Garrett M. Vonk

I just saw this quote in an article about the Virginia Tech shootings. Does this send chills down anyone else’s spine?

Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government’s files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.

It doesn’t really surprise me that they have a huge, privacy-invading database of our prescriptions, but what is unnerving to me is how definitive they consider it. I can just picture a Shadowy Government Official at his computer… “Why, he must not have been on antidepressants,” *clickety-clackety* “I don’t see it anywhere in our records.”

Edit: Someone at Boing Boing noticed the quote too and has a little more information on this database.

Here’s me, 4 months ago today, predicting that New Orleans will use eminent domain to their benefit in the aftermath of Katrina:

I wonder if any of the governments in New Orleans will take it upon themselves to sieze the flooded homes, since the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Kelo v. New London gives them every legal justification to do so. They could bulldoze everyone’s homes and sell them to condo developers! Thanks, Supreme Court!

Here’s the Washington Post, today, in an article discussing the rebuilding plan in New Orleans:

Angry homeowners screamed and City Council members seethed Wednesday as this city’s recovery commission recommended imposing a four-month building moratorium on most of New Orleans and creating a powerful new authority that could use eminent domain to seize homes in neighborhoods that will not be rebuilt.

I Hate Bellsouth More Than Anything Else in the World - An Introduction

Let me start by saying this–I hate Bellsouth. I’ve never been so angry with a corporation as I’ve been at Bellsouth dozens of times over the years. I can’t think of a situation that proves a company as inept as the time that Bellsouth charged us for two separate DSL services, in one house that had one phone line. Between their glacial response time and the Indian call center reps who clearly hadn’t learned enough English to actually communicate with me–let alone help me– there isn’t much about Bellsouth that doesn’t frustrate me. Then, relief. We finally lived and worked in an area with five bars, and could ditch Bellsouth. I don’t think I’ve ever had a phone call as satisfying as the one where I called Bellsouth to cancel our phone service and DSL subscription. They saw that I had been a customer for several years and pulled out the stops. I politely listened to their offers of greatly discounted service and I suggested a few places where they could shove said offers. Years of bad service, incompetent CSRs, and predatory pricing had made me bitter and spiteful, and this was my only opportunity to really vote with my wallet, so made sure that the poor “retention specialist” felt my wrath. Yes, I’ll burn my bridges with a business that has acted unfavorably; I don’t care what they think of me.

Lest you confuse this space for some kind of Clark Howard-ian discussion of consumer gripes, I’ll get to my point, which is that…

I Lied–Actually, I Probably Hate Nationalization of Industries a Little More Than I Hate Bellsouth

Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.

According to the officials, the head of BellSouth’s Louisiana operations, Bill Oliver, angrily rescinded the offer of the building in a conversation with New Orleans homeland security director Terry Ebbert, who oversees the roughly 1,650-member police force.

City officials said BellSouth was upset about the plan to bring high-speed Internet access for free to homes and businesses to help stimulate resettlement and relocation to the devastated city. Around the country, large telephone companies have aggressively lobbied against localities launching their own Internet networks, arguing that they amount to taxpayer-funded competition. Some states have laws prohibiting them.

If your employer asked you to chip in, say, a third of your paycheck to build a robot that would completely replace you, with the knowledge that they wouldn’t need you anymore once the robot was complete, would you do it? What if your employer forced you to do it?

Nearly every business contributes to the communities in which it does business in the form of state and local taxes. For a giant such as Bellsouth, these taxes, in the form of income tax, payroll taxes, and others, must be enormous. For the local government to go and use that money to build a service that supplants one of Bellsouth’s most lucrative offerings is ridiculous and immoral. Bellsouth has the right to charge whatever crazy price they want for their services, and for the record, I think their pricing structures for both their internet offerings and their POTS services are crazy. But this annoying practice will change with increased competition from Cable Modem service and FTTH on the ISP side, and Vonage and cell phones on the POTS side. Even if it doesn’t, look at me– I am not a Bellsouth customer anymore, by choice. That’s how it should work.

So, we come back to the issue of the offer of the donated building, which Bellsouth has now rescinded. The indignant outrage that some are expressing over Bellsouth’s withdrawal is understandable. Corporate giving, they cry, should not be contingent on the recipient behaving in a manner pleasing to its benefactors. But such corporate giving is voluntary, and Bellsouth would have been foolish to not rescind it, virtually consenting to NOLA’s decision to use their own tax dollars to crowd them out of the market.

