voluntaryXchange

Gashoax

This isn’t so much a pro-fracking video, as a video about whether a particular anti-fracking video activist is being truthful.*

There’s some interesting economics in here, particularly about the rates of workplace absence. These are higher in industries like entertainment and education than they are in oil and gas.

Honestly though, one of the reasons I like this video is because I grew up in one of those places where you could light the water on fire. This was not hard to do, and I did it the first time at an age when my parents would have freaked if they’d known I was even lighting matches … decades before horizontal drilling or fracking became available.

*

Fracking is a word that is misused.

Most of the increases in oil and gas production over the last decade are due to horizontal drilling rather than fracking. Horizontal drilling is going straight down (old-fashioned vertical drilling), and then turning sideways and drilling some more. This offers a huge advantage because most oil is found in pools that spread horizontally when some geologic formation keeps them from rising. Another huge factor in horizontal drilling is the splitting of the well into many horizontal wells, creating a network that reaches all parts of those underground pools. There is no alternative to horizontal drilling, which is why it such a big deal.

Then comes fracking, which is pumping stuff down a well (vertical or horizontal) that expands underground, fracturing the rocks to get the oil and gas to flow out more readily. The alternative to fracking is rarely mentioned: strip and open pit mining down to the level where the rocks are, and crushing them up on the surface. Most people don’t want that, but they aren’t aware that it is the alternative choice.

This video is cross-posted from Tufte’s Curated Economics Videos.

Technorati Tags: gashoax

The Old Folks Party

Not to be age-ist, but if the shoe fits:

Honestly, I have some sympathy for (fellow former-Buffalonian) Perez, who seems to have been dealt a bad hand in the aging-with-grace category.

Not much sympathy for the Democrats though, who seem to have an across-the-board problem with bringing new blood up through the ranks.

Technorati Tags: tom,perez,democratic,national,committee

Later That Same Life

You’re going to wish you could do this for real:

How did he make this?

Stoney Emshmiller did the interview of his future self in 1977. Then he kept it for almost 40 years, and edited his older self into it.

If it were me, I think I would have been most surprised at 18 to find out, not that I wasn’t famous in my 50’s, but rather that I lost interest in being famous by the time I was 21 or so, and even stopped worrying about it by the time I was 35.

P.S. I love the part where he tells his 18 year old self that he knows he’s still a virgin. Nothing like calling someone on the biggest teenage self-delusion of them all.

Via Kottke.

Technorati Tags: stoney,peter,emshmiller,later,that,same,life,interview,older,self

SCOTUS On Trump’s Immigration Ban

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court upheld much of Trump’s ban on immigration/travel based on location.

For practical purposes, they left an out you can drive a truck through, by allowing potential immigrants to leverage any relationships they can create to permit entry.

And, the decision isn’t final. The law will be reviewed in full next year.

*******************************

I’m not a legal expert. But I don’t think there was even a serious question that Trump’s action was legal in the large, although some of the details might not be.

I was a little more than befuddled, then, when two courts overturned this, and my liberal friends celebrated. Excuse me, but this deserved a huge WTF. It smacks to me of an unwillingness to consider what was on the plate in front of them.

We’ve had Bush Derangement Syndrome, then Obama Derangement Syndrome, and now Trump Derangement Syndrome. Folks … the liberals at the top of the judicial heap just told the liberals further down that Trump Derangement Syndrome can’t be the basis for policy. Grow up.

*******************************

For the record, I don’t like the ban. And I don’t like Trump but I strive for and think I achieve some wait-and-see neutrality towards the administration.

I think the ban is motivated by a sense that past methods weren’t working (I think some other president noted that elections have consequences). And I think it’s an admission that the buck stops in the White House. Whether we like it or not, sometimes people we don’t like will be in charge, and sometimes they will make decisions that we don’t like but that are sound in their own way. Get over it.

*******************************

I also tend to think there’s an innumeracy problem on the part of people with a knee-jerk opposition to Trump on this. Here’s the numbers:

• U.S. Population is about 330 million
• Foreign visits to the U.S. per year are about 75 million

We need to start asking what portion of those people we’d like to stay. We all know that some do, legally or otherwise.

