultimately married one of her doctoral professors. She and husband Vincent had a marvelous career challenging traditional notions of organization and centralization. Both in her writing and in a couple of chances where I had the opportunity to hear her speak she had a special skill of consistently challenging established interpretations.</span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">As I have thought about the Commons issues I think there is a reciprocal (basically the inverse of the original argument). Hardin had no understanding of the possibility of spontaneous organization - as an “environmentalist” one would expect he had seen many examples of those things happening in nature - but he seems to have missed them all. But if you step out of the apocalyptic bubble you realize that there is a strong case to be made for some inverse logic on Hardin’s argument. Too much regulation can be even worse that too little.</span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">My home state is ground zero for Apocalypticists. California currently spends a quarter of a billion dollars in licensing more than 200 professions; many of those licenses are designed to protect us from imagined ill effects that are supposedly eliminated with state regulation. The Mercatus Center at George Mason University recently ranked California 49th in terms of economic freedom and 50th in regulatory freedom, <a href="http://freedominthe50states.org/regulatory/california"><span style="color: #084899;">finding that</span></a> “California not only taxes and regulates its economy more than most other states, but also aggressively interferes in the personal lives of its citizens.” In addition to its vigilance on all sorts of professions California has lived with the Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) which simultaneously slows down the process of development and adds costs to almost every land decision. Any wonder why the state’s housing is so expensive? Is it a surprise that the state is a center for homelessness? </span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Then there is Prop 65, the annoying proposition authored by Tom Hayden, that requires disclosures about supposed cancer risks on a wide variety of real and imagined dangers. There are some real perils with dangerous substances but the standards in Prop 65 are absurd. For example, Disneyland has a Prop 65 warning which intones that they use substances that are cancer causing - one of those warnings is near a place to buy coffee. The problem with the Prop 65 warnings is that this additional annoying disclosure may indeed reduce concern for really toxic substances. If we know that some of those disclosures are downright silly, how likely are we to have trust in the real risks? Was Hardin a new example of the boy who cried wolf? Certainly Tom Hayden made a career on wolf calls.</span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Opponents of the Apocalyticists are often characterized as “deniers”. If we want to be fair we should probably shoot back that the Apocalyticists are overly pessimistic about the human propensity to adapt. Does that mean that I do not accept any form of regulation? That is an absurd question - but it suggests that my thinking says we should be equally skeptical of the efficacy of regulation as some are about the human ability to manage their own affairs.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8HJ92SfinUcGVPPwYn5JetT35uOJqaL8955ltbc-N1Wf8iq_hYS6a19_mFOXAAFaixJWYkyuPSJ0l1lA4WBHEsgiMYpXmw8ZSV281ty58qmhzxzZb6XP_fPZ6seHQ0qPerWdGcm9N_6HD9_MtbamU0esPzeBTNvrQkTjghgTHgw6tW3ignE91XAXdow/s648/7C9D04AB-D3B6-4F11-BC14-71A4561ADB1E.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="clear: left; float: left; font-family: georgia; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="648" data-original-width="432" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8HJ92SfinUcGVPPwYn5JetT35uOJqaL8955ltbc-N1Wf8iq_hYS6a19_mFOXAAFaixJWYkyuPSJ0l1lA4WBHEsgiMYpXmw8ZSV281ty58qmhzxzZb6XP_fPZ6seHQ0qPerWdGcm9N_6HD9_MtbamU0esPzeBTNvrQkTjghgTHgw6tW3ignE91XAXdow/w133-h200/7C9D04AB-D3B6-4F11-BC14-71A4561ADB1E.jpeg" width="133" /></span></a></div><p></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="color: #e6000e;"><b>THE BOOK. </b></span><b> </b> I have had a couple of friends who have wondered whether <i>Of Course It’s True, Except for a Couple of Lies,</i> is part of the continuing Lucy and the football story. For the past couple of years I have argued that it is about to get published. Well, in the last few weeks, things have started, finally, to change. First, I got solicited b one of the imprints of Simon and Schuster to have them publish the book. I spent a couple of months talking to them but did not like the original proposal they offered me. Then about 2 weeks ago, because of a note on Linked In, I got an inquiry from Forbes. They have a division for first authors. Early in the week, I had a discussion with their rep. The Forbes imprint is not something that fit my needs, they seem to expect that first time authors need a ghost writer. So I restarted the discussion with the S&S people and early in this week signed an agreement for them to publish the book. That imprint makes has distribution through all the normal channels - Apple Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and a host of others in hard copy, paperback and E-Books. The good news is that I think I can see the end of this line. The bad news is that the process will take about 25 weeks from the time that the final manuscript is submitted.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><br /></p></div></div>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-87769673143545589602022-08-25T12:08:00.000-07:002022-08-25T12:08:18.494-07:00<p><span style="color: red;"><b> <span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Where is <span face=""Noto Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, "Liberation Sans", Roboto, Noto, sans-serif">"ceteris paribus" NOW that we need it?</span></span></b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Every discipline has a couple of key phrases, those secret passwords that practitioners invoke.. In economics there is "ceteris paribus". It is a way to analyze a situation by looking at one variable and holding all other variables constant. It is a great way to simplify a complex question. But increasingly, those kinds of common courtesies are ignored. Two (related) cases in point come to mind. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The Attorney General approved a search warrant to obtain classified documents from the estate of our former president. Whether or not that was an efficacious strategy to reduce the chance that Trump would protect classified documents appropriately, or even whether the former president should have such documents, is not at issue. I personally thought the raid was a bit overly dramatic. There is a law which stipulates the treatment of presidential records (although interestingly it does not seem to have any sanctions for bad behavior) but after the raid Trump released personal information about the agents who executed the warrant. I think that was bad behavior but there does not seem to be a specific federal statute which prevents someone from publicizing the names. In my mind that really does not matter. As my dad used to say "just because you can, doesn't mean you should." </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The parallel story comes from a group called Ruth Sent Me, who thought it was their duty,when they did not agree with the recent decision on abortion (Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health) it was their duty to publicize the home addresses of several Supreme Court justices. In this case, there is a federal statute that prohibits disclosure of the Justice's address and also in picketing in front of their residences. But the Ruth Sent Me people thought it was ok because they really disagreed with the decision. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In both cases, Trump's and Ruth Sent Me's, the actions were inappropriate, whether or not there is a specific law against such behavior. But neither cared about holding other variables constant. In both cases because they held strong beliefs about the search warrant and the draft decision, they could move everything all in. Basic standards of decency in society will not work very well with that kind of idiocy.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">We clearly live in times when reasonable social restraints are ignored by a significant fraction of society. Andrew Mir, writing in the Summer Issue of City Journal, argues that as newspapers moved from an advertising model (where adds supported Journalism) to a subscriber model - the propensity to pander to the subscriber's whims increased significantly. That may be part of the problem we face in the quest to have reasoned discussions - we have created echo chambers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I had so many conversations over the last couple of weeks with friends who are genuinely grumpy about how strident their friends on the left or right are. I have the great good fortune to have friends who believe Trump is the devil incarnate and others who believe that Trump had the election stolen from him. I don't believe either meme; but those polarizations diminish our ability to try to figure out what is happening in a particular area. And ultimately what is the right thing to do for the largest fraction of our fellow citizens.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtOiJAmbSXTVCisfb_wJld-UbjixGp4OXKd5_S0RtW38kb-0yjigtkvkNfqrdlhk6_xk-_CqL8pXbdHLpcgGi3X_B-Grc1IURghUsz0ZQpYWxnnW95HcwtYG31Z2AVTKvq83ormMxwbxWj1YnTsqK6roVn3Wp7MMgzTSpdyPI8SIKXC5y0kbB5Zgpq1g/s648/7C9D04AB-D3B6-4F11-BC14-71A4561ADB1E.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="648" data-original-width="432" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtOiJAmbSXTVCisfb_wJld-UbjixGp4OXKd5_S0RtW38kb-0yjigtkvkNfqrdlhk6_xk-_CqL8pXbdHLpcgGi3X_B-Grc1IURghUsz0ZQpYWxnnW95HcwtYG31Z2AVTKvq83ormMxwbxWj1YnTsqK6roVn3Wp7MMgzTSpdyPI8SIKXC5y0kbB5Zgpq1g/s320/7C9D04AB-D3B6-4F11-BC14-71A4561ADB1E.jpeg" width="213" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: red; font-weight: bold;">UPDATE ON OCITEFACL </span><span> This week confirmed two new things. First, my design editor has come up with a dandy cover for the book. Victoria Vinton (</span><a href="mailto:victoria@coyotepressgraphics.com%20www.coyotepressgraphics.com" style="color: purple; font-size: 14.666667px;">www.coyotepressgraphics.com</a>) sent me what I think is called a pre-print of the book. That means all the text has been converted into a file which can be sent to my publisher. My job this week was to go through the manuscript for the 1100th time and look for things which did not look right. Yesterday I sent her back the PDF so she could make the edits. At the same time she sent me proposals for the "wrap" the front cover and the side backing. Victoria proposed using a brown highlight for the author's name. Our daughter suggested that when people are asking for the book in a bookstore they could simply ask for the brown one.</span><p></p><div><span style="font-family: arial;">Second, I found out yesterday that KDP (Kindle Direct Printing) rejects manuscripts with lots of photos. From the start I have thought - even though the pictures in this book will be in black and white for the print edition - the images were an essential part of the project. Does that mean my book will not be on Amazon - I think the answer is no, but the book may have to be fulfilled from my publisher (Ingram Spark) which prints books on demand. In my current thinking the book will also be on Apple Books (and there I think we can have color photos). During this interim I am exploring options to assure distribution through the channels.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">So what happens next? Two files have to be created for publication - one is in a format called E-PUB which is used for digital editions. The second one is basically a PDF which goes to be used for the PRINT edition. When the final edits are done I will then submit both files to my published, get ISBNs for both editions (that is the tracking number for all books) and then we will be off to the races. That is an exciting prospect for me.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The ultimate sentence in the book is a quote from Huck Finn - <span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; text-align: justify;">“So there ain</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">’</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; text-align: justify;">t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">’</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; text-align: justify;">d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">’</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; text-align: justify;">t a tackled it, and ain</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">’</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; text-align: justify;">t a-going to no more.” But that may not be true. One of the things which this project captured me with was a second story </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">about my namesake (Jonathan Archer - 1823-1850 - who left New York to go to the gold fields in California. Jonathan was there for less than a year and after a lot of research I am convinced he embarked on that arduous journey around the horn not just to hunt for gold. His younger brother, Oliver Hazard Perry Archer (1825-1899) stayed in New York, expanded the family business in dry goods and into deliveries and eventually became a very wealthy person. It turns out OHPA was part of the group that bounced Jay Gould out of the Erie Railroad in 1872. There is some evidence that JA and OHPA were close. But one brother chose to leave the homestead and the other did not; both were pursuing "happiness" in the Jeffersonian sense. When everything is I am toying with the notion of doing a novel about their individual quests. But first let's get this one out.</span></span></div>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-72498078527617676752022-08-03T14:46:00.002-07:002022-08-03T14:46:44.016-07:00<p> <span style="color: red;"><b>Crystal Radios and Vin Scully</b></span></p><p>From about age 10 I was intrigued by technology. One of the first devices I purchased was a Heathkit Crystal Radio. It was a very simple device that you put together in about 3 minutes. It used radio waves to get a signal and required no batteries. It was underpowered and had no amplifier so it used earphones. I built that in Bakersfield and soon found that clear channels (those stations with a lot of wattage) were the only ones that came in. I found two stations that were almost always available - one in LA and one in San Francisco. On summer nights I could listen to the Dodgers and Vin Scully in bed. That reinforced my interest in baseball. I started to like the team in the 50s when the Dodgers went to the World Series in '52, '53. They finally won in 1955. They came back in '56 to lose to the Yankees and then in '59 they did it again. That was the first series with a west coast team. But I learned the phrase "wait until next year"even though the Dodgers won twice in the decade.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjOqwOJJlHeL4TrYxkjcgYDsM0ZoupCnvk5XLQDX2FOoBc1Tf212Fn3wGkVbhbOyayrrlq-o_nsnL6OMuRw1f_k1F7VQQuEL048veJhlqqCqJzdgr-O8fJJ-XhaLsq5kU1mGukN5f3HDJWKDK1zForIdGYhHtFKU71qhPaVYtQjgmZo1zK8xdNfUq8vHg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="440" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjOqwOJJlHeL4TrYxkjcgYDsM0ZoupCnvk5XLQDX2FOoBc1Tf212Fn3wGkVbhbOyayrrlq-o_nsnL6OMuRw1f_k1F7VQQuEL048veJhlqqCqJzdgr-O8fJJ-XhaLsq5kU1mGukN5f3HDJWKDK1zForIdGYhHtFKU71qhPaVYtQjgmZo1zK8xdNfUq8vHg" width="192" /></a></div><p></p><p>That crystal radio also informed me about the Our Lady of the Angels fire in 1958 in Chicago and the death of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens in 1959. But the Dodger games were most important.</p><p>Scully was a fan of baseball but never was a "homer" announcer. His call was always balanced and it often involved tons of baseball history that seemed to well up at the drop of a hat. His call of Kirk Gibson's home run in the 1988 World Series is one that I have replayed many times.</p><p>Come forward several decades and I was offered the opportunity to meet Scully in his broadcast booth. I had a friend who was doing some consulting for the O'Malley family and he invited me for a game and a chance to meet the voice I had first heard on the crystal radio.</p><p>As I entered the booth, I noticed a three ring binder with lots of notes. As I watched his work, he would flip through what looked like unorganized pages and then come up with a classic story or quote. When they got to a commercial break, I got to say hello and I told him about listening to him since the 50s but said I was a bit disappointed. He asked why and I said I had always admired his skilled weaving of baseball facts and history into his game coverage. He joked back - "Look I am over 70 years old, I can't remember everything!" He was truly gracious.</p><p>Fast forward about another decade and I was at a dinner held by an underwriter at a national conference of University Chief Financial Officers. I was sitting next to the CFO of one of the institutions I represented who had his 10 year old son with him. We started talking about famous people we had met and when it came to be my turn I listed a bunch of politicians and other famous people and then I said and I had met Vin Scully. The kid looked at me, ignoring the Presidents, Governors and other celebs and asked "You met Vin Scully?" That really put the American fascination with celebrities in its proper place. The book has a chapter "Fleeting Encounters with Fleeting Fame" which discusses my chances to meet some very famous people.</p><p><b><span style="color: red;">TWO DEVELOPMENTS ON "OF COURSE ITS TRUE EXCEPT FOR A COUPLE OF LIES.."</span> - </b>Last week I was approached by a representative of Archway Publishing, which is a division of Simon and Schuster. They offered to help publish and distribute the book. We had a couple of discussions but in the end I did not choose to use them. I also had the chance to speak with the authors of a wonderful book - <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mitkas-Secret-Slavery-Surviving-Holocaust-ebook/dp/B08ZSBBJRK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1659541291&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Mitka's Secret</a> which is an inspiring story of a child who was forced into slavery by the Nazis - who are friends. The child emigrated to the US and became a successful person in spite of not being able to read and write. (Buy the book it is an inspiring read!). I learned a lot about promoting a book. </p><p>Finally, my ACE Design Editor is about ready to have a draft of the completed and designed manuscript. There are a lot of unappreciated details in preparing a manuscript and I seem to have added complexity but adding asides and lots of pictures. She commented that she has enjoyed the stories in the book - and that has slowed her down a bit. As we say in Mexico - "Better right than fast." The final steps are for me to review the manuscript and then to send it to my publisher. (Ingram Spark - which is a major printer and distributor of books on many platforms.) I assume that the book will now be available on Amazon and Apple Books and through a couple of other sources in October.</p><p><br /></p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-75343639102859408532022-06-04T14:01:00.002-07:002022-06-04T21:15:15.902-07:00<p> <span style="color: red; font-size: medium;"><b>Charles Tiebout's Chickens</b></span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">When I first started my doctoral work I discovered an economic geographer named Charles Tiebout. In 1956 he wrote an article called the "Pure Theory of Local Expenditures" which argued for an economic consideration in where people live based on ambience. If I want </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">good schools for my kids. I will search out an area based on price of housing and how good the schools are. It was one of those little gems that got me to think about many things differently. </span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIXe69dTptGc5XI5_HIXO8Jy1oZAyOSwWplRRsFqb89bpxwm7TcW9H99R7-9cW8rCmXkSsDQ9h_goxRo68tmUTc-YbTTmTG8KBLPX0WhI_QJS2jWVfm4XGyN3CMgxdzt332ihDqvU7CT4Mfsi7CCBfOrkagDzIw0nNSojIaPbNHxAU4auBW9ETEMOKoA/s1530/Wealth%20Migration.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="855" data-original-width="1530" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIXe69dTptGc5XI5_HIXO8Jy1oZAyOSwWplRRsFqb89bpxwm7TcW9H99R7-9cW8rCmXkSsDQ9h_goxRo68tmUTc-YbTTmTG8KBLPX0WhI_QJS2jWVfm4XGyN3CMgxdzt332ihDqvU7CT4Mfsi7CCBfOrkagDzIw0nNSojIaPbNHxAU4auBW9ETEMOKoA/s320/Wealth%20Migration.jpg" width="320" /></a></span>But this week brought two issues where I rethought about Tiebout's brilliance. The Internal Revenue Service published data on the migration by AGI (adjusted gross income) of taxpayers among the various states. It turns out that Tiebout was right. In the 2017 Tax Act one provision to find revenue and to make the tax system more equitable (so the rich would actually pay more taxes than middle and lower income taxpayers) the State and Local Tax Deduction was limited to $10,000. That means that a huge subsidy which formerly went from middle and lower income taxpayers in low tax states to very high income taxpayers in high tax states was limited. It should have been long ago.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">SO after the limit was adopted, what happened? As the chart above clearly shows lots of high income taxpayers migrated from high tax to low tax states. California alone lost almost $18 billion in AGI. And as I have discussed before the California revenue system is heavily dependent on having lots of very high income taxpayers. If those high income taxpayers disappear, there will be less revenue for the state to spend on all the public services a state offers. </span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">The argument for reinstating the unlimited deduction for state and local taxes is a bit odd. Some wizards claim that the SLOT prevents "double taxation" (yup they actually make that claim!). But the distributional effects of the deduction are clear - almost 90% of the value of the deduction (either before it was capped or after) go to very high income taxpayers who live in high tax states. SLOT is like asking a truck driver in Idaho to help subsidize a venture capitalist in California.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_zesAsXPtOt1DGLYyLF3biiEGKE_X5lgB9R_5bC2JyrhFh-fnXY3JhueuhLOAoWtWf_3uxxRWn0alSp34HUaeD2HFY3IR92yukxoFWGn2Oy19nZze36LRzViPf6J2bAk2eB6wnWI-zZLM00RunzDk2WyNmnXtKp2Ke2d7KNy3B4GTAgVQSXgqEgYPAg/s1024/6C977459-2B3A-4D48-9C23-7081D03B427C.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_zesAsXPtOt1DGLYyLF3biiEGKE_X5lgB9R_5bC2JyrhFh-fnXY3JhueuhLOAoWtWf_3uxxRWn0alSp34HUaeD2HFY3IR92yukxoFWGn2Oy19nZze36LRzViPf6J2bAk2eB6wnWI-zZLM00RunzDk2WyNmnXtKp2Ke2d7KNy3B4GTAgVQSXgqEgYPAg/s320/6C977459-2B3A-4D48-9C23-7081D03B427C.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>The disappearance of wealthy taxpayers from the California tax roles is explained by Tiebout's hypothesis. What is a mystery is another disappearance, no less cataclysmic. We live in the village of Fair Oaks. It is an odd community - mixes of incomes and backgrounds. Our honorary mayor attains office by who can raise the most money for some civic activity. Most importantly, the village is famous for its feral chickens. Often when I am walking Indiana in the morning, and on a phone call, the chickens will be squawking and one of the people on the call will wonder where I am. The village has numerous chicken memorabilia on shop walls. We even have an annual chicken festival (along with the St. Patrick's Dinner in the Community Clubhouse and the Fair Oaks Theater Festival in the summer (where the plays are occasionally interrupted by chicken accompaniment) which helps to define our community. Those might be called our "Tiebout amenities" and for us that is pretty good.<div><br /></div><div>But about two months ago the chicken population around the square (across from the Stockman's Bar - a classic saloon) our birds began disappearing. I've asked around and no one seems to know why the chickens disappeared. When I walk in the morning some people have argued that they vanished because of a) attacks of coyotes (yes you do occasionally see coyotes and deer, but not in the square); b) the homeless population down by the river, or c) or some rare form of avian influenza. But no one believes any of that. The two Guinea Hens, which were interlopers into the brood, still are in the park and seem to be fine.</div><div><br /></div><div>What has not been discussed to this point is whether their disappearance can be explained by Tiebout. Were our chickens very high income and did they move to Florida? Did some other locality offer better amenities than a free place to roam and plenty of chicken feed?</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="color: red;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><b>OF COURSE IT's TRUE EXCEPT FOR A COUPLE OF LIES (PROGRESS REPORT)</b></span></span></div><div><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">The book is with one final editor who is called a design editor. I searched for someone who had good experience in getting the design elements right. Those are things like the cover photo and the internal organization of the book. A friend, who has published three books, recommended an editor in Arizona and I spoke to her. I also looked at her website and thought it was a good match. She will produce a final manuscript which will be print ready for both an ebook and a paperback. There is one unresolved issue - one of my editors suggested that we divide the book into three volumes (each of about 150 pages) - one on family, one on life and one on ideas/beliefs. In the end my design editor may recommend to put it all in one volume. That would make marketing simpler and at the same time it could increase the utility of the volume especially for pressing flowers!</span></div><div><span style="color: red;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><br /></span></span><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><p></p></div>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-45861591893770101442022-04-26T13:52:00.000-07:002022-04-26T13:52:07.316-07:00<p><span style="color: red;"><b> <span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The Arrogance of the Chattering Class</span></b></span></p><p></p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEzuop_NCMVe5cEGsro2X_yECJsBgIg_braOTbnrh1pvYqmna2A-6zfb_lheZsmeVnezcdERg80UMCcGuADn7H0VSQmgfRz71E2SiT9FFGOgkF8UQzRw8mVE2yD4M0oE8lyJ7X-TvbnJh1C2P78BlNEJ5xX_A_XV9_p6G3Z2gbOd6p9DRKWii26aoB-w/s660/7EBC9B69-1038-4759-9748-3226D067663B.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="656" data-original-width="660" height="131" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEzuop_NCMVe5cEGsro2X_yECJsBgIg_braOTbnrh1pvYqmna2A-6zfb_lheZsmeVnezcdERg80UMCcGuADn7H0VSQmgfRz71E2SiT9FFGOgkF8UQzRw8mVE2yD4M0oE8lyJ7X-TvbnJh1C2P78BlNEJ5xX_A_XV9_p6G3Z2gbOd6p9DRKWii26aoB-w/w133-h131/7EBC9B69-1038-4759-9748-3226D067663B.jpeg" width="133" /></a></div>In the last few weeks I've been amazed at how the chattering class has reacted to two stories; the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk and the actions taken in response to a woke corporation's scolding of Florida, especially their governor. At the same time the CEO of one of the major investment firms proposed that he should decide, in behalf of his investors, how the money we put in trust for him should vote the underlying shares for corporate governance. All three stories suggest that the hegemony of cultural elites is under pressure. From my perspective that is a very good thing.