Green Jobs!

... have been created by government mandate. Now all we need to do is figure out how to pay for them.

Los Angeles City Controller Wendy Greuel warned this week that the city's general fund could run out of money and fall $10 million into the red by May 5 unless the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power transfers a planned $73.5 million payment it has so far said it would withhold...

The Los Angeles utility, the nation's largest municipal utility, said it wasn't making the payment because the city council earlier this month failed to approve substantial increases in electricity rates.

Utility officials say they need those higher rates to help cover the costs of investing in renewable energy, such as wind and solar, that are mandated by state and municipal laws.

But wait, don't worry, there's a solution on the horizon!

On Wednesday, City Councilman Greig Smith moved to put a measure on next March's ballot that would ask voters to allow it to shift control of the utility—and its massive budget—under the auspices of the council.

Outstanding! The government will mandate "green" energy requirements, remove the utility's ability to pay for them and then when the budget falls apart, they will absorb the utility. The fiscally insolvent government will force the utility into fiscal insolvency and then subsume it making an even bigger fiscally insolvent entity! Yay!

Now would be a good time for Henry Waxman to call a hearing to find out why bigger numbers are bigger than smaller numbers. That sounds discriminatory to me, if not out-and-out racist.

Cheezburger of the Day

moar funny pictures

Global Air Traffic

I found this on The Corner and thought I'd share.

Austerity Happens

... whether you want it to or not.

Greek bonds are still getting hammered. The Euros have stroked their chins in deep thought, shaken hands, nodded heads and made agreements with the IMF. The Greeks have mumbled promises about some budget cuts that might be made some time in the future if they really, really need to do so. Greek bonds are still getting hammered.

In getting my Greek Geek on this morning, I came across this little bit of gloom regarding the latest victim on the altar of compassion.

The Greek general government had total expenditures of 44% of GDP in 2008, and tax revenues of 41% of GDP. If the 13% adjustment effort were to come entirely from expenditures, this would imply a cut in public spending of 30% of GDP. Conversely, if all the adjustment were to come from taxes, it would require a tax hike of a similar scale. Given the degree of corruption and the inadequacy of the Greek tax collection system, there is no way that taxation could take the lion share of this adjustment.

The math is complicated, so let me clarify it for you. Greece is facing the need for budget cuts of about 25% of their government spending. In the US, this would equate to $850B in budget cuts at the Federal level to prevent default, bank failures, a run on the currency and the advent of carteneros. In Greece, they have practically no defense spending at all, so all of these cuts will have to come from public sector pay and social services.

Compassion kills.

Problems with Comments

I'm really struggling with comments right now. I'm getting duplicates that aren't really duplicates and missing others that should have been published. I apologize if I've deleted some of yours (sorry, Jeff!). If you're using Blogger and are seeing the same thing, I'd love to hear about it.

Why Do We Have CAFE Standards?

The whole thing seems stupid to me. Oil is a global resource. With the 2,000,000,000+ people in India and China rushing to catch up to the West in living standards, what possible difference will it make if I drive a car that gets 18 MPG or 38 MPG?

Brain Plasticity

If you've got a spare hour and a half, here's an outstanding* Google Tech Talk on brain plasticity.

* - Well, I think it's outstanding. To tell you the truth, I've only heard 20 minutes of it so far. I downloaded the flv file from YouTube with my Real Player, converted it to wmv with Real Converter and then converted it to MP3 with Adobe Media Converter. I've now got it on my Droid and am listening to it while I drive. I mean, when I drive. I'm not driving now; that would be really dangerous - blogging while driving.

Update: The presentation is really well done. The fellow is a great speaker and has organized his material in an interesting and understandable way. A big part of my professional life is based on me doing public speaking. This guy can run rings around me. I'm going to listen to it a couple of times just to break down his style and technique. He's a joy to hear.

Captchadef

Welcome to another installment of captchadef!

prollycl (n): A guess at chemical composition, in this case Chlorine. Related words include "prollyo2" and "prollyfe".

Cheezburger of the Day

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Controlling the World is too Hard

... or so the City of Los Angeles is finding out. They're suffering the same problem all command economies face: reality is too complicated for government to manage. Dig this.

The crisis came to a head on Monday when the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power today indicating the utility wouldn’t send an anticipated $73 million payment to the city’s general fund.

The Department of Water and Power normally makes an 8% contribution to the city in lieu of taxes but does not have the expected $73 million because the city council blocked a proposed electricity rate hike.

What's the crisis? This is.

Los Angeles will run out of cash on May 5, city Controller Wendy Greuel said today in a release in which she requested a $90 million transfer of reserve funds to pay bills.

“The question I have been asked most often during the budget crisis is, ‘When will the city run out of money?” Greuel said in the e-mailed release. “Unfortunately, we finally have the answer.”

Filled with compassion for the less fortunate*, the city unwittingly hurt itself by blocking the water rate hike that the market demanded. Surely they can make up the difference somehow!

It's all his fault. Let's kill him, take everything he has and sell his organs!
* - or bailing out people who have made bad decisions, take your pick.