So, you’re in a hotel ballroom at a wedding party. There’s a business meeting next door. You open the doors, and 75 people from the business meeting wander in and join your 330 wedding guests. There’s mingling, and noise, and everyone has a good time. So how many of those businesspeople do you want in the family photos? Or hanging on the cash bar at the end of the night? I think the answer most people would give is that they’d be OK with a few or several staying on.

I think this points to a comfort zone of a couple to several million immigrants per year. That’s probably where we are right now. But that number has been going up for a generation now. Oh … and … we can’t get an exact count.

Technorati Tags: supreme,court,trump,travel,ban

$10 Million for a Comma

I last liked grammar in 6th grade. After that, I thought it was dumb, and I got fairly adversarial about it. I had to be told quite a few times in the later parts of high school and then in college that my writing wasn’t that good before it started to sink in. I’ve been a lot better about this the last 20 years or so.

So when I read that $10 million hinges on the absence of an “Oxford” comma, I perked right up.†

Read the following:

The canning, processing, preserving,
freezing, drying, marketing, storing,
packing for shipment or distribution of:
(1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.

In Maine, those are jobs that don’t qualify for overtime. Basically, I think there’s an expectation that you take these jobs knowing that sometimes you’re going to have to work extra hours because otherwise the food will spoil, and that your hours will even out over time.

OK, so here’s the thing: do drivers get overtime? It’s not that clear.

If “packing for shipment or distribution” is one thing, done by the packers, then the packers don’t qualify for overtime but the drivers would.

But, if “packing for shipment” is one thing, and “or distribution” is a second one, then the drivers who only do the latter don’t qualify for overtime.

A lower court ruled in favor of the former. The drivers appealed and won at the next level (75 drivers are due about $100K each if they win).

The drivers made an interesting point: the exempt activities are all written as gerunds, while distribution could be but is not. They argue that this points towards the first interpretation, because drivers could have been clearly excluded if it was written as “packing for shipping, and distributing of”.

† For the record, I favor the use of the Oxford comma.

Technorati Tags: oxford,comma,grammar

How the World Works. Unfortunately.

Two things. One personal, one in the news.

1)

The vXboy is going to college, and had to read through several pages of legalese about living in the dorms. He’s perplexed about … why.

As a father, how do I explain it without sounding like a Trumper? Or worse? Because these days, a lot of what used to be considered common sense does get you labeled that way.

2)

Home Depot is being sued because it’s two-by-fours are not two by four.

Um … yeah … no shit, Sherlock.

Last I checked, they’re niche is retailing intermediate products as final goods, and the two by four concept is for the wholesaler of intermediate products.

BTW: I asked the vXgirl (who’s a few years younger) what a two-by-four measures theoretically, and in actuality. She got those mostly right. Then she noted, that well, duh, wood absorbs water and expands, so you wouldn’t want it any other way.

What Do They Think Comes After Trump?

I’m worried about where progressives are going. We are months into this gotta’ dis Trump at every opportunity thing. It isn’t working.

Don’t get me wrong. I still think Trump sucks. But what I see is a hugely ineffective White House, with zero credible signs of anything untoward.

In short, yeah, where there’s smoke there’s fire, but I’m not even sure there’s any smoke any more.

Where does that leave us?

• Republicans keep winning special elections, because a majority of voters approve of them, and see them as outsiders.
• Trump won because a majority of voters approved of him, and saw him as an outsider. (Don’t even start with the Russian interference stuff, since it mostly advertises that you don’t understand how disaggregated and complex adaptive systems work).
• Clinton was seen as an insider, and she lost.
• Obama was seen as an outsider, and a majority of voters approved of that. Twice.
• George W. Bush, the ultimate Republican insider, has gone down in ignominy.
• Clinton (Bill) won because he was seen as an outsider.

I don’t see the election of 2016 as a new thing. I see it as the story of the last generation. The last insider that elected and succeeded was Reagan (and many people still see him as an outsider). Heck, Carter was an outsider. My heck: Nixon portrayed himself as an outsider. We have to go back to LBJ to find someone who was proud to be an insider.