</span><p></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); font-family: arial;">SO let's start with Elon Musk and Twitter. This morning David Leonhardt had a column about the Twitter transaction and brought up Thomas Piketty (again). The author of a flawed book on economic inequality is a go to source for issues like Musk's use of his own resources to takeover Twitter. Obviously if Musk gets control of Twitter, that is a bad thing. And, although I have some serious reservations about the methodology (Piketty's book <i>Capital in the Twentyfirst Century</i> seemed to me when I read it to have written a series of conclusions before amassing the data) we do have some very rich people in society. </span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); font-family: arial;">Leonhardt's colleague at the NYT Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote a supplemental column called "Friends and Foes" which created all sorts of hobgoblins relating to Musk's actions - completely ignoring the manifold bias of the "fact" checkers who have governed social media (and indeed the main stream media) for a very long time. Sorkin's argument seemed to characterize Twitter and the other social media platforms as almost public utilities. That could be true, (and one might consider whether that would be a good idea) but it is not.</span></p><p style="color: #262626; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Sorkin seems to assume that Musk's ownership will result in "More bullying? More lewd commentary and images? More misinformation?" Well, Mr. Sorkin - the answer is yes. But the virtue of free speech is that it is inherently messy. As James Suroweicki pointed out in <i>The Wisdom of Crowds </i>- give crowds the chance and they will sort out the bad stuff. Arguing that "the science is settled" (to prevent discussion of alternative thinking about scientific questions) or that any one of a number of other issues in dispute have definable limits is antithetical to the limits of free speech. Trump did not win the election. There were some alternative strategies for dealing with the pandemic. Free speech is better when the limits of moderation are done by the crowd not some self satisfied group of elites. The crowd has the ability to sort out the crazies. The WSJ this morning sorted out (in my opinion) what might happen with Musk's acquisition - <span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">"</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333;">If Mr. Musk can strike a more satisfying balance on content moderation, maybe he’s right about Twitter’s hidden value. Current management is correct that most regular social-media users don’t want a daily bath of Russian bots, jihadist propaganda, noxious harassment and so forth.</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333;"> "</span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLXuP7sx8WLcbtemdZ8BK377TeVNGcdW0DQiRleabQV1CJvYUQE20H-RBYzRNdxb0do7_I31Iu3cL2HQEj3lLQJ_GSipszxzH40yksWU9s-KRVW6L9Tb8HlMeDMUCT7QEqi8ZfTf3gC6VZ5Cve4teQbxVO4HOhKvzKi5gWAPCzS0mHOZT97FnAh0qqew/s274/565B9069-7387-40E2-96AA-82721A742458_4_5005_c.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="255" data-original-width="274" height="117" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLXuP7sx8WLcbtemdZ8BK377TeVNGcdW0DQiRleabQV1CJvYUQE20H-RBYzRNdxb0do7_I31Iu3cL2HQEj3lLQJ_GSipszxzH40yksWU9s-KRVW6L9Tb8HlMeDMUCT7QEqi8ZfTf3gC6VZ5Cve4teQbxVO4HOhKvzKi5gWAPCzS0mHOZT97FnAh0qqew/w126-h117/565B9069-7387-40E2-96AA-82721A742458_4_5005_c.jpeg" width="126" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: arial;">Simultaneously we've seen grumpiness and misrepresentation on the stance of Florida on teaching sex education in the early grades. Disney's woke CEO Robert Chapek claimed that Florida's recently passed legislation which limits the teaching of sex issues before grade 3 was somehow an abridgment of free speech. The left has also has come up with some marvelous fictions about the actions by the legislature to eliminate a special district created in behalf of the company to help them build Disneyworld. </span></span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: arial;">OK - so was it a good idea to eliminate the district and has the legislature considered the consequences of eliminating this special privilege for a wealthy California corporation that employs a lot of Floridians and adds a lot to the state's GDP? Having worked with legislators for more than 4 decades I can affirmatively answer that the answer is NO. But are the issues appropriate for a legislature to consider? ABSOLUTELY Should a legislature consider constraining the public education establishment from determining curriculum without seeking parental input or consent? The answer is YES. But the whining of the cognoscenti is just plain silly. Free speech is messy, so are democratic systems - but the chattering class believes that their point of view should control. Not in our system. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Is part of this story the presumed candidacy in 2024 of Governor DeSantis? Of course there may be political motives attached to the Governor's and the Legislature's actions. But then of course all the criticism on each side of the issue has some political grounding. The chattering class tries to hide that their political motives are above judgment. NO MORE!!!</span></span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); font-family: arial;">Finally we come to Larry Fink of Blackrock Capital. In recent years an increasing number of financial professionals have begun to talk about ESG (Sustainable Investing) where somehow the owners of the company (those who hold shares in the company) are somehow equated with the suppliers of capital. Corporations become servants of some broader social purpose. For the most part this new range of investment theory has been relegated to funds created for those purposes. If you invest your funds in their investment vehicles you assume that your returns will be better. (Based on a reasonable set of criteria). But then comes the CEO of Blackrock (FINK) who has raised the bar a bit - he now claims that he will vote the shares he owns using his personal predilections. This is ESG investing on steroids. When he made his statement I divested the funds I had from Blackrock as his principles and mine do not coincide. I don't want to boycott him as some want to do with Florida. The answer for people like me who disagree with philosophies like Fink's is to not invest with the guy. On the left, California official boycotts working with a of majority of states because those states have established positions which contradict the orthodoxy of "woke" California. So much for tolerance.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: arial;">In recent years a good portion of the cultural elite have tried to impose their values while disregarding alternative points of view. All three of these stories suggest that attempt at dominance will be under increasing challenge. From my perspective that is just fine. We need, as a society, to work on two things. First, we need to understand that in a diverse society the cultural commons will include diverse points of view. Second, and as importantly we need to think about how to talk about issues which divide us. My grandmother used to say "there is a good reason why God gave us two ears and only one mouth." Not a bad place from which to start.</span></span></p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-35560972032019421052022-03-17T15:37:00.002-07:002022-03-17T16:00:35.494-07:00<p><b><span style="color: red;"></span></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: red;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjjfj01hBwohRxokTYBKXX1XPZgBG9GBJLX-KupDg9yyObTGY1SrIyijXZZ88K-LYkLSegNd0R5yLTjk9qG2-f1lbI4D9NoNqJPgdXgl_czByPnbZ33r2CQPl7GZJqhBeugoLTRhLo3ElWIhaMzO3RlRA0UhPvPPuKGsR9JOMoqlqfSTUHzei2HBTXSrw=s1003" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="799" data-original-width="1003" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjjfj01hBwohRxokTYBKXX1XPZgBG9GBJLX-KupDg9yyObTGY1SrIyijXZZ88K-LYkLSegNd0R5yLTjk9qG2-f1lbI4D9NoNqJPgdXgl_czByPnbZ33r2CQPl7GZJqhBeugoLTRhLo3ElWIhaMzO3RlRA0UhPvPPuKGsR9JOMoqlqfSTUHzei2HBTXSrw=w257-h205" width="257" /></a></span></b></div><b><span style="color: red;"><br />Didn't you always hate those Supply/Demand graph</span><span style="color: red;">s?</span></b><p></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">I've just finished reading a pretty good book on the Fed called </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Easy-Money-Federal-American-ebook/dp/B098423WTR/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1JV0JQ8CG76QH&keywords=the+lords+of+easy+money&qid=1647531810&sprefix=The+lords+of+e%2Caps%2C175&sr=8-1" style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);" target="_blank">The Lords of Easy Money</a><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"> by John Leonard which describes the role of the Fed especially as it relates to that recent invention called </span><a href="https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Clark+and+Dawes+on+Quantitative+easing&&view=detail&mid=78E8BFB08525C0AA5AB078E8BFB08525C0AA5AB0&rvsmid=4642FDA72A3A98973F674642FDA72A3A98973F67&FORM=VDQVAP" style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);" target="_blank">Quantitative Easing</a><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"> (for those of you not schooled in this arcane idea the Australian comedy-news team of Clark and Dawe did a very short explanation of the policy which is right on point. - click on it - Clark and Dawe were a brilliant team of satirists whose weekly political spoofs on a variety of topics were cut short when John Clarke died in 2017).</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">The numbers around QE were astounding. At one point the total QE injected into the system was larger than the total monetary expansions in 300 years! All of that seems pretty arcane until you begin to realize that, at least according to the author there were several other consequences of QE. To understand those, one needs to be reminded of two types of inflation - PRICE inflation and ASSET inflation. The easiest way to understand price inflation is to go to any gas station in the US, or make a trip to the grocery store. The cost of all sorts of things have increased rapidly over the last year. Chair Powell commented that he expects if all the things they talked about yesterday are successful that at the end of the year price inflation will be down to just under 5% or two and a half times the Fed policy rate. </span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Asset inflation is harder to detect and often its effects make us want to proclaim how smart we are. When you buy a house that increases quickly in price - many people simply judge that they were good "students of the market." Asset inflation can also be a bit harder to assess because one is not always to establish an accurate price for an asset easily. Many assets are intangible. When I worked in a securities firm for two summers in college there was an obligatory read called </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Popular-Delusions-Madness-Crowds-ebook/dp/B08FFZJ84X/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1647541582&sr=8-1" style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);" target="_blank">Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds</a><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"> by Charles MacKay written in 1841 which described a series of market bubbles where assets were absurdly valued because of the "madness of crowds". (Note it was a good yarn although several of his tales were not quite accurate). Don't blame a 19th Century Scottish poet for not getting the facts right on financial blunders - economists have done their best to build fallible models since then. When I started investing in securities about a decade later the founder of Fidelity Magellan offered some very sound advice to avoid bubbles - Peter Lynch commented that if you cannot define a financial transaction on a single sheet of paper with a crayon - you probably should avoid it.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Price inflation makes all of us poorer (we pay more for less) but the effects are harder on those who spend most of their resources on things. (The poor really do get whacked when we have 7% inflation!). Asset inflation affects only those who own assets (except for some indirect effects - like possible increases in rent for dwellings which might go up as the perceived price of the asset increases). And an increasingly smaller percentage of society owns real assets.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">While I am not a fan of the nonsensical wails of "social justice" advocates who decry income and wealth inequality and attribute the changes to conspiratorial effects, it is worth considering that as QE grew, the American economy slowed the opportunity for making moves between income quintiles.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Leonard argues that as all that fluffle money was pumped into the system it produced tons of asset inflation causing a couple of stock and housing bubbles - with the inevitable crash. That is because as you add money to the system it reduces the price of money (in essence it keeps rates low) so investors are forced to search for yield. But here is where his analysis is most interesting. First, as QE money sloshed the rich got richer, exacerbating the wealth inequality in society. The most prominent discussions of income and wealth inequality seem to ignore that major factor. It is easier to point to some sinister force like the "1%. " Second, federal policy makers decided that when asset markets crashed that the losers (owners of those inflated assets) should be bailed out. SO the richest in society were given a chance to make odd economic decisions and still get bailed out. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">The Fed announced on the 16th (the day I finished Leonard's book) that they would begin doing rate hikes in the federal funds rate - the first in about 4 years. Powell said there would be seven before the end of the year (with the possibility that they might do another four soon after). That sounds like pretty stiff stuff until you realize as the WSJ pointed out - all of those jumps would still leave negative interest rates (inflation would be higher than the borrowing rate). He also said there would be an indeterminate reduction in the $9 trillion in QE still floating in the markets.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">So with all these increases in rate - how will life change? If you maintain either a variable rate mortgage (which was a lousy bet during this low rate environment) or any credit card debt - you are going to see rates increase. Ditto for car loans and student loans. You might get a slight jump in the rates you receive for money market and savings accounts. But if you don't have any of those types of debts or plan to add some you might not feel anything. The real question for everyone is whether all these rate hikes will tame inflation. For me the Fed's actions are a step in the right direction but I remain to be convinced that price and asset inflation will moderate (assets are more likely to be slowed than prices). Obviously, if the Fed moves too quickly we could be moved into a recession.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Leonard argues that the Fed stepped into a breach created by our other dysfunctional government institutions. It is ill equipped to make policies which the Congress and the Administration and the interplay of interests would be better able to deal with. I will admit that during the Greenspan era I was bothered by the rock star treatment that he was accorded by members of Congress. When you compare Greenspan to Volker - the latter comes out as much more of a hero. I think the same can be said of Bernanke and Powell. (With a nod to Powell and not Bernanke) But I must admit that I have always been a fan of the approach that Stanford professor John Taylor suggested where monetary levers are set and forgotten - fine tuning seems to be a contradiction in terms.</span></p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-21957237462302075492022-02-20T20:16:00.002-08:002022-02-20T20:16:43.504-08:00<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> <span style="color: red;"><b>Where we are is not based on Geography</b></span></span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: arial;">Our two kids are not alike in many ways including their approach to political questions, Our daughter is in the mold of "progressive" LA politics. And to her credit she has not been a passive bystander. She worked tirelessly in trying to make the public school where her daughters attended better. Our son is on the other side. But he too has been involved in trying to change his community. He took an active role in the "let them play" movement which urged lifting the restrictions on kids playing sports outdoors. He also participated in rallies urging the re-opening of the schools.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span>Our daughter and I have had a continuing set of discussions (mostly civil) about how to fix the big problems of our society. Often I have been reminded of P.J. O'Rourke's quip about the the vibrations between liberals and conservatives - </span></span><span>"</span><span style="background-color: white;">In a democracy it's always vibrating back and forth. People want the government to do everything for them, then when they see that it sucks, they want the government to let them take charge, and when that doesn't work, they want the government to come back and fix all the problems that they themselves caused when they took charge." O'Rourke died this week of lung cancer. He wrote a series of books that were of the quality of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. He even did a superb book on Adam Smith's two books. His last book was called a "A Cry from the Far Middle" which mostly echoed my concerns about our current state of political discourse. </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span> </span></span></span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: arial;">Many of the discussions Emily and I have come down to issues where she thinks things should be "affordable" - most of those are what political philosophers call "positive rights" - the Constitution was built on "negative" rights - preventing government from intervening in our lives. There are two problems with positive rights - first many of the things people ask for are unattainable. Since the goal is not attainable (for example an absolute definition of "affordable" housing") we spend a ton of money find out it is not going to happen and ultimately get into rationing. In the first election after WWII in Britain Churchill ran a campaign against suggested Clement Attlee's promises of positive rights he had a great speech where he warned that if Attlee were elected the UK would become a nation of "queues." He was right, of course, but he still lost the election.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">As I have said most of our dialogues are civil. That does not mean that Emily's naturally combative father does not occasionally throw a hand grenade. In recent months the news about the progressive side of the ledger has not been positive. When the NYT has an editorial titled "Can the Democrats Dodge Doomsday" and we find every state poll showing the president's approval at less than 50%, it suggests that the country is trying to re-center away from the left. There were several indicators that something is up. For example, this week I wrote Emily about the recall of three looney members of the SF school board - who had such great ideas as transforming Lowell High School (where admittance is based on merit) into a lottery and changing the names of a number of schools including ones honoring our first and sixteenth presidents. All three were not just defeated - they were (as I believe they should have been) humiliated - 70% of the voters rejected them. She wrote back that she did not need to read the article I sent. We've had good talks about the terrors of LAUSD and how bureaucracy trumps sound educational policy. She and I have spent a lot of time exchanging articles about COVID politics including a recent article from the NYT's David Leonhardt about what differentiates liberal and conservative approaches to the pandemic. Since the start I have seen the policies of COVID based more on perceived political advantage (and an over-weighting of perceived security over individual choice). I don't think I have expressed an opinion about PM Trudeau's rather clumsy handling of the trucker convoy disrupting traffic into Canada.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">But then the New Yorker published a fawning interview with </span></span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/is-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-an-insider-now?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_TEST_All_021422&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9d4c33f92a40469e37637&cndid=15950873&hasha=b3317dd908c2a42ed054ad5dba33a589&hashb=cfc28494a06f09820a15aa1d6871952302cd0ae1&hashc=9efe038b06efae3095b6f5be7f5659ff81becae3c20f9c6245d49205c3fdcdfd&esrc=&utm_content=A&utm_term=TNY_Daily_TEST_All" style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); font-family: arial;" target="_blank">Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez</a><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); font-family: arial;">. One wonders why the Congresswoman has not changed her political designation from Democrat to Demagogue. Her unwillingness to engage in the fundamental process of governing by working to understand the substance of ideas of people who disagree with her is profound. If she cannot get something through Congress her alternative seems to be use presidential power or any other means to achieve her objective. Never mind that people like Senator Manchin may have some substance behind their opinions. Admittedly I did not start out admiring AOC but her comments in this article give me even greater pause.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Finally there was one more story about the limits of political correctness. The President, announced in the 2020 election that he would nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Don't get me wrong, I think it is just dandy to identify and promote people with different backgrounds to the Supreme Court - but I do object to reducing the qualifications to gender and race. Nominations to the court have come from an exceptionally small number of law schools and that standard should be broadened. But from my perspective his artificial limit is absurd.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Over the last 50 years - some presidents, who were guided by narrow characteristics were (or should have been chagrined) at their choices for the court. Does anyone remember G. Harold Carswell the Florida judge nominated by Nixon who was defended by a Nebraska senator (Roman Hruska) with the following logic - "</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 34); color: #202122;">Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Brandeis" style="background-image: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Louis Brandeis">Brandeises</a><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 34); color: #202122;">, </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Frankfurter" style="background-image: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Felix Frankfurter">Frankfurters</a><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 34); color: #202122;"> and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_N._Cardozo" style="background-image: none; color: #0b0080;" title="">Cardozos</a><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 34); color: #202122;">." Just as Biden was not interested in supporting a well qualified Black Woman (He led the fight to stop Janice Rogers Brown from being on the court but based on ideology not gender or race) I think the most important characteristic for a Supreme Court Judge is talent and philosophy. Clearly, I am not going to agree with a nominee from this president based on judicial philosophy. But his lens is far too narrow.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">This week I read a speech by a Federal Judge that I knew before he became a judge. Ilya Shapiro, headed the Cato Institute's Constitutional Studies, and was chosen to head a similar project at Georgetown, but he was suspended from his position for raising a question about whether the sole qualifying characteristic for Justice Breyer's replacement should be a combination of gender and race. Shapiro was simply arguing that Biden's vision was too narrow. Immediately the Black Students Association at Georgetown demanded Shapiro be removed. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 34); color: #202122;"></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #202122; font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;">James Ho, who I met when he worked in the California Legislature became a staffer for Texas Senator John Croyn. He was later appointed to the Fifth Circuit. Jim had been slated to speak to the Federalist Society at the Georgetown Law Center on some other topic. But he chose the occasion to defend Shapiro's right to express his opinion. Jim is a naturalized citizen from Taiwan. He understands the evils of racism because he has experienced them. He commented "</span></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Racism is a scourge that America has not yet fully extinguished—and the first step in fighting racial discrimination is to stop practicing it. That's all Ilya is trying to say. That's all he has ever tried to say. And so, if Ilya Shapiro is deserving of cancellation, then you should go ahead and cancel me too." He went on to comment "C</span><span style="font-family: arial;">ancel culture is not just antithetical to our constitutional culture and our American culture. It's completely antithetical to the very legal system that each of you seeks to join. . . .</span><span style="font-family: arial;">If you disagree with Ilya Shapiro—if you think his understanding of the law is absurd—if you think his vision for our country is awful—here's what I say: Bring him onto campus—and beat him!"</span></p><div><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); font-family: arial;">Those stories and many more give me pause about the future of the country's political system. Even though I continue to disagree with Emily on a wide range of policies I am heartened by our ability to communicate and even try to convince the other of our point of view</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> - I am not sure either of us has moved the other closer but that is not the point - we keep trying. It is a shame that many simply don't believe in the key arguments that Madison offered in Federalist #10 (on the inherent power of having factions and the need to get those factions to work on common purpose) and #37 (where Madison argued that governmental systems need to pursue the seemingly contradictory goals of energy and stability). OAC openly mentioned that we might be moving toward an irreparable breach in our Constitutional system. One wonders whether she has ever considered that her dogmatism is contributing to that risk in huge ways. There are many on the right who make the same point as OAC, and yet they won't even listen to the other side. Neither of the extremes has any interest in doing what the founders thought was critical for our system - listening to our fellow citizens. That was the point of O'Rourke's final book. It is a shame it was not wider read.