Yesterday, The Stranger published an in-depth piece about the things that could go wrong with the proposed deep-bore tunnel downtown that would replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The Stranger’s reporting has gone downhill since Josh Feit left a few years ago, but this one is pretty good muck-raking yellow journalism. I urge you to read it if you live around here.

I’m not particularly invested with whether we replace the viaduct with a tunnel, another viaduct, or with a surface option. I don’t think having unshadowed access to the downtown waterfront is key to Seattle’s future. I wouldn’t mind it, but whatever. I do care about a couple of things though. First, the current viaduct is unsafe and should come down.

Second, I don’t think it should be Seattle’s responsibility to pay for the replacement. And that’s where things seems to have gone off the rails in the last year. As it stands right now, if anything big goes wrong with the tunnel construction (and if you read The Stranger article, much could), there’s no money to pay for fixing the problems. The state has said it will try to find a way to make Seattle residents pay for it, on the theory that we’re the ones who really want the tunnel. The Seattle City Council (or at least a couple of them, Tim Burgess and Richard Conlin) say we won’t have to pay, but all they offer is some trust us, we’ll make sure we don’t have to pay statements. In the meantime, the City Council wants to move ahead and sign contracts without dealing with the issue of what to do with cost overruns up front.

So what? Stuff’s gotta be paid for right? I’m generally in favor of levies and taxes for needed things. However, Seattle already has a huge deficit, according to the 2010 Seattle adopted budget. We have revenue of $3.4 billion ($1.2 billion from property taxes) and expenses of $3.8 billion. We’re already trying to figure out how to make up that $400 million. A lot is coming from other resources. Cost overruns on the tunnel could easily double our deficit. In other words, if something goes wrong big time (and that often happens), we’re either going to see significant property tax increases, or we end up with an unfinished and useless tunnel, no viaduct, and the state has spent a buttload of money that we don’t get back. The third option is to spread the cost increases across the state, but that’s not the way the law reads right now.

If you live in Seattle, it behooves you to let the City Council know now that you’d prefer cost overruns be planned for now. Richard Conlin and Tim Burgess are probably the two council people who need opposing feedback the most. Or, if you’d prefer to cross your fingers, you can just not do anything.

Anyhow, I just had an epiphany.

All of these feminists are smart, sun-blinding smart. They would easily shred 90% of anyone in debate. There may be 1% or 2% who would edge them out, but no more. And then only if those folks brought their A game.

Probably something I shoulda realized earlier.

But they didn’t really find the origins.

Someone on the Seattle Livejournal Community wants that community given credit for Snowpocalypse. And they certainly have a case for popularizing it during last year’s snow storm, though the Stranger’s Slog and other popular local blogs had a lot to do with it. But the term goes further back than that.

DCist claims they first used it. In 2005.

But they are wrong. Searching even further back I found a post by sea_colleen at Seattle Metblogs that used the term Snowpocalypse a couple weeks before DCist did. I didn’t use Google to find that. I knew it where it was because the origins of the term have come up before, and I know the term had currency in one Seattle group before 2005.

Seattle Metblogs sea_colleen is Leenerella on Livejournal, and she was an active participant on the old Seattle Gothic message boards, hosted on ezboard. The word was used there a lot in the 2002 to 2004 time frame to refer to the local media’s hyperbolic coverage of various snow events. They’d imply that the city would shut down, but then we’d get ¼ inch of snow and life would go on. If we did get any snow, King 5 would send Danger Jim Forman outside to report from the most blustery location he could find.

I don’t know who first used the term on Seattle Gothic. I don’t know where they stole it from or if that person coined it herself. But the folks there have a better claim than the other pretenders.

Sadly, little remains of that message board. The moderators pruned message threads, particularly little content ones like Snowpocalypse!. Ezboard moved it from server to server, and lost oodles of discussion threads in various crashes. Versions of it were hosted by members both before and after it was on Ezboard. Ezboard became Yuku and some archives are there. The Wayback Machine has a few posts archived.

