Something Doesn't Add Up Here

I recently had cause to look up some articles on solar farms, and came across this one about a small-scale solar farm built by an apartment complex in Indianapolis. I noticed these paragraphs:

The electricity generated by the panels won't be used at the complex, but will be sold back to Indianapolis Power and Light instead.

"It's really an economic decision on their part," said John Haselden with IPL. "The 24 cents (they are selling the electricity for) is probably better than the than the eight or 10 cents that they are purchasing it for."

That doesn't add up at all. Why would IPL be willing to pay 24 cents for electricity when they're only selling it for eight or 10 cents? You simply can't pay more for your wholesale product than you sell it for retail without going out of busines. I bet if the reporter had dug just a teeny, tiny bit deeper he would have found out that IPL's purchase price for green energy is government-subsidized.

As was the cost of the solar farm itself.

The farm cost $345,000 and will generate expected revenues of $20k. That's a 17.25 year just to break even on the initial investment, which is pretty damn crappy in my book. And there's all sorts of things that can happen over the course of 17.25 years to extend that period: acts of god, vandalism, changes in the purchase rates to match market realities (If the subsidies or incentives or whatever's allowing that 24 cent price end, then the power company is surely going to want to pay less than the eight or 10 cents they're selling for -- which would bring in as little as 1/3 the expected revenue.

Of course, the apartment complex doesn't have to worry about the full ROI because it was built with government "stimulus" grants. In other words, they spent taxpayer money on a private project, and the taxpayers ain't ever seeing that money again.

Would you as a private citizen give money to someone to build something that's not going to see a profit for 17.25 years, if ever, and for which you'll never see a share (remember, it's a grant, not a loan)? No, of course you wouldn't. That's why they had to take the money from you whether you like it or not.

Even if everything goes as planned, after 17.5 years, the panels could last as little as another 13 years after that (they're estimated to last 30-50 years in the article). Is that 30-50 year estimate accurate? Not according to other articles I found:

"Solar photovoltaics slowly lose their generating capacity. Although some solar panels are still working satisfactorily 40 years after installation, the conventional view is that most will dip below 80% of their rated capacity within about 20 years. This will vary slightly between manufacturers and between different types of silicon"

"Typically, the warranty given by solar cell manufacturers covers just 80 percent of power output. All this means that it may make economic sense to substitute older panels with newer panels before they are 30 years old."

If true, then not long after the $345,000 investment starts to get paid off, the owner will have to start re-investing in replacement panels, thus reducing the long-term profit potential even further.

Journalists: Doing The Hard Work Of Being Plonkingly Stupid For You!

Fox News just published a sensationalist article linking Monster Energy Drink to five deaths.

The article lists the factoid that "Monster Energy Drink, which comes in 24-ounce cans and contains 240 milligrams of caffeine, or seven times the amount of the caffeine in a 12-ounce cola."

The parents of a California 14-year-old are suing Monster for the death of their daughter "who died after drinking two, 24-ounce Monster Energy Drinks in 24 hours."

According to the article:

An autopsy found that Anais Fournier died of cardiac arrhythmia due to caffeine toxicity that impeded her heart's ability to pump blood.

 Oh my gosh! That's terrible! Monster Energy Drink is poison! Oh, wait, no....

She suffered from an inherited disorder that can weaken blood vessels. But the child's parents claim Monster failed to warn about the risks of drinking its products.

So your child suffers from a life-threatening disorder and it's someone's resposibility other than you and her to keep her away from high-caffeine drinks?

Oh, yes, back to Monsters and its killer levels of caffeine. The article completely fails to put that 240 milligrams of caffeine into perspective. Exactly how negligently outrageous is that enormous amount of caffeine in a 24 ounce drink?

Well, according to a couple of informational websites, 8 oz. of a flavored coffee contains 100 mg. So a typical venti Mocha at Starbucks has about 300mg of caffeine. A typical 8 oz. cup of ordinary coffee from a drip coffee maker has 115-175 mg of caffeine (depending on how strong you make it).

