Rebane's Ruminations

They sure ain’t like us (updated 5may16)

George Rebane

A continuing narrative on these pages has been the grossly asymmetric way that the Right (conservatives, libertarians) and Left (socialists, liberals) treat each other’s expression of ideas and beliefs in the public fora.  A corollary to this narrative is how narrow and broad are the spectra of news sources and commentaries that each side consumes.  This morning’s papers and news sites are chuck full of examples.

Comparing those of collectivist vs conservetarian bent, I ask -

• What’s the relative frequency of the Left vs Right assembling, organizing, and transporting a legion of hoodlums and rioters to block Right vs Left gatherings – political gatherings (e.g. here and here), conventions, economic conferences, religious meetings, … ?  (Here the progressive reader should do his best in the attempt to distinguish between a peaceful demonstration and a disruption requiring the presence of armed police to keep the peace).
• Which political cohort has subverted our educational system to become the outlet for disseminating their ideology and enforcing ‘correct thinking’ about every social issue of significance?
• Which political cohort has commandeered the humanities in the nation’s institutions of higher learning, and in the process created a generation of intellectually vapid students who must be actively and selectively shielded from politically incorrect, insensitive, and sometimes outrageous ideas and modes of thought?
• The congressional members of which party have politicized science and are now actively attacking corporations, think tanks, and scientific agencies to criminalize public skepticism of the causes and portents of global warming?
• People of which political philosophy are actively promoting policies and laws that continually diminish the public’s use of public lands and public waters.
• Which political extreme takes as ground truth that if an individual is only against government funding of some activity, then that is indisputable evidence that they are actively trying to proscribe or censor that activity per se.
• People of which political philosophy are actively promoting objectives and "sustainable development" policies which are stated (here) in the UN’s Agenda 21 (while vehemently denying that they are doing any such thing).

Sandbox - 29apr16

[To the scurrilous would-be character assassins that frequent these pages I have a question.  How does diverting to and focusing on Hitler's reputation as genocidal maniac bear on Germany's introduction of autobahns in a productive discussion about the development and utility of limited access highways?  gjr]

Nothing good from the good ol’ days

George Rebane

[This is the transcript from my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 28 April 2016.]

Conservatives, and even some libertarians for good measure, are accused of wanting to bring back the America of the early post-war years – the period from, say, 1945 to 1960. When any of the progressive media find someone prominent longing for those bygone days, they are immediately pounced upon and ridiculed as a knuckle dragger who wants the country to return to Jim Crow racism, to abandon the technical advances such as the personal computer, the internet, modern medicines, and most certainly to go back to a time when we ignored our environment.

And there is nothing nuanced about how liberals perceive someone who points out another silly aspect of today’s political correctness. These are stigmatized and accused of longing for what today is labeled as the ‘bad old days’, an epoch we abandoned as we became aware of social injustices to which formerly we were blind, and we realized that equal opportunity and equal outcomes were the measure of each other, and came to understand that all forms of diversity are now the new normal no longer subject to our individual value judgments. But most of all, that western culture and civilization has been and continues to be the source of evil in this world.

That aspects of the Americana of those bygone days might be worth another look never crosses the minds of our progressive neighbors. And most certainly, even if yesterday did have any good parts, these would be so ineradicably bound up with the really bad parts, that separating them out would be futile. How could we ever return to a time when kids played unsupervised on neighborhood streets, took part in unplanned pick-up baseball or basketball games, carried a BB-gun, earned money doing chores for neighbors, built forts and played war, and learned to resolve differences all by themselves? How could we again conceive of forsaken liberties that did not need to be reined in by growing stacks of laws, ordinances, and regulations to keep us on the straight and narrow?

Today we are taught that all conflict resolution must involve the state, that defense of your person or property makes you at least as guilty as your assailant, that your parenting skills are problematic at best, that your children are really wards of the state and only tentatively in your custody, that your property is yours only to the degree that it pleases the state, that owning and operating a business is prima facie evidence of greed and corruption, and that we should strive to build a society in which we can take from each according to their excesses, and redistribute to each according to their need. All that within a framework in which a famous 20^th century social engineer observed that to make a delicious omelet, one first had to crack a few eggs.

