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Monthly Archives: October 2010

Science/Nature

Wired: Edison Gets the Bright Light Right

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In Edison Gets the Bright Light Right, Wired‘s Randy Alfred writes that, on October 21st, 1879,

Thomas Edison crowns 14 months of testing with an incandescent electric light bulb that lasts 13+ hours. Sir Humphrey Davy had produced incandescent electric light in 1808 by passing battery current through a platinum wire. But the voltaic pile was expensive and could be messy.”

….Soon, the [Menlo Park] lab got a carbon-filament bulb to last 40 hours. It had cost $40,000 (about $850,000 in today’s money) and taken 1,200 experiments, but was ready at last for a public debut.

On New Year’s Eve, 3,000 people visited the lab in Menlo Park to witness 40 electric light bulbs glowing merrily. Edison switched them on and off at will, dazzling and delighting his guests. These bulbs used carbonized cardboard.


Daily Bread

Daily Bread for Whitewater, Wisconsin: 10-21-10

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Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast calls for a sunny day with a high temperature of fifty-five degrees.

In our schools, there will be band concerts at Lakeview and Washington Schools, respectively, today at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.

In Wisconsin history, the Wisconsin Historical Society recalls an important date in science —

1897 – Yerkes Observatory Dedicated

On this date the Yerkes Observatory was dedicated. Founded by astronomer George Hale and located in Williams Bay, the Yerkes Observatory houses the world’s largest refracting optical telescope, with a lens of diameter 102 cm/40 inches. It was built through the largess of the tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes, who rebuilt important parts of the Chicago transportation system after the fire. Situated in a 77-acre park on the shore of Lake Geneva, this observatory was the center for world astronomy in the early 20th century and invited a number of astronomers from around the world, including Japan, for scientific exchange. [Source: Yerkes Observatory Virtual Museum]

Here are photographs of the giant refractor, from 1897 and 2006 —



Conservation, Government Spending

Volt Fraud at Government Motors – Investors.com

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It’s simply wrong to claim this thing’s especially good for the environment —

Advertised as an all-electric car that could drive 50 miles on its lithium battery, GM addressed concerns about where you plug the thing in en route to grandmas house by adding a small gasoline engine to help maintain the charge on the battery as it starts to run down. It was still an electric car, we were told, and not a hybrid on steroids.

That’s not quite true. The gasoline engine has been found to be more than a range-extender for the battery. Volt engineers are now admitting that when the vehicles lithium-ion battery pack runs down and at speeds near or above 70 mph, the Volts gasoline engine will directly drive the front wheels along with the electric motors. That’s not charging the battery — thats driving the car.

So its not an all-electric car, but rather a pricey $41,000 hybrid that requires a taxpayer-funded $7,500 subsidy to get car shoppers to look at it.

We heard GM’s then-CEO Fritz Henderson claim the Volt would get 230 miles per gallon in city conditions. Popular Mechanics found the Volt to get about 37.5 mpg in city driving, and Motor Trend reports: “Without any plugging in, a weeklong trip to Grandmas house should return fuel economy in the high 30s to low 40s.”



See, Volt Fraud at Government Motors – IBD – Investors.com

Liberty

Institute for Justice Takes Arizona School Choice Fight to U.S. Supreme Court

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Sometimes a commitment to liberty, one that would offer low and middle-income students a better life, requires a strenuous defense. That’s the task facing the Institute for Justice in a school choice dispute. The IJ is taking its case for Arizona school choice to the United States Supreme Court.

Here’s a video that describes what’s at stake for thousands of students, and why it’s a case worth fighting for.

I will post in greater detail on the case later — for now, here’s a fine video that describes the issues involved. The Arizona program allows private individuals to make private contributions for individual families to send children to schools of their choice.

Here’s the description that accompanies the video:


On November 3, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the oral arguments in the case Garriot v. Winn. Arizona, like many states, offers tax credits to individuals and businesses for donations to fund scholarships for students to attend private schools. The goal of these programs is to give as many students as possible the resources they need to get a good education. The Dennard family has benefited from this program. Hear their story.




Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weipY6rpMss. more >>

Politics

Whitewater-Area League of Women Voters Candidate Forum for the 43rd Assembly District (Hixson/Wynn)

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The Whitewater-Area League of Women Voters hosted a forum with the candidates for Wisconsin’s 43rd Assembly District, Kim Hixson and Evan Wynn. I have embedded the video of the discussion below. The 43rd district includes Whitewater and other communities to south and west.