So you could be consuming more than twice the caffeine of 24 ounces of Monster energy drink by drinking 24 ounces of coffee -- the large size coffee you'd pick up at your local gas station.In other words, Monster has less caffeine than one of the most ancient, commonly enjoyed, ubiquitous beverages known to man

Get a clue, journalists! Don't be led to be the propagandists for sensational claims by litigation-happy people trying to cash in on their daughter's tragedy!

Anyone who has a condition that could become life-threatening if they consume too much caffeine but who doesn't know that Monster is loaded with caffeine (That's how they advertise it! It's mentioned prominently on the can!), is like a diabetic who gorges themselves on Twinkies, goes into a diabetic coma and then pretends to have no idea that they were loaded with sugar. This is nobody's fault but the girl and her parents. Don't be a shill for them.

Sounds Legitimate

Looks like legitimate free WiFi to me. What do you think?

Is Being Nice A Requirement To Be A Good Teacher?

In an article in today's New York Times, Deborah Kenny writes

AS the founder of a charter school network in Harlem, I’ve seen firsthand the nuances inherent in teacher evaluation. A few years ago, for instance, we decided not to renew the contract of one of our teachers despite the fact that his students performed exceptionally well on the state exam.

We kept hearing directly from students and parents that he was mean and derided the children who needed the most help. The teacher also regularly complained about problems during faculty meetings without offering solutions. Three of our strongest teachers confided to the principal that they were reluctantly considering leaving because his negativity was making everyone miserable.

As a person of the curmudgeonly persuasion, I'm a little distressed by this paragraph. What I'm taking away from the parapgraph is that the teacher was fired because he wasn't nice. That his students performed well seems to be inarguable. But he was fired for reasons that had nothing to do with his teaching excellence and all about his demeanor.

So he "derided the students that needed the most help." Have we still not put the abomination of "self esteem über alles" out of its misery? Maybe those special flowers that needed the most help also needed a little derision. Teaching isn't about always making you  feel good.

As for the faculty members complaining about his negativity, "Suck it up, Buttercups." That sounds like staff room backstabbing to me. I really dislike the faux constructive attitude some people have that you're only allowed to complain about a probllem if you have a solution. Is it a problem, or isn't it? If you want to sweep his complaints under the rug only because he doesn't have a solution,. what you often mean is that you'd prefer to ignore a problem because it's hard to solve.

Teaching isn't a popularity contest, either for the students or the teachers. Ms. Kenny's school fires a teacher not because he was incompetent, but because he didn't know how to play the popularity game. He was a grump, a curmuedgeon, a son-of-a-bitch. Well, a lot of great things in history have been done by people who were real sons-of-bitches.

Ms. Kenny goes on to explain that the firing of this teacher is why she opposes government-mandated teacher evaluations. "If our schools had been required to use a state-run teacher evaluation system, the teacher we let go would have been rated at the top of the scale." Yes, that's because the state-run evaluation system would have been objective and performance based, instead of basing his employment on whether the teacher was able to assuage the delicate psyches of some liberal buttercup teachers and some whiny students who didn't like being told they sucked.

Ironically, though, I am opposed to state or federally-mandated teacher evaluations on principle. At the federal level, the government simply has no grant of power to become involved in education. If you don't like it, push for an amendment, but that's the way it is.

Farther down at the state level, I think local control of education is the most fair and beneficial for all involved. Local school districts are best suited to work directly with parents and students to meet the educational needs of the students. If you could remove unions from the picture and local boards of education were free to fire teachers at will, and judge performance however they chose -- from Ms. Kenny's more subjective standard or an objective performance-based standard -- then that maximizes the choice and freedom of all involved. Ms. Kenny's charter school network has a right to be a feel-good liberal enclave that values feelings and group tranquility over performance. And parents have the right to either not send their kids there or to voice their dissatisfaction and work for change.