</span></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: red;">(IS THERE) Progress on Of Course It's True Except for a Couple of Lies</span> - One thing the last few months have taught me is that getting the last details done on getting a book into print is not simple and not often logical. So far I have had both a developmental editor and a copy editor. They were superb in getting better focus and prose. The first two parts (STAVES) of the book are now with a proof reader. When he is done the book will go to a design guy who will take the well worked prose and make it look better visually - he will also help me place the 75 photos in the book. (NOTE - The paperback version photos will be in Black and White; the electronic edition will use color.). If everything continues to progress I am shooting for getting this into print in late June.</span></span></p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-67093402392164343782022-01-20T07:37:00.001-08:002022-01-21T18:51:47.128-08:00Don't Cry for Me California<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhd7O1Urx7Zx0dm8mVObhMvt9kgPzzbIF-KBr_i-HVlsVDT06f1KjFksLdJ2PjMxHCjsP4NJXAS4ybWph4gV2Q_phZp90MIrETXoyTMR_KoOd3DAMppIc53WNNwADl2suOrv3eXqq1wxWFP-cBQkAmNZ8cLMNzVQo2byVX41EfMi7RwDjQopV2Pf0HwSQ=s3264" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2448" data-original-width="3264" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhd7O1Urx7Zx0dm8mVObhMvt9kgPzzbIF-KBr_i-HVlsVDT06f1KjFksLdJ2PjMxHCjsP4NJXAS4ybWph4gV2Q_phZp90MIrETXoyTMR_KoOd3DAMppIc53WNNwADl2suOrv3eXqq1wxWFP-cBQkAmNZ8cLMNzVQo2byVX41EfMi7RwDjQopV2Pf0HwSQ=s320" width="320" /></a></div><br /> The Atlantic, in my mind, has partially taken over from The New Yorker as a source of long form journalism. While their political tendencies are almost always to the left of where I am - many of their writers post articles which make me think. Conor Friedersdorf serves as a "California" correspondent. In a July 21,2021 he wrote a piece called <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/california-dream-dying/619509/?fbclid=IwAR0ROubYAkDbkrNumpIFo16kKEh7s6lbw7raR6FTzHT4v-ivo4MgcWpha-g" target="_blank">The California Dream is Dying</a> which argues that California has become an ungovernable, unlivable mess. He makes a strong case. When I sent the article to my daughter , Emily, she commented that the analogy offered actually might well apply to the US. (The picture by the way is was taken at a friend's house in Monterey - he is one of those Californians who has been marvelously successful in the tech industry - he worked very hard to be able to get that place AND he provided a real benefit to tech users in the area in which he worked. But Monterey is often used as the image for California in part because of its beauty and the ruggedness of its coast.)<p></p><div>The first chapter of the book I am writing (Of Course It's True Except for a Couple of Lies) has a first chapter about an ancestor who came to California in 1849. But it also reflects many things about the California I grew up in. (In the 50s and 60s). It was a state that was cocky. In <i>California the Great Exception</i>, Carey McWilliams gave a mostly optimistic view of the state but was also credited with identifying some of the warts. In 1973, Kevin Starr, who later became a friend, began a series of books about California's intellectual history. In the initial volume, <i>Americans and the California Dream,</i> covered some important figures between 1850-1915. Many of the key figures Starr covered are now often forgotten and many others had lives that were more important than other places - take Jack London for instance who is probably more famous for his Klondike exploits but who lived in Sonoma county and helped to shape that area.</div><div><br /></div><div>After the WWII the state exploited some key resources including several great universities - a dean at one (Stanford) who understood the dynamics of linking industry to an engineering school; a research institute (CalTech) which worked in a number of areas at the frontiers of knowledge and technology; a public university (UC) that was constitutionally protected and thus able to develop world class programs in a number of other areas; and a university which was one of the founders of the field of public administration (USC). Californians were, as opposed to their counterparts on the east coast more prone to accepting risk and less fearful of losing it all and then recovering. The mythology around all this infused the air.</div><div><br /></div><div>When I was about 14 our family went to Edwards Air Force Base for Armed Forces Day and watched a series of demonstrations including one I remember still where a rose was dipped in liquid nitrogen and then broken like glass.</div><div><br /></div><div>But then came the 8s. In 1958, the senior senator from California forced the Governor to switch their re-election bids (Knowland wanted to be governor so he forced his GOP colleague to run for the senate and both lost) and the employer community over-reached with a "right to work" initiative which was defeated by pretty stiff margins. The new governor was from San Francisco and established a political dynasty - during his time he expanded the University system, built the California Water project, and initiated a long series of other public projects. By the end of his second term, he tried to run for a third (only done once by Earl Warren) and lost to Ronald Reagan. The late 50s also brought a series of new legislators including the ascension of one Jesse Marvin Unruh who transformed the work of the legislature. One of the odd things was that Unruh and Pat Brown fought a lot.</div><div><br /></div><div>The next 8 was 1968 - the middle of the "summer of love" in San Francisco - which was emblematic of all sorts of societal disruptions going on in society - much of that started in California. "Peace, love, dope" became a mantra for many - but there were also a series of bizarre events some of horrific proportions. By 1968 California was more balanced in its politics but the state also had a series of real nuts (one wit said it had become the "Granola" state because after you sorted out the fruits and nuts you were left with the flakes.)</div><div><br /></div><div>In the middle period between 1968 and 1978 the state suffered through a "mystical" governor (Pat Brown's son). During that period that state began to move quickly. Several laws were passed which changed things deeply - the most important one was the ability of public employees to bargain and (now at least somewhat diminished) the ability of those same unions to force employees to fund political action committees run by the unions. </div><div><br /></div><div>But then came 1978 and the passage of a landmark initiative which limited property taxes. The legislature fiddled with rising property taxes for about a decade and with Proposition 13 - the voters took charge. We went through a series of initiative campaigns which attempted to reset policies about taxes and a host of other issues, some failed; some didn't. Some made sense (for example indexing the income tax and eliminating the estate tax) some did not. While the GOP established a majority in the Assembly for a short period, they became increasingly irrelevant. The state benefitted from several GOP governors (Deukmejian and Wilson in particular) but the conservative side of the ledger diminished.</div><div><br /></div><div>Beginning in the second decade of this century people began to flee the state. That resulted in two things. First, California's ranking of residents with BA and higher declined; the state is ranked 34th among the states. But as importantly 38% of the outmigrants from the state in the last decade have come from individuals earning more than $100,000 (the rate is even higher as you go further up the income scale). Los Angeles was only behind New York in the number of residents leaving the area. San Francisco, which from 1850 to 2000 had a pretty steady rise in population began to decline. With a series of odd laws the city began to experience leakage. Little wonder. With the leaders concentrating on things like eliminating the legal penalties for defecating in the street, and at least passively tolerating homeless camps, and having prosecutors fail to prosecute shop lifting for items under $900 - the civility of the place deteriorated. </div><div><br /></div><div>California has always been a place of income and wealth divergencies. (think the Hearst Castle built in the depths of the depression). But in recent years those differences have become more stark. A good way to get an idea of these trends is to a) Drive from the Bay Area down the center of the state. Or drive in many large cities in California and travel from high income to the homeless encampments. </div><div><br /></div><div>The trend in California, seems to have been replicated in other cities in the country. But there are some slight signs of hope. Recent statements by the mayors of San Francisco and Chicago made movement in the right direction by suggesting that some of the looney laws were about to change and that prosecutors who wanted to change laws by ignoring them would be less supported. What has not changed especially for California is the dogmatic adherence to legal structures like our NIMBY planning rules which impede construction of new housing and allow groups like the LA teacher's union to over-rule common sense on educating kids.</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="color: red;">OF COURSE ITS TRUE -</span> My editor has just sent me the final chapters in the book. The next steps will require some new skills. I want to have about 75 photos in the text and I will need to make sure the photos have enough pixels to be printed. I will also engage a design guy to take the text file and format it correctly. Because the book is divided into three staves (volumes) I will need to collect ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) so that each of the staves and the digital and paperback books will have one of those unique identifiers. There is (finally) light at the end of the tunnel; and I am relatively convinced it is not a train coming from the other end.</div>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-64856064128848420102021-11-19T10:24:00.004-08:002021-11-19T10:24:44.651-08:00<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> <span style="color: red;"><b>Perception is 9/10 of the law....</b></span></span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"></span></div><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXWzoH2VDDLos2M_5Nxi_O-Pn2Hcqto8fUm-b0xBDnAyydizJONfDOF10Jvz6VpEQKIQzypDZwsTPlyjXr1vflPaDGwLoNbSs1AQb8V08f3lx-SNBQ99oFtHwMmPY3yLceHGql0SDLwgup/s1440/BAD97473-5559-44D8-AD2A-C98B59279EC4.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1440" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXWzoH2VDDLos2M_5Nxi_O-Pn2Hcqto8fUm-b0xBDnAyydizJONfDOF10Jvz6VpEQKIQzypDZwsTPlyjXr1vflPaDGwLoNbSs1AQb8V08f3lx-SNBQ99oFtHwMmPY3yLceHGql0SDLwgup/s320/BAD97473-5559-44D8-AD2A-C98B59279EC4.jpeg" width="320" /></a></span><br />I rediscovered a book which I first read in graduate school about the use of numbers in public policy debates called <i>Damn Lies and Statistics </i>by Josh Best, a University of Delaware Sociologist. Best's book argues that statistics are essential to discuss things we want to solve in the public </span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">arena AND that because so many people accept, often without question, numbers offered by public figures, newspeople and social media gurus - we live with a lot of bunk.</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Let me offer one example that he offers at the start of the volume. Some unnamed PhD candidate who had the good fortune to have Best on his guidance committee. The candidate made the absurd argument that the number of child murders had doubled every year since 1950. Think for a moment about the power of numbers. 1 becomes 2 becomes 4 becomes 8 and so on. (at 10 days the number is 512, per day) In a very short period the number of annual childhood murders would be will beyond the number of children and perhaps very soon larger than the world population. The student's gaffe was not caught until a scholarly journal had published part of his research.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">The problem we face with numbers is that some people are either careless or malevolent with numbers. All of us who have practiced in the public arena have been guilty of a bit of balderdash with numbers. In the early 1970s I worked for a Michigan congressman who was a moderate environmentalist. (That was when such things were possible.). He had a constituent from Ann Arbor who had a summer home in Minnesota near Silver Bay on Lake Superior. A company called Reserve Mining extracted low grade iron ore by crushing the ore into a slurry and then extracting out the iron. The company offered jobs to people in the area but the remaining gunk, without the ore, was held in some holding ponds and then simply washing into the lake. The pictures of the spillway were dramatic.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">We were sitting around one night and wondered how much effluent was being dumped into the lake. I was tasked to figure that out. We knew the depth of the sluice and its width and the approximate speed of the water. We made some assumptions about the carrying capacity of the water and Voila a statistic was created. The other Voila was how quickly people of authority began to quote the number. The basis had no real justification except a (poorly) educated guess. Eventually Reserve Mining was closed down, in part because of that bogus number. Lake Superior is exquisite and had Reserve gone on for (a very long time) while it would have become less beautiful.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Made up statistics are frequent. For example, Mitch Snyder once claimed that the number of homeless in the US exceeded 3 million people - the Reagan Administration did the numbers and suggested that it was closer to 300,000 and Snyder immediately claimed that the number was reduced because the Administration wanted to deny the problem. For me that was one of the first examples of "fact" shaming. Similar outlandish numbers came up in all sorts of other policy debates - at one point the estimated number of deaths from anorexia in young women was claimed to be 150,000 annually - that number is highly dubious but the advocates were trying to push a point.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">The good point about rediscovering this book is the clear way that Professor Best describes the terrors of statistics. He has several "hazards" for stats - they can, like my effluent stat (yes indeed it was effluent!) be made up. Others may consider apples and oranges. And still others can be intentional distortions. The book was written before there was much cable news and before social media were here - but he points out that even when the book was written many reporters are simply too lazy to chase down wild claims and many may be too innumerate to understand the implications of what they bandy about. The problem is that many people listen to the "experts" babble on about some number and believe it may have some basis in fact - and indeed, sometimes it does. But often a number is just a close cousin to luncheon meat.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">We've heard all sorts of numbers behind the Administration's Build Better America plan which has a cost of several trillion dollars ($</span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #111111;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(17, 17, 17);">1,000,000,000,000 - a trillion is 12 zeros!) and even those estimates are bogus because of the bizarre way costs are estimated. Don't believe the number used in the House debate - it has so many tricks and dodges it might even be called slight of hand. I was amused a few days ago when Senator Sanders grumped that journalists have not done a good enough job selling this boondoggle</span></span></span></span><span style="color: #111111; font-family: arial;">. Perhaps another explanation is that a good number of us are skeptical of a massive expansion of both the deficit and mucking around even more <span style="caret-color: rgb(17, 17, 17);">deeply in our lives. Last time I checked the Press is not supposed to be a mouth piece for any administration - but Sanders thought because he was for it, the forces of political correctness must defend the point - no matter how bogus.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #111111; font-family: arial;"><span>SO what about the picture? One fraternity brother was driving through a small town in Mono county and saw the Chevron prices for gas. (IN the Eastern side of the state - think REMOTE). Another fraternity brother commented <span style="background-color: white;">"</span></span></span><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: arial;">Incredible gouge. Way over prices here in Oakland." My immediate response was to question whether the huge increases in Federal debt and the Biden Administration's attacks on all forms of fossil fuels might have created this pricing spike.</span></p><p><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: arial;">But as you think about both of our reactions - they involved a lot of jerky knees. Here are some other things one should think about. First, Mono county is remote - their gas prices are always way higher than in other parts of the state which are closer to refineries. Second, as we have come out of COVID lockdowns more people are driving thus putting more demand pressure on gas prices. California especially has artificially curtailed supply. Third, the Year to Year increases between urban Oakland and rural Mono County are not the same - Oakland's gas prices have jumped 60+% over the last year while Mono's have grown only about 11%.</span></p><p><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: #050505; font-family: arial;">Understanding how things interact is tough. This gas thing made me think a bit about being more cautious in responding to images or posts. Not a bad lesson.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial;"><span face="system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); color: red;">UPDATE ON Of Course It's True, Except for a Couple of Lies </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(5, 5, 5);">- <span>The book is now tripartite; the first on Family; the second on Life; and the third on Beliefs. They will be published simultaneously - and will be roughly the same size. The first "Stave" has been done in final edit and the next two are progressing. Based on the amount of work left to do it will probably be available in Q1 2022.</span></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #111111; font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(17, 17, 17);"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><br /></span></span></p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-33956478917963682492021-10-15T21:11:00.001-07:002021-10-15T21:11:26.094-07:00<p><span style="color: red; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><b>Social Media and Me</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I have been struggling with a problem where I hope Five Cent Thinking's readers will offer some advice either as a response to this post or via my normal email. <span style="color: #04ff00;"><b>NOTE #1</b> </span>- As the owner of this blog I have control over what appears here; so if you want to respond but not publicly please put that in your response and I will not publish your comments.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I joined Facebook in its early stages(2004), at the time it seemed like an interesting platform which could provide two benefits. First, as someone who spent a career working on public policy issues I thought it might be a place to participate in engaging discussions about key issues. Second, it seemed like a way to communicate with friends and acquaintances many of whom I have not been able to keep up with over the years.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">About the time I started being on Facebook I also set up a Twitter account. But I have never used it much, if this blog has proven anything, I am not prone to short form writing! But part of my aversion was based on the need to not react to events instantaneously. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I continuously avoid watching any of the cable channels because of their absurd need to fill every waking minute with "news". I first recognized the trend when I was coming back from a trip to Mexico at the time that Princess Diana died (1997). My Spanish at the time was much more limited than now but even without understanding all the words, I noticed a pattern of commentary and images that I found disconcerting. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Soon after I joined FB, a friend who I knew from both politics and because she was a doctoral student at SC when I was there, invited me to join a group of political types her dad had created (but this time the group was digital). I knew a lot of the people in the group and met some interesting people through it. The politics of the group was diverse. But the "Wheelspinners" deteriorated after a couple of people on both sides of the political divide substituted invective for argument. In a valiant attempt to continue the positive notions from the original group it revived it under a new name. But that also deteriorated somewhat quickly. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">One consequence for me, if I decide to leave FB, is that I will no longer be able to exchange insights with the half dozen people on the group who constantly help me understand nuances on a wide range of issues. In the time I have been on FB I have been periodically surprised by a someone's different take on something I had thought quite settled. In the Bismarkean sense part of the "politics is the art of the possible" for me is the ability to consider all sorts of options.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Both Facebook and Twitter seem to fit what a good friend in Sacramento used to call Kabuki politics. We watch contending sides put on their makeup and join the political fray with masks or makeup on - not wanting to contend but more wanting to engage in stylized discussions where the genuine opportunity to think about things in new ways is scorned.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Let me add that I believe that the key people at FB and Twitter have absolutely no scruples. They have consistently censored substantive ideas which do not fit their worldview. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">From my perspective the country needs to have some reasoned debate about a lot of issues including (for me) the big four of 1) Climate change, 2) Wealth and Income Inequality, 3) Racial Reconciliation, 4) Fiscal Policy (come on, when one wrote his dissertation on Tax Theory that one is essential). But serious discussion does not seem to be forthcoming. You are not a "denier" or a "deplorable" because you have a different understanding of both the nature of a specific problem and the best way to handle it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In my mind the current system of identifying political leaders is not serving us well. When I started in the political arena there were politicians on both sides of the aisle that I admired. Now the number of politicians in that group from either party is very limited. IF you believe that in at least the last two presidential elections we had what David Halberstam called the "best and the brightest" as the standard bearers for either party, I guess we are going to have to disagree. Dick Tuck, who was a thorn in Richard Nixon's side for a good part of his career had the great quip that the "lesser of two evils is still evil" (I know that many attribute that to Jerry Garcia) and I think in trying to defend our choice for President that we ignore that maxim. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">For the last year and a half, the country has devolved into discussions which I believe have been structured to evidence virtue signaling rather than exchange of views. I will admit that I can get on a high horse too. But quite frankly, I am tired of engaging in these kinds of yammerings. As long as we are relegated to retreating into tribes, we won't make progress in discovering the best of options.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">A bit more than a year ago, a good friend who had been a distinguished college president and a keen analyst of our political environment posted on Facebook that she was leaving it. She is a certified FOB (Friend of Bill) having gone to law school with both Clintons. She actually taught a course with an economist of my persuasion in the Claremont Colleges. I would have liked to been able to audit the course. I am sure it was a good set of exchanges. When she announced her intention to dump FB I wrote her (outside of FB) about the decision. She replied that the cost of participation in FB far exceeded any benefits. Over the years I have had some superb discussions with her about a wide range of issues. We often do not agree on solutions but the exchanges have been fun.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">About a decade ago a Georgetown computer science professor, in his blog Study Hacks offered a simple equation to discern the value of technologies - “</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> Technologies are great, but if you want to keep control of your time and attention have the self-confidence to insist that they earn their keep before you make them a regular part of your life.” FB fails on that equation.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">One final comment; an obvious solution would be to use the Wildavsky Maxim (Aaron was a professor at UC Berkeley) He quipped that politicians should "NO, thyself" - so I could simply quit responding to political posts. Quite frankly, I am pretty sure that would not work for someone who spent more than 4 decades working in the vineyard of politics.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">So here is the ask. I am thinking of dropping Facebook by the end of the month. Here are my three questions. 1) do you have any thoughts about stepping out of social media? 2) For many of my buddies on Facebook is there a good way to stay in touch without FB? I really do enjoy hearing about families and trips. 3) Do you have any other suggestions about how someone who would like to continue to discuss public policy issues can do that in without being stuck in the mire of virtue that both sides of the spectrum try to hold us in?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #04ff00;"><b>NOTE #2 </b></span> - If you do not have an Email address for me (outside of FB) and want to communicate privately or simply stay in touch after I leave FB, please use messenger and I will get back to you.