Edited to add: Found a couple other references from Sea-Gothers that pre-date DCist’s claim. Here’s Prince of Happiness, another Sea-Gother, using snowpocalypse in December 2005 as well. And a snapshot from the Wayback machine of forum topics on Seattle Gothic from January 2005, one of which is SNOWPOCALYPSE 2005!!1ONE!!!ELEVEN!1!!.

I guess the way I’ve been trending in my political thought in the last few years is towards a sort of free-market liberalism. In other words, finding market based solutions for problems that the country faces. I still favor government intervention, but in such a way as to align that intervention with how people naturally behave. I don’t believe markets are magic. Any serious look at the economics of health insurance shows there’s a huge disincentive to that market working properly. But using the free market can have huge benefits. Carbon taxes or an auction based cap and trade system for reducing greenhouse gases, for instance.

Back to the immigration thing. Our current immigration policy essentially allows large numbers of low-skilled immigrants and very few high skilled immigrants. While there’s lots and lots of bloviating about illegal immigrants, there’s very little that’s done about it in comparison to the number of people that are illegally here, though what’s done is fairly harsh. Illegal immigration is largely composed of low skilled immigrants.

High skilled immigrants, like doctors and economists and journalists and programmers, is very limited. Illegal immigration for these kinds of people is much lower. Legal immigration is also limited. But if we put high skilled employees in direct competition with people who are willing to work for less, the benefits to the average American would be much greater than low skilled immigrants. Bringing in one doctor who is willing to work for 10% less than American doctors will help the average American far more than 10 additional minimum wage landscapers.

So how to do that? The thought that occurred to me as I was reading was an auction. Set the number of people allowed to enter the country legally at a fairly high, but limited number, say 250,000 or 300,000 per year. Then auction off those slots. Use the money to help fund job training for those displaced, and for additional safety net protections that conservatives complain about. I.e., they complain about immigrants using welfare. Well, use these visa auctions to fund welfare for immigrants.

The economics of it would favor high skilled immigration, but not cut off low skilled immigration if the number allowed in is set high enough.

At the same time, I would drastically reduce the paperwork necessary to immigrate this way.

Obviously, I can’t have been the first person to think of this. On returning home, a quick search brought up some academic papers relating to the idea. And something on the Becker-Posner Blog, which I generally avoid because Richard Posner is annoyingly a hack in areas outside his expertise. But nothing I could find that was written for a non-economist that discusses both pros and cons.

Because of that I’ve been skeptical about U.S. government claims about Iran’s nuclear program for the last couple of years. Having a Democratic President hasn’t lessened my skepticism. Here’s an example.

In an A.P. story on Iran’s obligations to the I.A.E.A. this morning, Iran claims it revealed it’s new secret nuclear facility early. According to them, they don’t need to reveal anything about it until 6 months prior to it going operational. According to the I.A.E.A., the additional protocols to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty require disclosure as soon as Iran started planning. Iran claims they aren’t party to those additional protocols (they voluntarily followed them for a couple of years) anymore, and Mohamed El Baradei (the head of the I.A.E.A.) claims that Iran can’t back out of them.

What are these additional protocols to the N.N.P.T.? Follow that link to read them. What I find interesting is that the I.A.E.A.’s own web site says that the agreement with Iran on those protocols was never in force. And the additional protocols document itself explicitly refers to the date the protocols come into force in the section on when a state has to disclose a facility. It does not refer to the ratification date or the date the I.A.E.A. approves the protocols with that state.

So who’s right? I don’t know. But it’s certainly much more ambiguous than the U.S. government and the I.A.E.A. claim. And my own personal idea of open and forthcoming requires much more than following the legal requirements.

some Black Caucus members said that Wilson’s outburst is but the latest in a long string of ugly events rooted in racism, such as last week’s flap over Obama addressing the nation’s schoolchildren …

I agree that there’s a large element of racism behind the anger and attacks on Barack Obama, but I don’t think the anger or attacks would disappear if racism wasn’t present (magically). A vocal and more-or-less-in-charge-of-the-party section of the Republican party would proffer idiotic baseless attacks that in previous generations would be laughed as paranoid delusions no matter which Democrat was President. And the media would be a primary legitimizer of those attacks no matter who was President.