Once you move control of the system up to the state and federal levels, you remove much of the ability for individual parents to effect change in their local school systems. At that point, getting anything done requires lobbyists and activists groups, not 20 upset parents at a school board meeting. Removing that immediacy of control is a bad thing.

At the local level, schools should be permitted to kick out the unions and run union-free. I've worked in at-will employment all my working life, more than 30 years, from my first teenage
 part-time jobs to the present. I've never had a union to "protect" me. My employes have always been free to fire me anytime they want. And I don't have a problem with that. If I was being subjected to harsh, unfair conditions, yeah, I'd consider a union to protect me, or maybe I'd just quit and look for a better job. But I don't live in a Dickens novel, and neither do teachers in the U.S. They're professionals, just like me, and they can seek employment on the same footing as me. The companies I've worked for have always treated and compensated me at least adequately for the work I do, and I've always been free to leave if I didn't like the situation. Teachers are no different.

There's no reason to have our schools held hostage to teachers unions that promote the interests of the teachers over the interests of our children.

Of course, my ultimate advice is to opt out of the current system: home school or private school. We have been home schooling my children for more than 20 years now -- two are out in good careers, one is in college, two are still being home schooled. I recommend it heartily. It's not easy, by any means, but I'm very proud of how they're turning out.

One of the things I like most about it is that the buck stops here. There's absolutely no one to blame for my children's educational failings but myself. That's quite a responsibility, but it's no more responsibility than any parent should be willing to take on for their child.

Welcome to California

I'm out in California on business this week. I stopped into a grocery to pick up some food for my hotel room refrigerator. Of course, I was greeted in the checkout line by this:

Yeah. And they charged me for a paper bag. Thanks Sunnyvale.The central valley is turning into Mad Max times, cities are declaring bankruptcy and entrenched public sector unions and environmentalists are quashing all growth in the state, but, thank goodness, Sunnyvale is plastic-free.

Another Year, Another Embarrassment for the Nobel Peace Prize

This year, the EU (yes, the whole thing!) won the Nobel Peace Prize. It's sort of a "lifetime achievement award" for "for promoting peace, democracy and human rights over six decades." Uh-huh. Yeah. Considering that the EU didn't exist as such until 1993, I am most impressed with how they packed six decades of promotion into less than 20 years. I know, I know, they're including predecessor organizations the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Economic Community (EEC), but I still think that's giving them way too much credit. Those organizations were a far different thing than the actual EU.

The EU has transformed most of Europe "from a continent of wars to a continent of peace," Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said in announcing the award in Oslo.
"The EU is currently undergoing grave economic difficulties and considerable social unrest. The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to focus on what it sees as the EU's most important result: the successful struggle for peace and reconciliation and for democracy and human rights," he said.
Jaglund praised the EU for rebuilding Europe after World War Two and for its role in spreading stability after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Ah, yes, I'm sure they'll mention the Marshall plan and the U.S. garrison of Europe over the past 70 years any moment now. Searching the article ... funny. No mention. Must be an oversight. Probably because they already award the Nobel Peace prize to the entire U.S. -- oh, wait, they didn't actually do that. Weird. They probably forgot.

I imagine they'll have some explanation for the wars that ravaged central and eastern Europe in the 90s. Where was the EU then? Oh, failing to keep the peace:

After centuries of war on the continent the EU has been at peace within its borders, but its effort to stop war in former Yugoslavia -- hailed by one minister as "the hour of Europe" -- was a failure.

The Nobel Peace Prize has descended below self-parody.

Media Bias, Voter Registration and My Old Journalism Prof

'The number of "inactive" voters is staggering.'

That's a standalone, unattributed one-paragraph sentence in a supposed news story about inactive voters.

I say "supposed" because a paragraph like that has no business in a news story. My old journalism professor would jump down our throats about every adjective we put into a story. Staggering? I can hear him in my head thirty years later in his thick Australian accent, "Staggering? Says who? The people aren't paying to read what you think! They're paying you to report the facts! I don't recall being literally staggered when I read your story! If you're going to make a claim like that you have to attribute it! This isn't the editorial page!"