Today it does not take a genius to see that we are already in the egg cracking phase on our way to a brave new global society. And how could we miss that certain candidates running for office this year have already promised and pointed out the next eggs that will need to be cracked when they get elected. Most certainly those of us longing for the ‘bad old days’ are prime candidates to be whipped into a homogeneous and undifferentiated amalgam that will become the fundamentally transformed omelet of our collective future.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.

Wanna bet?

George Rebane

Suppose astute observers of the political scene Manny, Moe, and Jack want to demonstrate their prognostication skills in a wager, and they decide to show their acumen by predicting the number of delegates with which Donald Trump arrives at the Republican Convention this July.  Now the standard way to do that would be for each to put, say, $10 into the pot and pick a number.  The one who comes closest to Trump’s actual number of delegates wins; ties split the pot.  A pretty plebian way to proceed, but it serves well for the unimaginative.

However, Manny, Moe, and Jack are a bit more sophisticated than that, and want to wager like the ‘big kids’ do.  They realize that each stating a single number does not really capture a complete representation of anyone’s uncertain knowledge since Trump’s actual number is really a random variable that will be ‘drawn’ from a probability distribution that defines the likelihood of a number of delegates from a range of such numbers.  So they agree that each will submit their distribution for Trump’s delegates.  Being aware of the nifty properties of the MAB distribution (here) for capturing such subjective knowledge, they decide to use it, and each submits his 4-tuple [low, high, most likely (or best guess), confidence].  They agree to split the pot pro rata on their resulting likelihood scores.

When the actual number of delegates becomes known, so will the likelihood value from each of three submitted distributions, say, 0.07, 0.34, 0.21.  This means that Manny gets 0.07/0.62 = 11.3%, Moe gets 0.34/0.62 = 54.8%, and Jack gets 0.21/0.62 = 33.9% of the $30 pot, or $3.39, $16.45, and $10.16 respectively.   Not exactly rocket science, but it is easy to calculate and yields the correct way to pay off bets that reflect the quality of each bettor’s knowledge.

(If this wager required no initial submission of funds, then the bet is reconciled by Manny sending Moe $6.45, and Jack $0.16.  Easy money.)

So now I invite our equally astute RR readers to submit their MAB 4-tuples for the pre-convention delegate counts for as many of the five candidates as they care to prognosticate.  Submit your entries before 2359PST 27 April.  Since I don’t want to handle any monies, we can make this go-around be cashless and just compare likelihood values to see who really would have taken home the bacon.  To make things easier, I’ll do all the heavy lifting in calculating the resulting likelihoods and post them with appropriate fanfare.  Or you algebraically comfortable can do your own using the MAB formula given in the above link.

If this draws enough interest, we can then do it again (maybe even for real) with the presidential election wherein readers can submit their MABs for the percent popular vote and also the electoral  college vote in the presidential election.  This should demonstrate the quality of the many claims of who will beat whose ass that have been made in these comment streams by several strident and determined voices.

To help you generate your MABs, here are the current delegate counts before tonight’s primary results are reported (click on figure to enlarge).

Sandbox - 24apr16

[Tempest fugit.  Again I am tardy with a fresh sandbox.  Was told that certain leftwingers are now sowing hate and fear because Oath Keepers have been detected in the county.  All hands on deck to man the purple paint brushes!  gjr]

Scattershots – 22apr16

George Rebane

Supes Miller and Weston gave their “rationale” for floating Measure W on the 7jun16 ballot (op-ed in 22apr16 Union). They tell us that W is “strictly about controlling nuisance, environmental and public safety impacts from outdoor (MJ) grows.”  Well maybe.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m on record for sharing these concerns voiced by our electeds, including Sheriff Royal and many other county officials.  But Messrs Miller and Weston slide by the real question of ‘why W vs Ordinance 2405?’ adopted last January.  The big unanswered question is why go from a readily modifiable county ordinance to a voter approved measure that must also be modified/rescinded by future voters.

