I always try to act professionally at my job - I really do. It is never good to burn your bridges with anyone as you never know where you will end up - or where they will end up. On occasion the bridge must be burned, however. I think that is a normal part of doing business in a competitive marketplace. In other words, you can’t let someone stomp on you forever, or have endless meetings with you with the illusion that they are going to buy goods or services from you.
Read the rest of this entry »

Chinese entrepreneur Liu Keli, who runs a company making copper cylinders for printing presses, decided to open a factory in South Carolina. He was motivated by a desire to improve his position in the U.S. market, and was surprised to find that substantial cost savings were also possible on some important aspects of his business. Specifically: electricity costs are 75% cheaper, and continuity of service is much better. Mr Liu also got 7 acres of land near Spartanburg for one fourth of what it would have cost him in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he operates three plants.

Labor is, of course, significantly more expensive: about six times as much on a per-hour basis. But with the benefits from reduced power and land costs, and a $1500/employee tax credit from South Carolina, the overall cost picture is closer to that in China than he would have previously imagined.

I’m also kind of surprised by these wide differences in land and electricity costs.

(via Carpe Diem)

The video is underlit. Just listen to it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m licensed to carry concealed firearms, and it is a given that I always go armed if it is legal for me to do so. There certainly is no question that I am packing when I take my dogs on their evening walk every night.

Last year the pack and I came across a coyote that was gorging on trash, a fairly sizable wild predator in the heart of a modern city that was miles from any wilderness area. Although I was certainly ready to put it down if it was rabid and attacked, I let it go without hindrance when it turned tail and ran. Besides the fact that I’m not about to fire a gun unless I need to protect myself, coyotes aren’t enough of a threat to merit hunting them down in the city.

That might just change.

Click on that last link and see how coyotes in southern California have attacked small children in three separate incidents in a five day period. It was only because of the timely intervention of adults that none of the children were killed. Killed and eaten.

And it isn’t as if the children in question were mere babies, either. It seems that the coyotes are trying to snatch toddlers from playgrounds and front yards. Think of a 2-year-old with their face in the sharp grip of a coyote’s jaws.

This news article discusses how the experts are puzzled by how predation on humans on SoCal is on the rise, even though it mentions how one of the coyotes which attacked a little girl was limping as it approached the child. Seems to me that you don’t need to be an expert to realize that humans are easy meals for animals unless they are properly equipped to resist something with natural weaponry.

Added to that is the hippy-drippy “Nature is our cuddly friend!” attitude that dominates in that area of the country. If you have people who actually delight in having wild predators live in close proximity to human children, then there is going to be tragedy some time down the road. Where is the big mystery?

There is no real chance that a predator will be able to prevail over me, or that one will harm a child in my care. But that is because no one in their right mind would ever be able to describe me as a hippy.

My esteemed colleague Dan From Madison wrote a well received series of posts concerning how cougars are losing their fear of humans. It is no surprise that the big cats generate more concern because they are certainly more dangerous, and they have easily killed adult humans. I think that, unless attitudes change, there is going to be an incident where a child is killed by a coyote some time in the not-so-distant future.

And then the hunt will be on, hippies be damned.

Most of the students in my charity self defense course eventually get around to asking my advice concerning the most effective home defense weapon. I always recommend a shotgun without reservation.

There is a lot to be said for the humble scattergun. It is probably the most devastating close combat weapon there is, unless you have access to a submachine gun or a flamethrower. (And both of those damage your house too much.) Load it up with the right type of ammo and it will cure what ails you.

They are also incredibly intimidating, which has caused more than a few violent criminals over the years to give up without a struggle when they found themselves on the business end of a 12 gauge. They are so scary, in fact, that the Germans accused the United States of war crimes when our troops started to use shotguns in World War I. The guys who embraced poison gas as a weapon thought that a Doughboy using a pump action scattergun in the trenches was beyond the pale!

For more than a century, shotguns have also been the main heavy arm for street cops. They are extremely effective close up, but have less penetration and range than a rifle. Just the thing if you are concerned about innocent civilians, yet still have to take down a nest of criminals who have set up shop in a densely crowded neighborhood.

