November 2007 Archives

I've read (here and elsewhere) that economists have collectively failed to accurately predict a recession in the past 40 years.

So where should we turn to peer into an economic crystal ball? Perhaps the nimble Winnebago. Yes, seriously:

Winnebago Industries Inc., Thor Industries Inc. and other U.S. recreational-vehicle makers will probably say shipments fell in 2007 for the first time in six years, a sign the U.S. economy may be headed for a recession.

For the past three decades, deliveries of motor homes and travel trailers have dropped before each decline in the U.S. economy, giving the $15 billion industry a reputation as a bellwether. As the U.S. housing slump worsens, gasoline prices rise and consumer confidence wanes, RV sales are forecast to slide this year and next.

I wonder how much gas prices are a factor here. It seems to me that if you are a baby boomer who can afford to shell out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for an RV, a $1 increase for a gallon of gas might not be a deal breaker. But that's just hypothetical thinking. I suspect anxiety generated by this trend is a bigger culprit.

Are you tired of hauling a stack of junk from your mailbox?

You might want to check out a website called Catalog Choice. On Friday All Things Considered had a segment featuring the site, which purportedly enables users to opt out of receiving unwanted catalogs.

Catalog Choice is endorsed by several environmental groups, for good reason: America consumes 19 billion catalogs a year, at a cost of 53 million trees. That's just the environmental impact from making the paper; it doesn't include the energy needed to print, ship, and then disposal of all those catalogs. A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you're talking some real waste.

According to the website, several corporations have a formed a relationship with Catalog Choice--not just for the environmental benefits, but also as a way to save money. It costs an average of 80 cents to ship a catalog. If you're not reaching interested customers, that's just money out the window.

I know my home address continues to get unwanted promotional mailings (not necessarily catalogs) sent to people who lived here more than 15 years ago. One would think companies would try to keep their mailing lists somewhat current. But obviously some of them do a bad job. Perhaps a website such as Catalog Choice will help.

An excerpt from philosopher Ivan Illich's "Energy and Equity":

Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.

The full text is here.

Heh. This is funny even by Fox News standards.

Apparently, the network featured a caption which read:

"Gas Prices up 39% Since Dems Pick Nancy Pelosi"

(Screen shot here.)

Good, this provides me another opportunity to run this:

I wonder if--being "fair and balanced"--FNC has run a similar graphic which read:

"Gas Prices UP 114% Since Bush Entered White House"

I'm guessing the hardworking FNC research department has never got around to doing that kind of heavy-duty homework.

On a more serious note, I wouldn't be surprised if energy becomes a an even more important 2008 election issue than we're seeing now. Prices could be higher in a year, helping push the economy into a recession.

Unfortunately, there aren't many viable short-term remedies to this problem. And the steps we should be taking aren't getting much play by the candidates. America's political leadership is way behind the curve on energy.

I was listening to comedian Rush Limbaugh again on Tuesday. He was advancing his radical consumerism viewpoint by arguing that we've got an endless supply of oil to burn. No need to worry about fossil fuels or global warming--buy a big SUV and be happy.

First he pointed to a story on a United Arab Emirates airliner ordering more airplanes as proof that there's plenty of oil. Why would an Arab country be ordering more aircraft if we we're running out of oil?

An interesting argument, but one you can just as easily turn on its head. Perhaps the company realizes that with tight oil supplies, it will be uniquely positioned to turn a profit if it has better local access to fuel than international competitors. Moreover, high energy prices would be a boon to Arab economies (at least in the short term), generating more passenger growth, and account for the "highly favourable home and regional market dynamics" rationale cited by the airline.

Limbaugh went on to say this:

Probably, you know, the conventional wisdom, "We're running out of oil supplies! Global warming," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That stuff is here for a reason. It's part of creation. God intended it to be used as we're using it, and we're using it, and there's tons of it out there.

Putting aside the question of whether or not God created the oil for us to use, how does that claim address scarcity? God also created water and food, and we've got plenty of examples of societies running short of those resources. Just because God may have created something does mean we have infinite supply to consume. God has never guaranteed $3/gallon gasoline. Nature has its limits, whether Limbaugh wants to recognize them or not.

This is odd:

Psychologists in marketing at Yale and the University of California, San Diego studying the unconscious influence of names say a preference for our own names and initials -- the "name-letter effect" -- can have some negative consequences.

Students whose names begin with C or D get lower grades than those whose names begin with A or B; major league baseball players whose first or last names began with K (the strikeout-signifying letter) are significantly more likely to strike out, according to the report published in the December issue of Psychological Science.
. . .
The researchers say the effect is definitely more than coincidence but is small nevertheless.

Despite the large sample size in this research, I'm still skeptical, viewing it kind of like this:

Then again, I don't claim to understand human psychology.

Funny incident on the radio. I was listening to comedian Rush Limbaugh go on and on about how the illegal immigration issue is a surefire winner for the Republican nominee in the 2008 presidential election.

Just a couple minutes later a caller comes on and asks which Republican candidate is best suited to carry the GOP torch on the illegal immigration issue.

That seems like a pertinent question, doesn't it? If your party has a winning issue, you want to vote for a strong candidate.

Oddly, Limbaugh didn't have an answer. He said something about only paying attention to a few (Republican) candidates and made a bumbling comment about Governor Romney being pretty good.

You'd think that on such an important issue, Limbaugh might do a little more homework.

I'm not a GOP insider, but I'm pretty sure Representative Tom Tancredo has made illegal immigration his signature issue. In fact, immigration is the only issue I associate with Tancredo. And yet Limbaugh didn't even bother to mention him. How come?

It couldn't possibly be because Tancredo, running on the all-important immigration issue, has languished at the bottom of the polls, could it? That's a rather inconvenient fact to square with Limbaugh's theory.