On to the merits of this "staggering" claim. The reporter gives the number of inactive voters in the U.S. at nearly 21 million according to the Census Bureau. The over-18 population of the U.S., according to the Census Bureau numbers for 2011, was 237,744,633. So, about 8.8% of the adult population is marked inactive on the voter rolls.

Color me not staggered. We have not had a voter turnout for a Presidential election that tops 60% of the voting-age population since the Nixon-McGovern election in 1968. If more than 40% of the voting-age population does not even turn out to vote, then eight percent being marked inactive seems precisely the opposite of "staggering" to me.

Marking voters who have not voted in many years as inactive is a very long-standing practice and I was unaware that it was in any way controversial. So what suddenly made this a controversy worth reporting on?

Ahh. You have to read between the lines. And I found the proper lines to read between are down between the 7th and 8th paragraphs:

Critics charge that the "inactive voter" lists across the country have led to the unfair removal of voters from the voting rolls. They have branded the process vote "purging."

"Inactive voter lists really place the onus on voters, to figure out what their voter registration status is," laments Ryan Haygood, director of political participation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Horror! Voters having to take responsibility for their own registration status? What's next, people having to provide for their own food and housing? What are we coming to?

I'd be willing to lay money that the reporter, named, um ... hey, there's not a byline! Odd. Oh, at the bottom it says "Fox News' Kathleen Foster contributed to this report." Really? You know when media outlets give a "contributed" credit instead of a full byline? They do it when not enough of the text is the reporters' own to qualify the story as her own work. So, as I was saying, this story is almost certainly a re-write of a press release from some activist organization attempting to turn an ordinary and long-standing facet of election law into a "controversy." Probably the NAACP in this case.

And that's how special interests hijack the news. Even though the reporter went to the trouble of getting opposing quotes, she (or the unattributed press release author) editorialized in the middle of the story and contributed to a biased atmosphere by actually allowing herself to be led by the nose to turn this into a story by some group's PR department. It doesn't matter to the group that originated the story that she included alternate viewpoints. The key thing is that they got a story in one of the nation's top news outlets.

Just by getting the story to print, they win by setting the public perception that there is an actual controversy. The reader thinks "Why would Fox print the story if there wasn't a controversy?" How did Fox know there was a controversy? Why, they were told so by the group trying to create a controversy!

Are there actual hordes of angry would-be voters complaining that they are unable to vote when they want to? No, that doesn't exist. There are only the imagined disenfranchised. Then number of lazy half-interested voters who don't bother to turn up to the polls in half a decade, don't bother to confirm their registration after that gap, and find out too late that they're no longer registered to vote, is miniscule, and they are precisely the opposite of the type to form a political activist organization to do something about it. They're more the "Oh, crap. Oh well, maybe next time." types. No, this "controversy" is generated by entirely more active and motivated types on behalf of those poor down-trodden who didn't bother to notice that they ought to be outraged.

We are awash in these "top-down" controversies. Things become "controversial" because a very small group of well-funded, committed activists say they are, and the reporters, desperate for easily-generated news copy, eat it up. Going out and doing the work of finding out how many people are actually turned away at the polls would have been hard. Rewriting a press release then calling up a few government officials for quotes was easy. Thanks, Ms. Foster, you've done your bit to further the demise of actual journalism. You can go home now.

The Kindergarten Morality of Nicholas Kristof

In today's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof asks the question "Why Let the Rich Hoard All the Toys?"

Kristof's columns are routinely reprehensibly dishonest and myopic, but this one is especially revealing in its analogy of choice:

Imagine a kindergarten with 100 students, lavishly supplied with books, crayons and toys.

Yet you gasp: one avaricious little boy is jealously guarding a mountain of toys for himself. A handful of other children are quietly playing with a few toys each, while 90 of the children are looking on forlornly — empty-handed.

The one greedy boy has hoarded more toys than all those 90 children put together!