Link of the Day

Who is John Galt?

The Greeks Are Kidding Themselves

... if they think that their problems started recently. Meanwhile, they are shrinking away from taking their medicine.

April 6 (Bloomberg) -- Greek government bonds slumped, pushing the yield on the two-year note up a record 132 basis points, amid speculation that a European Union and International Monetary Fund plan for reducing the nation’s deficit may falter ...

Greece has been receiving information from the IMF about the conditions it would impose in return for aid, Market News said. Government officials found them to be “tough,” and are concerned that they could result in civil unrest, Market News said, citing officials it didn’t identify.

Cut social spending? Outrageous! That's too "tough." Instead, they're embarking on a world pity tour, trying to sell worthless Greek bonds all over the place so they can keep the trough open just a little while longer. Unfortunately for the Greeks, that's going to fail, too. Mathematics has caught up with them.

So when did it start? It started a long time ago when they decided to be compassionate with borrowed money. More and more compassion, more and more borrowed money in good times and in bad. It got substantially worse last month when they decided to completely detach earning from having and they passed ObamaCare, a bloated monstrosity that blew their budget apart.

Hmm. I do have the right country here, don't I?

Blog Post Title of the Week

... is this one from Ed Driscoll: In The Future, Everyone Will Be A Klansman For 15 Minutes.

Support for the Tea Party folks now surpasses support for the president. While that might come as no surprise for the deranged folk who see racism everywhere, it makes me wonder about the tactical reasoning behind the accusation. Somewhere there is a set of Democratic strategists reading polls and conducting focus groups that is suggesting that this is a good idea*. I wonder if the polls suggest that blacks are starting to reconsider allegiance with the Democrats. If they dropped to only 60-70% support for Democrats, it would be an almost unrecoverable blow for them and many, many elections would be lost. It would seem that the best way to keep them in the fold would be to keep screaming that outside of the Democratic party, there are hobgoblins and demons that will devour your soul.

* - On the other hand, it's entirely possible that the grown-ups in the Democratic party are begging their politicians to cut it out because all these accusations of racism are just killing them.

Languid

Or is it liquid? Our Maximum Leader reposing in a sunbeam at the top of our stairs deserves a click on the image.

I'm a Dinosaur

I read about the iPad's brisk weekend sales on my XP machine and didn't feel even a twinge of interest in buying one.

Rawr.

He Is Risen!

Have a happy and blessed Easter,  everybody!

Cheezburger of the Day

... is one of our own!

moar funny pictures

Feel free to suggest better captions in the comments.

Oahu Sunrise

Yesterday morning before work, I zipped over to the eastern side of Oahu to get some sunrise photos. The horizon was socked in, so really dramatic ones weren't in order. Still, it was a lovely scene. Enjoy.

The Cultural Logic Behind Phil Hare

The right wing blogosphere is all in a lather over Congressman Phil Hare being ignorant of the Constitution and being willing to dispose of it so he can do what he wants. When I watched the video where he was hectored into making those fateful statements, a few thoughts came to mind. Note that my interest here is cultural, not legal. I'm trying to answer the question: Just how did we get to this point?

• The Constitution is a few pages. The health care bill is more than 2,400. There's no excuse for him not knowing the Constitution backwards and forwards. It's the rulebook for his job.


• Rules of any kind are irrelevant. Intent is all that matters. This is the social revolution of the 1960s coming home to roost. Rules are for squares, man.


• The Left is totally ignorant of financial matters. As other nations have shown, the little boy in Congressman Hare's example is going to have a lot of company if we don't snap out of it soon. The Greeks are finding that out right now, but Phil has no appreciation for that fact at all. Intent is all that matters.


• Phil Hare cares deeply about people. I know there are lots of opportunists and parasites on the Left (I'm looking at you, Al Gore), but Phil isn't one of them. He means what he says when he talks about sick kids and his harassers miss that point entirely.


• The Left and the Right are talking right past each other if this video is indicative of anything. If there is going to be a good conclusion to this, the Right needs to argue that suffering is a tragic reality of life and this kind of compassion is going to increase suffering, not decrease it.


• I would bet that many in the Peron government cared deeply, too. They really did want to help the poor. Unlike Mussolini, who was Peron's idol, the Argentines didn't run off on militaristic adventures. They just redistributed their wealth until the whole thing blew up on them. Once that happened, there were lots and lots and lots of little boys without health insurance. The cure was worse than the disease.


• Phil's argument is an emotional one. That's fine as far as that takes you, but in the end you have to accept that sometimes bad things happen to good people. He's not willing to accept that and so closes his eyes to the cost of his help.


• Intent is all that matters.

There. That's as far as my thinking takes me. Dean has a great post on this subject, too. To borrow from the old Clinton campaign slogan: It's the Peronism, stupid.

Sunlit Ocean

After I got out of my meetings yesterday, I zipped over to the northwestern tip of Oahu, hoping for a dramatic sunset. The clouds didn't cooperate and the horizon was socked in, but there was a pocket of clear space a few miles out to sea that gave this vision of heaven looking down on the sea. It might be worth a click to see the bigger version.