Their answer is a vapid attempt to embrace democracy and avoid voter disenfranchisement when they state that “the 62,000 voters in Nevada County deserve to have their voices heard. This is why we believe a ballot measure is needed — it is important to hear from all voters to determine what really is the majority opinion and how we want to define our community.” But the county’s voters have already been heard in their emplacement of the current Board of Supervisors who are chartered by law to make such ordinances.  Instead, the current Rood Center machine is really disenfranchising future voters and their electeds to the extent that it is much harder to change a codified voter approved initiative than for a future BoS to change an ordinance.  And to confirm the real purpose of W, we note that its passage is optional as far as what powers the county will actually have to regulate MJ grows.  Ordinance 2405 is alive and well, and can be tweaked to do whatever the powers that be want.  However, because of the large opposition to W, such tweaks will also require spending some political capital (aka balls) which, from the looks of it, must be in short supply at 950 Maidu Ave.  Taking the cue from Sacramento, it’s always safer to work from behind vox populi.  

Speaking of the people’s voice, on vox.com Emmett Rensin in his ‘The smug style of American liberalism’ spells out the roots of our country’s polarization most clearly – 

There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what's good for them. … The smug style arose to answer these questions. It provided an answer so simple and so emotionally satisfying that its success was perhaps inevitable: the theory that conservatism, and particularly the kind embraced by those out there in the country, was not a political ideology at all. The trouble is that stupid hicks don't know what's good for them. They're getting conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists until they believe all the lies that've made them so wrong. They don't know any better. That's why they're voting against their own self-interest.

And that’s why we all need the care of a comprehensive state under which we will not be burdened by decisions that are out of our ken. The reader need go no further than these pages to confirm Rensin’s "smug style" assessment.  The entire piece is definitely worth a read.

State senator Ted Gaines writes about ‘California’s high-speed fail’ in which he also presents the dismal stats about cost overruns continuously authored by California bureaucrats at the behest of its liberal legislators. In the aggregate Californians demonstrate daily that they have failed the Great Experiment on which our Founders embarked.  Given CA’s critical infrastructure needs – e.g. roads, water storage – spending non-existent billions on a demonstrably insane project is yet another confirmation that in the large big government is incompetent.  Which reminds me of the CEO who opined in a recent Union that Obamacare was going to be a blessing to the country since administering over-regulated healthcare today consumes 30% of its overall costs, and when government finally takes over the coming single-payer system, then administration costs will be cut in half.  Now when was the last time anyone ever discovered a program that government could administer more efficiently than the private sector?  Dumbth rules!

(BTW, I finally found a data source on the costs of single payer systems around the world. Soon I’ll report on its findings about the sustainability of such programs.)

Candidates Ignore Growing Risk of ‘War for our time’

George Rebane

Among the many failures of the Obama presidency, I believe history will record that his chamberlainian naiveté and failures in foreign policy will eclipse the other disasters he has authored for America.  More observers are starting to see the growing number of harbingers to war popping up all over the globe as America repeats its preambles to both 20th century world wars.  Mark Helprin, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, warns that “Obama is weakening US defenses and credibility, but there’s little debate about the growing risk of war.”  His latest piece in the 18apr16 WSJ opens with –

In this powerful nation with founding principles and latent capacities second to none, politics have become fit for the fall of Rome, the culture is sick with self-destruction, and the rule of law is routinely perverted. Though politics, culture and law are the arch of the nation, the keystone without which they cannot hold is defense. For war transforms whole peoples and threatens their sovereignty and national existence more decisively than any other force.

The Liberal Mind – there are so many of them

George Rebane

On Saturday mornings I cook a big breakfast centered around a multi-layered frittata (dubbed Eggs Rebane in the family) and sautéed vegetables all served with toasted slices from one of my artisan breads (have baked all our bread since 1998).  Jo Ann makes the coffee, cuts my vegetables, and then gets to sit down as Lynne Warfel on KXJZ plays musical hits from the movies in the background.  We then start munching and dive into the morning newspapers (The Union and WSJ) with our trusty iPad at the ready for in-depth research.