Counterpoint

Here in Chapel Hill, NC fear of angering local businesses and large corporations is preventing a municipal network from being created by the Town. See how Bell South treats suffering New Orleans? Remember what Verizon did to Philadelphia? Imagine what big bad business will do to Chapel Hill if we dare give something to those in need!
- Angry BellSouth and Anti-Public Good Chapel Hill Business

“Helping those in need” is quite a different proposition from using your own tax dollars to put you out of business. The author of this piece likely wouldn’t cry a single tear for the people who would lose their jobs if nobody had to pay for internet service in this market. People who think this way value the needs of the underprivileged, but don’t seem to give a damn about the people who’ve worked to build a business. It reminds me of a discussion I had about mandating that power companies heat the homes of people who can’t pay. There are people on both ends–people with jobs at Bellsouth or Verizon or whoever, people investing in these companies, etc. and it’s as if you can just ignore these people because you think we should wield the government as a handout tool to give people what they want for free.

Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes

This article makes several fantastic points. One I had forgotten: Bellsouth and the other carriers built their infrastructure, and indeed their legacy, in a highly regulated, anti-market market. That’s why it’s such a beautiful thing to see Vonage, Skype, and the like rush into the market, swords drawn, and declare war on the dinosaurs. And on the broadband carrier side, as the article points out, we have Google. (If you haven’t read about the efforts the Big G is making in the nationwide wireless space, read all about it. )

In other words, these solutions are the panacea to any problems I might have with Bellsouth, and if they are successful enough, might make us forget that Bellsouth’s success was built on government regulation in the first place. But these alternatives will only thrive in an environment where they can compete. If the local government all of the sudden hands out internet access to everyone, free of charge, we’re back where we started– with a government-built monopoly that obviates any need for market competition.

Carl Berg failed to pay a $25 annual fee for rural fire protection and, as a result, firefighters let his house burn to the ground last month near International Falls, Minn.

Along with his daughter and a grandson, Berg escaped the fire, grabbing two rifles and a camcorder as he went.

“I lost everything [else],” he said. “Stand and watch it burn was all I could do. … They should have put the thing out, but they didn’t.”
Fee not paid; firefighters let home burn

My first instinct is that $25 a year for rural fire protection is a pretty sweet deal, especially since the article itself notes that their initial efforts alone cost the department over $1,000.

This reminds me a bit of an earlier discussion in which I participated regarding the power company and their inability to legally cut nonpayers off during particularly cold weather. I tried to make my point there, and the same issues of ownership should apply to this decision. If you don’t pay for fire protection (or homeowner’s insurance, or car insurance, or for a motorcycle helmet), you don’t get the concomitant protection. That said, such protection should only be mandatory if there’s any danger of the fire spreading to the property of others. It’s not unreasonable to ask people to minimize obvious risks that their property may present to the property of others.

And I ask again– who looks at a $25 bill for a year of fire protection and says “Hmm, should I pay this or not?” Seems like a no-brainer to me. And I bet it seems like a no-brainer now to Mr. Berg, the owner of the incinerated mobile home.

So, driving to work this morning, I heard a commercial for the Georgia Lottery’s latest game, and the announcer said “There’s no other game in Georgia like it!”

Really? There’s no other game like it? That’s shocking, considering the state government has a total monopoly on those games. So they created a type of game that is illegal for anyone else to offer, and then advertise that there’s “no other game like it”? Amazing!

It doesn’t even seem like there’s any debate over whether this is a proper function of government. Maybe there’s a section of the U.S. constitution that I missed, a part that says "And the States Shall Create a Game whereby Citizens can Pick their Favourite Numbers, but Make such games Illegal otherwise; These States Shall offer Worse Odds than any other Game, and Shall be Exempt from Fair Advertising Laws and Thus can Lie about where the Money Goes."

• Evolution
  Some Christians apparently see The March of the Penguins as good scientific support for Intelligent Design.

  Because obviously, the most contrived, mythical, unscientific explanation for something must be the correct one.
  

  “To think that natural selection or even the penguins themselves could come up with the idea to migrate miles and miles multiple times each year without their partner or their offspring is a bit insulting to my intellect. How great is our God!”

  Ignoring the ripped-straight-from-The-Onion flavor of that last interjection, pretending that natural selection is an entity that can “come up” with things sounds like a third grade science paper at best. It’s like saying “To think that gravity or even a rock could come up with the idea to fall to earth at a rate of 9.8m/s² is insulting to my intellect. Praise Jesus!”

  Oh, and I loved this bit earlier in the article:
  

  Due to harsh conditions, most of the young chicks do not survive.