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><span style="color: #04ff00;">NOTE #3 </span></b> - On October 4, Facebook went down and Joanna Stern - the ACE technology reporter for the WSJ had <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-outage-what-to-do-when-your-online-life-vanishes-11633386950?mod=followjoannastern" target="_blank">suggestions for getting your data from Facebook and ideas for alternative platforms to use to stay in touch. </a> If you do not subscribe to the WSJ - send me an Email and I will send you a Pdf of the article.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><b style="color: #04ff00;">NOTE #4 </b>- And I realize this might sound contradictory. Even if I dump Facebook - I will continue to use the FB product called What's Ap - it is an essential, and at least for me, non political tool in Mexico.</span></p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-87291471285378308462021-10-01T18:12:00.002-07:002021-10-02T07:46:51.493-07:00<p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="color: red;">E Pluribus Meum</span></span></b></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLuVESgndB_nSd2t-a0kEYxhC8AdG-YuY8MHzGmZrxBqo-XMXrjgzw8Dg4mYhus2KsHktB-TNzHX_GgYI11A5mbKuxaWaC2cR8zswzxFeK6fe0T8pAwktgGD15R0dSLaScVOP4NjY4sEb1/s1200/70C761DC-D43B-43AD-8416-6E5169D9777E.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLuVESgndB_nSd2t-a0kEYxhC8AdG-YuY8MHzGmZrxBqo-XMXrjgzw8Dg4mYhus2KsHktB-TNzHX_GgYI11A5mbKuxaWaC2cR8zswzxFeK6fe0T8pAwktgGD15R0dSLaScVOP4NjY4sEb1/s320/70C761DC-D43B-43AD-8416-6E5169D9777E.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">We went to Costco this week to pick up some things - Costco has upped their game with great fresh fish (like Steelhead) and Prime beef and even great veggies and fruit and they still have monster proportions of many good products. Plus we wanted to get toilet paper and paper towels. Evidently, after a local news story claimed paper products were under pressure, the hoarders descended and cleaned out every Costco in the area. The story also mentioned that water was facing a run and indeed we encountered a woman with a basket full of about 10 40 bottle packs of water.</span><p></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">We seem to have lost sight of one of our founding principles - <i>E Pluribus Unum </i>- which is based on the idea that we have some common principles that bring us together. I am not a complete pessimist on this problem - there are counter examples. But the trend line based on the amount of me first, is troubling.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">The same afternoon, while Quinlan was going to pick up a prescription, she found that booster shots were available, so she got hers. No line. By the time she got home and got me back there a substantial line had formed. But she dragged me back and I had to stand in line for almost an hour. The line was convivial. Each of us waiting patiently (no pun here!) to get the third stab. One lady ahead of us was much older than we and a couple of people found her a chair while she waited. So in spite of our Costco experience we got some hope from the booster line. </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">I began to think about what has caused this seeming increase in selfishness. I came up with three possible types of people who might be likely to be ignoring our interrelationships - (these are presented </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">in no order) ....</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">1) </span><b style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Those who immigrated to this country from despotic regimes. </b><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"> This is not a statement about immigrants - the American tradition of welcoming people who want to join us is a good one. We benefit from their contributions. But those who have had to live under totalitarian regimes understand the absolute irrationality of them and they have had more experience negotiating with scarcity. One of my favorite movies is Robin Williams’ </span><i style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Moscow on the Hudson. </i><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">It tells the story of a Russian circus performer who before he defects at Bloomingdales is forced to wait in line for everything - he accepts a pair of shoes which don't fit because that is the size they have. He can trade the ill fitting shoes for some other favor. Before he defects he celebrates with his family because he was able to stand in line for toilet paper. When Paul Mazurzky wrote the script I am sure he did not think that snip would become prophetic almost 40 years in the future. When the circus performer defects to the US he is confronted with the range of choices and a lack of lines. At first he dislikes all those choices. But he soon learns that with freedom comes sometimes daunting choices.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">But again there is some reason for hope - in the University board I chaired for seven years we heard from a student. He was a physician from Venezuela and told a compelling story of his flight from his country. He did not have a chance to "pursue happiness" in his own country as totalitarians destroyed a vibrant economy. So he came to the US. Even though he could not get his transcripts from his home university and is now working on a degree as a Nurse Practitioner. That kind of initiative is something we should celebrate!</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">2) <b>Those sucked into entitlements. </b>Entitlements are those programs where eligibility is not limited - you get the benefit often without a demonstration of need. Student loans are a good example of the risks of entitlements. Students who need to borrow (or want to borrow) for their education can use a number of programs which provide subsidized rates and terms. In this case, when the Obama administration took over the programs (which previously had private sector participation), and transformed loans into a program run by the Department of Education - the number of loans grew substantially and concurrently so did defaults. (Reminds me of a saying in one of my favorite saloons in Stockton - they had a sign that said "We have an agreement with the bank, they don't sell beer and we don't cash checks.") The feds proved incompetent at running the program and defaults soared. The revision in the program was foolhardy - in recent years there has been a clamor that a student can borrow money, default on the loan and then have it forgiven. That creates some truly perverse incentives. If you are entitled to one set of things - why not everything? A few years ago at the Democratic National Convention we heard the story of a cartoon character who derived all her benefits in life from the support she derived from government. For me at least that was a bizarre picture contrary to things which made the country great. </span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"> Let me offer another entitlement that is closer to me. The Social Security Trust Fund will go bankrupt as the number of recipients is rising and the number of tax payers paying into the fund is diminishing. The fix is pretty simple. In 1983, some very modest adjustments to the age of retirement and the tax base, funded the program for almost 40 years. That could be done again - but the Senior Meums think as long as they get their check they don't need to worry about the next generation.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">3) </span><b style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Heavy consumers of social media. </b><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">When I first got back to San Miguel in March of 2020 I went to my doctor and asked him what I should do special - being a recently cleared cancer patient. He offered all the normal things about masks and distance and hand washing but then suggested the most important health devotion was to "avoid social media." That was good advice. The old story of Chicken Little is one that anticipated the bizarre range of opinions that came out on Covid. Who the hell thought that a highlight of social conversation would be about “spittle distance?” Moral certitude and virtue signaling have been substituted for common sense.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Clearly, the threat of COVID is real. But in reality the constant “if it bleeds it leads” for both social media and cable news has diminished our ability to separate the real horribles from the imagined ones.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">What concerns me is that we’ve seen a huge increase in a perspective which does not serve us well. </span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><b>So what are the consequences of moving from Unum to Meum?</b></span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">The Meum world is very close to what Hobbes described in his description of life as "cruel, brutish and short." The Meums look at the world as a zero sum game - if you get something I am deprived of it - so there is every incentive to get mine NOW. In my mind, positive sum games are closer to reality. If that is the case we should think about ways to devise methods where if each of us contributes a bit we are all a lot better off. Cass Sunnstein and Richard Thaler wrote a book called <i>Nudge</i> which tried to tease out the implications of this type of thinking.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">If we do not turn back from Meum, we will be following a sad path divided into warring tribes with an increasingly narrow range of choices. That seems both sad and stupid.</span></p><p><b style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Update on the book -----</b><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"> This week my editor got me a final draft to work on. My next step is to get a copy editor to clean up the draft and then to get the final to a publisher. I've also retained a design editor to make the manuscript fit into the constraints of publishing. The good news is that almost anything that traditional publishers once did can be done in the DIY world with very seasoned professionals. I spent some time this week on Reedsy - which is a great site which has tons of resources for authors. I attended (ZOOM) a seminar to learn about the range of alternatives to print and distribute books. There are some exciting options from Amazon and Apple Books - to Ingram Spark - which actually can print on demand AND can help new authors distribute their work. Like other parts of the economy the web has forced a very hierarchical business model to change. That has democratized the process of creating a book. The complexity for me is that to be effective I need to tread through these elements to get to where I want to go. I hope to have a copy editor identified in the next couple of weeks; have my final edits to that person after that and then get this project into production. One of the best pieces of news I got from the Reedsy Zoom meeting (led by an author who has done traditional and DIY publishing) is that the DIY world, once you understand the elements is much quicker. The Author had a book which went to his traditional publisher at the beginning of September and expected to go into print in Q3 of 2022 and his DIY book should be in bookstores and on the web by the end of November. That is quite a difference.</span></p><p><br /></p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-73116027452374038102021-09-04T12:49:00.000-07:002021-09-04T12:49:48.322-07:00<p><span style="color: red; font-size: medium;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><b>In Quest of Conclusions</b></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">So this week was a momentous one. I sent a final edit to my editor. Well, as you may have noticed final in the publishing world is a lot like many other finals in life. I will come back to the book at the end of this post.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">This week our president, finally pulled us out of Afghanistan. That was a conclusion I believe that most Americans thought was appropriate. There was an uproar on his lack of consultation with our allies and his “strategies” (I believe both were justified in spite of the need to leave) to withdraw. The chaos at Kabul airport was horrific. I think if one is charitable this was not the USs finest hour. But we are out of this 20 year involvement, or are we? Babylon Bee joked that the Taliban had opened an Army surplus store with all the military equipment left behind. For me I am more concerned about the people we left behind. News reports are that the Taliban has not treated those who helped our effort but could not get out well. One wag described the evacuation as a Blunder-Bus.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">From my perspective the lessons we should learn from this - which we do not seem to be very good at -a) is to follow one piece of advice my mother gave me - "Just because you can doesn't mean you should" and another which suggests that if you don't have a pretty clear plan when you get into something you are not likely to succeed (if you fail to plan you plan to fail). In several instances of foreign policy in the decades since WWII - we have violated both rules and paid the price.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">It turns out that Sacramento will be a large venue for the Afghani refugees who were able to get out ,many of whom worked in support of the American mission(s), And in one of those odd turns of technology - we got an appeal from a friend in SMA (a former State Department employee) who worked with an Afghani who worked for the American Embassy (and she had worked with) who will be coming to Sacramento. Soon after we got that, our Priest in Sacramento convened an interfaith meeting to think about how we could help these people as they are resettled to our area. IMHO that is the least we owe them. At the meeting we heard from a couple of remarkable people who have helped to coordinate including one amazing woman who is in charge of collecting and distributing food and other kits to new arrivals. Her husband commented that their lawn is a bit shaggy because their garage is full. Two local charities <a href="https://www.rescue.org/united-states/sacramento-ca" target="_blank">The Rescue Center </a> and the <a href="https://www.sacwelcomecenter.org/about-us" target="_blank">Sacramento Welcome Center</a> seem to be working hard on accommodating our new arrivals. At the meeting we had Episcopalians, Latter Day Saints, and Muslims represented. It was heartening.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">But then we are also coming to a conclusion on the Recall effort against Governor Newsome. The polling at this point seems to be going in favor of retaining Newsome. As often happens in the last two weeks before an election there is an awful lot of hyperbole being thrown about. The leading candidate to replace the Governor has had a bunch of wild charges made against him. But then you look down at the choices that Californians are being offered to replace the Governor and you don't need to wonder why the state has a flaky reputation (even if we did not have a Governor who in the middle of the COVID lockdown chose to have an unmasked dinner at a fancy restaurant in Napa which one of my democrat friends charitably described that action by Newsome as “tone deaf”). The range of talents is quite limited while the depth of aspirations is mind-boggling. Well actually the talent is in short supply. Perhaps four or five of them could actually do the job. As one long time democrat campaign guy said, skills here should not be considered. If the governor is recalled the sages in the legislature are likely to greet the budget proposal with two words “and those are not likely to be Merry Christmas” - as a native Californian I would wish that we could get a group of us who could get off the Kabuki politics we’ve lived through for the last couple of decades and begin to tackle issues like homelessness, water, improving the schools and things that really matter to Californians. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The fire season also started early this year and much of the Northern part of the state has enjoyed AQIs (Air Quality Indexes) of well over 200 for several weeks. Not to make a bad pun but we are not out of the woods yet. The combination of terrible forest management, idiotic water policy combined with whatever effects their might be from climate change offer real risks through the next couple of months. The good news, to the extent there is some, is that most of these fires, so far, have not produced significant damages to homes like the 2017-18 fires did. When we left SMA the AQI there was 28; when we arrived in Sacramento it was 226. I don’t think anyone can tell you when we will be out of this fire season or more importantly when the “leadership” of the state will be inclined to tackle the real issues that leads us to move to “smoke without mirrors” in each of the last half dozen summers. Presented at the bottom of this post is a primer on AQI. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">One other odd comment about disasters. Are you as puzzled as I am about the news coverage on Ida? The number of deaths as a result of the 2005 storm Katrina was more than 1800 - this year in the south is is fewer than 5. Sure power went out. But because of a new system of levee reinforcement since Katrina hurricane alley was relatively safe. Compare that the the news coverage o deaths in the northeast (46) where the coverage has produced comments like this from the AP "<span style="caret-color: rgb(44, 44, 44); color: #2c2c2c;">A <b>stunned</b> U.S. East Coast faced a rising death toll, surging rivers and tornado damage Thursday after the</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(44, 44, 44); color: #2c2c2c;"> </span><a class="" href="https://apnews.com/article/ida-aftermath-live-updates-a89def354c007a2c0dd76b0b7e2948fc" style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(44, 44, 44); color: #104ba5; text-decoration: none;">remnants of Hurricane Ida <b>walloped</b> the region</a><span style="caret-color: rgb(44, 44, 44); color: #2c2c2c;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(44, 44, 44); color: #2c2c2c;">with record-breaking rain, drowning more than 40 people in their homes and cars." (Yes I did add emphasis)</span></span></p><p style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">The AP goes on to comment "In a region t<b>hat had been warned about potentially deadly flash flooding but hadn’t braced for such a blow</b> from the no-longer-hurricane, the storm killed at least 46 people from Maryland to Connecticut on Wednesday night and Thursday morning." If you ever wondered about the regional biases of the MSM - look no further.</p><p style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="color: #fb0007;">SO what is going on with the book?</span> As noted at the start of this Ramble (the apt name of my original blog) a final draft went to my editor this week. But what does a “final draft” actually mean? <b>First</b>, I have two chapters still out with reviewers. The comments I have received on all the other chapters have been stunning; very very helpful. For example, in the chapter I did on Values - a good friend helped me understand that the Bible does not mention luck. He commented that if God is either omnipresent or omnipotent he does not get surprised - but humans do. <b>Second</b>, I have spent some time working on photos. A key part of this project for me has been to include photos. But there are some quirks in getting photos printed. As noted in the last post, they need to be of a high enough resolution to be useable. But I may actually be able to use color photos in the Kindle/iPad version but will probably need to use black and white photos in the paperback. Getting those organized for my design guy is a bit of a task. <b>Third</b>, one of my sources offered me two dozen publishers who can get something into a paperback edition. Over the last two years I have consulted with some of those but there are still half a dozen leads to run down from Kindle Direct to a bunch of smaller presses. <b>Finally</b>, there are two unresolved issues in the manuscript. My editor suggested that I include a visual timeline at the end of the chapters on Family. I do not like what I came up with (visually) and I may just leave that up to my design person. But there is also one chapter that I am still undecided on whether I will include it - which originally came when this was a Storyworth project. It is a musing on my reading habits. I’ve already cut several chapters (ones on Critical Race Theory - called Plessy v Diangelo - which I liked and my reviewers also liked; on on how I dealt with COVID; and one on media influences when I was a nipper which was restructured to a speculation on whether I am a person of my times). My goal is to get comments back from my editor by the end of the month; spend some time in early October doing final final revisions; get the manuscript to the design person so that by about the first of November we will begin to getting the project to final publication.</p><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">As I was researching the book I re-read Huckleberry Finn and came across his epithet for his book </span><span style="font-family: arial; text-align: justify;"> </span><span style="font-family: arial; text-align: justify;">“so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more.” Who knows whether I will follow Huck’s standard.</span></div><p><span style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: DroidSansFont; font-size: 24px;">What is the U.S. Air Quality Index (AQI)?</span></p><p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: DroidSansFont; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">Think of the AQI as a yardstick that runs from 0 to 500. The higher the AQI value, the greater the level of air pollution and the greater the health concern. For example, an AQI value of 50 or below represents good air quality, while an AQI value over 300 represents hazardous air quality.</p><p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: DroidSansFont; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">For each pollutant an AQI value of 100 generally corresponds to an ambient air concentration that equals the level of the short-term national ambient air quality standard for protection of public health. AQI values at or below 100 are generally thought of as satisfactory. When AQI values are above 100, air quality is unhealthy: at first for certain sensitive groups of people, then for everyone as AQI values get higher.</p><table class="table table-bordered" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: DroidSansFont; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 20px; max-width: 100%; width: 886.125px;"><thead style="box-sizing: border-box;"><tr style="background-color: #e1ebf4; box-sizing: border-box;"><th scope="col" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;">Daily AQI Color</th><th scope="col" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;">Levels of Concern</th><th scope="col" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;">Values of Index</th><th scope="col" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;">Description of Air Quality</th></tr></thead><tbody style="box-sizing: border-box;"><tr style="background-color: #00e400; box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Green</span></td><td id="good" style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Good</span></td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">0 to 50</span></td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Air quality is satisfactory, and air pollution poses little or no risk.</span></td></tr><tr style="background-color: yellow; box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Yellow</span></td><td id="mod" style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Moderate</span></td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">51 to 100</span></td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Air quality is acceptable. However, there may be a risk for some people, particularly those who are unusually sensitive to air pollution.</span></td></tr><tr style="background-color: #ff7e00; box-sizing: border-box; color: white;"><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Orange</span></td><td id="sens" style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups</span></td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">101 to 150</span></td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Members of sensitive groups may experience health effects. The general public is less likely to be affected.</span></td></tr><tr style="background-color: red; box-sizing: border-box; color: white;"><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Red</span></td><td id="unh" style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Unhealthy</span></td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">151 to 200</span></td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Some members of the general public may experience health effects; members of sensitive groups may experience more serious health effects.</span></td></tr><tr style="background-color: #8f3f97; box-sizing: border-box; color: white;"><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Purple</span></td><td id="vunh" style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Very Unhealthy</span></td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">201 to 300</span></td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Health alert: The risk of health effects is increased for everyone.</span></td></tr><tr style="background-color: #7e0023; box-sizing: border-box; color: white;"><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Maroon</span></td><td id="haz" style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Hazardous</span></td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">301 and higher</span></td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Health warning of emergency conditions: everyone is more likely to be affected.<br /><br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-10862137649778992732021-07-25T16:28:00.001-07:002021-07-25T16:38:48.354-07:00<p><span style="color: red; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Back to the Book</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">When last I wrote I discussed an increasing tendency to be super cautious. This post is different. You see, I've done a couple of things in the last two weeks which I think are progress. First, I completed the final chapter in the section on philosophy - that is focused on values. It proved more difficult to write in part because the subject is not an area where I have spent a ton of time studying the issues. The ratio of economics and finance books and articles in my library to religious texts is perhaps 879:1. (That is not because I only have 879 books on finance, economics and tax issues.). I sent it to three friends more qualified than I to look at the draft.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Second, I got out the conclusions chapter which I finished almost a year ago. The opening meme (A glass is neither half full or half empty but refillable) is still on point. But believe it or not since I got that first draft done my thoughts have modified, a bit, in many areas. Writing a book like this is an iterative process - and thanks to the people who have read chapters also an interactive one. So I have begun to redraft that last chapter.