President Bush, yesterday:

The majority was elected on a pledge of fiscal responsibility, but so far it's acting like a teenager with a new credit card.

Outstanding United States public debt under Republican government:

January/Year	Public Debt (Trillions)
2001	$5.7
2002	$5.9
2003	$6.4
2004	$7.0
2005	$7.6
2006	$8.2
2007	$8.7

That's a teenager with a $3 trillion credit card.

I haven't paid real close attention to presidential campaign rhetoric, but one of the talking points I recall Senator Hillary Clinton using--repeatedly--at the last debate was that we should elect her because she would "fight" for us voters. In fact, she said it so often it seemed as if this was the only reason we should vote for her. She's fought Bush and she will keep fighting.

Well, Senator, if this is your way of showing us how you confront adversity, you're doing it wrong:

After a tour, the candidate [Clinton] took questions from the crowd.

She called on a young woman. "As a young person," said the well-spoken Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, "I'm worried about the long-term effects of global warming. How does your plan combat climate change?"

"Well, you should be worried," Clinton replied. "You know, I find as I travel around Iowa that it's usually young people that ask me about global warming."

There's a good reason for that, too. The question was a plant, totally rigged in advance, like a late-night infomercial. Just before the public forum a Clinton staffer had chosen the young woman, a student at Grinnell College, and asked her to ask that specific question.

Arranging for staged punches isn't exactly the hallmark of a champion fighter.

I'm not totally unsympathetic to campaigns wanting to focus their message on campaign events. And if I was a candidate I'd probably grow weary of fielding lame questions at such events. But if the Clinton campaign felt they had to set something up, couldn't they have at least generated an interesting question? That wasn't even as creative as a fake FEMA press conference.

What's up with all the "fighter" talk, anyway? I think this is the Clinton campaign's cleaver way of trying to mask her high negative numbers. People don't like her because she is so effective in combating Republican ideology, the excuse goes.

That would be nice if it were true. Unfortunately, I think there's much more to her unfavorable numbers than that. And this kind of story only perpetuates the notion that Clinton isn't a straight shooter.

What can right wing bloggers do while waiting to rehash their "war on Christmas" foolishness? Gin up bogus outrage about how someone recognizes another holiday.

According to this L.A. Times article, some people have been getting bent out of shape over--of all things--the decorative logos Google occasionally features on holidays or to commemorate historic events. According to these people, Google hasn't been patriotic enough in its use of logos.

Frankly, I think you've got to be awfully bored to be keeping track of Google's logo usage. But if you want to fault Google for having skipped Memorial and Veteran's Days, while recognizing most other major holidays, that's a fair--though trivial--criticism.

Remarkably, it's gotten far sillier than that:

[L]ast week's decision to honor the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch -- the second "g" in Google was replaced with a drawing of the Soviet satellite -- is being blasted by some conservatives.

Not only did Google honor an achievement by a totalitarian regime that was our Cold War enemy, they griped, but it did so without having ever altered its logo to commemorate U.S. military personnel on Memorial Day or Veterans Day.

"It's a kick to your belly," said conservative blogger Giovanni Gallucci, 39, a social media consultant from Dallas. "I understand these guys are scientists and engineers and they have their quirks and want to make sure people are recognized who might not normally be recognized . . . but why not celebrate the struggles that we've come through as a people?"

"Kick to you belly"? How much more petty can one get? We're not even in the Cold War anymore, are we? Is Soviet Union bashing still mandatory?

Whether because of this pressure or otherwise, yesterday [Veteran's Day] Google did have a special logo featuring WWI-era helmets. Hopefully the search engine police were able to sleep easier last night.

Juliet Eilperin has an article in today's Washington Post which outlines the risks inherent in campaigning on a platform to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In a nutshell, calling for changes which cost consumers money (at least in the near term) is not the best strategy to win votes.

From the piece:

According to energy expert Tracy Terry's analysis of a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, under the scenario of an 80 percent reduction in emissions from 1990 levels, by 2015 Americans could be paying 30 percent more for natural gas in their homes and even more for electricity. At the same time, the cost of coal could quadruple and crude oil prices could rise by an additional $24 a barrel.

I don't know if Ms. Terry has been paying attention to energy prices lately, but they've been increasing at a faster rate than that, without any new regulations. Frankly, this is a reason I've been ambivalent towards imposing an additional carbon tax to reduce emissions. Nature is in the process of imposing its own "tax" as energy supplies fail to keep pace with demand. Oil is poised to rise above $100/barrel and beyond. How much can we expect drivers to shell out? Do we really want to add another tax as gasoline rises to $4 or $5 a gallon? At some point you have to worry about the impact high energy prices will have on the economy. This is a more immediate problem which I think Democratic candidates should be focusing on.

Thanks to a high electricity prices and a generous renewable energy law, solar energy is a booming growth industry in Germany:

Even though millions of Germans flee their damp, dark homeland for holidays in the Mediterranean sun, 55 percent of the world's photovoltaic (PV) power is generated on solar panels set up between the Baltic Sea and the Black Forest.

So far just 3 percent of Germany's electricity comes from the sun, but the government wants to raise the share of renewables to 27 percent of all energy by 2020 from 13 percent.

It is a thriving industry with booming exports that has created tens of thousands of jobs in recent years, posting growth rates that surpassed the optimistic forecasts made by the fathers of a pioneering 2000 renewable energy law.

I don't know whether or not it's wise to adopt the German incentive model here in America. Many people couldn't afford it if we doubled electric rates. But Germany is demonstrating what we are capable of doing if we mobilize to change our energy paradigm.

If cloudy Germany can harness the sun's energy, we can certainly do it in the Southeast.

Here's a clip from PBS' Nova which examines German solar energy: