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Yesterday was Chicago’s inaugural TEDx meeting. It was thought provoking, a full house, and a very educational evening. The event lost one speaker due to snowstorm but he made it in via Skype. Like any inaugural event there were a few technical hiccups but mostly they added charm to the event. I expect them to only get better from here.

The next one’s in October. I’ll be there. Fortunately, the room will be bigger so hopefully it will take a bit more than a week to sell out though I fully expect it to sell out again. Details to be released soon.

The original Gary Death Countdown can be found here.

Some residents of Gary, Indiana are impatient for the death clock to count down to 2012 and have asked the Indiana Distressed Unit Appeals Board to not wait so long. The Miller Citizen’s Corp President Douglas Grimes said it straight out:

The board must insist that the city explore Chapter 9 bankruptcy, receivership and other options which could allow the city to reset its compass and move forward

Chapter 9 bankruptcy is not a liquidation but a reorganization under the federal bankruptcy code. To do it now would be admitting that the DUAB process is a farce that will not lead to a Gary government that can live within its means. An early bankruptcy is a vote of no confidence in the political class of the city and the ability of the DUAB to do its job helping that political class change the way the city does business.

Bankruptcy would help the city get out from under its $34 million (or more) in obligations beyond the structural imbalances imposed by the tax caps. It wouldn’t help with the imbalances themselves. For that, the DUAB process would need to work its way through to a successful conclusion or Gary’s elected officeholders need to be replaced by a state appointed receiver and committee that would be willing to make the changes needed and given the powers necessary to negotiate the pay reductions needed to bring expenditures in line with revenues.

The wonderfulness that is TED is now coming to Chicago on February 10th. The theme for this kickoff local event is “Creative Convergence”. If you’re a member of the Museum of Science and Industry, you can get discounted tickets.

correction: Originally said it was the 15th, my error entirely.

Whether you love Wikipedia or hate it, if you have strong opinions about just about anything you are very likely going to want to go over there at some point and give them a piece of your mind. If you don’t prepare beforehand, you’re very likely going to be ignored or called names. Here’s how to avoid that fate.

1. Register for an editor’s account.
2. Pick two or three topics you’re interested in that are a bit off the beaten path and tend not to be controversial.
3. Create some solid, boring edits in your non-controversial topics, at least 10 edits if you’re not running an anonymizer or 100 edits if you’re coming in through an anonymizer like TOR.
4. Put up a basic description of yourself on your user page that’s noncontroversial.

Once you’ve done these things and your account has a bit of longevity to it you’ve passed the participation hurdle of Wikipedia and you’ve paid your dues. The classic Wikipedia excuses that are used to not listen to new users don’t quite apply to you. If a page is semi-protected, you can still participate in the discussion and any voting.

You also might consider continuing the non-controversial edits, just for fun. Outside hot button topics such as politics and furry webcomics (really, don’t ask), Wikipedia actually does very good, neutral work on a whole host of topics. If more people were involved, especially in underrepresented groups like conservatives, it would be a better tool for everybody.

[UPDATE: A follow-up Gary Death Countdown post is here.]

It’s much more likely not to happen than to happen but the clock is ticking for the death of Gary, Indiana. State law imposes property tax caps on all local governments far below the level Gary has grown accustomed to. Gary finances 80% of its $80M+ general fund operations through the use of property taxes. A vote on including the tax caps in Indiana’s Constitution is widely expected in 2010.

Gary has appealed and gotten special exemptions at a level unique in the state to maintain higher taxes while undergoing adjustments to bring government down to a size that can survive on anticipated revenue. Absent that relief, Gary’s 2010 property tax receipts would drop from a projected 62.9M to 28.1M.

As a condition of the transitional relief, a financial monitor was required for Gary and its related municipal districts (sanitary, storm water, public transport corp, and airport authority). The transition ends in 2012. If Gary has not adjusted sufficiently that it can handle somewhere between 20-30M less in revenue by that time, the 5th largest city in Indiana will be forced to declare bankruptcy.

Complicating matters are at least $34M in outstanding debts on top of its impending structural deficit. The term at least is used advisedly because unlike most cities, and most private organizations of its size and complexity, Gary uses a cash based accounting system. Future obligations that have not been presented for payment are not accounted for at all in a cash based system. The city government literally doesn’t have the capacity to accurately know what it owes. Because of the lack of information the financial monitor is forced to guess at some basic information.