Opening this morning’s newspapers for the 50Kft scan I noted two pieces in The Union that deserved a thorough read, and one little bagatelle from a local lefty that was whimsically ensconced in the ‘far right’ column of the op-ed page.  There we are informed by a Ms Jane Calbreath that “capitalism is an ‘ism’ and it has created more poverty in our country over the past thirty five years, exactly because it has become runaway hoarding of wealth by the very rich, who seem to have no end to their greed.”  Wasn’t quite sure how to picture her revelation – were there mattresses in big mansions all over the country overstuffed with $100 bills, gold bars galore buried in hidden concrete bunkers, …?  A little googling revealed that her wisdom was acquired from the California Institute of Integral Studies and her higher learning certified with degrees in Transpersonal Studies and Organizational Development and Transformation.  I leave the reader to puzzle out the kind of organizations that would pay this woman a living wage.

That little nugget served as a proper segue to Mr Darrell Berkheimer’s column.  He is another one of The Union’s progressive pundits who regularly share their insights.  I don’t know the man other than by his columns, and that he has authored three(?) books and “studied at Temple University”.  He explains that ‘When buying power plummets’ its ripple effects draw the country into a vicious cycle that can only end in economic calamity, and presumably a crisis of governance.   The causes of the current vicious cycle are the greedy employers and the ignorant rich.  But take heart, Berkheimer’s curative for the whole thing is simple and comprehensive – “provide a more equitable share of profits to those who produce the products and services”.  These monies, and those clawed back from overpaid management, will release the needed funds to re-establish America’s middle class with ample wages and benefits that will restore their buying power and our economy.

His poster child solution to all this is Costco which has “proven that providing good benefits and paying employees well will yield more stability” and provide “happier employees” who will “build the customer base and produce little turnover”.   Unfortunately, the concept that Temple University omitted from his curriculum was the effects of sales volume and efficiencies of scale.  Costco is able to pay their remaining employees so well because in their ‘big box’ business model - banned in Nevada County - their current revenue is more than $830K per employee (here and more here), with past levels having exceeded this figure.  Such sales productivity levels are not possible for the thousands of smaller businesses that do not scale well and cannot command these sales volumes.  And therefore these businesses must pay lower wages, or get by with a fraction of an employee, or fold.  (What is more cynical is that Costco is a major contributor to Democrat causes, apparently with the understanding that the progressive elites in politics and the media don’t blow their cover to the great unwashed.  To which cohort does Mr Berkheimer belong?)

Nowhere in his palliative does he recognize, let alone see the impacts of stifling government regulations, high corporate taxes, and the substitution of advancing technology for ever more burdensome human labor.  As with his socialist brethren, the man’s solutions come from the mythical well of abundant unrequited altruism practiced abundantly.  I complained that Ms Hodge could not connect the dots (here) in her lament about the country’s un- and under-employment.  Here Mr Berkheimer demonstrates to the thinking reader that he cannot even see the dots to be connected.

To be fair, The Union also included a column by Mr Manny Montes – ‘Genesis of socialism is that of communism, fascism’ – that, while not directly addressing Berkheimer’s errors of commission and omission, attempts to give some perspective and balance to the strong liberal voices in the newspaper.  And so we are informed in these tranquil foothills in this most unusual of election years.

 

Sandbox – 16apr16

[Apologies; it’s past the time for fresh sand. A correspondent sent me this one-liner seen on a t-shirt: "liberalism: moochers electing looters to steal from the producers!"  Now some of our readers are of the zero-sum variety and maintain that it’s the 1% who steal from the 99%.  And that keeps the country destitute, causes foreigners to spurn coming here, and gives rise to the long lines of Americans clamoring to emigrate to greener and socially more just pastures.  gjr]

Ruminations – 15apr16

George Rebane

Even former Obama SecTreas Larry Summers attributes the bad economy to giving rise to populists Bernie and Donald. This is in contrast to the big National Lie continually repeated from the WH press room.  Regarding the election, Summers said, “I think the prospect of Donald Trump being President would be the gravest threat to our prosperity, our security, and our freedom in my adult lifetime.  That's the thing I would worry most about.”

In the aggregate millennials as a ‘generation’ are not too bright – that finding by Pew Research was reported here some time ago. The informed reader recalls that according to pundits of the progressive persuasion, millennials are society’s designated saviors.  Now Pew has come out with a follow-on finding that may explain away their manifest deficits (e.g. favoring socialism over capitalism).  It turns out that, in addition to having been educated in union schools, “most millennials get their news from Facebook”.  Nuff said.