Remember Bill Clinton? He was accused of murdering Vince Foster, running drugs, raping women, and having the Arkansas State Patrol kill opponents.

How about Al Gore? He got branded as a liar and an environmental lunatic. Of course, he turned out to be right on the money for his concerns about global warming. Every major case of his lies weren’t things he said. They were things Republicans and journalists said he said, but when quotes were checked he hadn’t said them.

Just a little over four years ago John Kerry helped coin the term Swift-Boating as it’s first subject. The so-called fringe right turned John Kerry’s war service from one of honor and valor to one of lying and cowardice. Their claims were all false.

And now Barack Obama gets the beat-down from the right wing. Racism is changing the substance of their attacks, and perhaps the number of them. But since 1994’s Contract With America, the trend has been towards a Republican party dominated by right wing lunatics with little grasp of the truth. Had we elected Hillary Clinton these attacks would have been anti-woman in nature, rather than racially focused. Even if we elected someone like Dennis Kucinich, we were bound to get crazy falsehoods.

The simple fact is that those who control the Republican party are by and large people who don’t believe anyone but the far right has a legitimate claim to power. And they will believe whatever it takes to confirm their view of the world.

But they are also racists.

Why sensible people remain Republicans I do not understand.

Container Ship

I’m currently reading The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (New Edition) (watch for a review over at Rat’s Reading eventually). While I love reading about economics, too often economists simplify things when arguing.

One area that frequently comes up is free trade. Libertarian and market-religion economists love to push free trade over all. I’m generally a fan of free trade, but one argument in favor of it bothers me: free trade improves everyone’s wealth/income/economic standing. This is not true. A better phrasing is that free trade improves a nation’s net wealth. But within the nation, some individuals will become net winners and some will be net losers. Under free trade over the long run, the gains from the net winners will be more than the losses for the net losers. But there will be net losers, particularly in the short run.

To illustrate, I shall pick a commodity. I’ll call the commodity airplanes. We might have one maker of planes in the country. For this illustration I’ll call that manufacturer Boeing, and I’m going to assume it has one owner. We might have one manufacturer because of protectionism from the government. (And in reality, Boeing receives significant subsidies from the U.S. government in several forms.) The protectionism will result in higher costs for airlines and thus higher prices for consumers, both for personal travel as well as for good shipped via airplanes.

If the U.S. were to eliminate the favored status for Boeing, as a whole we’d be better off. Foreign competition (and perhaps domestic as well) would lower the prices of airplanes. Travel would become cheaper and goods shipped via airplane would as well. We’d save a lot of money in small amounts that add up.

There would be one big loser though: the owner of Boeing. He’d lose lots of money.

Overall, the U.S. would be better off because the savings from all those cheaper goods and travel would (more than likely) be more than what the owner of Boeing lost. As a whole, we’re better off. But not everyone sees the same benefit and in particular the Boeing owner sees a huge loss relative to his former position.

Too often I read economists glossing over this fact that some folks are net losers from free trade. We are not all better off because of free trade. A better phrasing would be that most of us are better off because of free trade. There’s lots of different ways that can be framed. It could be looked at as protected industries stealing from the public and deserving nothing. It could be that the public should compensate the formerly protected in return for removing protection. But there isn’t any magic that turns everyone into winners.

Some economists believe that this distinction shouldn’t be made publicly. If free trade isn’t promoted as being a winner for everyone, the losers will band together and become special interests and could convince voters to be protectionist. In order to keep us on the march towards libertarian free trade with gains for most of us, we have to ignore the losers. One clue that an economist believes the distinction shouldn’t be made is if the economist has a position with the American Enterprise Institute or the Cato Institute. Often folks making such arguments aren’t economists at all, but pundits with some economic knowledge. (Yes, I fully realize I am a non-economist making economic arguments.)