The current Gary financial monitor’s report makes for frightening reading. Property tax revenue is scheduled to drop 50%+. There is no likelihood of a local income tax and Indiana does not share its sales tax revenue with local government. One of two casinos operating in Gary has entered bankruptcy and even before then a dispute with the casino operators disrupted payments to Gary. The bad news keeps on rolling for 265 pages.

Sometimes forgotten lessons will get refound. Writing up a comment on the breast cancer guidelines brouhaha, I dredged up what turned out to be an inappropriate analogy, but one that is useful elsewhere.

Remember LynxGate? The allegation at the time (early 2000s) was that forest service employees falsely added lynx hairs to collection samples in order to get habitat declared protected when it should not have been. After investigation, a more complicated story emerged, one of false consensus, unauthorized controls/faked samples, and a general finding that there was no conspiracy.

The 1998 Weaver survey, at the time considered reliable but since discredited, showed a much more extensive lynx habitat than the federal three year survey was detecting. Independently, a couple of government employees decided to submit control samples of lynx hair, one obvious, the other less so, without going through the normal process of creating such controls that would ensure that their data would not get mixed in with the rest of the survey results. The intention, as reported to the investigators, was to ensure that lynx was not getting misidentified as domestic cats (feral domestic cats do live in the woods sometimes).

The lesson that a false consensus can make scientists skip certain safeguard protocols got buried as the right found itself embarrassed and the left uninterested in any sort of blood sport against people on its side.

Fast forward to today’s Climategate. From the Harry Read Me. we find, about 40% of the way in:

If an update station matches a ‘master’ station by WMO code, but the data is unpalatably
inconsistent, the operator is given three choices:

[BEGIN QUOTE]
You have failed a match despite the WMO codes matching.
This must be resolved!! Please choose one:

1. Match them after all.
2. Leave the existing station alone, and discard the update.
3. Give existing station a false code, and make the update the new WMO station.

Enter 1,2 or 3:
[END QUOTE]

You can’t imagine what this has cost me – to actually allow the operator to assign false
WMO codes!! But what else is there in such situations? Especially when dealing with a ‘Master’
database of dubious provenance (which, er, they all are and always will be).

False codes will be obtained by multiplying the legitimate code (5 digits) by 100, then adding
1 at a time until a number is found with no matches in the database. THIS IS NOT PERFECT but as
there is no central repository for WMO codes – especially made-up ones – we’ll have to chance
duplicating one that’s present in one of the other databases. In any case, anyone comparing WMO
codes between databases – something I’ve studiously avoided doing except for tmin/tmax where I
had to – will be treating the false codes with suspicion anyway. Hopefully.

One of the things that happened in Lynxgate was that the “obvious” control being sent in was not so obvious to the lab which had in other contexts seen plenty of legitimate samples be that sloppy. They treated it as legitimate data.

So what happens if somebody randomly decides to give the CRU unit at the UAE a bit of control data with not so unusual but falsely high values? In 2 out of the 3 choices the control will be included with the rest of the data. In option 3, a false station would be added to the list of WMO stations and used going forward. This is part of the process of good databases going bad and bad ones not being corrected that Harry famously complained about just a little bit later in the same file.

Somebody will, if they haven’t already, claim that nobody would ever just submit false data, that this can all be explained away by climate station central offices not keeping up with new stations in the field. And that would sound plausible, unless you’ve forgotten that obscure scandal that wasn’t, Lynxgate where they did just that based on the mistaken conclusions of a soon to be discredited study.

But this isn’t the only past scandal that is illustrative of the large potential problems facing CRU. Pulling in Briffa’s suspect Yamal chronology you have an additional difficulty. It seems that some data points are more equal than others in the climate game. Any unusually influential data points now have to also get traced back to an actual station, something that hasn’t been done on any of them.

And how good are those actual stations? Anthony Watts’ experiment over at surfacestations.org is pointing to the answer “not very”. If you look at a global map of stations it’s amazing how many of the stations are in the USA. Watts’ survey of all USHCN stations is 82% complete and only 10% of stations have an NOAA error rating of less than 1C.