As a last note, shotguns are easy to learn how to use, and to use well. This doesn’t mean that no training at all is necessary, just that it doesn’t take nearly as much time to turn a novice into a safe and effective defensive shotgunner as it does to teach the basics of using a rifle in an urban setting.

All of that was going through my mind when I read this article by Bob Owens. It seems that the Chicago Police Department, reeling from a week of increased criminal shootings on the streets, is planning on buying 13,000 assault rifles and issue them to their patrol officers.

Whoa, Nelly! Hold the phone! Are they going to invest in SWAT training for every single one of their patrol officers? Because that is what it would take to minimize the risk to innocent civilians that using weapons with such high penetration in a city would bring.

No, of course Chicago wouldn’t invest in such training! They would never have the budget for something like that. Click the link to the Owens article and read how it is problematic for them to be able to find the money to buy the rifles, let alone the ammo needed for training and the infrastructure to keep the weapons in repair.

Have I mentioned that shotguns are only about 20% of the cost of an assault rifle? They are even cheaper than most handguns! So why advocate a poorly reasoned plan to buy assault rifles when a cheaper, easier, safer, and extremely effective alternative is available?

Because it is all an exercise in public relations. The city has been subjected to some bad press because of their lack of ability to control criminal violence, so this is an attempt to be seen as taking positive and highly visible action. Assault rifles are sexy and have a bad boy cachet, while shotguns are dull and pedestrian and lack charisma. The fact that it wastes money and actually puts innocent civilians at greater risk isn’t important, they have to look good on the evening news!

You might think that this is an isolated event. Chicago has a few bad weekends, some ne’er-do-wells shoot each other up in gang territory, and the city tries to deflect criticism by buying some unnecessary toys for their boys. But I would like to bring this news article to your attention, which reports that several other police agencies are planning on equipping their patrol officers with semi-auto versions of military weapons.

I suppose this post here at The Chicago Boyz will destroy any chance I have of employment as a firearms instructor for a major police agency. They’d never waste money on someone who says it is better to go with what works instead of what looks good on camera.

(Hat tip to Glenn for the heads up on the Bob Owens article.)

One Time’s site, Romesh Ratnesar argues we should consider invading Burma in order to head off a humanitarian disaster that could claim upwards of a million lives.

It’s not a bad idea except it is at least 6 months too late.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a very interesting article in the WSJ about how it apparently now seems to be more profitable (and less risky) to steal a semi full of cigarettes than to steal an armored car full of cash. This is mainly due to the mountains of taxes that the various agencies in New York have put on the product. You have a huge state tax on top of the New York City tax, making a very nice spread between a non taxed product and a taxed product.

Read the rest of this entry »

“The old fierce pull of blood.” - Faulkner

Literature helps us understand human nature. Disciplines designed to do so are not always so good at it. Sometimes, indeed, they seem counterproductive. “Buried Prejudice”, an article by Siri Carpenter in Scientific American Mind (via A&L), argues that “[e]ven our basic visual perceptions are skewed toward our in-groups. Many studies have shown that people more readily remember faces of their own race than of other races.” But to Carpenter (and the researchers summarized) the tension between our understanding of truth and justice (transcendent ideals that also pulled Faulkner’s young hero, Sarty) and our feel of the tribal (which he feels mixed with “despair” and “grief”) is not the tension between feeling and thinking, the biological and the rational. Our culture has slowly developed institutions to restrain the tribal passions central to our earlier survival but detrimental to a more diverse and larger society. But, Carpenter describes a group of researchers who have found (”[u]sing a variety of sophisticated methods,” that we “unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin.” (The word “astounding” is telling.) Of course, this is not always helpful - say, in sitting on a jury - when we link (as Jesse Jackson implies he did in the catchy intro) “black” with “danger”.

Read the rest of this entry »

An assortment. Click “Read the rest” to see the rest.
 

An NSF-funded study, and a response.