10/25/10 — updated with district map:



Additional information on the two candidates is available at Wisconsin State Journal – Candidate Profiles: 43rd Assembly District and Evan Wynn / Kim Hixson 43rd Assembly Forum 2010 – WCLO.

more >>

Government Spending, Politics, Taxes/Taxation

Coolidge as the ‘Great Refrainer’

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Amity Shlaes, author of the fine The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, has an essay originally published at Forbes in which she praises Calvin Coolidge as The Great Refrainer.

Shlaes writes that

When Harding died suddenly in 1923, Coolidge knew he was going to need another pair of hands to launch further reforms. One of his first moves as President was to reject the Treasury Secretary’s resignation. [Andrew] Mellon became the navigator who charted Coolidge’s economic course. The pair worked well together because they were alike; both were so taciturn that it was said they conversed in pauses. Whenever they could, Coolidge and Mellon, professional minimalists, pared away unnecessary features of their craft to make it sleeker.

They began with the tax brackets. Both disliked the fact that under Wilson the tax schedule had gone from seven brackets to dozens, confusing taxpayers to the point they didn’t know what they should pay. Once the number of brackets was drastically reduced, more people could easily figure out what they owed.

But their grandest feat involved tax rates. Coolidge and Mellon tightened and pulled multiple times, eventually getting the top rate down to 25%, a level that hasn’t been seen since. Mellon argued that lower rates could actually bring in greater revenues because they removed disincentives to work. Government, he said, should operate like a railroad, charging a price for freight that “the traffic will bear.”

Coolidge’s commitment to low taxes came from his concept of property rights. He viewed heavy taxation as the legalization of expropriation. “I want taxes to be less, that the people may have more,” he once said. In fact, Coolidge disapproved of any government intervention that eroded the bond of the contract…..

Coolidge refrained from economic meddling, so that others might be unburdened.

He wasn’t much of a speaker, but his thinking was serious and sound. I have embedded below a clip of a short speech he gave. It is — and so very much seems — the speech of a man from another era, before audio-visual savvy.

If we are to spend — and we will — we should direct spending foremost to public safety, and assistance for the poor (including preserving current services that are of disproportionate benefit to those who are disadvantaged). Along these lines, there would be room for a much smaller government, and larger, more vibrant, private sphere of life.

I think that’s true nationally, and in small Whitewater, Wisconsin, too. (A discussion of the proposed 2011 Whitewater municipal budget is a topic for another time. Whitewater could have a budget with these emphases – safety and assistance – and still reduce spending.)

Hat tip for the link to Daniel Mitchell of Cato.



Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5puwTrLRhmw more >>

Government Spending, Politics

Draining the Swamp of Red Ink

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Congressman Paul Ryan’s office released the text of a speech he delivered in Oregon. Ryan’s noted for a budget roadmap he’s drafted, but it says much about our politics that budgetary reform makes both many Democrats and many of Ryan’s fellow Republicans uncomfortable. The address appears below.

Rep. PAUL RYAN: Like my home state of Wisconsin, Oregon has long exuded a forward-looking spirit of optimism, rooted in our nation’s timeless founding principles. Much like the early settlers of Oregon and Wisconsin, when we survey our nation’s economic landscape we find ourselves at a crossroads, facing a choice of two distinct futures. Unlike our forefathers, though, we have a clear sense of what lies ahead.

Most urgently, unemployment remains unbearably high and economic growth far too low. Policymakers urgently need to advance an agenda for growth — removing the obstacles to job creation and the paralyzing uncertainty from Washington. Both parties contributed to the current hardships — and both parties helped plant the seeds of the crisis on the horizon: a fiscal time bomb from the explosive growth of government debt.

Stacking trillion-dollar deficits year after year, President Barack Obama’s 10-year budget plan will double the debt in five years and triple it in 10. The federal government’s unfunded liabilities — government’s unpaid promises — stand at $76.4 trillion and are set to spiral further out of control each year we kick the can down the road.

The government’s own experts are telling us that our health and retirement security programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — are on a path to bankruptcy unless we take action soon. In addition to overwhelming the entire federal budget, the collapse of these programs will result in painful cuts for seniors and society’s most vulnerable.

Presented with these facts, the choice before us becomes clear. We can stay on our current path, allow unprecedented levels of government spending and higher taxes to crush the economy and shred the social safety net. Or, we can do what past generations of Americans have always done: work together in tackling the nation’s most pressing challenges and leave the next generation with a stronger, safer and more prosperous America.

To overcome our current fiscal challenges, we need a plan — a specific course of action to ensure the government secures the promises made to current and future generations, allow communities and individuals to grow and flourish, and guarantee America’s best days are ahead, and not behind us.

In an effort to spur action on meeting this challenge, I put forward a reform plan back in 2008: “A Roadmap for America’s Future” (www.americanroadmap.org). When I introduced the plan over two years ago, and reintroduced an updated version earlier this year, it was my hope to break through the political paralysis, and advance an open and honest discussion about how our nation can address its fiscal challenges.