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoItPBifmEYhOTkaTgArAouJRl7dW3x7a9GGts_1cSR20KhjtWXqNBvWdEKxJ0nRYb1-y-W6tSp74CFUWZb7ZTd4A21apLJzQ8wW8RIIoxuHWi5Z5OFzeg8a29FlWUXzlT-jppMia0Zx48/s2048/IMG_0486.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoItPBifmEYhOTkaTgArAouJRl7dW3x7a9GGts_1cSR20KhjtWXqNBvWdEKxJ0nRYb1-y-W6tSp74CFUWZb7ZTd4A21apLJzQ8wW8RIIoxuHWi5Z5OFzeg8a29FlWUXzlT-jppMia0Zx48/s320/IMG_0486.jpeg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;">Third, then there is Filomen. One Sunday night two years ago as Quinlan and I were going out to dinner with some friends we encountered a burro parked on the street, standing there calmly. I thought the photo was evocative of many issues raised in the book and thought it could be a perfect cover photo. I went to the guy who is doing design and he said my photo was a bit thin. (Not enough pixels). So I tried a bunch of techniques but could not get to the density needed. So I called a bunch of friends in SMA who gave pointers to the Burro Guy in SMA (Armando Rivera). I found him, talked him into coming up to the original site of the photo. He spends many Sundays with Filomen posing for pictures around the Centro. He noticed my facemark and remarked "Tu cubraboca es Filomen!" (Your mask is Filomen). We walked up - I shot several pictures. They may not be enough. If not I will ask him again to help me so I can shoot one more shot in RAW image. (Which is 25 Megapixels). When I started this project one friend told me based on his experience of writing a book - that at one or more times you will become obsessed with a detail - either running down a fact or something like this photo. Ok, so that obsession thing seems to have passed, for now.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Fourth, a book written by two friends came out this week, called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mitkas-Secret-Slavery-Surviving-Holocaust/dp/0802879160/ref=sr_1_2?crid=39YOOW6ZH53I6&dchild=1&keywords=mitka%27s+secret&qid=1627254113&sprefix=mitka%2Caps%2C200&sr=8-2" target="_blank">Mitka's Secret</a>, which is about Mitka Kalinski. At the beginning of WWII Mitka was orphaned from his parents and then spent all of the war either in concentration camps or as a slave of a Nazi sympathizer. He then spent a couple of years in post WWII relocation camps and eventually was relocated to the US. He started in the East, married and then made a life in Sparks, Nevada. He never learned to read and write. But he worked hard and became comfortable retaining an indomitable spirit. The book is hard not to read it in one setting - It is an inspiring story of the indomitable human spirit. Mitka's Secret has a much different focus than Of Course It's True" but it showed me there is light at the end of tunnel.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Finally, beginning next week I will go through the entire draft one final time before sending it off the my editor and the designer. With luck, <b>Of Course It's True Except for a Couple of Lies</b> (Por supuesto que es verdad, excepto por un par de mentiras - if there is ever a Spanish version), will be in print by the end of the year.</span></p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-87768173272741955902021-06-28T06:30:00.004-07:002021-06-28T08:34:09.491-07:00Belts and Suspenders<p><span style="font-family: arial;">For a good part of my career I worked on insurance issues. That came about because of some odd events, described below. First, there was a suggestion by one of my doctoral advisors who argued that if we were going to become a part of the club we owed it to send them a copy of any paper which mentioned their work. I sent one of those papers to Aaron Wildavsky, at Berkeley (an issue not related to insurance). He responded quickly. But then for about five years he would send me preliminary manuscripts of books he was working on. I was so flattered that I would read up on the issue and write him a substantive critique, perhaps 15 pages of notes. Soon after I had written the response, one of SCs professor's told me that was the way Wildavsky would explore a new area. He would cobble together a manuscript and then send it out widely. One of the books he sent me in preparation was the beginnings of his thinking about risk. He published a series of papers and then a wonderful book called <i>Searching for Safety</i> which described the essential mix we need to have between anticipation and resilience in thinking about risk.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In the late 1980s the independents in California were facing a crisis on D&O coverages (indemnifying the actions of boards of directors) because of some bad decisions by the insurance industry earlier in the decade. It was what is called a very "hard" market. I assembled a group of financial types to explore solutions. We soon found that even with the number of our institutions we could not generate enough premium volume to interest companies. A national group formed and as it developed I soon became the founding chair of the new board.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Finally, in the early 2000s I joined the Advisory Board of a reciprocal Casualty (auto and home coverages) Company where I served for more than 15 years. I had managed our joint program for Worker's Compensation coverages until the legislature created something called open rating which made our cooperative venture no longer viable. A host of terrible companies swooped in to offer coverage at ridiculous rates and several of our members got burned when after a year they got a seeming bargain they suffered huge premium increases as the fly by nights withdrew from the market.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Insurance is an odd business because it attempts to manage risk based on a small number of principles. People who study risk (actuaries) look at two major variables - frequency (how often something happens) and severity (what is the cost of the loss). They then try to price the relationship of those variables so that the money they take in with premiums and investment income (before they have to pay out losses) will actually exceed losses and administrative costs (that is called a combined ratio m- a ratio above 1 makes the company profitable). Auto accidents happen with relative predictability and are relatively minor in cost compared to the sinking of ocean liners which can be very expensive but don't happen often. Essentially the only other variable in the transaction is how much risk you want to share with the company - those decisions are called deductibles or retentions. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Even with those limited number of variables, most consumers don't think much about the contract they are entering into. When American insurance companies began to sell life insurance in Japan in the latter part of the 19th Century, agents were in great risk because many of the clients thought that by purchasing life insurance they would escape death. An example closer to home comes from son Peter who works for a major casualty insurance company. He frequently gets calls from indignant policy holders who wonder why their rates have gone up. When he looks up their records he finds that have multiple accidents. When he explains that, they ask plaintively "Isn't that is what insurance is for?" NOPE.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">So what does all this have to do with the title of this post. As we have come out of the COVID pandemic I have increasingly wondered how many of the conventions we accepted during the pandemic will become permanent. And I am reminded of Franklin's maxim - "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiusDLJO2x4NaJmsHrS2ZRJEcJ6nLo88VLMOfd-vhVORaMZ39Q5mzwER2vIpxZTlPpS_qfjUZ3IYulXN5ZxRxBGzSTkZx29I4-f6aMayS11mdsie-mBxaiGUO0vnAwQzRxX1VRzuGSDc09j/s2048/IMG_0574.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiusDLJO2x4NaJmsHrS2ZRJEcJ6nLo88VLMOfd-vhVORaMZ39Q5mzwER2vIpxZTlPpS_qfjUZ3IYulXN5ZxRxBGzSTkZx29I4-f6aMayS11mdsie-mBxaiGUO0vnAwQzRxX1VRzuGSDc09j/s320/IMG_0574.jpeg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;">As the pandemic developed I discovered several things which bothered me. First, many public officials (including California's Governor and our former President) put on the emergency windbreaker and began to speak mostly nonsense about how well they had this problem in control. In reality, there was a reason this was called a novel virus. Those politicians refused to acknowledge that we were in a learning curve. At the same time, we quickly adopted some precautions which seemed odd at best. We were in San Miguel a year ago March and we soon found city workers going around the Centro in hazmat suits spraying down the sidewalks with some unknown substance. Some friends and neighbors began to adopt an almost religious fervor for isolation. Because of my own situation, having at least a partially compromised immunity system, I consulted all of my physicians. The best advice I got came from my Mexican doctor - "become a hand washing nazi (Apple now actually includes an APP on their watch which counts how many seconds you wash your hands and yes I have continued to work on that standard); maintain reasonable social distance; wear a mask where you might come in contact with strangers and; finally (and I thought most importantly) avoid social media. (I wish I had done that even more than I did - I saw too many hyper discussions of spittle distance - a term I had never heard before March of 2020). As a militant individualist I tried, sometimes successfully, to not react to what I thought were extreme reactions. Occasionally I could not resist. At one point I was in a market in SMA and saw some hand wipes, which were in short supply in the city. There were six packages and I wondered whether it was appropriate to buy one or two packages, when I decided to get only one, a San Miguel swell (It is a distinctive type in SMA - that fits the epithet of a person who thinks they are "all that an a couple of chips") immediately swooped in and grabbed the remaining packages. I asked her (Not at all innocently) "trying to snap these up before the hoarders get them?" To which she shrieked "This is a health emergency!!!!!!"</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">But here is where I begin to wonder. There are at least two realities that will come out of COVID 19- First, it is likely that in the next few years we will experience additional pandemics, perhaps not as severe as the most recent one. But as Niall Ferguson explained in his most recent book (<i>Doom, the Politics of Catastrophe</i>) the period between the 1918 Flu (which in many ways was more terrifying) and COVID was had several pandemics of varying proportions including the polio one in the mid-1950s and the 1957 Flu - which was a big deal I had forgotten about.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">We need to think creatively about what we did in this very real crisis that was ultimately an overreaction and what we did well. The scientific community was, with some regulatory relaxations, able to create new vaccines (some based on very recent science) very quickly. That confirms a bias of mine that the US oversight of medicines is expensive and not helpful. So if we modify the FDA protocols we might get cheaper drugs. But I also look at the current requirements of the CDC (which require a COVID test for passengers re-entering the country, even if they have received a vaccination) and think that does not make sense.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The President of Purdue raised in the very question in his address to graduates in 2021. Mitch Daniels commented "</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue";">This last year, many of your elders failed this fundamental test of leadership. They let their understandable human fear of uncertainty overcome their duty to balance all the interests for which they were responsible. They hid behind the advice of experts in one field but ignored the warnings of experts in other realms that they might do harm beyond the good they hoped to accomplish. </span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Sometimes they let what might be termed the mad pursuit of zero, in this case zero risk of anyone contracting the virus, block out other competing concerns, like the protection of mental health, the educational needs of small children, or the survival of small businesses. <b>Pursuing one goal to the utter exclusion of all others is not to make a choice but to run from it. It’s not leadership it’s abdication</b><b style="font-size: 13px;">." </b>( Emphasis added). Daniel's address won my best commencement address of 2021 award (I always read a dozen or so commencement addresses each year - the entire text can be found at <a href="https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2021/Q2/purdue-president-daniels-biggest-risk-of-all-is-that-we-stop-taking-risks-at-all.html" target="_blank">https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2021/Q2/purdue-president-daniels-biggest-risk-of-all-is-that-we-stop-taking-risks-at-all.html </a>- it is well worth the time). What we seem to need here is a careful review of what we did without the "Science is settled" hype or the assumption that there is one best way. I hope we can figure out as a nation to do that intelligent review. But I am not altogether confident that we can which leads me back to Franklin and the worry that Belts and Suspenders are not useful.</p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>The BOOK - </b>I am down to doing a final edit of the last chapter in the fifth section (Family, Work, thoughts about life, Mexico and Philosophy). That chapter is about religious values that have motivated me. When that gets done, I will send the full draft to my editor for a review and then to my designer. Timing seems to be looking at the end of the year to actually get <i>Of Course It's True, except for a couple of lies</i> into print. I appreciate your patience.</p><div><br /></div>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-47136701565467586492021-06-10T15:34:00.004-07:002021-06-10T22:50:45.132-07:00Reflections on Guns and Internment<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: arial;">For the past couple of years I have gotten together with my two brothers for a couple of days each summer. Last summer we went to the scout camp that they went to from Berkeley and we based that trip in Murphys which is a cool town in the Gold Country.</span></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt3lkQ6WJPA3DlV-iPnXHMyUo13YlmEbeXIAIWv-wnpm3N4f3gVEDRdhPePqDCBHsc3XMhiG07AFyAO43Nw4ce82psZqq_qoiCUMYfWWDR9Cd3FkcaNUSSVZ6_B4aXxOZubtnYdXLn-IYz/s2048/C8082333-DB3F-43E8-BDCC-457932C20992.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt3lkQ6WJPA3DlV-iPnXHMyUo13YlmEbeXIAIWv-wnpm3N4f3gVEDRdhPePqDCBHsc3XMhiG07AFyAO43Nw4ce82psZqq_qoiCUMYfWWDR9Cd3FkcaNUSSVZ6_B4aXxOZubtnYdXLn-IYz/s320/C8082333-DB3F-43E8-BDCC-457932C20992.jpeg" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">This summer, at the invitation of my oldest brother, we flew to Twin Falls where he lives part of the year and where his medical practice was. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">We went to the Japanese internment camp near Twin Falls. No doubt about it Minidoka and the other nine camps established during WWII are a blot on our common history. The two I have visited were in desolate places. Minidoka is not as impressive as Manzanar, which Quinlan and I visited several years ago. Manzanar, after the Japanese reparations bill was signed, was substantially restored. In one sense both of these sites should be akin to Pearl Harbor - solemn places. Both camps need to be preserved to remind us of the excesses that government can engage in - we should approach them with reverence and awareness. One of the impressive stories out of both camps is how many young men left the camps to join the 442d which was the legendary battalion made up of former internees after FDR authorized them to join the Army. They fought with valor in Europe - gaining a ton of decorations (4000 Bronze Stars and 4000 Purple Hearts).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The next day we went out to Hagerman to do a day course on handguns at Shaw Shooting. Shaw Shooting has two locations - the Idaho one is in Hagerman. My oldest brother is a gun enthusiast, my middle brother is not and I been mostly indifferent to firearms. Even with that indifference I feel very strongly about the efficacy of the Second Amendment. It is important to remember that the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, they are designed as negative not positive rights. Most all of the language in those first 10 Amendments were intended to limit government activity, not encourage it. The language is pretty clear - “<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 34); color: #202122;">A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.“ When the Amendment was written the context was clear, both the creation of a militia AND the individual right to own firearms was seen as a deterrent to an out of control government. But beginning in the 20th Century some began to interpret the first clause (</span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 34); color: #202122;">A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State) as defining the second (</span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(32, 33, 34); color: #202122;">the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed) - that argument has never been persuasive to me. But it also has never meant to me that any civilian can possess any kind of firearm.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">I have lots of friends who, if they could, would prohibit private ownership of any firearm. I strictly disagree. At one point a professor published an article arguing that firearms were not important in colonial America by claiming to have reviewed colonial probate records. Luckily a researcher asked to verify the “data” and when the first author obfuscated and then refused to offer proof went back to the same records and found the first researcher had made up his data. The first guy was trying make the case that the Second Amendment is limited to arming militias. It was a great example of politically inspired research, which in this case was exposed. The most recent decision by the Supreme Court (which involved a horrible law in DC) called the Heller case made a pretty clear statement that the syntax supports individual rights to possess firearms. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">I have one revolver but have never been much of a shooter - although in college a fraternity brother and I would sit on the back porch of our fraternity and hand launch clays out over the Calaveras river. There always seemed to be a bottle of Jack Daniels involved. For someone who is relatively indifferent to firearms, I seem to have been pretty wordy about my thoughts! But back to the course at Shaw Shooting….</span></p><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Shaw Shooting is legendary - they train everyone from rookies like me and my middle brother to military and police. Shooting a pistol with any skill begins with figuring out how to sight the weapon but also how to squeeze the trigger. Our instructor was absolutely superb. He spent an hour in the morning explaining hand gun and range safety. After the safety discussion we went out on the range and practiced with paper targets. I got the chance to shoot a 40 caliber, a .22 and a Sig Sauer 226 although I liked the 9MM best. In the last part of the day we went to shoot at metal targets. By then I was getting tired physically and mentally so my accuracy declined</span><p></p><p><span style="clear: right; float: right; font-family: arial; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigvWw3VgCQnAlSfJshtKS7NseATmFAHrN2rg5-9gS6_OEHm9csI7o9hslAgWJMnlFZLFdUeHpxcBt8Ujqc-sToQIgagwq4SzyYF6REI3DBKKLqMSZE-tm3MGZBfrfm14aACdrVVMKTYn_e/s320/1C0D7123-A128-4AA9-9136-3EEBA0BB7433.jpeg" /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">At the end of the day I was surprised that the process of learning how to shoot a pistol requires both physical and mental capabilities; one might say it is a like golf with bullets. The picture is of a cluster I achieved with a 9MM at 7 yards. The target I was shooting at was about 5-6" - with the center white space about an inch. Our instructor used those smaller circles as his target. While I was relatively pleased at my clusters - he added a couple of handicaps (shooting the pistol upside down). Even with those handicaps he could shoot out the little white circles with one clip of 10 shots. It was a good way to establish just how far an amateur like me was from proficiency.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">While I was in Idaho I started a book by a UVA professor named Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind) where he created a typology of six moral scales which animate our feelings and thoughts about politics. For example he discusses a continuum of care >>> harm and <span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(24, 24, 24); color: #181818;">liberty >>>0ppression ; fairness >>>cheating. Haidt argues that liberals, conservatives and libertarians value the individual variables with different weights. They also consider some of the variables more important than others. That helps to explain why we have such a hard time talking civilly to each other. Haidt’s matrices remind me a lot of Thomas Sowell’s landmark work <i>A Conflict of Visions</i> where he argued that liberals and conservatives may use the same terms but with fundamentally different meanings.</span></span></p><p><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(24, 24, 24); color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">There are many examples where we seem to be stuck in thinking about solutions to problems which most Americans would acknowledge. The day after our class at Shaw there was another shooting in the US. Immediately many in the political class came up with utterly predictable and completely useless statements trying to hook their constituencies but not doing anything to think about how to reduce the number of incidences like the one on that day. Haidt's book gives one a good idea about how we could potentially improve our civil communication. What concerns me is that with the 24 hour media cycle, social media and politicians who may well gain from keeping us apart - there may be no incentive to creatively think about getting back to civil talk.</span></p><p><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(24, 24, 24); color: #181818; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">UPDATE on the Book - I have one more chapter to edit from my editor’s comments. I will then spend the rest of this month and July re-reading the manuscript and formatting the pictures in it. The first section of the book has a ton of pictures. Each needs to be checked for quality and then a placeholder needs to get added to the manuscript. The designer then places each in their proper place.</span></p><br /><p></p></div>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-70252960534818513532021-04-15T11:30:00.000-07:002021-04-15T11:30:11.677-07:00<p><span style="color: red;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: red;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfVfZT5-O4HM2kHjcWMZNyoDXpjJNrvRftLS2QZKbWzxFYeuYjypNmfzjbyRQXTFD_VeODnh3NVISH2s2aFK8BZJyPS5Z1vTJ6sQXFQ-uOVT3loS1rIYKfhjOIVRfIkNiJRS99R6dO7hQ-/s2048/080063C3-8C38-4101-B4CB-09A542FB977D_1_201_a.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1688" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfVfZT5-O4HM2kHjcWMZNyoDXpjJNrvRftLS2QZKbWzxFYeuYjypNmfzjbyRQXTFD_VeODnh3NVISH2s2aFK8BZJyPS5Z1vTJ6sQXFQ-uOVT3loS1rIYKfhjOIVRfIkNiJRS99R6dO7hQ-/s320/080063C3-8C38-4101-B4CB-09A542FB977D_1_201_a.jpeg" /></a></span></div><span style="color: red;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Editores magna</span></b></span><p></p><p>Believe it or not I am making good progress on the book. This week I got comments back from my editor (more on her below). For some reason I had an odd idea that an editor was a ghost writer - NOPE - this one is a coach. In our first conversation last Spring she commented "After all you are the author here."</p><p>The original design included three sections - One on my namesake (Jonathan Archer) and then a series of reflections on family. A second section dealt with several ideas that have been important to me over my lifetime. (That one exchanged photos for footnotes!). And then a third section of questions that were generated by either Storyworth (which my daughter gifted me for Christmas a couple of years ago) or things which interested me but were allegedly on the theme of the book.</p><p>Early in the year at the suggestion of a friend in the Dominican Republic I hired an editor to take a deep dive into the project. It turns out she lives in Sacramento. At the same time I identified a designer who could help put the book into a form which publishers will accept. He lives in Denver. Both of those things were focused on improving both the readability of this book and the look and feel. In the world of somewhat DIY publishing there are a lot of details.</p><p>Book publishing has changed a lot in the last decade. A year ago I got a feeler from an unnamed company (who had two Ss in their name) who said they would read my manuscript for a fee of about $2000 and if they thought it publish worthy they would send me back part of the fee and agree to publish the book. If they did not like it they would keep most of my fee. I thought that was a silly deal, but it did show me some of the things which companies we call publishers now have to think about. There are tons of new titles every year and as Tracy Kidder said in his 1995 Book <i>Good Prose</i> - which is a series of reflections on writing good non-fiction - the number of books each year exceeds the populations Pomona and Escondido (Combined!) so the expectations of both authors and publishers have changed. Some of the most entertaining books I've read in the last few years were DIY efforts. But as Kidder suggested content and design are still critical. Hence some outside and professional assistance was merited.</p><p>This week I got 10 pages of evaluation from my editor. She recommended reorganizing the book into five sections from the three- Family and Childhood; Education and Work Life; There's More to Life than Work; Mexico; and Ideas and Values 2020 and Beyond. It was what one of my professors used to call an "Aha" experience. It allowed me to focus some underlying thoughts I had on my own. In addition to the structural comments she made a series of suggestions which will materially improve the flow of the text.</p><p>So what are the next steps? Well, first of all, I am going to work through the comments. Second, I will begin the process of reorganizing and rewriting. We agreed to have her a copy of the manuscript by September which would then get the book into final form in late Q3 or Q4.</p><p>When our daughter Emily first suggested this project, she argued it was a good way to keep me off the streets. It now looks like her original plan will continue a bit longer. Thomas Sowell quoted Benjamin Disraeli who suggested that many of us create a genre of writing called "anecdotage" when we are later in life. That was a good term for a memoir.