Bureaucrats defend themselves against proposed reductions in what they believe they have coming to them by immediately threatening to close down the most popular and/or most vital service they provide. The US Park Service became famous for it and gave the phenomenon its name through its habit of immediately closing down the immensely popular Washington Monument whenever a government shutdown occurred or threatening to close it down when budget cuts were discussed. It’s a species of blackmail, simple to operate, but even simpler to shut down, if you understand it and have the guts and the foresight to prepare.

All government services provide various levels of benefit to the public, from essentials like police protection and national defense down to museums on the history of condiment and bridges to nowhere. At the same time they distort, to a greater or lesser degree the private sphere. Sometimes this is a net good (police departments distorting the private gang system) and other times it’s not so good (we’ve yet to recover from disruptive urban renewal bulldozing of black neighborhoods in the 20th century). All these activities have to be funded by some sort of tax or fee and the taxes too have various levels of pain and benefit associated with them. The taxes also distort the private sphere (sales taxes suppress consumption, inheritance taxes suppress thrift, luxury taxes shift buying yachts to Canada).

It’s perfectly possible for any individual and for our society in general to list out taxes and spending, from least justifiable to most in two lists. Politicians occasionally do this and try to reign in various forms of government stupidity. The Washington Monument Syndrome consists of bureaucrats taking threatened spending cuts and applying the cuts to the wrong end of the list at key moments before there is a popular consensus on cutting spending, disrupting spending control plans.

The solution to this syndrome is simple, ban it. Remove civil service protection from government workers who engage in the practice. Follow through by getting these blackmailers out of government service when they try their tricks anyway.

We need to change the sequence of events so that the consensus of what’s most valuable is arrived at first. Then when stark economic reality shows up and revenues aren’t there to cover expenses, we already know where all the cuts would land. Bureaucrats who significantly deviate off the list and purposefully pick painful targets for cuts will be exposed for what they have always been: saboteurs of the will of the people, emotional blackmail artists holding popular programs hostage.

Ideally you would develop the cut lists in good times as an exercise in civic responsibility and first execute the list in bad times so spending cuts do the least harm and tax cuts the most good. As a political reality, things are never that neat. Good and bad times are never universal. Probably the best time to do it is in the honeymoon phase of our next Democrat president, when the media’s in the tank and blowing kisses at the new administration. It gives the opposition something to do and answers the charge of “how to pay for” tax cuts. The people decide what they want and the government organizes and gives voice to their sometimes contradictory desires.

It also puts the shoe on the other foot in terms of government economic analysis. Static analysis of tax cuts, inaccurately taking into account their growth effects, would lead to steeper cuts in spending than necessary. Besides being economically illiterate (which it always was), that sort of analysis would become a politically perilous thing to do because it would lead to more people losing services.

Another follow on effect is an opportunity for privatization. Certain services will lose their secure funding, and become episodic. We’ll fund them in good times but they’ll repeatedly face the chopping block in bad times. Private philanthropy could step in and ensure steady funding through an endowment so the job gets done without this government spending yo-yo. This splits the actual “bleeding heart liberals” off the socialist coalition as it becomes clear that sometimes shrinking government is a better way to actually get something done for the poor and the powerless.

This is a great video about your Fifth Amendment rights.  Don’t be afraid to use them.

In a recent post, I noted that various military branches had lists of suggested reading. I optimistically suggested that this might partially offset the virtual banishment of military history from America’s colleges and universities. I was politely but firmly corrected by an excellent comment from SmittenEagle. SE’s comment (which you should read) is far better and more interesting than the post it responds to.

I will only respond to one point in his comment. SE stated, inter alia that “…I find that most of my peers (junior Marine officers) don’t spend nearly enough time in study. The Marine capstone doctrinal publication, MCDP-1: Warfighting, implores officers to spend at least as much time in study as they do on physical fitness. That is a lot of time, and almost all of my peers fall far short.”

This reminded me of something from a long time ago … .

Read the rest of this entry »

Way back in 2004 I wrote about how the lack of an intuitive sense of scale prevented many people from viewing the Lancet Iraqi Mortality survey with skepticism. The same lack of sense of scale shows up in other areas such as in this article (via Megan McArdle) about ending subsidies to the oil industry instead of levying a windfall-profits tax.