  Hmm, yeah, I guess only the ‘fittest’ survive. I think I’ve heard of that before.

  So… Baby birds freezing to death in hellish antartic conditions over and over throughout the seasons is something you consider well-designed? And you wrote a press release to trumpet the fact that this icy death props up your pseudoscience so well? Now you’re insulting my intelligence.

• Abstinence:
  Hey, kids, you should try abstinence! In fact, let’s spend a billion dollars on teaching abstinence. Oh, we already did?
  

  “There’s a group of people who are using abstinence as a vehicle, pretending to be concerned about public health,” says Bearman. “But it’s really a vehicle to advance a program, a cultural program that doesn’t help public health.”

  This is a very good point. It’s similar to using Leviticus 18:22 to push an anti-gay agenda. None of the crusaders –who use this verse to condemn homosexuals– care the least bit about the other prohibitions in this chapter, which is rife with restrictions on all kinds of behavior. That same set of laws prohibits eating birds of prey, eating shellfish, cross breeding livestock, picking up sticks on a Saturday, planting a mixture of seeds in a field, and wearing clothing that is a blend of two textiles, but imagine that– nobody protests these activities whatsoever. Could it be that they are using the bible verse as a cover to try to restrict activities that might make them uncomfortable, conveniently choosing one restriction from the bible among literally hundreds that they ignore?

  Of course, it gets better. Later in the story, the good minister promoting these programs has the balls to throw his own daughter under the bus with this one:
  

  “A kid’s part of your program, and he comes to you and says, ‘You know, I’m going to have sex. I’ve reached a point and I’m going to do this. Should I use a condom?’ What do you say?” asks Bradley.

  “My own daughter, my 16-year-old daughter, tells me she’s going to be sexually active. I would not tell her to use a condom,” says Pattyn. “I don’t think it’ll protect her. It won’t protect her heart. It won’t protect her emotional life. And it’s not going to protect her. I don’t want her to get out there and think that she’s going to be protected using a condom.”

  But wouldn’t his daughter be more protected with a condom than without? “Not long term,” says Pattyn.

  Wow. CBS didn’t even bring up his daughter, but this minister wants you to know that he’s so committed to keeping kids ignorant about sex that he’d tell his own daughter, even if she’s going to have sex, not to use a condom. He’s an awesome dad, isn’t he? Combine that with the other statistics* on abstinence-only education that you can find in the article and I think he’s a good candidate for father of the year.

  [*Summary: Kids who try abstinence are A) one-third less likely to use condoms, B) more likely to try anal or oral sex, C) much less likely to get tested for STDs, and D) 88 percent likely to have sex before marriage anyway.]

• Eminent Domain
  I really can’t think of anything sadder than a private Catholic high school being allowed to annex a perfectly good bar through eminent domain.
  

  In Tan’s situation, Cotter said he would argue that the need for St. Peter’s Preparatory School to complete its athletic field outweighs the current use of the building as a tavern.

  And I think the need for me to have a ranch in Montana outweighs the current use of the land as Ted Turner’s playground. Damn, if only I were more politically connected, I could just steal whatever I wanted from its rightful owner!

I wonder if any of the governments in New Orleans will take it upon themselves to sieze the flooded homes, since the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Kelo v. New London gives them every legal justification to do so. They could bulldoze everyone’s homes and sell them to condo developers! Thanks, Supreme Court!

Hey, whattayaknow, it’s a new study that suggests that paying mandating a “living wage” isn’t necessarily good for everyone.

I learned something about wages in my first economics class, and apparently politicians want to either ignore it or are ignorant of the fact. A wage is just a price. When you fix prices artificially, you hurt the equation. A price ceiling (like rent controls) means the quality of the good suffers, and a price floor (like a minimum wage) means that the normal market forces of supply and demand won’t apply. Case in point: increasing the minimum wage. The simplest economics lesson is that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Everybody’s heard it. TAANSTAFL. How does it apply here? The extra wages to pay an increase in minimum wage (some labor unions have suggested doubling it) don’t materialize out of thin air. They have to come from somewhere.

As we learned in that same economics class, all costs to a business in a competitive marketplace are passed on to the consumer. If McDonald’s can save fifty cents on each burger they make by some new cooking method and still remain competitive, they’ll do it, and drop the price to attract more customers. And if they are required to spend $2-6 more per hour on labor, they’ll have to raise their prices to cover that amount. This is a pretty quick way to bring about rapid inflation. And whom does inflation affect the most? The poor. Now, when the Walmart employee is making $8.15 instead of $5.15, but his dinner at McDonald’s now costs $6 instead of $3.50, he’s in exactly the same place he was before. I, Middle Class Joe, can afford to eat at Chili’s whether it’s $12 or $14, so it doesn’t really affect me as much, and Chili’s didn’t have any minimum wage earners in the first place, so their prices remain the same. So, in fact, this creates a catch-22 that disproportionately affects the working class.