So without any conspiracy we seem to be betting trillions on science that does not adequately coordinate to prevent control data from entering real data sets, has practices in the discipline that are inadequate to guard against undue weight, and is taking large chunks of its data from weather stations whose error bars far exceed the global warming signal we’re all supposed to be worried about.

At this point a finding of “no conspiracy” would not reassure me. It should not reassure us at all.

The President of the United States presides over a government that employs a huge number of people who write regulations that either slow down job creation or are actual job killers. In these times of high unemployment, the President could, by executive order, instruct these employees to use their existing discretion in favor of the interpretation that would save or create the most jobs.

There would be no need to wait for the Congress. There would be no need to spend the public’s money on this initiative. This executive order would be entirely ’shovel ready’ and its impact on the deficit is overwhelmingly likely to be positive. So far as I know, President Obama has not signed such an order, nor has he given any evidence that he is even considering it.

Why?

Breitbart’s Biggovernment.com scores again, interviewing homecare workers threatened by the SEIU in a union election in Fresno. Obviously there are labor law issues but SEIU’s former counsel and now NLRB member Craig Becker can probably keep the SEIU out of hot water on the labor front. But what about the postal front?

Multiple times on the linked video, the workers said that SEIU representatives took their mail, opened it, and intimidated them into voting SEIU, and then took their ballots. This stinks, but is it a crime? According to postal inspector Hillary Smith, who covers the Fresno area, it certainly sounds like one. Specifically, the crime would be mail theft, which carries a financial penalty of up to $250,000 and up to 5 years in prison.

Filing a complaint for mail theft can be done electronically here. Without complaints, mail theft cannot be investigated. The inspectors have seen the video. They just cannot proceed without a complainant. To date, they do not seem to have received one.

All the head scratching over this year’s peace nobel is overshadowing the Nobel Literature Prize, given to Herta Muller, a surprise pick. Mrs. Muller’s writings deal with Communism, focusing on Romania, and she is an activist in the cause of exposing the truth of what happened during the communist period and where are these people today. Her works are sure to gain in popularity though they necessarily must remain difficult. The reality of communism is difficult, there is no getting around that.

There does seem to be a strange meme floating about, suggesting that Obama would have been a better Nobel laureate for literature. I can only think that the Literature Nobel has been debased so badly that the actual winner isn’t even looked at before the snark starts.

Full disclosure: Herta Muller was born in Timis county, Romania, as was I.

I can’t tell if it’s a joke but there’s currently a Chicago Craigslist ad seeking only white males for a network admin job.

Considering the situation of our economy and the fact that almost every company in the Great City of Chicago is practicing racial profiling when it pertains to hiring, we will be straight forward and save a lot of time by asking that ONLY WHITE MALES apply for this position, since that is whom we are going to hire anyway.

I’m currently job hunting right now. I submitted my resume mostly to see what sort of train wreck this company is. Since I belong to a tiny religious minority and while I have a genetic mix that can pass visual inspection it doesn’t really match classic American racist requirements, I would have to be much more desperate than I am now to really consider these guys for a job. Oh, my tolerance for idiots is also probably set too low.

Unless it is a joke or some sort of false flag operation, this is a company that’s going to have its finances ruined by the upcoming class action suit. Explicit white racism is not something that lends itself to them making payroll for any length of time.

So how would you take advantage of the situation?

From the AP:

Experts say that anarchists successfully deployed a tactic in Pittsburgh that they have often used at other protests, leading a large group of people toward police, then slipping out of the crowd to commit mayhem elsewhere.

Nice.

I’d been thinking about disincorporation for a bit as a monkeywrenching technique when I came across a WSJ article on the phenomenon (Towns Rethink Self-Reliance as Finances Worsen) as conventionally conceived. Disincorporation has traditionally been adopted when a Town itself realizes that its continued existence doesn’t make sense.

Disincorporation as monkeywrenching is when the State realizes that its incorporated subsidiary (town, county, whatever you call it) is so mismanaged that a portion or even all of it would be better off unincorporated and has an established mechanism to remove territory and resources from the control of the dysfunctional government. As socialism is the major form of differential dysfunction in municipal government in the US today, it creates a firewall that strips out neighborhoods from a dysfunctional city and provides opportunities for more functional arrangements to take hold.