One of the more onerous items (there are so many) in Obama’s oeuvre is Dodd-Frank. This 2010 law has been much celebrated by grassroots liberals as the legislative tool that finally reined in the runaway greedy banks.  These information-resistant folks will never acknowledge the damage that the law has done to the banking industry and its ongoing drag on the country’s economy.  Finally, things have gotten so bad that both sides now recognize that the travesty needs to be repealed or rewritten.  The headline today reads “Regulators admit the law hasn’t worked while judges question abuses.”  The 14apr16 WSJ reports –

A federal judge has knocked down a major decision from Mr. Obama’s Financial Stability Oversight Council. Also, a federal appeals court panel is questioning the constitutionality of Mr. Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Russia’s air force staged simulated attacks on one our Navy’s ships in the Baltic Sea. Pairs of Su-24s buzzed the USS Donald Cook in international waters, one coming within 30 ft during a high speed pass.  Putin is again playing Obama for the fool as the world watches.  We don’t know many more details beyond the revealing videos.  However, if those jets appeared on our radars closing in at low altitude and high speed, and they were painting us with their targeting (vs search) radar, then Rebane Doctrine would have called for their being warned and then engaged were they to continue closing.  Our President would then put in a call to Vladimir, telling the thug that any Russian warplane that approaches any of our naval vessels in attack configuration will be committing an act of war and dealt with accordingly.

Nevada County's economic development - augmented or virtual?

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 13 April 2016. 19apr16 update - An edited version of this commentary appeared here in the 19apr16 edition of The Union.]

Last week the Economic Resource Council held its annual soiree on Nevada County’s economic development.  Executive Director Jon Gregory and his team put on a fine affair at the GV Veterans Center that continued with a VIP dinner at the Holiday Inn Express.  This year was a marked improvement over a similar affair in January of 2015.

The outcome of last week’s ERC ‘economic summit’ was the announcement and launch of the Green Screen Institute which is to become an incubator and accelerator of high-tech ventures that focus on the exploding Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality markets.  These A/VR technologies, applications, and uses are expected generate $150B of annual sales by 2020 (more here).  And many in Nevada County believe, that just as we became a world class center and source for video handling and management technologies, we can segue now into the A/VR technologies and become equally prominent in that sector.

First, what are these augmented and virtual reality concepts?  For a start, think of Augmented Reality as an audio/visual add-on to what we see and hear in the real world.  It may be implemented by a special pair of glasses, an app on your smartphone, or ultimately a new kind of contact lens.  When you drive around town or shop or go to a meeting, you will see additional information presented about the real things you see and hear.  In your visual field this information will be either superimposed on the objects or displayed nearby, and you will be able to program when and how much you want to be ‘augmented’ with this information.

Early applications may include smartphone information displays you access by pointing its camera at a building, car, scene, or item in a store.  More advanced applications could enable presentations at a meeting where the presenter can invoke or draw charts, graphs, pictures in the air that will immediately appear to all attendees on their personal AR headsets.

Virtual reality is different in that VR takes its user into a totally alternative world which looks and sounds (and ultimately will feel and smell) different than the real world environment of the user.  The user wears a headset that generates her entire visual field, and is sensitive to the direction she looks and where she focuses.  The user will be able to travel and explore wholly different places, and interact with other similarly equipped people or avatars who are nearby or across the globe.  The VR equipment may also include handsets that let the user manipulate virtual objects, instruments, weapons, and drive or pilot vehicles.  The latter uses of VR are already implemented in immersive video games and training applications for law enforcement and the military.

Promising uses of A/VR in education, training, and on-the-job performance are limitless.  These technologies when combined with smart software can provide a literally unbounded amplification of human capabilities in ways that we can barely conceive today.  Think of a low-skilled worker able to perform a sophisticated automotive maintenance task on his first day on the job when he dons the repair shop’s AR headset, and the computer leads him through the work sequence, showing and telling him exactly what to do in which order.