</p><p>Two other footnotes. One of the questions I was trying to answer in writing this book was why the ancestor I was named after chose to undertake the arduous trip around the horn in 1849 to seek his fortune while his younger brother chose to stay in New York. The younger brother, Oliver Hazard Perry Archer, became very successful and according to family lore was a buddy of Jay Gould. Research dispelled that story. It turns out that OHPA was part of the group that ousted Gould from the Erie in the mid-1870s. Although Jonathan lived only a year in California, succumbing to either Cholera or a burst appendix, he seems to have come with the same entrepreneurial spirit that his younger brother had in New York. But as Paul Harvey used to say, if you want the rest of the story, you will need to tune in later in the year.</p><p> </p><p> </p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-68455826644020024062021-03-03T14:26:00.001-08:002021-03-03T14:26:51.015-08:00<p> <b style="color: #e6000e; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 16px; text-align: right;">LLOYDS of LIFE </b></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaZ4CqXCqasb7OCysH4QA8u-6OTRkDd3PQvTgMXAOFy68lUNiE5T5HdrrNVu0fhv3RRtZTgRWPnn5k4ulWgNcXOFSjeipX1EEf2iTNxT5iBGWwqfTbAvrOoF7aQTVlWlSWjnhd39l6Rw3e/s2048/9778B54E-BE7D-41B3-820C-2ED6D6ECE042_1_201_a.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1534" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaZ4CqXCqasb7OCysH4QA8u-6OTRkDd3PQvTgMXAOFy68lUNiE5T5HdrrNVu0fhv3RRtZTgRWPnn5k4ulWgNcXOFSjeipX1EEf2iTNxT5iBGWwqfTbAvrOoF7aQTVlWlSWjnhd39l6Rw3e/s320/9778B54E-BE7D-41B3-820C-2ED6D6ECE042_1_201_a.jpeg" /></a></div>One of my favorite Yogi Berra quotes is ““It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” But for the last 40 years I have worked a lot to understand just how tough that is. This week in our local market a sign set me off and got me to think about how we as a society handle risk. You don't usually get inspired in your local market - but then these are inspired times.<p></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">What is the hell is an “<b>over abundance of caution</b>?” And more importantly is that a good thing? COVID has taught us to be careful. But what are the appropriate limits of caution? From my perspective many of the policies we so easily accepted to “keep us safe” were nuts. Later in this post I will offer some examples - but first let me explain how I got interested in understanding risk.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Near the completion of my doctoral work I began a strange tangent into insurance. That came about as a result of several things. First, the insurance markets, especially for liability coverage and more specifically for Directors and Officers policies, began to constrict. Fashion played a part in that debacle because a group young financial analysts in several companies speculated that the high interest rates in the late 1970s and early 1980s would last forever. So they convinced their bosses to ignore normal standards of underwriting and to simply pursue a strategy that any unprofitable business could be made up by returns on the bond portfolio. That was foolish. When the inevitable losses appeared several of the companies that followed that advice began to restrict coverages and raise rates to compensate for all those losses that happened after interest rates went into more normal territory.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">By the time the folly of cash flow underwriting had become a crisis many of the colleges and universities in the Association were having problems in finding reasonably priced insurance. I brought together a group in the Association and we spoke with four or five major insurance experts to see if we could form a risk pool. The Association I worked for had done a remarkable job in pooling risk for workers compensation coverage; in that case a pool limited to California worked; in liability coverage it did not. I became involved in a group of institutions nationwide and we soon formed a company called United Educators RRG, which to this day is recognized as a leader in providing a range of coverages for non-profits. I became the founding chair of the board.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">A few years later I was asked to join the board of a reciprocal company (which is like a mutual insurance company) that offered casualty insurance for educators, nurses and cops. I served on that board for fifteen years. In 2018 and 2019 that company faced some huge losses as a result of the California fires.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">A second precipitating event for my interest in insurance was created after following some advice from one of my professors at USC. He urged doctoral students to send copies of their papers (at least the good ones) to living scholars that they wrote about. I wrote the two founders of the field of Public Choice Economics after I had written a paper about one line of their theories. And damned if they didn’t write back and we kept up a sporadic correspondence for a couple of years. They were both very generous with their time. Lo and behold about two years after I finished my dissertation one of those two was awarded the equivalent of the Nobel in Economics. (Technically the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences). </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">I also sent paper to UC Professor Aaron Wildavsky. I had read one of his books as an undergraduate (<i>The Politics of the Budgetary Process</i>) and had come across an article on an issue that I was thinking about and wrote him some of my thoughts. Wildavsky sent me back some handwritten comments but then within about a year he began sending me manuscripts of book drafts (he was a prolific author). The first was on tax and expenditure theory (a book with audacious title of <i>A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World</i>). A couple of years after my dissertation a manuscript arrived, which I continue to treasure, called <i>Searching for Safety </i>in the same early form<i>. </i>In both cases I was so flattered by the attention of such an academic notable that I actually spent a fair amount of time researching and commenting on the manuscript. One of my SC professors told me that was how Aaron wrote. He would throw together a manuscript in an area - send it out widely, then cull all those comments do a bit more research and write the definitive book in the field. <i>Searching for Safety</i> evolved into a second book on risk theory. This time he coauthored with a colleague named Mary Douglas in which they explored the cultural theory of risk. Both books argued that our approaches to risk were in part cultural and political.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Insurance is a strange topic. In its simplest form we are trying to predict the future. Its founding is often credited to Lloyds of London which was created in the 17th century in a coffee house in London. The members of the syndicate would be given the chance to underwrite potential losses from maritime activities. So if ship were bound to India, the owners might go to Lloyds and see if they could get a group from the syndicate to, for a fee based on risk, indemnify the losses if the ship were lost at sea. Each of the members of the syndicate would bid on the cost of providing coverage and often the market functioned from a series of bids from individual members who ultimately agreed to take down all or part of the risk. In a very pure sense that is how much of insurance still functions, especially the reinsurance market - where companies seek to hedge their risks for extraordinary losses. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Two concepts are important here frequency and severity. Betting on the future requires two judgments. First, how often do losses happen? Some insurance is relatively predictable - for example car accidents. Based on lots of data, it is relatively simple to predict how often someone will have an accident. Second, how much will it cost to cover the loss? So for example, car accidents, as things go, are mostly inexpensive to fix. But some big events don’t happen very often. So if you are trying to indemnify losses for something like a flood the costs when the losses are paid out episodically but when the losses occur they can be huge. For the years that I owned stock in Berkshire Hathaway Warren Buffett’s annual reports gave a superb tutorial in the economics of insurance (BH owns Geico as well as a series of companies that offer reinsurance and high cap coverages).</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">In San Miguel last Spring the municipal government deployed a series of measures, including one which made me giggle. One morning while I was out (properly masked and socially distanced) I encountered a city employee with a hazmat suit on. He had a reservoir on his back attached to a hand pump sprayer and he and his colleagues, which looked to me like a group of Pillsbury Doughboys, would go out a couple of days a week and spray down the cement with some mysterious fluid. Was that an example of an overabundance of caution? </p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">In the US, from my view, we have allowed the teacher’s unions to get away with keeping the schools closed too long. Our governor in a sign of “health theater” has commented several times that he sympathizes with all the parents who are concerned that their kids are losing educational time. Needless to say he has not mentioned that his darlings attend a private school which has remained open. Kids sporting events have been cancelled, in my mind, without rationale or reason. I can see limitations on some contact sports and on some crowd events but it made no sense to cancel events like kids soccer. Our son has been a leader in the “let them play” movement - which seems finally to be making progress in reopening things, under reasonable standards. In both schools and sports - the chances for “super-spreader” events are remote. (Who invented the term “super-spreader” is still a mystery to me.)</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">But it seems to me that Wildavsky and Douglas were right about cultural and political approaches to risk. In the 2012 Democratic convention there was a short video, called “the story of Julia” about a woman who got cradle to grave services from the government. The vision of what government could do successfully and more importantly what government should do was robust. As I watched that message, I kept wondering whether it made a good argument for shielding Julia and her counterparts from the visisitudes of life. Obviously there is a balance here. Even such conservative icons of conservatism like Frederick Hayek and Adam Smith recognized an appropriate role for government in providing a “safety net.” But the question of whether there are inappropriate trade offs from making all those decisions for society is never addressed by the left.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">There is in my mind a second set of issues here. Once something is authorized for government to assume more risk there are always what economists call “moral hazards.” The formal definition of that term suggests that when risk is protected by some form of insurance that people are less likely to be vigilant in assessing their own risks. The classic example in the literature is seat belt usage. Many writers suggest that mandatory laws may encourage drivers to be a bit more risky in their driving habits. But would anyone really like to go back to the era when seatbelts were not used?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">A good example of the absurdity of nanny statism is contained in Proposition 65 warnings. We recently switched internet providers and as a consequence had a new router installed. The provider, as required by Proposition 65, informed us that the router, I assume if we decided to consume it, had the potential for causing cancer. Just how does that help protect me from getting cancer?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">About a decade ago Cass Sunstien and Richard Thaler produced a book in 2008 called <i>Nudge.</i> The novel argument suggested what some reviewers called “Nanny State Paternalism.” It proposed that by setting decision structures in the right way you can get individuals to make the “right” set of decisions. An example might be by simply resetting a default choice. So for example, in retirement programs a company might reset a decision so that employees need to opt out of investing in their retirement program rather than making an affirmative choice to pay into the program. I can see the rationale for making that change. But I simply disagree with it. An even more pernicious example is called age based investing which some financial advisors sear by. In its simplest form as you age your portfolio commitment to stocks diminishes as you age (for example at 25 your commitment to stocks should be 75%/ at age 50 it should drop to 50%). Look at any long term investing strategy and the age based approach is a good example of an over abundance of caution. I am all for educating employees about the benefits of saving for retirement and for providing information about the consequences of various options; but I think even this small choice has larger effects on society. That is the crux of my quibble with the sign.</p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">What the writers of the sign don’t seem to realize is that the over abundance of caution can produce the same kinds of distortions as reckless behavior. But then you wouldn’t be surprised that a baseline for most of my philosophy is to encourage individuals to take responsibility for their actions.</p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: red;">The state of the book - </span>Of Course It’s True, Except for a Couple of Lies, is with an editor. And I am fast learning about the dizzying range of options in the DIY world. Here are some of the issues I am trying to think about. First, I want an Ebook format as well as a soft bound. It will be published on Apple Books and one other site for the ebook. I am looking at options. Second, a good part of my research for this book is a series of photos, especially in the first section of the book. Two examples are a photo of the original passage receipt for my namesake to come to California and a photo of my great grandfather in front of his telegraph office. But putting images in a book creates some other issues. I’ve thought of creating a website which would be referenced in the manuscript and logged by chapter. A niece did that for her book on computer security and it allowed her to add updates. If I chose to do that it would require some rewrites.</p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-63931765870117622102021-01-10T11:37:00.004-08:002021-01-10T12:07:23.499-08:00A CONSERVATIVE RESPONSE TO THE EVENTS OF THE LAST WEEK<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal; text-align: justify;">I should say at the outset I did not vote for Trump either time. </span><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal; text-align: justify;"> </span><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal; text-align: justify;">In 2016, on a prior blog I wondered whether the nation was ready for someone who had been a former star on World Wide Wrestling.</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal; text-align: justify;"> </span><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal; text-align: justify;">In spite of that pretty clear position I have had to endure my virtue signaling friends from the left every time defended those things in the Trump Administration which I thought were positive.</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal; text-align: justify;"> </span><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal; text-align: justify;">And in spite of those scolds, there were several at least six- </span><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal; text-align: justify;"> </span></div>
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<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Economic Growth PRE COVID</b> - As a result of the tax bill in 2017 and conscientious efforts to dethatch our regulatory environment, which had grown quite thick over the last several administrations we had real economic growth for a couple of years. That was after several prominent economists claimed GDP growth was over. The numbers were impressive and NO they were not a continuation of the very slow growth (the slowest recovery in the nation’s history) coming out of 2009. One of the most important parts of that growth was that for the first time in several decades those at the lowest income ranges experienced real growth in wages. That improved the GINI coefficient materially.</span></li>
<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>The Tax Bill</b> - while I don’t think 2017 was as good as 1986, it did some important things. It reduced corporate taxes to a level more closely approaching taxes in other developed countries. That helped to repatriate some capital back to US shores. It simplified taxes so that only a tiny portion of the taxpaying public need fill out the long form. For me, one of the things which annoyed many governors was the reduction of the state and local tax deduction which offered HUGE subsidies to the VERY WEALTHY in HIGH TAX STATES. (Emphasis added!). Ideally this should be eliminated entirely to improve tax equity. But at least that was a start.</span></li>
<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>The revocation of net neutrality</b> (a last minute attempt by the Obama administration to redefine the Internet as a public utility and apply 19th Century regulatory rules) helped lower costs for all of us and actually improve speeds right at the time that we were learning ZOOM skills.</span></li>
<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>His mideast policies</b> materially improved the prospects for reduced tensions in the Middle East - with the recognition by several Arab nations that conceded Israel’s right to exist. I believe, although I understand that many on the left disagree, that moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem was a positive step.</span></li>
<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Getting COVID Vaccine in Place</b> - In spite of the nattering of his critics he was able to mobilize a real effort to get a vaccine for COVID into production in record time. His critics claimed it would not be done and they were wrong.</span></li>
<li style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>JUDICIAL APPOINTMENTS </b>He made a series of very good judicial appointments including three members of SCOTUS and a bunch throughout the judiciary. </span></li></ul></ul>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">That is not to ignore the numerous negative parts of his administration. On Thursday I had a conversation with my Spanish tutor and she commented that the President was like a singer - (in Spanish it is not as funny as in English) because he was always singing “Me,me, me, me, me.” Trump showed himself remarkably unable to rise above the personal and the petty. Whether his critics were also unable to do that is not relevant. We should expect that our president can operate at a higher level than even his antagonists. Politics has been debased, not just because of Trump - but it certainly was not uplifted by his example.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">We had a couple of politicians who rose to the occasion this week. Mitch McConnell's speech on the floor of the Senate on Wednesday was one example. So was the Vice President's letter explaining why he would not countenance ignoring the limited role of accepting the electoral college ballots from the states.</span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Beginning on Saturday and continuing to Wednesday things went downhill. In two very stupid moves, Trump destroyed his legacy. Let me address each separately. On Saturday he hectored the Georgia Secretary of State in a phone call which only an idiot would assume would not be made public. Trump won in part in 2016 because his opponent made comments about “deplorables” in what she thought was a private meeting. Why would he not understand that his call would immediately become viral? As Important is the notion that election results can be changed by fiat. For me, the elections I cared about, including three ballot initiatives in California; reducing the democratic majority in the House which included the election of some very good and thoughtful conservatives including several women to counter the “squad”; and the election of a county supervisor in our home district played out well.</span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I believe there were irregularities in the 2020 election. We rushed into electronic and vote by mail without serious consideration of how to do it well. That being said, I do not believe that the sum total of those irregularities resulted in a defective result. Biden won. If there were ever any energy to think more carefully about improvements to election procedures, Trump’s phone call and his actions on Wednesday doomed any serious discussion about those issues. Quinlan and I voted from Mexico using a federal procedure which requires verification processes but then is pretty simple. Insuring the integrity of the electoral process is critical to confidence in government and Trump’s actions assures that the country won’t spend much time before the next election trying to improve the process. </span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The call on Saturday materially affected the results on Tuesday in Georgia. Mind you that I did not have high regard for either GOP candidate, but I do admire the legislative skills of McConnell over those of Schumer. Ossoff is a near perfect exemplar of George Bernard Shaw’s quote on political figures ““He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.” And while Perdue was not significantly better he would have contributed to a restraining force on excesses that are now going to be less restrained.</span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Perdue and Loeffler did themselves no favor by pandering to Trump by expressing support for the $2000 stimulus boondoggle and by pledging to take the extraordinary step of voting to make the certification process more than it is intended in the Constitution.</span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">But then came Wednesday. I believe very deeply in the First Amendment and in the provisions for the Right of Assembly and although I don’t accept the premise of a rigged election, I would have fully supported the right of my fellow citizens to Assemble to express their views. What I don’t agree with is the right to anarchy. </span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In the same vein I reject the nonsense perpetrated by the left to defend the anarchy in cities like Seattle and Portland and the wanton destruction of property and the pathetic notions of “defunding the police”. If there is reason to look at police powers and to modify them to current conditions, then do it in an orderly manner. Contrary to the bizarre statements of the Mayor of Seattle, the takeover of a major portion of the city, was not part of a “summer of love.”</span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The President’s remarks were close to incendiary. Those by Rudy Guiliani went significantly more over the line. The call to combat should be prosecuted. </span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">So how to we get to reconciliation as the President elect has promised. For me there are a couple of quick steps that Biden could take which would point us in the right direction. First, the President Elect should announce that he will drop his Twitter account. The NYT on Sunday morning had an article detailing how much Trump relied on Twitter - during the last four years he tweeted more than 11,000 times a day. In recent weeks he has tweeted more than 200 times a week. That is absurd. It is not as if the president does not have access to news outlets, even if the claim that Trump faced a barrage of hostile lefty journalist (which I think for the most part is true). But don’t we hire a President to do more important things?</span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The last job I had in DC was working for Bill Simon. One Saturday afternoon, we scheduled a press conference to announce something we were doing to respond to the Arab Oil embargo. I had the duty to write Simon’s opening statement, and as a joke I did a single sheet which said, “We actually don’t have anything to announce but we just wanted to see if you would show up!” Luckily Simon thought that was funny and I also wrote a real announcement about our news. But the WSJ reporter on our beat showed up in Tennis Whites. There is nothing to suggest that things have changed; a president commands attention. I grew quite tired of the self righteous “journalists” in the White House press room who believed that their role was to make the news. But even with those challenges the President has what TR called the “bully pulpit” to shape the news cycle and it should not be in 240 character tweets.</span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">A corollary to the first suggestion is that we need to take down the mini-Rasputin who parades as a CEO of Twitter. He and the head of Facebook are entirely too full of themselves as protectors of our system instead of grubby jerks trying to make a. Bucks without regard for the long term consequences. If you have not seen the excellent NETFLIX documentary called the Social Dilemma, you should. The best way to negate their profound attempts to control our lives is to simply use them left. A good friend on the left, about a month before the election said she was considering dropping out of Facebook. That sounds like a good idea to me, although I have not yet followed her lead. Did you ever wonder why the root word for Rasputin’s “service” is twit?</span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Second, many politicians could benefit from re-learning the “pottery barn maxim” of politics - if you break it you bought it. Trump and many Governors around the country should have relearned this in the year of COVID. There are times when an elected official can bring stability to an uncertain situation. And there are also times when respected experts need to be brought back down to earth because they try to express opinions as expertise. But the stream of consciousness briefings that Trump and his fellow executives offered was oftentimes laughable. Especially, when their actions and their pronouncements did not mesh. Too many politicians thought “do as I say not as I do is acceptable.” It is not. From my perspective the ham handed interventions by elected officials actually allowed experts to quash discussion of alternatives to the prevailing orthodoxy.</span></p>