A disincorporation statute would set minimum standards of performance which, if violated, would result in city shrinkage. If you’ve got an urban area that’s returning to woodland (which seems to be happening in Detroit for instance) because nobody’s building on a significant number of lots and wild animals move in, create an unincorporated enclave and you have an instant change in incentives. Add in an obligation by the surrounding urban area to sell basic utilities at a reasonable (non-subsidized) price and you have a powerful stick that can be wielded against a dysfunctional socialist municipality that can no longer let significant chunks of their territory decay in favor of other sections. Under a properly formed disincorporation regime the favorite socialist past time of robbing Peter to pay Paul eventually leads to elimination as the decaying socialist city spawns more realistic capitalist mini-urbs.

Socialism doesn’t work. Experience has proven it. Creating a mechanism to shift back through disincorporation would create a powerful tool to end this sort of foolish socialist empire building.

On reading this article on unsustainable public/private compensation gaps I wondered whether I had any pension funds drawing on my tax dollars that were grossly underfunded and would inevitably be coming after my budgeted retirement savings to save their pensions. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to get that information but it’s vital for financial planning for the long haul to a dignified retirement where one can reliably live on your own money.

The cycle of negotiating generous government employee contracts, underfunding pension contributions, and then jacking up taxes to make up shortfalls at the last moment is another way the socialist ratchet effect works. Since so many of these pension funding sources are location based, the real estate industry offers us a way out.

When you buy a house the quality of the local public school district is a large factor influencing prices. Childless couples buying a house with no prospect of children will still take an interest in their local schools because of the influence school quality has on house prices. Most who have gone house hunting knows this.

If I know that taxes will have to double to pay for some lavish government promises within the timeframe of my likely ownership term, I’m going to not be so enthused about buying in that jurisdiction. I certainly would not pay the same price as a neighboring town or county that set up their pension payments as the actuaries say they should be funded.

Were there to be an unfunded liability index attached to every house in the US comprising of a basket of future expenditures traditionally paid by property or other municipal, county, or state taxes, housing prices would react relatively quickly to poor governance and the drop in housing values prior to the future crisis where the pension fund simply ran out of money would lead to a secular trend of homeowners increasing pressure for responsible government and likely smaller government.

Right now such an index doesn’t exist but all the information needed to make such an index are already public record. Any large real estate agent system that created such an index would have a competitive advantage over its rivals, even after those rivals replicated the work. The reputation benefits of being the guys who did it first are likely to last much longer than the exclusivity of the index.

The effort needed to make government bigger is much less than the effort needed to make government smaller. This is the basic principle that underlies the government ratchet effect. The beneficiaries of government action are concentrated and thus both have more at stake and know it than the beneficiaries of shrinking government which are very often the general public who derive at best a diffuse benefit that is often not even noticed or even understood.

But I believe this pro-socialist ratchet dynamic only happens so long as the starting question is “should government (or program x) be cut?” What if we start from a different question? What if the assumption is that there is a lot of bad government out there and that as a matter of course 10% (or 5% or 15%) of the government can and should be turned over each year so that poor past decisions don’t hang around forever. Which part would get cut? The answer becomes obvious, the corrupt, useless, inefficient parts, of course. The corrupt, useless, and inefficient caucus is tiny (at least when it’s identified as such). Nobody supports corrupt, useless, and inefficient government out loud, even self-described socialists. This sort of government is supported by ‘middle of the night’ bill insertions and inertia.

The counter-argument would be to assume that good, efficient, honest programs would be disrupted and now we wouldn’t want that would we? But this assumes that a significant chunk of government programs are incapable of being reformed and improved by termination, privatization, or reform. That’s something that needs to proved, not assumed.

Most everybody right now wants to protect their own ox from getting gored. so there is a fear that ‘my’ programs are going to be disproportionately targeted and ‘your’ programs will be protected by political juice. The trick to avoiding this sort of cynical CYA is to identify the targeted bottom percentage in a fair way. This is where things get sticky because it’s something of a risky proposition to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

What if we simply asked everybody who would have an expert opinion, to simply rate the worthiness of every program, to the extent they can. All members of the legislature, all members of the executive giving their opinions to identify the stinkers. What if we made it a job requirement? Of course the system would be gamed but it would be a massive improvement on current practice and would significantly reduce the ratchet effect.