So the future economic growth for our community is bright if we can attract the right kind of people and funding to staff and launch the ERC’s Green Screen Institute.  Nevertheless, we have significant problems to overcome.  These include our ingrained NIMBY attitude toward developments like housing and commercial spaces, our poor educational system that underperforms in STEM subjects, and a reputation as a remote rural community that is visibly permissive of drug abuse and indigent living.  These are all the things that entrepreneurs and venture capitalists will also consider as they admire the natural beauty and off-the-beaten-path lifestyles of Nevada County. 

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.
 

The Liberal Mind – Hilary Hodge can’t connect the dots (updated 21apr16)

George Rebane

Liberals, in the footsteps of Bernie in this election year, have worked themselves into a white heat denigrating business, employers, profit, entrepreneurship, …, in short all the trappings of free market capitalism.  Our local outlets for such sentiments include the neighborhood progressives whose commentaries decorate The Union’s op-ed pages.  Among them is the recently added Ms Hilary Hodge who today writes ‘Working harder for less reward’.

Her lament opens with, “The idea of work has changed significantly in recent years. I think this is especially true for people living in California, where opportunities are waning and where wealth disparity can be especially stark.”  When I read that I automatically gave a little internal cheer – ‘Hold and develop that thought Hilary!’  But instead, she went on to cite some stats about how CA has the nation’s second highest underemployment rate (15.4% not fully employed) and that “more than 38% of households in Nevada County live below the self-sufficiency standard.”  With these we include the 40% of CA residents who are on some form of government assistance, and that, no matter its hokey calculation, the state enjoys an unemployment rate that’s 12% above the country’s average.

Moreover, according to longstanding surveys done by various universities and policy institutes our golden state occupies a very tarnished bottom-of-barrel place in the nation’s rankings of personal and economic freedoms.  For example, the Mercatus Center of George Mason University has us 49th overall with component rankings – fiscal 44th, personal 47th, regulatory 50th (here).  It is especially the latter that gives rise to the exodus of productive people and companies from the clutches of Sacramento’s entrenched socialism.  (And we have yet to feel the impact of the $15/hr minimum wage.) 

A burning election year question for Americans (updated)

George Rebane

In this year of 2016AD, is not the disjunction of our communal knowledge remarkable when it informs a goodly portion of us that capitalism and free enterprise are evil and the prime causes of misery and suffering wherever they are practiced; when in reality these are and continue to be the ONLY social institutions that have liberated humans from millennia of brutish and mind-numbing serfdom that promised each successive generation no relief whatsoever?

[update]  And where did this 'goodly portion', especially of the millennials, get such ideas.  Well, from their first rate educational experience of course.  Today we have thousands of college students who are sensitive and politically correct beyond belief, they demand safe spaces, revisionist history, restricted and censored speech, etc, etc.  In Great Britain such unpleasant or 'scrotty' students at Oxford, along with some Rhodes scholars, are demanding the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue.  The university's chancellor, Lord Patten, has responded to them on the British media and more comprehensively by letter which you can download here.   Download LordPattenLetter_Feb2016

Scattershots - 8apr16 (updated 9apr16)

George Rebane

Socialists and communists have been trying to destroy America for generations.  Learning from past mistakes, they have picked up the pace in recent years under a clearly socialist president.  From this pithy analysis of things one year into FDR's administration, our current clutch of collectivists are doing much better.  Checking the list below, today's three out of four ain't bad.

More later, I just had to get this in given the current Bernie/Hillary puffball exchanges.

Wisconsin has been the poster child of the abuse of government power at the state level. The history of this abuse during recent years is not known to many Americans, most certainly those worshipping at the altar of Leviathan.  In ‘The Case for a Really Open GOP Convention’ WSJ columnist Kim Strassel outlines both the history of abuse and how it relates to the upcoming GOP convention in which the party and a majority of its delegates will seek an alternative to Donald Trump as the party’s nominee.  It’s worth a read.

[9apr16 update] The Union’s editorial board is populated by a spectrum of ideologies.  In today’s op-ed section the paper published ‘Wage increase will impact both sides of the paycheck’ purportedly reflecting “the consensus opinion of The Union Editorial Board”.  In it they write – “We agree that every person putting in a full-time work week deserves a living wage, but from where the increase will come is a key question.”