“What’s going on?” you ask. “Let’s learn to share! One child shouldn’t hog everything for himself!”

 Kristof of course goes on from there to analogize the top 1 percent of wealth holders as the equivalent of that greedy kindergarten boy.

Well, let's make your analogy more accurate, Mr. Kristof, shall we?

Look again at where those boy's toys came from. Some were given to him by his parents. Some he received from a classroom system set up to reward those who worked hard in class. Some he bartered with other students who got a fair trade (candy, other toys, information, whatever) for the toy. None of the toys simply came from some communitarian pool of toys that he greedily hoarded.

After obtaining all his toys in such legitimate fashion, is it fair for the teacher to simply come and take them from him? Without compensation?

And here the analogy breaks down utterly because who the hell is this teacher?

Of course, we know the teacher is meant to represent the government. Kristof believes that citizens of this nation are to the government as a small child is to a teacher. To him we are not autonomous independent citizens of a republic. A classroom is not a republic. A classroom is a tyranny ruled by a dictator with awesome unilateral powers. That, apparently, is how Kristof wishes the U.S. was governed -- by a tyrannical federal government that believes all the wealth of the classroom -- erm, nation -- is really its to redistribute as it sees fit.

Of course, I know Kristof is a fan of democracy. But say all the other children voted to take that child's toys away. Yay! Democracy! It also sounds a lot like Lord of the Flies or the classic "two wolves and a sheep sitting around voting on what to have for dinner." Fortunately, thank God, we don't live in a democracy, we live in a constitutional republic.

Kristof's article and the analogy he bases it around is a nearly perfect distillation of the politics of greed. Kindergarteners are greedy, selfish, usually incapable of self-control, and prone to acts of cruelty and mass chaos. That's Kristof's America.

In the adult America, we have to look at issues with more than a Kindergartner's greedy perspective.

I take exception to Kristof's cherished inequality bugaboo. He lists some bullet points, starting off with "The six heirs of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, own as much wealth as the bottom 100 million Americans." (The article that Kristof links to for this point phrases it much differently, and more accurately, though ultimately, the article is as gross a mischaracterization of the situation as Kristof's:"In 2007, it was reported that the Walton family wealth was as large as the bottom 35 million families in the wealth distribution combined, or 30.5 percent of all American families.")

Well, who are those 100 million? They're overwhelmingly young families, just starting out. They have virtually no wealth, often negative wealth. (Update, to clarify: Negative wealth is when you have more debt than assets. If you're a bright, young neurosurgeon with a wife and child, just out of your internship, you may have a home mortgage, car payments, and tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. You are deep into negative wealth despite being a very prosperous and elite member of society. Simply having one more dollar in assets than debt is actually doing quite well in modern society were virtually nobody buys a home outright with cash. In fact, you can be a poor renter with nothing more valuable to your name than a 10-year-old Toyota and have more positive wealth than many people more affluent than you. Having a low or negative amount of wealth is by no means the terrible thing that Kristoff implies.).  Is there any way one can argue that these people are entitled to a completely unearned piece of someone else's wealth? How would one even redistribute it meaningfully? Would the poor benefit from tearing the Walmart empire apart and parceling it out to them? Hardly.

Taxing the rich wouldn't make those poor people less poor. Name me anyone who has amassed wealth due to being a recipient of tax money who isn't already a wealthy business owner, a politician or a bureaucrat. It's a ridiculous idea that the government is better at creating jobs than an actual business like Walmart that creates jobs for millions of people.

The classic argument -- and where Kristoff goes with this -- is that the money should be used to educate the poor. Right. When you've been engaged in a cycle of dramatically increasing spending on public education and public funding of private education for more than 60 years and your results are flat, what you naturally think to do is ... spend more money.

The glut of public money for college tuitions has encouraged colleges to raise their costs far beyond the inflation rate for decades, locking students into mountains of public debt for less and less return. A big chunk of those 100 million Americans or 35 percent of American families who have less wealth than the Walmart heirs are in that bracket because of student loan debt!