Certified by the Congressional Budget Office, my reform plan fulfills the mission of health and retirement security, saving Medicare and Social Security; lifts the crushing burden of debt, paying off the debt completely; and restarts the engine of economic growth and limitless prosperity.

First and foremost, the Roadmap for America’s Future makes no changes to Medicare and Social Security for those 55 and older. Those in and near retirement will receive the benefits that they have been promised — this is a critical component of entitlement reform and a guarantee that we won’t be able to make unless we take action now. For those younger workers, the Roadmap offers gradual, sensible reforms to ensure that future generations have access to these vital programs. My plan offers those 54 and younger the same health and retirement benefit options I enjoy as a member of Congress. The Congressional Budget Office and the programs’ own actuaries have certified that the Roadmap would make Medicare and Social Security permanently solvent, averting the painful cuts from the unsustainable status quo.

Economic growth is a prerequisite to getting a grip on our federal budget. This is why my plan advances bold reforms to our anti-competitive and needlessly complex tax code. The tax reforms are designed to simplify and broaden our nation’s tax base and put the United States in a position to lead, rather than follow, in the global economy. To get our economy growing again, the Roadmap would eliminate our corporate income tax — currently the second highest in the industrial world — and replace it with a business consumption tax, lowering the tax burden to create job opportunities and job growth.

These reforms, coupled with proposed changes to our health care system and our job training programs, show that it is not too late to deal with our economic challenges and do so in a way that preserves the promises government has made and keeps intact the ideas our nation was founded upon: liberty, opportunity and individual initiative.

Our fiscal and economic challenges offer a unique opportunity to restore our nation’s prosperity. On the Oregon Trail or in the harsh Wisconsin winters, settlers did not have the option of kicking the can down the road. Each generation of Americans rose to the occasion — and now it is our generation that must do the same.

— Rep. Paul Ryan, ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, represents Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District.

Link:
Draining the Swamp of Red Ink.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for Whitewater, Wisconsin: 10-20-10

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Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast calls for a mostly sunny day, with a high temperature of sixty-six degrees.

There will be a meeting of the Effigy Mounds Task Force at 4 p.m. today, and a meeting of the Landmarks Commission at 5 p.m.

There’s a story at Wired entitled, Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market. Perhaps the title should have been Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market?



The emotional roller coaster captured on Twitter can predict the ups and downs of the stock market, a new study finds. Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 percent.

“We were pretty astonished that this actually worked,” said computational social scientist Johan Bollen of Indiana University-Bloomington. The new results appear in a paper on the arXiv.org preprint server….

“It’s a pretty interesting result,” commented computer scientist Sitaram Asur of HP Labs. But even though the correlation is there, Asur is reluctant to believe that the moods captured on Twitter can cause the stock market to change. Not everyone on Twitter plays the stock market, he notes, or even lives in the United States. And he would like to see the algorithm used on tweets from a wider span of time.

“If it is true, if we can actually find this correlation to be consistent, that will be a very important result,” he said. “But right now, I would be cautious about saying how important this is.”

A test of confidence would be someone’s willingness to trade based on these findings, such as they are.

City

Whitewater’s Fiscal Trend Analysis

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About two months ago, the City of Whitewater prepared an analysis our small city’s fiscal condition, entitled, City of Whitewater Financial Trend Analysis (1988-2009) and City Budget Projections (2011-2016). I have embedded a copy of the document at the bottom of this post.

It’s a description of only part of the city’s life, a part much smaller than that of the daily condition of her fourteen-thousand, four-hundred fifty-four residents. Whitewater descends, from greater to smaller, in a simple order: the community, the municipal government’s overall fiscal condition, the municipal government’s annual budgetary position (merely a slice of a longer-term fiscal condition).

Most things that matter in the city, to most people, don’t concern municipal government, politics, bureaucrats, or politicians. That’s true even of economic matters; most economic activities are still free of the influence of Whitewater’s municipal government, and that’s how it should be.

The community’s actual condition constrains the municipal government’s fiscal prospects; the field on which people ‘live, work, and play’ is far larger than the smaller stage on which budgetary decisions take place.

It’s impossible to begin a post about the city’s fiscal prospects, or a single budget, without thinking about the real town in which Whitewater’s government exercises authority. It’s a town with high poverty, and especially large numbers of children living in poverty.

The latest Census figures are not available for the city, but they’ll certainly show an increase in poverty. Part — but I think only part — of this poverty increase will be a result of the recent recession. (There’s an indirect way to show how poverty increased in Whitewater from 2000 to 2010, even in supposedly better years during the decade. I think it’s unlikely Whitewater’s had only a recent spike in poverty from the recession. That’s a subject for another time.)