In the early parts of the book, Bryan Caplan uses some phrasing that falls into this trap. I don’t think he’s one of the everyone’s a winner crowd. He’s a professor at George Mason University where folks like Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok also teach (they run Marginal Revolution, an excellent econ blog). My view of GMU is that it is a home for non-dogmatic economic libertarians. Which is kind of where I find myself on the economic political spectrum. Kind of.

Now, back to The Myth of the Rational Voter.

Image Container Ship by Nedster78 used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Seattle Intelligencer Building (1874)

The Seattle P-I announced today that it will publish it’s last print edition tomorrow, March 17th. After that it will go online only. What the online version will look like, how Hearst will staff it, and what kinds of news they will cover in the online incarnation have not been announced.

On one hand, I am sad to see the newspaper disappear. The P-I has been a part of Seattle for years, longer than the surviving Seattle Times in fact. I delivered the P-I for approximately three years in the 1980s, spanning the standalone time and the beginning of the Joint Operating Agreement with the Times, when their biggest rival took over all aspects of the paper except editorial. My grandparents to this day only pick up the P-I on their morning walks. I always considered it the better newspaper of the two Seattle dailies.

That written, I think the city news is in dire need of a shake-up and this might be the needed catalyst. Both dailies are as bland and mediocre as local TV news. They appeared to be in a fight for the most milquetoast middle of Seattle’s culture. When I moved back to Seattle after a decade in Idaho, I did not subscribe to either paper. I continued my subscription to the New York Times. In Idaho it was necessity because the Idaho papers and the Spokane papers are so provincial that the only way to get any kind of non-wire-service coverage of the world was to get newspapers from outside the confines of the Palouse.

On returning I found my sanity still necessitated a New York Times subscription. Too many puff pieces. Too often getting the story wrong. What comes to mind is how the P-I blithely cast aspersions on a crane operator after his crane fell over in Bellevue several years ago. He’s a former drug addict! That must be a factor in the accident! Then when his drug tests turned up clean, nary a word from the P-I in apology. They didn’t even give the clean bill of health the same prominence that they did the drug accusations. Those got page 1 for several days. The exoneration got buried. That is typical television news style. Lurid tales of murder, sex, drugs, and anything that might shock and scare middle-brow Ballard. And lots of boring, bland stories about snow, or rain, and fawning Microsoft coverage. Bleah. I couldn’t pay for that.

Instead, I subscribed to the P-I’s local news coverage via feed syndication. If the headline indicated something of interest, I’d read the excerpt. If that indicated something worthwhile, then I’d click through to the story. In the last 30 days, I only read 13% of the excerpts. And almost never about local politics, which should be a local paper’s forté.

Where did this news junkie get his news? The Stranger. The sad fact is that the local free alt weekly Stranger has hands-down the best news in Seattle. That’s partially because they are willing to have a point of view in their news pages, where the dailies have tried to be objective (maybe I’ll write about objectivity another time). But it’s partially also because they have dedicated reporters who really dig into our urban politics. The Stranger more often covers stories I care about than our other papers.

In it’s current form, the Stranger isn’t a substitute for a good daily. For one, they are too focused on politics and arts from a hipster perspective (despite the fact that they denigrate hipsters at every step, they are tied at the hip to them). They are also only once a week. They don’t have the numbers of staff to cover breaking news. They can’t do investigative journalism properly either because of their staffing levels.

The word I am hearing is that the online P-I will have greatly reduced staffing levels and will become something like Huffington Post, partially an aggregator. If that’s the case, I won’t bother paying much attention.

There are some experiments in news in Seattle. I am hoping one of them takes off. Perhaps The Seattle Courant, Publicola (awful name), or Crosscut (although anyone who publishes Knute Berger needs to have a CAT scan). Maybe something else.