I know several on that editorial board and find it hard to believe that all of them hold to that statement. There is nothing in real world economics that supports a “living wage” as the reward for some arbitrary number of hours that government mandates as “full-time work”.  When we glaringly omit what is produced for the hours worked from that assertion, then students of history know that such statements come directly out of the writings and street speeches of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin.  And from whence the increase indeed?!

Re MJ’s Measure W: In the same (9apr16) Union we have Mr Paul Berger echoing the growing cry, ‘Has the Board of Supervisors abdicated its responsibility?’ heard in these pages and elsewhere.  More to be said about that.

Finally, Mr Norm Sauer, member of the aforementioned editorial board, writes a cogent summary of today's renewed and invigorated attack on liberty and capitalism by America’s Left. In it he reminds us again that “the direction the left takes our country is toxic.  It punishes success and rewards failure, and ultimately results in less creativity and jobs.”  

Ruminations on 2016 Economic Development (updated 8apr16)

George Rebane

You can never go wrong in today's media making fun of a white, anglo-saxon businessman.

The economy and economic development is on everyone’s lips these days. The Left continues to conjure the vision of an ephemeral Obama recovery from the ongoing ‘Great Recession’.  The Right points to the fabricated and pretzellated statistics the administration uses to describe what isn’t happening in the realworld.  Meanwhile, our county’s population is declining, the exodus fostered by both local factors and the butt stupid statewide mandates issuing from a post-socialist Sacramento.  Let me start with a positive tidbit.

Sandbox – 5apr16

[The NCAA championship, Trump’s latest follies, Hillary’s ongoing lies and impending (or not!) testimony, Bernie’s heartfelt exhortations to a socialist future, Muslim ragheads killing and colonizing, global cooling, Obama’s political revelations, another shot at economic development, …; so much to sort out and inform each other about the error of their ways.  Where to start?  gjr]

Nevada County’s Latest Economic Development Push (updated 4apr16)

Ready, Fire, Aim!

George Rebane

Local folks who read, listen, or go online know by now that our Economic Resource Council (the politically acceptable name sans that dreaded ‘development’ in its moniker) is putting on its now annual economic development extravaganza this Thursday, 7 April 2016.  Yesterday ERC publicist Janet Augstein broadcast its latest online press release (here) describing the event to which you can buy tickets.

The 2016 NCERC Annual Regional Economic Development Summit will make the case that Nevada County is the ideal place to start a center for developing augmented and virtual reality technologies and products.  I agree with the focus of the event, if not yet completely comfortable with its thrust.  To find out more about that, Jo Ann and I will attend the whole affair to understand what all the fuss is about.

According to The Union (here), the baby’s new name is The Green Screen Institute; the old name which didn’t get much traction was Sierra Digital Media Campus.  The intent of the GSI is to field 1) “a three-month accelerator program designed to provide technical, educational and financial support to virtual reality and augmented reality start-ups”; and 2) “provide co-working space for more established corporations.”  Besides our quality of life, Nevada County also has a surfeit of quality office space, the supply of which has increased markedly during this extended economic doldrum.  A casual drive through our several business parks under the pines will confirm this.

MJ – the numbers game (updated 5apr16)

George Rebane

The importance of every social issue derives only from the numbers which underpin it. Without understanding the numbers, our response is limited to unfounded and misplaced emotions.

A major RR tenet has been the importance of numbers in the discussion/development of public policy, and the need for a numerate population to maintain our republic.  I’ve posted versions of the above tagline many times in these pages.  Now it seems that our local newspaper has given a nod to numbers when discussing the county’s new efforts to update its MJ ordinance.

As all local RR readers know, we will be asked to vote on Measure W in June (full text here).  W essentially limits the growing of MJ for only medicinal purposes and in qualifying indoor grows – no outdoor grows are permitted in the county.

In the 1apr16 Union our Sheriff Keith Royal writes an Other Voices column (here) explaining the county’s rationale for advocating a YES vote on W.  On the front page the newspaper also features a major report on MJ that contains some relevant numbers (here).   The reasons for opposing MJ grows and consumption categorize as follows – public nuisance, crime, environmental degradation, health & safety, habituation (gateway drug), and no clear financial benefit to permitting jurisdictions.