When government leaders see difficulties ahead, despite years of crowing about how the city is a paradise, with a brilliant municipal administration, it’s a refutation to those haughty claims. With easier times now a memory, and without the same and addictive supply of support from Madison forthcoming, Whitewater’s municipal administration can no longer contend credibly that it has been a great success.

The endless string of announcements, declarations, and assertions of triumphs was a distraction from the truth of a troubled economy. It was troubled even in seemingly flush years, when city projects were in full swing. Those projects weren’t uplifting to the condition of thousands in town; they obscured the daily struggles many in Whitewater faced.

Pages 3-50 of the document present the city’s fiscal analysis and outlook; pages 1-14 thereafter, in a separate section, present budget projections from 2011-16.

I’ll consider only the fiscal analysis, and address the budget later, as the city’s 2011 budget process unfolds.

For now, two parts of the fiscal analysis are notable: the City of Whitewater’s revenues per capita, and her net direct debt service.

Municipal government’s revenues per capita.

Page 5 tells the tale on revenues per capita, from 1988 to 2009. Beginning in 2001, revenues per capita begin a precipitous plunge, as the city gets less each year in revenue. The city’s analysis, following the graph, is telling:

The warning trend is that there is a decrease in net operating revenues per capita occurring in Whitewater. Over the studied 21 year period, adjusting for inflation, revenues per capita has varied from $275.2 (1989) to $355.66 (2001). For 2009, the Revenue Per Capita equals $278.97. Since 2001, revenues per capita has been steadily declining. This reclects [sic] lack of growth in the City’s major revenue source, – state shared revenues.

It’s true, of course, that the ground on which so much relies has been the shifting (simply eroding, really) sand of shared revenues. In this critical respect, we are considerably different from most of Wisconsin communities of similar size. I’ve written on this topic before.

Municipal government’s net direct debt service.

Page 35 shows how the city’s net direct debt service has been rising markedly from 2005 through 2009. Here’s the city’s analysis:

According to credit industry standards, debt service on net direct debt exceeding 20 percent of operating revenues is considered a potential problem. Ten percent is considered acceptable.

In analyzing this trend, the City in 2006 had a percentage of 24.35% which is considerably above the credit industry standard.

However, because the City has issued $ 3,618,622 in new debt for TID#4 in 2005, $500,000 in 2006, and $5,600,000 in 2008, this percentage will be increasing. The general fund has only a small portion of the total debt service outstanding for the City. 85% of the net direct debt service is due to borrowings for TID #4. The balance of 15% is supported by the shared revenue utility payment from the power plant.

Policy statements should be developed by the City that would indicate desirable levels of debt service as well as procedures for analyzing future debt service. Suggested policies are that 1) total debt service for general obligation debt will not exceed 10 percent of annual operating revenues and 2) before bonded long-term debt is issued, the impact of debt service on total annual fixed costs will be analyzed.

Tax incremental district 4 is a remarkable story, by itself. For now, it’s enough to see that our trend, however allocated, has been unfavorable.

There’s so very much said about how many changes there have been, how many projects, these last several years. Some are quite lovely. Yet, for it all, our fiscal condition is dependent — now more than ever, as shared revenues decline — on the economic health of our community.

That health will not be improved through big ticket items, as it has not been improved that way over this last decade.

We’ve lost, I think, more than we’ve gained.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for Whitewater, Wisconsin: 10-19-10

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Good morning,

The forecast for Whitewater on Tuesday calls for a mostly sunny day, with a high temperature of sixty degrees.

There will be a meeting of Whitewater’s Common Council tonight, at 6:30 p.m. The session will include presentation of the city’s proposed 2011 budget, to be presented in part tonight. The agenda is available online.

At Lincoln School tonight, at 6:30 p.m., there will be a band concert in the upper gym.

Over at Wired, there’s a post entitled, 10 Things You Probably Didn?t Know About Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, that offers some surprising (to me, at least) information. Among the revelations, there’s this unexpected one:

Yoda was originally named Buffy. No, really. In Lucas’ earliest outlines for the sequel, Luke meets a supernatural entity named Buffy, or Bunden Debannen. Here’s how Lucas described it:

Buffy very old – three or four thousand years. Kiber crystal in sword. Buffy shows Luke. Buffy the guardian. “Feel not think.”

And Lucas concludes by saying Luke will become the chosen one, “the human Buffy.” In later drafts, he thought of Yoda as a kind of small frog, and Yoda had a full name: Minch Yoda.

In the earliest script draft, Minch has the immortal line: “Skywalker. Skywalker. And why do you come to walk my sky, with the sword of a Jedi knight? I remember another Skywalker.”