With two bland dailies sucking up 90% of the news space in Seattle, I don’t think their was much room for these experiments. But over the last year as it became increasingly apparent that one or both would shut down, these online sources germinated (and the Stranger increasingly began using Slog as the vehicle for stories that later appeared in the print edition). Now that the P-I will be really emasculated, these perhaps can really thrive. It’s going to be scary, and ugly, and it’s sad that the P-I went. But something needed to die in order for something new to live.

The fix is in. He’s not allowed to mount an effective defense and is not being afforded due process. That may be perfectly fine in an impeachment trial, but it doesn’t mean that Blagojevich should participate in what is a show trial. Why waste the time?

Here’s what I found in my reading:

• The defense is not allowed to challenge any of the prosecution’s evidence that is included in the House impeachment record. In other words, most of the evidence. — No objection, however, may be made against all or any part of the House impeachment record filed by the House Prosecutor with the Secretary.
• Blagojevich is not allowed to present any evidence without the permission of the U.S. Attorney who is prosecuting him. The charges from the U.S. Attorney form the core of the impeachment charges. In other words, he could only stand in front of the Illinois Senate and say I didn’t do it. He can’t present any evidence to the contrary unless it’s already public or the U.S. Attorney approves.

Those aren’t rules that are conducive to participation. Given that set of rules, I wouldn’t participate either. The Illinois Senate should pass out the impeachment record, let everyone voting read it for a day or two, and just hold a vote. The trial is all show.

Since her site was built using Wordpress, the first place I headed was the Wordpress plugin repository. The handy-dandy integration between Wordpress 2.7 and the repository makes such things simple. By far the most popular contact form plugin is cforms II (no link). So I installed and configured. Voila! A little complex but it wasn’t too hard to work with.

Testing it out, I noticed a link at the bottom of the contact form. It pointed to Oliver Seidel’s web site. He’s the developer for cforms II. I didn’t like the placement for the link (my friend has a credits page where I would put it). So I immediately Googled how to do this. Lo’ and behold Mr. Seidel has deliberately made it difficult to remove the link. That’s fine. His software… sort of.

See, here’s the thing: All plugins on wordpress.org are supposed to use GPL-compatible licenses. That means that users get the source code, and they can do nearly whatever they want with it. Turns out that Mr. Seidel never actually included a license in the download (so far as I can tell). And on at least one page on his site, Mr. Seidel claims the license for cforms II is not open source or GPL compatible. Specifically, he says that users may not modify or redistribute the plugin or it’s source. That’s not GPL.

This plugin is so popular, and the credit line issue is so prominent, that the folks at Automattic (who run wordpress.org) can’t have missed it. Supposedly they check the license for every plugin to verify it is GPL compatible. They’ve booted hundreds of themes from the repository for lesser offenses. But the popular cforms II remains. Does Automattic not want to lose a popular plugin from their repository?

When uploading plugins to the repository, plugin authors assert that their plugin is GPL compatibly licensed. Did Mr. Seidel lie? Or did he just not read it very thoroughly? Regardless, if he’s not going to license it under a compatible license, he should voluntarily pull cforms II from the repository. He should not take advantage of the multiple benefits of the repository (easy installation, high prominence, etc.) if he doesn’t want to play by the rules.

Insult contest winner(s)!

I hereby announce the winners for my Insult King Rat contest. Here’s your prize, links to your site from this post without rel=”nofollow” added.

Christopher Mendes gets first link for saying he would bescumber me if I was already fimicolous. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I suspect he typo-ed his entry by omitting the word not.

And I’ll give eliZZZa a link for saying I’m driven by larmoyance. My friends and I weren’t quite sure what she meant by that, as the definitions of larmoyant didn’t quite work in context. We think she meant to say I was a crybaby, but we are just guessing.

Anyway, here’s hoping you get some traffic for your efforts. Though it did seem like people weren’t even trying.