My own position on MJ, both MMJ and RMJ, is a matter of record on these pages.  Given our country’s disastrous history combatting drug use as a criminal act, I favor controlled legalization of drugs using the template of alcohol and tobacco regulations and laws as starting points.  I am sure that the final form of such drug use laws and regulations will differ from such starting points, but we have to start somewhere so that we may gain experience in order to enact reasonable and effective modifications.  The process will probably be longer than shorter, but according to my lights this beats continuing the decades long and tragic game of cops and robbers.

California’s Economic Dive Picks Up Speed (updated)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast a bit belatedly on 1 April 2016 due to mutual scheduling problems.]

California is ready to hasten its spiral into economic destitution with its new legislation to make $15/hr the new statewide minimum wage over the next few years.  As such our state will be the first in the nation to so burden its businesses and people.  This new law will be the latest spawn of California’s socialist legislature and powerful unions led by the SEIU working together to increase union memberships and provide them the fiscal clout to re-elect co-operating politicians to architect California’s continuing decline.

According to Governor Jerry Brown, with this legislation “California is proving once again that it can get things done and help people get ahead.”  Those who get their news from the leftwing media have little idea that at $10/hr our state already imposes the highest minimum wage in the nation which along with its other business throttling laws, regulations, and ordinances continue to drive employers out of the state at an increasing rate.

Today 40% of the state’s residents are on some form of government aid.  And with vast inland regions of unemployment stubbornly above the 10% level, California already is home to the largest number of welfare recipients in the country.   The Sacramento politicians know they are walking a fiscal tightrope by placing this additional cost burden on employers that will not do anything to help people get ahead.  A moment’s thought raises the question, if $15 is good, why stop there?  Why not raise it to $30, $40, or even $50/hr?

But given special interest momentum and voter ignorance, this economy stifling bill will become law in spite of analyses by the state’s Department of Finance, university academics, and other institutions that correctly predict the loss of more jobs – 700,000 by some estimates - more companies leaving, and finally the reduction of state tax revenues to further increase the state’s debt burden.  Evidence that such initiatives kill jobs is abundant, as shown by recent data from Seattle’s similar moves which reduced its job growth for low-end workers to 1.4% as compared to Washington’s 6.9% overall employment growth.

Here, the hardest hit will be the Central Valley workers in places like Fresno and Merced where unemployment already is 10.5% and 12.6%.  More people will be laid off as businesses, especially manufacturers, attempt to cut costs, move out of state, or simply shut down.  Every such government wage increase mandate has motivated another surge to adopt new worker replacement technologies.  The governor’s latest attempt at “economic justice” promises to increase unemployment benefit payouts and government wages by over $3B by 2019 as our minimum wage ratchets toward $15/hr.

Not enough people know we have a growing systemic unemployment problem with tens of millions of workers without marketable skills.  MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee, authors and experts on technology’s impact on jobs, tell us that “most of the technologies we’re currently developing replace or obsolesce far more employment opportunities than they create.”  In short, today technological progress eliminates jobs and leaves average workers worse off than they were before.  And in every case where government mandates increasing the cost of low-skilled labor, the result is greater income inequality across our country’s workforce as employers seek alternatives to hiring people. (more here, here, and here)

So in this election year while Republicans attack each other with gusto, Democrats are doing their best to destroy the fundamental underpinnings of our economy spouting homilies that liken communism to capitalism while advising the uninformed to just ‘choose what works’.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[update]  The 1apr16 Union reports - Assemblyman Brian Dahle, R-Bieber, today voted against a massive minimum-wage increase that one major media outlet described as making California “a guinea pig in a bold economics experiment. … Following on a 25 percent increase in the state minimum wage in just the past two years, the plan — negotiated behind closed doors, announced Monday and rushed through the Legislature in just three days — will raise the minimum hourly pay from $10 to $15 over the next several years. (paywalled here)

To underline the points made here, today the Labor Department included the following little vignette in its report on the nation's overall economy - "a broad measure of unemployment that includes Americans stuck in part-time jobs or too discouraged to look for work rose slightly to 9.8% from 9.7% in February, when it reached its lowest level since 2008."