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<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Finally, I am not sure how it should be accomplished but Mr. Trump should not be allowed to complete his term. From my perspective, the best alternative is to have the Vice President invoke the 25th Amendment. A rehash of the absurd impeachment process that we experienced from sanctimonious politicians like Adam Schiff and Gerald Nadler would not help toward reconciliation and would reinforce the concerns that a good portion of our population holds against the earlier process. But the country needs to respond vigorously to the incitement to anarchy and it needs to happen before inauguration day. </span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><span style="color: red;">UPDATE ON THE BOOK</span></b> </span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I have retained an editor to work through the manuscript. As a looked at the current version it is a bit too long. So I spent the two weeks at the end of the year doing some more revisions. A couple of friends have read chapters and made some good suggestions. There are two questions that I have been thinking about. First, adding photos to the book adds complexity. I have thought of putting up a set of webpages that would be referenced in the Print and E-Book format which would point the reader to the photos by chapter. </span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Those changes will delay getting <span style="color: red;">Of Course It's True Except for a Couple of Lies </span>into print until later in 2021. But from my perspective it will be a much better book because of the changes. </span></p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-81670850556780119812020-12-13T11:17:00.002-08:002020-12-13T11:25:53.727-08:00The ELECTION IN FIVE EASY POINTS<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9VXSXZi99Twh-q5carBcLwAo29ec1EGH7Zs1kepSIH6wH9DgYt0whg9aN3XJ73uWrlBVpqFEc5P-FeINdGrpeO1vLm_4iVR-JHpYrvZfYTaIlmrE8bknhe9ZitpVaWPSJDKg96q2T6bSN/s2048/94AAA9EF-B499-4A18-8BDB-0691D51FB093_1_201_a.heic" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1587" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9VXSXZi99Twh-q5carBcLwAo29ec1EGH7Zs1kepSIH6wH9DgYt0whg9aN3XJ73uWrlBVpqFEc5P-FeINdGrpeO1vLm_4iVR-JHpYrvZfYTaIlmrE8bknhe9ZitpVaWPSJDKg96q2T6bSN/s320/94AAA9EF-B499-4A18-8BDB-0691D51FB093_1_201_a.heic" /></a></div><span style="color: red; font-family: arial;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><b>CAUTION - The picture does not reflect my thoughts here.</b></span></span><p></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">A friend wrote on one of my Facebook posts unrelated to the actual post - “Without meaning to disrupt your tour of our favorite Other country, I do have 2 questions: who really won the US election, and what “should” the outcome be? I am, as you well know, asking this respectfully, mi amigo.” Well thanks, amigo.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I think my friend thought this question might cause me discomfort. If he did, he was wrong. Elections in the US have many levels. Let me offer five propositions about the recently concluded election, before the final vote is cast tomorrow (December 14) in the Presidential race. But this election was not just about who lives in the White House.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>#1 - Biden won the Presidency</b></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">From my perspective, a lot of the electorate was tired of Trump’s histrionics. I believe he sealed his fate with the first debate performance. It was horrid. Who really lost in this election were the pundits and pollsters. Both groups look increasingly like buffoons. At the beginning of the cycle many of those dopes were predicting a big blue wave. They were off by more than a scooch. The GOP picked up 13 seats making Pelosi’s Speakership held there by a mere 9 seats. In the Senate, the GOP lost two seats in Arizona and Colorado, while the Dems lost one in Alabama. Worst case for the GOP is a 50-50 split.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">That is not to diminish the positive things that the Trump administration did. In spite of claims to the contrary, economic growth after the tax and regulatory changes adopted by the Administration were tangible. Two statistics bear repeating - first, for the first time in a couple of decades, at the beginning of 2020 the number of jobs available exceeded the number of job seekers, that led to a real (after inflation) growth in incomes for the lowest paid workers. His results in getting several players in the Middle East to regularize relations with Israel are positive. I believe the ultimate result in the Presidential contest was not a strong positive reaction to Biden's Harding-like basement campaign but a desire to try to return to at least a bit more civility. </span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>#2 - There were some shenanigans in the election</b></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">There is plenty of evidence that there were irregularities in the election, but let me say at the outset, I do not believe they were determinative of the final presidential result. We moved into a new election regime without a great deal of thought about how to assure electoral integrity. So while that horrible example from 2018 of ballot “harvesting” seems to have been stopped, I believe that the new system was not without some things which reasonable people could help to improve in the next cycle. But there were also benefits, a large group of voters decided to participate - turnout was amazing. I think they were motivated. Ideally, after we get through with the quibbles about this or that, thoughtful people should think carefully about electoral security. We might well have transitioned into a new era with electronic voting. But we did not think carefully enough about issues like when each state can begin and end the election and when counting can begin and end. Some states prohibited counting until after election day - that seems like a silly rule. Some states were looser than I think they should have been in accepting ballots long after the election. In one agonizingly close congressional race in New York they even found a dozen votes in a drawer a couple of weeks after the election - that is simply wrong. </span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">We might also think about adopting the system for domestic voters that expats used in this election. At the beginning of the cycle, realizing that we would be in Mexico, we tried to figure out how to vote. There was a Federal site which required one to verify registration and then hooked us up with our local county registrar. We faxed our completed ballots to the registrar and they confirmed we had voted. They confirmed back that they had received our ballots.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As noted earlier, I don’t believe the irregularities influenced the outcomes to a material level. But get ready for tons of conspiracy narratives. I am not a fan of Biden on many levels (Neither of us voted for President) but I hope he is smart enough to resist buying into the lunacy of the BC coalition (Bernie and AOC). If he does buy the BC approaches, 2022 will look a lot like 2010.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">While I think it is appropriate to make sure votes are counted correctly, I think Trump's continued unwillingness to accept the result looks a lot like nullification movements in the mid-part of the nineteenth century. For those who have either a pathological dislike of Trump or an unrelenting support for him, we need to stop both.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I have a Spanish tutor in SMA who is excellent. On Friday we talked about the perspective of time in politics. There are two phrases which we spent a good deal of time on the tendencies of politicians to ignore long term consequences (a largo (or corto) plazo). One of the priorities that all of us in what PJ O'Rourke calls the "Far Middle" is to begin to think about how to restore civil discourse. The problem seems to be imbedded in most of the democracies around the world.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>#3 - The voters made were pretty sophisticated in their choices.</b></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Nancy Pelosi’s majority in the House was diminished by 13 seats, included in that list were four seats in California. And based on the results in the legislative races across the country, the dems failed to win one legislative house. One democrat commentator suggested </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">“There’s a significant difference between a referendum on a clown show, which is what we had at the top of the ticket, and embracing the values of the Democratic ticket,” said Nichole Remmert, Ms. Skopov’s campaign manager. “People bought into Joe Biden to stop the insanity in the White House. They did not suddenly become Democrats.”</span></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">For my money, on the initiative front, Californians scored a trifecta. They voted down by a narrow margin (sorry it was not higher) the idiotic proposal to create a split roll for commercial and industrial property. Businesses are already fleeing the California environment and this nonsense would have exacerbated that trend. The proponents argued that the multibillion tax increase would have no effect on our already lousy business climate and the voters saw through that bunk. An attempt to reinstate affirmative action was rebuffed by a higher margin than the original proposition that passed the ban. (Prop 209). Finally, the attempt to move Gig industries back to 1930s style labor law (an unabashed attempt by the SEIU to organize UBER drivers and others) was REJECTED by a huge margin. Let's hope that the author of this nonsense does not come back with a variation (small chance). </span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Then there was the attempt by the SEIU to buy a Sacramento Board of Supervisor’s seat in our home district. The victorious candidate has been a resident of the district for his entire life. We supported him after hearing him in a candidate’s forum in the Spring. He seems remarkably untied to ideological extremes. He had some good ideas about how to deal with homelessness (which is a much smaller problem than in the camping area formerly known as the Bay Area) and infrastructure and even some thoughts on economic development. His opponent took a series of positions which would satisfy AOC. The former newspaper called the Sacramento Bee rode his candidacy like a racehorse. But the good guy won.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>#4 - The MAGA brand may be shifting</b></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Dan Henninger, the astute deputy editorial page editor for the WSJ, noticed that rejection of the "do as I say not as I do" authoritarian policies of governors like Cuomo, Newsome, and Whitmer are on increasingly tenuous ground. They should be. But the people who are rejecting the arbitrary exercises of authority are not traditional Magaistas. A good poster child is the owner of a restaurant in LA who spent a lot of her own dough to construct a safe outside site for her patrons only to be closed down by Mayor Garcetti's order for closure of all restaurants. Somehow the Mayor thought the ban should not apply to a production crew to set up a commissary next to her closed restaurant.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">For a good part of this pandemic we’ve heard a “one best way” approach to the pandemic. No alternative views were acceptable. So for example, Anthony Berenson, detailed examples of suppression of alternative points of view. The media suppressed a Danish peer review study on the efficacy of masks. Amazon refused to allow a KDP monograph from Berenson that questioned whether some policies we’ve adopted, almost without question, were efficacious. While the Great Barrington Declaration (by three distinguished epidemiologists) did not get the coverage it should have, holes have begun to appear in the orthodoxy of both the media and the medical/political establishment. Science is a process not an unalterable set of models.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Does that mean we should drop all safety strategies? Of course not. Should we support the loons on the right who support conspiracy theories of all flavors? Nope. Where we are going was seems to have been explained in the SCOTUS decision released on Thanksgiving Eve - ROMAN CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF BROOKLYN, NEW YORK v. ANDREW M. CUOMO, GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK. The decision said the state of New York could not discriminate between bars and churches. It carefully did not accede to claims of some of the evangelicals that the First Amendment expression clause allowed unlimited gatherings. While the decision was remanded to a lower level I it did provide guidance by arguing that if you can have 50 people in a bar you should also be able to have a similar number in a church or synagogue. The only disappointment here was that the Chief Justice for some reason sided with the minority. Justice Gorsuch made the right argument about as clearly as possible - “Government is not free to disregard the First Amendment in times of crisis. At a minimum, that Amendment prohibits government officials from treating religious exercises worse than comparable secular activities, unless they are pursuing a compelling interest and using the least restrictive means available.” Roberts’ tortured dissent bought the BS that Cuomo has used more than once. “There is simply no need to do so. After the Diocese and Agudath Israel filed their applications, the Governor revised the designations of the affected areas. None of the houses of worship identified in the applications is now subject to any fixed numerical restrictions.” That sounds to me like a license for officials like Cuomo to reach for the stars and then to pull back when their ploy looks like it will be rejected. It is not as if he has not tried this approach before. Specious is too kind to describe the Chief’s logic. I am not sure who the Chief thought he was playing to but it certainly was not to the Constitution.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>#5 - Who knows what will happen on January 5?</b></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The 2020 election has two important elections to be decided before the inauguration of Biden. Both are in Georgia. There is tons of money descending into the state. I watched part of the Loeffler-Warnock debate and was not impressed with the incumbent. And while I think the debate format in these times is not helpful to understanding candidate positions, I think it was a mistake for Perdue to reject another debate with Osler.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">So the final result for 2020’s election will have to wait until January 5 and 6 (the day of the specials in Georgia and then the Congressional confirmation of the Electoral College vote). But as a response to my friend - who won the election?/ And what should be the outcome? My response is "aren’t both answers obvious?" The more we can frustrate the political class - the more I’m satisfied.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>AN UPDATE ON THE BOOK </b></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">This week I talked to an editor about working on "Of Course It's True, Except for a Couple of Lies". I did a work count of the manuscript and it is almost 180,000 words. I was impressed with the editor and thus will cycle the manuscript into her workflow perhaps in February. Not being a fan of War and Peace I will spend the next couple of months refining the three sections.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">We also discussed options on publishing. At this point we are planning two editions - a traditional paperback and an Ebook. As I have investigated options there are multiple options in publishing both versions. As this progresses I will keep you informed.</span></p><p> </p>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-47963626509752291022020-10-29T11:49:00.003-07:002020-10-29T15:11:31.069-07:00<p> <span style="color: red;">BOOK COVERS AND HAVING CHILDREN</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCd9_QYflsOz87PzuLbEimfP-8aYQislQ3llwtr5x88eEPCR_d1vu4QFhzmdYJgkzAFwmr51Lz52MxRO9l1igpkO3gXDND167rANkN8dzxSvW1aNTFUGTeU8eY9KRwG3mhF4hyvdx_lbzC/s2048/080063C3-8C38-4101-B4CB-09A542FB977D_1_201_a.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1688" height="139" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCd9_QYflsOz87PzuLbEimfP-8aYQislQ3llwtr5x88eEPCR_d1vu4QFhzmdYJgkzAFwmr51Lz52MxRO9l1igpkO3gXDND167rANkN8dzxSvW1aNTFUGTeU8eY9KRwG3mhF4hyvdx_lbzC/w114-h139/080063C3-8C38-4101-B4CB-09A542FB977D_1_201_a.jpeg" width="114" /></a></div>This is the third set of comments which proceeded the book and also a chance to weigh in on possible book covers. The point of these recent posts is to give you an idea of what might be in the book.<p></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">This post describes my feelings about becoming a father, first with our daughter and then with our son. I remain intrigued about how different our kids have become. What I appreciate about both are two qualities they hold in common. Both have built strong marriages and are devoted to their children. At the same time both understand the need to be active in their communities; Emily with her work in Eagle Rock Elementary and Peter in sports both football and little league.</p><p></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"></p><i>NOTE - The original draft for these posts is in response to a series of questions that my daughter asked me in 2019. Thus, the references are to her (as in Before you were born) </i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp5FbwquCcUe7Pl8ZyS0rEEnKgDs78qNb9Aet3uZon5PDLpZFVrspmUaAve8dXgYPSD0vgK5VCqNDg48sKV88h0MoC6bAtEUF55EhrUJSwwoBfTCImPkE7S-hwWuc4CT4rYypWgFUyncsX/s1650/Donkey+Cover+idea+%25236+copy.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1650" data-original-width="1275" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp5FbwquCcUe7Pl8ZyS0rEEnKgDs78qNb9Aet3uZon5PDLpZFVrspmUaAve8dXgYPSD0vgK5VCqNDg48sKV88h0MoC6bAtEUF55EhrUJSwwoBfTCImPkE7S-hwWuc4CT4rYypWgFUyncsX/w154-h200/Donkey+Cover+idea+%25236+copy.jpg" width="154" /></a></div><p></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px;"><span style="text-align: justify;">First things first. Presented on either side are two alternative covers for the book. I actually like both. If you have a preference, shoot me a note.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivcOcBVkATnU_6yourrfhN-aQzhe26xYwmMtGZnvS3-kzpr5Nkw8YhV9fTXdfFsOUzd_NoLGVO9Jo7U56-z2odJ1UPdSWkm4nVCQ60MQ8ztvRdrK6TA51HxWe5d8IZgYkKDII9Yg5sbVq_/s1650/Cover+Mock+Up+%25235.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1650" data-original-width="1275" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivcOcBVkATnU_6yourrfhN-aQzhe26xYwmMtGZnvS3-kzpr5Nkw8YhV9fTXdfFsOUzd_NoLGVO9Jo7U56-z2odJ1UPdSWkm4nVCQ60MQ8ztvRdrK6TA51HxWe5d8IZgYkKDII9Yg5sbVq_/w154-h200/Cover+Mock+Up+%25235.jpg" width="154" /></a></div><p></p><p></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 12px; text-align: justify;">But now back to the blog - This week are comments about what it was like to become a father to Emily and Peter. One initial comment, I think it can be said, without hesitation that becoming a grandfather is much easier.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><b></b><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"></p><b>4) Describe what it felt like to become a father? What do you remember from my birth or infancy? </b><div><b><br /></b><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">There are a jumble of thoughts. Before you were born, we were in LA visiting Albert and he gave me a book called “How to Raise an Independent Daughter” - it was a compilation of psychobabble with some Zen like phrases thrown in. I was polite but thought the way you raise independent children is to give them responsibility and love. I read at least part of the book. In the end it was thoroughly forgettable new age crap. I understood the intention (which was a goal I shared) but thoroughly useless. The night before you were born Jerry and Suzy Cook visited and Suzy laughed at mom (in a nice way) because mom was huge - by that time she was wearing my sandals because those were the only shoes that fit. </p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">The day you were born was a busy time in the end of the legislative session. Mom gave me a pager (Those times are called BC - Before Cellular). On that morning I was walking up to testify on a bill by Joe Montoya in the Senate Education Committee. The pager went off and Senator Rodda said from his chair’s position, “Mr. Brown, I think you have more important things to do than testifying on Mr. Montoya’s bill. “ Montoya gratuitously added, “Yeah and your testimony probably would not have made much of a difference.” I walked out of the hearing and into Assemblywoman Teresa Hughes office to see what was going on - for a couple of years after that we celebrated your birthday in her office. When Mom was ready to go into the delivery room - I waited. I have a negative reaction to the stuff the scrubbed down the operating rooms and at that time a C-section prevented the dad from being present. I was able to hold you first in the recovery room. In some ways that was exhilarating but in others I realized that even more than mom I had a responsibility for the rest of my life.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">That night, mom had to stay in the hospital for one night, I went to a Buffalo Chips run and then called Mom pretty blitzed and told her how excited I was.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Dawn came to help out a couple of days after you were born to help out. </p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">When Peter was born it was a planned C-Section - so everything was very orderly. We played backgammon while waiting, although your mom claimed she was distracted, I still collected on our bet. </p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">I went into the recovery room and started to talk to the nurse about how she had learned her technique. She was marvelous – professional and yet caring. I asked her about her training and then we talked about an issue I was working on in the legislature (the use of pound animals as models) and I actually recruited her to testify against the “Dog Bill”. Finally, mom looked up and said, Who is the patient here?”</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Your mom had never had a brother and I was unfamiliar with how to deal with sisters. (Nancy was old enough so I never dealt with her as a peer until I was an adult.). So in one sense you were unique. That paid off later because my mother, who had all male grandchildren, kept getting you dresses made by Florence Eisman. Many of those were velvet with appliqués which made them quite impractical for even a toddler. But mom did not seem to care.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">I wrote a simple song for Emily when she was about 1 -</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 45px; text-align: justify;">Emily Bemily Booglie Brown, she’s the funniest (prettiest, sunniest) lady in town</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 45px; text-align: justify;">She laughs and she giggles and she makes her sound;</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0px 45px; text-align: justify;">That’s Emily Bemily Booglie Brown</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">I did a song about Peter when he was about the same age - but I cannot for the life of me remember either the fetching tune or the words. Such is the case of second children - I should know I was fourth! But Peter’s assertion of having a birth announcement done on the back of a napkin, is totally false. And after a lot of effort I have found visual proof (in the book).</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">For both you and Pete we tried to read to you both each night at bedtime - your two favorite books were<i> Green Eggs and Ham</i> and <i>A Chocolate Moose for Dinner</i>. Both of you liked to listen to banjo music which I played almost every night. You heard a lot of traditional bluegrass - but the constant song you heard was John Henry. In one sense I have always liked the message in the song because John Henry strives. His boss says you can’t beat the machine and yet he does.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Before Pete was born we were at a summer meeting in Victoria BC. We were going to Butchart Gardens with a bunch of nuns and you told the “bunny farts” joke. (What is invisible and smells like carrots?) Luckily the nuns thought it was charming. That night we got back and you threw a fit right before we were going to a very fancy restaurant - we should have given you a nap. I finally, in great frustration, sat you down on the bed and said “Young lady, this behavior is unacceptable. If you make one peep out of order at dinner I will immediately bring you back to the room, find a baby sitter and you will stay in the room.” We then got you into your Florence Eisman dress (mom kept buying these expensive dresses that were velvet and lovely but not practical - after all you were her only grand-daughter) and we went to dinner. Your comportment at dinner was exceptional. When the waiter came for dessert I looked at you and said “What would you like?” You said “What do they have?” The waiter then described the choices including Cherries Jubilee - you asked what was that - and when he finished his description - you said “that would be wonderful and I think my father would like that too.”</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">When Pete was born my mother came - she was very excited because he was the first grandchild where she had a chance to care for the mom.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">We also started a tradition called the “God Dammit Mile.” When we would go on a trip with both kids, one would eventually start to frack off. (Note the distribution of fracks was about equal!) Because I believe in incentives, I began to offer an incentive for potty training - it was a trip to Disneyland. When we were driving to the Magic Kingdom for Peter’s reward, you guys started yammering before we had left Sacramento. I stopped the car on the side of the freeway and brought both of you to the side. I said “If I hear one more peep out of either of you before we get to LA I will turn around and we will not go to Disneyland.” I then asked “Do you understand what I have said?” Emily sort of blubbered “Yes.” I then added “Do you have any questions?” She said “No” I looked at Peter and asked him. He waited a minute and said something like “Yes I do. Why did the chicken cross the road?” (Or some similar non sequitur) I nearly bit through my lip but the rest of the trip was less fracky. </p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">When you were about 2 I decided to take you on a business trip to Denver with me. About 30 minutes into the flight you decided to throw a fit. Every woman near me wanted to comfort you - you were passed around a lot. I was proud to bring you along. Mom took care of you during the day and when we flew back your behavior was perfect.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Pete was more likely, especially with his friend Kyle, to get into mischief than you were, at least as I knew about it.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">When Emily was ready for kindergarten we spent a fair amount of time thinking about alternatives. The local public school was a mess, although several families in the neighborhood said we should support it. We finally decided with Emily that she would go to the Sacrament equivalent of what Quinlan went to for her entire K-12 experience, Sacramento Country Day School. It was a stretch to support but we thought that of all the things you can buy a child, this is one of the few things that cannot be taken away.