Read the rest of this entry »

Indian pols revert to Third World type:

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — India is reportedly considering a ban on futures trading in food commodities, as the government struggles to curb soaring inflation and the rising cost of food has become a major international concern.
 
India’s finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said Monday that he was considering a blanket ban on trading in food futures, according to a report in The Financial Times.
 
Chidambaram said that governments across Asia share his worries over speculation in the commodities markets, the FT reported.
 
India is “facing a very grave crisis on the food front,” the minister said on the sidelines of the Asian Development Bank’s annual meeting in Madrid, according to the FT.
 
India has already banned futures trading in rice and wheat. The latest remarks from India’s finance minister come as his government confronts growing pressure at home to curb rising inflation.
 
On Friday, official data showed that India’s inflation hit a 42-month high of 7.57% in the week ending April 19.
 
“It’s indicative of the fact that there’s a real issue here and governments are scrambling to find some kind of solution,” said Cameron Brandt, global markets analyst at EPFR Global, about India’s idea to ban trading in food futures.
 
“I don’t think it’s a great idea especially given that their food futures market is fairly modest,” Brandt said. “If you take that away, you lose pretty important market signals. One thing the food futures market is telling us is plant more food.”
 
[...]

There’s not much to say about this except that India still has a ways to go to become a first-rate country.

Also, the ignorance about basic economics of many of the commenters on economics and finance websites never ceases to surprise me.

A clue to the future performance of a company may be found in the literary style of the CEO’s annual letter. That’s the opinion of Laura Rittenhouse, head of an investor relations consulting firm, who has studied this topic extensively.

A study found that when the letters are analyzed for clarity versus jargon, shares of bottom-ranked companies lost more than 18 percent of their value in a two-year period ending in 2002, compared with a 12.7 percent drop for the top-ranked companies. More recently, another Rittenhouse study focused on newly-appointed CEOs and their content scores versus those of their predecessors. For the group with the highest gains in content scores, stock prices increased an average of of 28.4% (in the year after the new CEOs were named) versus an average decline of 10.5% for the ground with the greatest declines in content scores.

The usual cautions about cause and effect analysis–correlation is not causation, the direction in which the arrow of causality is pointing is not always obvious–of course apply. Nevertheless, this is interesting.

Here’s a presentation which provides a little bit of detail on the Rittenhouse analysis method. Ms Rittenhouse quotes Orwell:

If thought can corrupt language, then language can corrupt thought

…and offers her own version:

If language determines actions and results, then corrupt language will lead to debilitating actions and unsatisfactory results.

See also The Edifice Clue, The Harvard Indicator, and Readin’, Writin’, and the Business Shtick.

See also this comparing writing at J P Morgan in 1933 and in 2006. (Although I thought Jamie Dimon’s letter in the recent annual report was pretty good–not sure what the Rittenhouse analysis process would have to say about it.)

The dust has settled, former Mayor Livingstone has departed, his immediate staff have had to clear their desks and Boris Johnson, the new Mayor has been, if not exactly sworn in, as that is a rather old-fashioned idea, certainly signed in. In some quarters the bells are still ringing and hosannas are being sung but, elsewhere, it might be time to take a look as to what might be reasonably expected from the new Mayor.

In the first place, it is worth examining what the position entails, where it is derived from and what controls there are on it. Until 2000 there was no Mayor of London. The reference one comes across in history and literature, particularly Shakespeare’s Chronicles, to the powerful individual, who owes that power to the fractious and difficult citizens of London, is to the Lord Mayor of the City of London, who still exists, still owes his (there has not been a woman so far) power to those who elect him and who managed to see off the upstart Mayor, Ken Livingstone, in short order.

Read the rest of this entry »

Zenpundit had a recent post critiquing the academic jihad against military history, and I responded, citing to an article by the excellent military historian Robert M. Citino. (I strongly suggest you read all his books, no kidding, especially this and <a href=”this and this and