In our elementary and high schools, we spend more per pupil, adjusted for inflation, than we ever have and we're not seeing better results. Kristof's desire to steal more and more from "the rich" isn't tied to any particular evidence that the money can be well-used, no less a moral justification for taking it.

Let's take a look at the poor, downtrodden 90 percent, again. Those poor waifs who sit by while that greedy kid has all the toys. Most of those people live better not only than most of the people on the planet, but better than most of the people who have ever lived in the history of mankind. The high water of American prosperity has raised all the boats. Frankly, Americans live so well and so healthily now, even at the lowest economic levels, that you simply can't mandate meaningful improvement in the American lifestyle.

The fact that a few at the top of the wealth scale have amazing, unheard-of levels of wealth is not a sign of injustice.

Furthermore, if I was in dire straits and had to turn to some group to help lift me out of poverty, who should I turn to?

The government? The government will give me unemployment for a couple years that might be meaningful if I had a significant work history to deserve it. They'll provide foodstamps and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families to keep me and my family from starving, but they're not getting me out of poverty. To get out of poverty I need a ... a ... what do you call it ... a job!

Hmmm. Where can I get a job? Oh ... Walmart. Or Target, or Microsoft, or IBM, or AT&T or one of the many large and small oil and gas companies benefitting from the private industry explosion in fracking and oil exploration. Hey, wait, all these things are ... private corporations run by millionaire CEOs, board members and stockholders!

I used to work for a newspaper owned and published by a multi-millionaire heir of a multi-millionaire family. The guy wasn't exactly a "man of the people." He spent his time in his private office suite and tooled around in a classic Rolls Royce. I always told people that what was good for that guy was good for me. Indeed, as his fortunes and the fortunes of newspapers in general have fallen, it's been very hard for the employees of that newspaper. Every one of them should have been pulling for him to continue to be as wealthy and successful as he wanted to be, because he and his family were the enablers of their employees success. The government wasn't going to step in and give those people the sorts of pay and opportunity that private one-percenter was.

I'll throw in my lot with living off the "scraps" of the one-percenters over the government any day, because the one-percenters are the enablers of all real wealth-creation.

When government takes money, from you or from the one percent, it spends some of it on legitimate government functions -- roads, police and national defense -- but an enormous chunk is simply squandered on enriching the power brokers in Washington and giving pork and favoritism to cronies of the elected officials and bureaucrats. The government power-broker class is the real "elite" of which we need to be wary.

The biggest chunk goes to entitlement programs. Government has succeeded in conning generations of citizens into believing that they're not competent to make arrangements for their own retirement and health care in order to build a giant, rickety ponzi scheme that sucks up a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth. But that's an article in itself.

Kristof's kindergarten analogy is an insult to adult U.S. citizens and has approximately the same moral weight as a kindergartener screaming because he's not getting to play with the toy he wants.

Remember This Next Time You're Tempted To Respond To A Troll

In a Los Angeles Times article, Senate panel criticizes anti-terror data-sharing centers, the Times reports that "the scores of 'fusion centers' across the country threaten civil liberties while doing little to counter terrorism, a two-year study by a Senate subcommittee finds."

The article does a fair job of indicting the wasteful and unconstitutional actvities of the centers, but the real eye-opener is a user comment: 

chanteuse at 1:34 AM October 03, 2012
I spent 2 years at the Fusion Center in Austin, TX and spent most my time on social media. Using my native language skills my job was to "create sparks" (as my manager liked to say) by deliberately infuriating other users on facebook, comments sections (like this one), etc. in an effort to manipulate users and gain intelligence information. We used an automated system that created fake profiles on thousands of social media outlets and, based on scripts I wrote, generated comments, videos, etc. to provoke people. If someone took the bait, we'd use a system that obtains their real identity (from the Internet Service Provider) and then put them on a watch list. This watch list (when I left) had hundreds of thousands of names on it.

Remember that. I have little doubt that this is a true account. This is not the sort of activity the government of the U.S. should be doing.