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Both kids had some excellent teachers at SCDS. I served on the board for six years. Peter was definitely a less diligent student - that may have been in part because the SCDS model for all its talk about meeting the individual needs of the student, seemed to be unable to deal with alternative learning styles. When Peter was in Kindergarten we went to one back to school night and kids exhibited self portraits. Peter’s was all blue. Quinlan asked Peter about his painting and he said, “It is a self portrait. It is in a pool and I am under the water.”</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">When Peter was in fourth grade he had a particular inept teacher. On one assignment he chose to work very hard. When he brought it in the teacher questioned whether he had done his own work. I called the director of the lower school and said I wanted a meeting. We went in and I vented my frustrations and argued that this was a chance to encourage Peter because he had worked so hard on this particular project. The director of the lower school said to me (in classic eduspeak “Jon I can hear your anger”. At that I broke up and said “This is not an auditory test, I am sure you can hear my words but are you actually going to doing something about this problem?”</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Two high school stories about Emily. When she was a senior she was late in getting acceptance offers to college. One of her teachers, who thought a lot of himself, kidded her about it. He thought of himself highly, always touting his Stanford degree (he got in through the Menlo option because he did not qualify as a first year student!). So Emily and I talked about it and created a fictitious acceptance letter from the Joe Bob School of Automotive Design - we designed a logo and all. (The teacher also thought he was a real gearhead.). It said</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Dear Emily,</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">We are pleased to offer you admission to the Joe Bob School of Automotive Design. We are especially excited because you came highly recommended from one of our most prominent graduates, who graduated with honors with a certificate in advanced tuck and roll. XXX XXXXXXX claims he actually went to Stanford, but we know better. We also are glad to admit you because it will mean we will have two babes in the entering class.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Emily brought it into his class and the guy did not even realize he was being made the butt of a joke. In Emily’s senior year each student had to obtain an internship. She got one with a State Senator, completely without my help. The same teacher monitored the internships and made two inappropriate comments. He first said when Emily described her experience “Isn’t it nice that Dads can help their kids get these opportunities. He then asked each if they had experienced sexual harassment. When I heard about that exchange, I called the teacher and bawled him out for about 30 minutes. I then called the headmaster and spent another 30 minutes with him. That night was a potluck for the seniors and their families. I soon noticed something fun. Every time I entered a room where the teacher was he would scurry out. I got Emily and demonstrated the principle. We both laughed.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Evaluating the value of private K-12 schools is hard. In the case of SCDS they did a lot of extra things for kids who fit their model. But they were also woefully bereft of recognition that every kid has unique educational needs. In Peter’s case we did not recognize that soon enough. In Emily’s case even the college counseling function was inadequate. The counselor who doubled as an English teacher and college counselor knew Emily was interested in a smaller selective college. But the counselor, when Emily expressed at least preliminary interest in a place in the South recommended that she look at UNC. </p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Pete left Country Day at Eighth grade - their methods were not matched well to boys who were a bit less compliant. He wanted to play football and so went to Christian Brothers. Unfortunately, in one of his games he nailed a knee. We had been on a short trip and when we came back he was lying on our couch with a blanket. When we came in he exposed the brace he had on his leg. It was one of those special moments.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">I am especially proud that both of our kids have taken an active role in helping to shape the school experience for their kids. They also seem to work better than we did in sharing responsibilities for raising kids. Quinlan and I had much more traditional roles.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Finally, I should offer some comments on our kids parenting skills. Between Emily and Michael and Peter and Jessica they have very different assumptions about raising kids; both from the way we did it and the way that each works with their own children. But the proof of parenthood is not in whether they follow our methods but in whether each of our five grandchildren are growing up to be independent contributing members of their communities. All five have distinct personalities. But each has developed a good sense of values.</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">The next post is about my involvement with running and Loma Prieta (Not related topics)<br /></p></div>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-22946160381958591352020-10-17T21:05:00.004-07:002020-10-17T21:05:45.650-07:00<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbgzvd624DbE-kZqULcWfmCLUiTQaVRNescI-EmkbJwKRuy_pyfkfYtZTkAaaP_Wj64aJF69KJ6MoyD5KIvzUqNyt-WNvZ6ZvuGbQemaVYWqkQsoyCrHao_eZ1Zc1mu67SHFY1Y3ZURWVK/s2048/080063C3-8C38-4101-B4CB-09A542FB977D_1_201_a.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1688" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbgzvd624DbE-kZqULcWfmCLUiTQaVRNescI-EmkbJwKRuy_pyfkfYtZTkAaaP_Wj64aJF69KJ6MoyD5KIvzUqNyt-WNvZ6ZvuGbQemaVYWqkQsoyCrHao_eZ1Zc1mu67SHFY1Y3ZURWVK/s320/080063C3-8C38-4101-B4CB-09A542FB977D_1_201_a.jpeg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: justify;">This is the second of nine glimpses of the types of themes in the forth coming </span><i style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: justify;">Of Course It’s True, Except for a Couple of Lies </i><span style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: justify;">- due in late 2020 or early 2021. </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: justify;"> </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: justify;">This one deals with two issues - Why I decided to get married and something about Vietnam.</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: justify;"> </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: justify;">The original questions came from my daughter Emily.</span><p></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b>2) Why did you decide to marry mom?</b></p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Simply because I loved her - her sense of humor, and because I could not imagine being without her. She was quick. We had fun together. I only had three serious girl friends - two in high school and your mom. Mom was different - when I first met her she was in academic trouble and I think I helped her stay at Pacific. </p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><i>NOTE - The comments about Quinlan are a lot more detailed - how I met her (at Pacific - in fixing her guitar); how we have made decisions over the last 50+ years (we both have always had bank accounts and made lots of decisions independently; what intrigued me about her (sense of humor was big); how she is often the most fascinating person in the room even after 50 years. Etc.</i></p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><b>3) What was your experience of Dan or your peers going to Vietnam? What did you feel about the war? Did you think the US should be there? What should they have down instead? Not what you think now but I’m curious what you felt then.</b></p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><i>NOTE - This set of stories is not a part of the final manuscript. Vietnam was something that everyone in my generation experienced. It was perhaps the one time, when I listened to Bill Clinton’s stories about the draft, that I felt an affinity with him. Although as noted in a chapter on famous people I have met - when I met him as President - he was the best extemporaneous speaker I think I ever heard. In the book I do comment on why I thought our involvement in Vietnam was poorly managed, especially based on the Hubris of Robert McNamara. As you will read in the chapter on Experts v. Crowds in the final version of the book I have a lot of faith in the expertise of people as a group over narrowly constituted experts. There was a great quote from a British labor politician in Britain after WWII - who said “The gentleman in Whitehall really does know better, what is good for the people than the people know themselves.” I believe that logic is consistently false. It is a big part of what I believe about how we should organize ourselves in common purpose. The philosophy chapters in the middle of the book argue that individuals often have specialized knowledge that is always better than the experts. We need to know how and when to use that. A recent book (Wake Up Call by John Mickelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge - well worth the read by the way) argues that governments in the West made a series of absurd decisions about how to deal with the pandemic of COVID. For me at least the two big government initiatives in the Johnson Administration were serious examples of the hubris of advocates of big government. Guns and Butter was something that LBJ thought was possible. As you will read in the book the democrats are not the only ones who believe that anything is possible - the only differences between many of our leaders in the last half century was what they defined as guns and butter. Non est talis res ut liberum prandium (there is no such thing as a free lunch) is still true. An odd saying indeed for someone who spent 40+ years on both sides of lobbying! </i></p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><i>Government to be successful needs to decide what it is trying to accomplish. From my perspective that should be a short list - but once we figure out what we want to do we need to think about how to pay for it. In recent years, because of something Mancur Olson observed (in the Logic of Collective Action) we haven’t bothered to have serious discussions of either what we want to accomplish or how to pay for it. For me Vietnam and the Great Society came at a time in life when I was trying to figure out key questions about government - throughout my life I have kept coming back to those basics. So below are comments that won’t be in the book - but the book does have some discussions about the other side (the butter). I had one brother who served and several friends, including a friend who was a ranger and another to who flew Hueys. So here are my thoughts on Vietnam, contradictory as they were then and now. </i></p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Vietnam is perhaps the most complex event in my generation’s history. We eased into it in part because of anti-communism of Ike and JFK but also because of the hubris of LBJ and the absolute incompetence of Robert McNamara. LBJ thought, because of his Senate experience that you could stage manage anything. A good part of our problems today in the US were created by LBJs attempts with the Great Society - a set of programs where we have spent trillions of dollars to end poverty with few positive results and a large set of problems which produced societal pathologies that we still live with.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">I had mixed feelings about the war - I thought we should either commit ourselves to go after the enemy or not be there. When we did fight back (as in Tet - where we clearly won) that worked. Even with that the press completely misrepresented the outcome. McNamara (who had been a car executive and the lead General (Westmorland) made our policy inconsistent. According to most reports Johnson actually spent a lot of time in the Situation Room - discussing strategy and the idiots in the Armed Forces accepted that. McNamara was a numbers guy (Scientific management) so the bureaucrats down the line created numbers which were phony.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">My brother Dan spent several tours in Vietnam on a small ship which patrolled the Mekong river. He enlisted in the Navy at the end of my Senior Year in High School. His stories about his deployments are interesting. Peter at one point had a long talk with him about those experiences.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">I did two contradictory things. I disliked the draft intensely - If you know me at all you know my distrust of bureaucracies - and yet I tried twice to enlist in the Air Force. I failed the draft physicals and the Air Force physicals (but because of sinuses not blood pressure). In 1967, the Congress reauthorized the draft so that those of us with student classifications were forced to double the time of our eligibility for the draft. I studied up on the draft and the new law and was so incensed that I wrote an impassioned letter of a 21 year old to my local draft board telling them I they were neither Selective, did not perform a Service and certainly were not a system. I am convinced that put a red letter on my file.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">The rules of the Selective Service allowed one physical and one re-check. I was marginally hypertensive (high blood pressure). In the end they sent me six notices for a physical. In the last one I was mildly above - so they put me in a green room - I was so mad when I came out my BP actually went up. </p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><i>When I got to graduate school in DC I did two contradictory things. First, I tried twice to enlist in the Air Force either to be a pilot (where my sinuses knocked me out) or in intelligence. In those two physicals I passed except for sinuses. But at the same time I worked to make sure I would not be drafted.</i></p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">When the sixth notice arrived I went to a law office of a guy who specialized in Selective Service cases. He wrote a letter which I signed which officially retained him as my attorney of record. I got a 4-F in 7 days. That certainly was an exceptional response, I am not sure how that happened.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Should we have been there? Hard question. Our role evolved so that by the time JFK was assassinated we had only a couple of hundred troops there. But then came the Gulf of Tonkin resolution - which was a doctored up crisis to get us into war. After that the number of troops escalated quickly.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">The Intellectuals turned against the war as soon as it became real. When the Tet offensive happened Walter Cronkite began to change his opinion - it was the first time that I noticed that the news establishment could be biased. By the time 1968 rolled around it was clear that LBJ could not get re-elected. He had this idiotic speech on March 31 where he stated “If nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve.” I had written my Honors Thesis on the James McGregor Burns theory of presidential invincibility - where I argued Burns was wrong. I got the paper back two days before the speech. After the speech I went over to my professor’s house - and he laughed (he thought Burns was right) and said “I will not change the grade.”</p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">A couple of my fraternity brothers enlisted into the National Guard. For some reason I did not even try.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Oddly, one of the biggest supporters of the Volunteer Army was my boss in the Senate - Winston Prouty.</p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><i>The draft was wrong on several levels. The local boards could be arbitrary and the exclusions got seemingly healthy but relatively wealthy young men out of serving. In the last physical I took, for some reason I was asked to take a second IQ test. (Go figure but for those of you who did not go through a draft physical see the scenes from Alice’s Restaurant mixed with One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The Air Force physicals were almost pleasant. In the last draft physical I took there was a group of perhaps 60 guys in a class room and a short Napoleonic NCO came in trying to look tough and claiming that if any of us intentionally failed the test, we would immediately be sent to Vietnam. There was a huge Black guy from Baltimore behind me - it was clear he would eventually end up as a draftee, he was angry. He started ask all of the guys in the back to give him their pencils. As the NCO was about to finish his harangue, the big guy stood up with about 30 pencils in his hand assembled like a bundle of twigs, broke them in half and then said “Hey Honkie, we need some more pencils here.” The NCO looked like he was going to faint but quickly handed the guy a new set of pencils. The draft physicals were bureaucratic in the extreme. </i></p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><i>Opponents of the volunteer army consistently argued that everyone owes a debt to their society and the draft was a great equalizer. The problem was it was not a good way to do that - young men with resources found all sorts of ways to avoid the draft from the national guard to medical claims. And yet I remain opposed to the idea of universal basic service. BUS presents all sorts of problems in my mind - the conception of a common culture when I was growing up depended on a series of activities including flag salutes and all sorts of opportunities to understand the unique nature of our American system. We lost those things in part because of cynicism. From my view that came from a common understanding of the over-reach of the supporters of expansions of government and a concurrent absurd reading of the thinkers like Adam Smith. </i></p>
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<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><i>The next post describes my feelings about becoming a father.</i></p><div><i><br /></i></div>drtaxsactohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12607564542286089496noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074047926050463661.post-78896678302426562852020-10-05T14:38:00.005-07:002020-10-09T14:02:38.582-07:00<p style="color: #e6000e; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">NEXT STEPS</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;">
<p style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKrDsYnvL5mPW-Cb4W7uMsW6QJLQsUexE2pGQX0KudRiqfCTsJbf9l40i519ceSt40Gi-2AONnvJa6mqJAE0IFbF277UBd06RW3sYr7BV8I9OkYZdcTWaKMfYo4vXikUXBmdyYvwOJtaB5/s2048/CF86D2B5-AE66-4FF1-A6E2-C3DD1C8ECC48.heic" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKrDsYnvL5mPW-Cb4W7uMsW6QJLQsUexE2pGQX0KudRiqfCTsJbf9l40i519ceSt40Gi-2AONnvJa6mqJAE0IFbF277UBd06RW3sYr7BV8I9OkYZdcTWaKMfYo4vXikUXBmdyYvwOJtaB5/w178-h237/CF86D2B5-AE66-4FF1-A6E2-C3DD1C8ECC48.heic" width="178" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I have not published in this space since June. Over the summer, I actually got some kind notes from regular readers who asked when the next post was coming. Regular readers of Five Cent Thinking have known about an effort by me to write a book. When I first retired, I thought about doing a Memoir (or as C.S. Lewis called it something done by people of my age in their "anecdotage"). One of the first things I wanted to do was to figure out more about the person I was named after, Jonathan Archer, who came to California in 1849. His story caused me to do some research into his experiences of coming around the horn and living in California but also into the larger story of both the family who stayed in New York and the thousands of others who came to California. The last post had an early version of the chapter.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">After the initial burst of enthusiasm inertia intervened and some good reasons, including procrastination, the book project stalled. When I wrote my dissertation there was an incentive at the end - A suitable for framing degree (which I never did frame) and a title which I rarely use. Then I got Lymphoma and that encouraged my daughter, Emily, to push me on the project. Her first prompt was to send me a list of questions which she wanted me to answer. I worked on that a bit more than a year ago and sent her the results which turned out to be a long response. But then for last Christmas she gave me something called <b>Storyworth</b>, which is a site which encourages the recipient to answer questions about their life which, when completed, is compiled into a book. I started that project in January. I had two reactions to it. First, Storyworth is a great idea, poorly implemented; the online version's editor is primitive. I suspect if they were a bit more entreprenurial they might generate a lot more income But second, as Quinlan suggested the project was positive because "it kept me off the streets." That was especially useful as the pandemic evolved. During the Spring in SMA I could easily spend a couple of hours a day working on the issues. That required some research but also to think about what things I wanted to say. </div><p></p>
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<p style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifukZsrA0R8zA-Y9Jktfd0UjVYAKoWhhq9yPi3hO1LExuSruaTh9eGGrJxhSgBnOnt_2hbG4VxLMFdq_siJGS_jdUWFuLxijiV1HJ3z8NQhnaRlB0xa7TJFYGnxPN0lCTwt73LZkSzi1of/s2048/080063C3-8C38-4101-B4CB-09A542FB977D_1_201_a.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1688" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifukZsrA0R8zA-Y9Jktfd0UjVYAKoWhhq9yPi3hO1LExuSruaTh9eGGrJxhSgBnOnt_2hbG4VxLMFdq_siJGS_jdUWFuLxijiV1HJ3z8NQhnaRlB0xa7TJFYGnxPN0lCTwt73LZkSzi1of/s320/080063C3-8C38-4101-B4CB-09A542FB977D_1_201_a.jpeg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At the end of the summer I had a kind offer from a former colleague who agreed to edit the draft. My God she has patience. But I then had two other decisions to complete. First, I needed a title for this project. And I came up with <i><b>Of Course It’s True, except for a Couple of Lies; a Memoir.</b></i> And while I thought briefly about including the picture of Indiana on the cover (See Above) I finally decided on another photo taken in SMA a couple of years ago as thinking it more appropriately represented the contents of the book.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
<p style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">I also had the great good fortune of having a couple of friends who have published books, including one novel (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Pianist-Bordello-Mike-Erickson-ebook/dp/B015L7L5PA/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Pianist+in+a+bordello&qid=1601932009&sr=8-1">Mike Ericksen Pianist in a Bordello</a>) and three very funny memoirs on developing an international business that I had the opportunity to read when they were originally emails to the author's family. (Robert F. Hemphill; <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Goats-Ate-Our-Wires-Business-ebook/dp/B08GFJWRG2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=9LP49B5M3M8A&dchild=1&keywords=goats+ate+our+wires+rf+hemphill&qid=1601932183&sprefix=Goats+ate+the+air,aps,323&sr=8-1">Goats Ate our Wires</a> , <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stories-Middle-Seat-four-million-mile-international/dp/0991298519/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=RF+Hemphill&qid=1601932258&sr=8-3">Stories from the Middle Seat</a> , and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dust-Tea-Dingoes-Dragons-Globe-Trekking/dp/B010DN2U9M/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=RF+Hemphill&qid=1601932258&sr=8-4">Dust Tea, Dingos and Dragons</a> ) I asked them about their experiences. They gave me some great ideas. I recommend all four books. They are inventive, in different ways.</p>
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<p style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">After ten months of work, I am at a place where I am ready to write a conclusion, getting to a couple of more edits and then decide whether to publish on Kindle or Apple Books. I talked to one arm of Simon and Schuster but was not impressed with their potential value added. But here are my intended next steps. First, with her permission, I am going to publish on this blog, the responses to Emily, slightly edited, to give you an idea about what you might find in the final manuscript. Those will be divided into nine separate posts. From my perspective, that will either tantalize potential readers or not. Second, then by the end of the year, I will go forward with both an Ebook and a paperback version. For those of you who are willing I would appreciate any comments on these pre-publication teasers. </p>
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<p style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">The book is really three books - a first section, which I have described previously which present some (hopefully) interesting stories about family. I started with a simple premise. We all tell family stories which we filter through our experiences. I first noticed that with my two aunts and my siblings. Neely, my mother’s youngest sister, had a great talent for remembering and elaborating family stories - which actually were modified over time - not cynically but often with positive effects.</p><p style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"> The second part, which sets out six philosophy chapters that conclude with an explanation of “Why I am not a progressive". Those of you who know me well will understand that the conclusion was not hard to come to for me - BUT I was inspired to write it based on some correspondence I had with a long time progressive friend over the last year but also because one of my favorite economists wrote a similar essay - then called "Why I am not a conservative" </p><p style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">The final section responds to a series of questions asked by either Emily or Storyworth. The final chapter, for example, before the Conclusions, yet to be written explores our trauma on race issues that we lived through this summer., it links <i>White Fragility </i>author Robin DiAngelo and Homer Plessy (the subject of the infamous Plessy v Ferguson decision). Not surprisingly I reacted to DiAngelo's Critical Race Theory nonsense negatively (actually that is a bit of an understatement) but I still believe one of our challenges for the country is to get closer to MLK's standard being judged on the content of one's character not the color of their skin. From my view Critical Race Theory is a horrible example of what JPII called “endless meanderings of erudition” (describing the risks facing universities who don’t go after the truth. But in the case of CRT, there is a lot of psychobabble and almost no erudition. I have shipped some of the chapters out to friends who are interested in a particular area and have gotten some excellent critical reviews, I am thankful for those comments.</p><p style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;">As was offered by the spirit in Dickens A Christmas Carol - expect the first in about a week.</p>
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