But the study admits that employers took away fringe benefits, overtime pay and passed the costs on to the consumers. It also admits that a “living wage” attracts better-trained and -educated applicants, thereby, hurting the low-wage earner the ordinance supposedly helps.

This is the “equation” I mentioned earlier, balancing itself out. I can hear the proponents of the living wage now, with even more “solutions”… We’ll restrict jobs at the lower tiers to lesser-qualified applicants… We’ll keep the jobs at minimum wage but pay a bonus to people who “really need the money”…

You can’t change economics. You can’t get something for nothing. Most of all, we shouldn’t incentivize stagnant personal development. You want to make more money? Make more money. That’s how the system is set up. Or, it’s how it should be.

GREAT speech by London Mayor Ken Livingstone:

Yes, I’m just pasting quotes lately. What can I say? It’s tough to be original.

In a closely watched case, petitioners from New London, Conn. challenged the government’s use of eminent domain to take and pay for private property and use it for private economic development.

Home and business owners’ contention that economic development doesn’t qualify as public use “is supported by neither precedent nor logic,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote.

The decision was 5-4, with Chief Justice William Rehnquist and others dissenting.

Government Power to Take Property Backed by Top Court - a more complete article from Bloomberg.

Argh! I don’t get it. People don’t seem to understand that local governments are just people. Ideally, governments shouldn’t have “special” rights that people don’t have, because they’re just other people…

Maybe it’s just because I’m a dork about things like this, but reading this news article makes me physically angry. The highest court in the land has decided that we can only really own property if it’s being used in a sense that pleases the local government’s idea of “economic development”. Haven’t we yet learned that letting the government elite decide who can own what leads to crippling corruption? OH WAIT, IT ALREADY HAS IN AMERICA.

Anybody remember the Walmart in Alabaster, Alabama? They wanted to tear down some homes and put up a Walmart, but several property owners held out and said no to Walmart’s payoffs. The development company building the ‘mart had friends in the local government who decided to condemn the homes and kick out the rightful landowners, because the sales tax revenues from the Walmart would be higher than the measly property taxes the landowners paid. People had their homes STOLEN from them to benefit a CORPORATION, and by extension, the local government. That’s the same thing that’s going on in this case. Pfizer wants to build a plant, but not everybody will sell. The local government is worried that this might mean they wouldn’t get the plant built in their district, or whatever, so they boot the residents out.

Is this America? Isn’t the government supposed to be in place to protect our rights, not subjugate our rights to whoever could benefit from it economically the most? The local government in a Kansas town did the same thing, stealing, under the guise of legitimacy, a car dealership from its owner to replace it with a BMW dealership, because that means more tax revenues. If the government gets to decide what economic activity is the “most appropriate” for privately-owned property, what’s to stop them from taking yours and mine? I’m going to become a property-owner in about 22 days, and it infuriates me even more because of that. If the city government up and decides that my home, the one that my wife and I go to work every day to be able to own, isn’t the most efficient use of the space, isn’t going to provide them adequate tax revenue, they can take a fucking bulldozer, rip it to pieces, and write me a check for whatever they decide, now with the blessing of the Supreme Court.

If that happens, I’d worry about me. I’d be that crazy guy who has to be dragged out of the home at the point of a gun, because I would not consent to this crap… I wouldn’t be a part of this game, because if you allow it to happen, you legitimize these looters with whatever laws they want to wave in your face saying that A is not A, that your home is not your home, and that your life is not your own.

If your life is not your own, they may as well kill you, because if you consent to the looting, you’re giving your life away anyway.

I think I’ll make a donation to the Castle Coalition the next time I have some extra cash.

This sentence in the Bloomberg article caught my eye. (my emphasis)

The ruling is a setback for property-rights advocates angered by what they said is an increasingly common practice, now used thousands of times a year.

The phrase “property-rights advocates” makes me flabbergasted. I thought… I thought there was some organization I heard of once that was made up of property-rights advocates… What was that called, again? Hmm… Oh yeah, it was THE GOVERNMENT. The fact that people who respect property rights are now apparently a fringe activist group blows my mind, it really does.