1. January 2012 by ropsnobi.

I’ve been reading a book on home production of Biodiesel. I’m not going to mention which book yet, because I’m not very impressed. It’s just that it seems like such a good idea.

Unlike ethanol fuel, the energy budget is positive - you get more energy in the product than it takes to produce. That makes it, at least, a viable idea. It can also be made from feedstocks which do not take up prime farm land, therefore there is at least a chance that it will not drive up food prices. It remains to be seen, however, if a feedstock can be found that can produce large quantities of fuel without impacting food production.

And home production remains both feasible and economical. It does not suffer from the major problem that ethanol has - the government thinks it has the right to prevent people from producing ethanol at home, while, so far, the government does not restrict the production of oil.

In any case, as I explore the subject you can expect more posts.

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1. September 2011 by Publius.

You hear the word ‘fair’ bandied about a lot these days. And all good people want to be ‘fair’, right? Therefore if you are not in favor of being ‘fair’, you must not be a good person.

The problem is that ‘fair’ is an ambiguous word. It can mean many things. Here are three ways in which it is used:

Fair: synonym for equal; dividing the cake is fair if everybody’s slice is the same size.

Fair: synonym for earned; you get what you earn - eat your vegetables if you want dessert.

Fair: synonym for charity; your brother had a hard day in school today, you should give him your cake.

Political speech today is very fond of the word ‘fair’; it is very unpopular, however, to specify which of these meanings is meant. The reason is very simple. People will object to one or more of these uses in any given case, yet everyone wants to be ‘fair’.

The best solution would be to abolish the use of the word ‘fair’. Second best would be for everyone to realize that anybody using the word in political speech is consciously trying to cheat and to ignore whatever they are saying.

I’m almost tempted to say, “It’s only fair!”

Now, all that talk of cake has made me hungry. I’ve got to go.

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10. August 2011 by Publius.

Forget politics, forget economics, forget global warming.

This is the post that will make me widely hated.

Apple has reached the top of my “Hated Technology Companies” list. They’re ahead of Microsoft, ahead of Google, ahead of Oracle.

Why? Because they are abusing the patent system in worse ways than the others. Microsoft, in fact, is making an attempt, if half-hearted and disorganized, to come to terms with the open-source communities. Apple, on the other hand, has managed to get an injunction against Samsung based on drawings that look like a tablet. The problem is that the drawings were made 10 years after Microsoft demonstrated a working tablet.

So Apple wins the Egregious Use of Patents Award, and their place on the freedom wall of dishonor.

I suppose that, to be fair, the courts, lawyers, and legislators ought to join them, but they’ve got their own lists.

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2. September 2010 by Publius.

The Restoring Honor rally in Washington, D.C. on 8/28 has sparked quite a bit of rancor in the arguments on crowd size. I would like to supply a bit of math to just point out how much idiocy is out there. Forget about being angry on this - it’s just a difficult job.I estimate that the area covered by the crowd is 1928644 square feet, just shy of 50 acres. This is based on just the picture of the crowd around the reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and 17th Street. There were people outside this area, but I have no way of including them as I can’t find any pictures. My estimate of the area is based on a few minutes work on google maps. It is a very rough estimate, but since 2 significant figures is adequate, this should suffice. By the way, I did subtract the area of the reflecting pool.So if you want to believe the CBS estimate 0f 87,000, it would mean that every person had an area of more than 22 square feet, or that people were standing nearly 5-1/2 feet apart. Not reasonable - look at the pictures.If there were 500,000 people, they would be standing just over 2 feet apart - not likely.250,000 people leaves them standing just over 3 feet apart.It is amazing, is it not, how slight differences in density create hugely different estimates of total numbers, is it not?So I think that anybody who claims to know anything about this is blowing smoke out of their ass.What you can say about the crowd that Glenn Beck drew to the Mall is that it has to be the cleanest, nicest bunch of people on the face of the planet. Did you see the pictures of all the trash left behind? No, you didn’t. It looked like the Mall was cleaner after they left than before they came.No matter how many, or how few, people were there, they obviously knew something about honor.

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3. April 2009 by Publius.

Sorry I haven’t been around.  The news from our nations capital has been depressing.  I think it’s only the additional adrenaline also engendered that keeps me from actually being depressed - at least in the clinical sense.  I am certainly angry, anxious, upset, and sad.

So I thought I’d involve you all in my psychotherapy.  I’m going back to basics.  It’s time to reread the Constitution of the United States again.  And I’m going to take you all along.  I’m going to present a series, an unlearned study of the Constitution, and you are all invited.  First of all, for those who don’t have a handy copy, a couple of links to places you can get one.

in print:  The Gutenberg Project

in audio book format: The Gutenberg Project

The Gutenberg Project is an amazing resource, it contains thousands, 28,000 or so, of books and links to many times that number of ebooks, all of which are free.  In particular, it has a number of texts on Constitutional law; I’m just beginning to explore them.  I will recommend some as a text for this course in the near future.