Here’s Kurt Schlichter on what we should watch out for:

… The Tea Party was the first manifestation of the anger out there at the establishment. It was polite – it even cleaned up its own messes after its peaceful protests. The media, and the same alleged conservatives who saw the Tea Party as a threat to their own position because it caused donors to start asking for results instead of simply writing checks, attacked the Tea Party. Well, then we got Trump, who was not nearly as polite, and who took the White House fair and square from the designated establishment candidate. And now they want to use non-ballot means to make sure the normals’ choice is again ignored.

What do they think comes after Trump? Someone nice?

Trump isn’t the disease. He’s the symptom. Don’t treat symptoms.

via Cold Spring Shops.

Why Macro Is So Hard: What Passes for an Expert

This is actually an addendum to a topic that’s already part of the canon (here’s an example, and it’s been in the principles lecture on this topic for years).

So, here’s Deadspin’s headline from another example:

Florida's Go-To Stadium Economist Is A
Hack, A Shill, And Also Not An Economist

Everyone should know by now that sports stadiums and arenas are a very bad investment for their communities.

In this particular case, Tampa is building a stadium for a team that doesn’t even have Tampa in its name.

Wha, wha, what?

Tampa is building a stadium for the Toronto Blue Jays to use for spring training.

(Now, if you’ve never been to spring training, it is a thing, but not a big thing. We’re talking about 15 or so games, held over 5 weeks, that average about 5K fans a piece.)

For perspective, Tampa is spending 4 times on this stadium what my university is spending on a new business building.

Maybe one reason is they hired a consultant who produced an economic report indicating that it was a good way to spend their money:

If Bonn’s studies don’t sound very economically robust, perhaps it is because Bonn isn’t actually an economist! He is a professor at FSU’s school of hospitality, where he teaches marketing and wine-tasting, and his degree is in resource development.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean Bonn can’t do the economic work; I also do not have a degree in economics. Then again, I don’t charge $23,000 for economic impact studies …

For clarity, Bonn wrote the report, and the “I” in the quote is the author of the linked piece on Deadspin.

Technorati Tags: why,is,economics,so,hard,tampa,stadium,toronto,blue,jays,expert,advice

Tyler Cowen: “The main Progressive argument, and why I think it is wrong”

Tyler was much balder with that title on Marginal Revolution than in his original on Bloomberg View.

Perhaps the most common policy argument I see is that the government ought to channel more resources to lower-income Americans, and finance this transfer by raising taxes on the wealthy. This argument is seductive …

Except that it’s premise is problematic: certainly weak, definitely immature, and possibly false.

That makes the seductiveness a huge problem, since it drives a lot of current policy discussion.

The times you feel good and righteous about your policy advocacy are exactly when you are making the argument look too easy.

So, what’s going on here.

First off, no one who is economically informed thinks that governments of developed countries can afford the promises they’ve already made. That realization is common across the political spectrum. Economists have been patiently explaining this for decades, but many people are still in denial.

But, even if you are in denial about that, it’s hard to be in denial about the downstream reality: most funding of government programs is about reallocating from other programs, not spending easy to carry bags of cash that just fell from the sky. It’s just not that different than the reality faced by households every day.

In short, you can’t soak the rich: we already did. And you can’t do it twice.

Secondly, if you’re worried about stuff being cut, fair enough. But, what you should worry about is what’s likely to be cut, because it happens to be politically feasible to do that currently. For example, we could fund a whole sh**-ton of progressive priorities by cutting the biggest budget items, but stuff like social security is off the table.

Lastly, it’s profoundly immature to justify what you’d like to do by referencing the thing you’d least like to do. Parents of toddlers know better. Suppose you serve a kid a burger, fries, and a vegetable. You might encourage the kid to eat more burger and fries, and you’d expect them to be happy with that. But if they refuse to eat more fries until you do something about the nasty vegetable, you know they’re not serious.

In case you don’t get the analogy, “the rich” are to progressives as vegetables are to toddlers.

Technorati Tags: progressive,priorities,policy

R.I.P. Glenne Headly

One of my favorite actresses passed away suddenly last night.

I always perked up when she had a role: The Night of, Parks and Rec, Kit Kittredge, Dick Tracy, Lonesome Dove (so sad), and of course Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (so over the top).

For me, she might be the actress that did not do too much for me in the attractiveness category, but that I was still transfixed by. For me, it was all about her acting … super-underrated.

Technorati Tags: glenne,headly