Right now, there is no generalized expectation that the legislature will periodically review government expenditures, pick out the worst, and either let bad things expire, privatize the solution, or provide a better, more efficient, less expensive way to solve the problem using government action. Cutting government in this system becomes progressive, not reactionary. Getting through less than 10% of the government is a real world assertion of incompetence on the part of incumbent legislators. And all that need change to bring about this happy state of affairs is to change the expectations game. Legislation will follow to eliminate the free riders.

I always thought that if we every got within shouting distance of a tipping point where we would become a socialist country somebody would start up an extended discussion on monkeywrenching socialism. Nobody else seems to have done so (feel free to educate me on other efforts in comments) so I thought I’d put in my two bits with a blog post series.

Let me be clear as to what I am talking about. This is not about felonious conduct. It’s not a mirror image of left-wing monkeywrenching. It’s about exploiting a simple fact of life, that socialism doesn’t work and the socialist ideology makes headway only when the long-term effects are hidden or obfuscated. Monkeywrenching socialism is about improving society across the board from politics to economics to culture by introducing moments of clarity and insisting that there is no moral or ethical high ground for a wrong system that has caused as much damage in the world.

Peacefully adopted socialism depends on people feeling a misplaced sense of loyalty to the corpse of the system that socialism is usurping. People know that something is wrong but they ‘play fair’ long after the socialists have started their long march through the institutions and played dirty pool to tear the guts out of the old order before anybody notices.

More soon.

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.

I work in a building with an in-elevator video system. This morning, a tale of russian cultists, 29 in all threatening to blow themselves up in their sealed cave if anyone interrupts them as they wait for the end of the world this spring. “Who cares” erupts loudly from the only other person in the elevator, a guy in a business suit. I was “It’s always good to talk them off the ledge” I replied and off I went to work.

You had to be there to catch the contempt, the utter disregard for the sanctity of life in his simple words. He was wondering why his life was being inconvenienced by these russian religious fanatics when he could be getting his stock news on his elevator ride. That was how little their lives meant to him. It was the culture of death in a nutshell. These 29 people (I later learned 4 were children, the youngest under 2 years old) were just meat to this guy and not only that, he had to share the sentiment so we could all join him in being unhappy at the inconvenience. We could have found out about the Dow 15 seconds earlier. And what about Britney? Don’t these Captivate Network guys have any sense of proportion?

The Culture of Death, where the rubber meets the road, will have a suit on more often than not, will be ‘respectable’ more often than not, and, more often than not, will insist on you joining in. That’s creepy, and not as theoretical as it was yesterday.

Priest: Christ is Risen
People: Truly He is Risen

The ancient rythms of eastern apostolic christianity rang out once more in Chicago just like every year but this year, somebody was missing. Josefa wasn’t around adding her cracked byelorussian voice to our romanian chants, her rolling gait was missing from the traditional procession 3 times around the church. The rock that so much of the practical life of our little church was missing and nobody had a clue. She’d been sick the week before “in the hospital” people in the know would mention to the curious just like people would mention her real story to those who asked but nobody who had not asked ever found out about the true story of the rough gem in our midst. In short, Josefa Tarasewicz was a martyr.

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You might notice (if it hasn’t been pushed off the front page yet) a Chicago fire story at the Drudge Report. I work on the 20th floor of that building. So here are a few short observations of my first real building evacuation.

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A new scam is running around. A bank account is cracked, real checks are printed, sent out in large numbers, the checks are deposited by people thinking they are for payment of “taxes” for a lottery and the “tax payment” is sent via Western Union / Moneygram to the “tax agent”, in other words, the scam artist. The name, bank information, routing number, security features on the check are all entirely legitimate. This way the group gets money sent to them without ever actually having to touch the bank.

I just got the 2nd one of these in a month and it’s ticking me off. My local police are too lazy to follow up on reporting this sort of scam (the route I took in the first case) so I’m throwing this out for a bit of international justice. Is there a coalition of the willing out there willing to bust scammers?

The “agent” gives a number of 011-491-60-91-92-39-92 which seems to be Germany. If anybody could trace this to a locality and get the police to act, I will press charges.