In the meantime, read over the Constitution and we will get started shortly.

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2. February 2009 by ropsnobi.

So yesterday I started paying attention again to Ron Paul. That took me to the Mises Institute, a research and educational center in Alabama. They advocate liberalism, libertarianism, and Austrian Economics, and they are getting my vote for the most important resource for the economic debate now going on.Economics and liberty are inextricably intertwined.  They cannot be separately discussed.  There is a movement today to control our lives.  Perhaps I shouldn’t use the word today, certainly this struggle has been going on ever since man first began to think.  Today, however, seems particularly poignant simply because it is today.Too many of our politicians are running around like Chicken Little, screaming, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!”  Then the same politicians take the part of the Fox, offering to save us, all the time hoping we will not notice the hungry gleam in their eyes as they put us in a position where they will be able to eat us alive.The economy has always been cyclical.  There are good times and bad times.  This time, the Foxes, - uh, the politicians, I mean - claim is different.  In one sense they are right.  Most previous times the bubble that burst causing the downturn was created by vagaries in the markets, and the downturn was both necessary to correct the market and inherently limited by that very market.This time the bubble was created by the government.  Fannie and Freddie are government entities. Fannie Mae came along in 1938 so it’s something else we can blame Roosevelt for.  It worked for quite a while, but as a private company, it did not toe the government’s line well enough, so, in 1970 Nixon signed Freddie Mac into law.  Fannie guaranteed mortgages.  Freddie bundled these mortgages into derivative investments and sold them.  Now things are starting to get a little dicey.  What is a derivative?  When you really understand that question, I dare you to go ahead and buy them.But then came that dark and stormy night… Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Franks, and others, in cooperation with ACORN, bullied the banking industry into making loans it considered non-viable and blackmailed them into buying the derivatives (see above) aggregated from these toxic loans.So… here we are.  The government now wants to dilute the toxicity of these loans by inflating the currency to the point where the bad loans are miniscule.  Welcome to the $100 cup of coffee.  They want to inflate our currency by a greater amount than it has inflated from 1938 to today.  And this is supposed to solve our problem.  Give me a break.  The real moral of this fable is “Don’t believe anyone who tells you you have to solve the problem before you understand what it is.”  Throw the bums out. 

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31. January 2009 by ropsnobi.

I’m rereading Ron Paul’s The Revolution: a Manifesto.  This should be on your must-read list.  If for no other reason than, printed in April 2008, he talks about the [then] looming economic crisis.  Paul is part libertarian, part constitutionalist, and totally eloquent.  He is that rarest of entities - a politician with principles.  Even if you disagree with him on any given issue, he deserves a lot of credit for that alone. 

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30. January 2009 by ropsnobi.

Does anyone dispute that our system of electing public officials is severely bent if not broken?  Doesn’t it seem that in a truely democratic system one-man-one-vote would translate into a more even division of power?  The American electorate has never agreed about anything.  I can’t think of a single issue in our entire history that garnered more than 70% agreement.  Most of the time the split is much closer to 50-50.  Remember that.  Nobody has a mandate to do anything.  Thank God.

Anyway, let’s look at the “simple” issue of how presidents are selected.  Nobody can claim that the system in place leads to experienced and competent winners.  The best predictor of the winner of any presidential race is to look at who is taller.  This is not highly correlated to intelligence or ability.  Nor is it at all correlated to having a valid philosophical basis.

I therefore have two improvements, which can be enacted independently, to offer:

1. No lawyer should be allowed to hold public office.  I think every official should have a lawyer on his staff (at least part-time) to offer advice on whether what he wants to do is legal or not.  The advice should be limited to exactly that question.  That would reduce the effort made to weasel changes through that should never happen.
2. More importantly, elections should be eliminated.  The President, vice-president, senators, and representatives would be selected by lottery from among all citizens filing a tax return.  Triggered by selection in this lottery, the citizen would be audited, and only if no fraud is found (Honesty is important in a public employee, don’t you think?) would the selectee would be dragged off to Washington to serve out his term.  Think of the drama… there you are, sitting if front of the TV, rocked back in your recliner, feet up, a bowl of popcorn balanced on your stomach.  There’s a knock on the door.  You open it.  Two men in black suits stand under the flickering flourescent bulb - it’s November and it’s too cold for the mandated bulb to work properly - and they’ve come to drag you out.  No time to dress, your country needs you.

There are those who are going to carp about what a poor method this is.  I submit that it is no worse than what we now have.  If you don’t like my idea, I suggest you take a look at Lewis Black’s ideas for selecting a president.  It may be an even better idea.

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