Month: October 2008

Grab bag: Android phones, Windows patches, and other product failures

Should Massachussetts abolish the state income tax?

The endgame of the 2008 election season is interesting in a few ways. First, I find it interesting that Obama’s numbers go way up after people get to see him in action (e.g. during debates), and start to edge back down when robocalls and other personal attacks start to hit. In particular, it’s interesting to compare the projected electoral map from the beginning of the week to today, when Florida becomes a toss-up state again, as well as seeing the effect of ebbing Obama support in West Virginia and New Hampshire (and a gain in South Dakota).

But of more interest to me at the moment is a local question: what if Massachusetts abolished its state income tax? What’s interesting to me is not the question itself, which as I wrote yesterday is an idiotic response to crisis (and the New York Times agrees), but rather how loud the voices are about the question. The question isn’t drawing the same urgent public outcry as the effort to get the legislature to put marriage to a referendum, but it’s a pretty loud outcry nonetheless. And it makes me wonder: what’s really going on? Does being a social conservative in a state like Massachussetts just get more and more frustrating until one feels compelled to hold the recipients of critical government services hostage to get one’s demands met? I sometimes think that if I were conservative here, I’d feel effectively disenfranchised and thus would be inclined to grand gestures.

Nevertheless, there are quite a few people I’ve heard from who think it would be a good idea because it would make the legislature “pay attention” to their concerns about waste. To which I reply: there are more constructive ways to pay attention, and more constructive ways to reform. Specifically, I urge anyone who’s thinking about voting Yes on Question 1 to try making the cuts yourself first, with the Boston Globe’s Massachusetts Budget Game Calculator. The brilliant thing that you learn as you go through the budget item by item is just how limited the options are, and just how many challenges are in your way.

And there are challenges, because the budget is non-linear. Reducing spending in some areas leads to reduced state revenue and federal grants, making the job that much harder. Here’s an example: cutting 25% from the $32.2 billion state budget across the board (a chainsaw of a budget cut, if you will) nominally removes $8 billion in expenditures but only closes the budget gap by $4.9 billion, thanks to losses in federal funds and inability to get revenue. In fact, even a 50% cut across the board still leaves a $2.5 billion deficit.

The irony is that we’re already seeing big cuts in state government, thanks to the market meltdown, and we’ll see more. So even with a nationwide progressive sweep on November 4th (and that’s an unlikely scenario), the state is going to have to be fiscally conservative to make it through the coming recession. And that’s without a yes vote on tax abolition. Proponents of the abolition of the tax claim it will make the state a more attractive place to live and work, but the massive hatchet of Question 1 could ruin us.

Grab bag: courting chaos

Grab bag: Are there really undecided voters?

Grab bag: Economics of all kinds

Two hours and change with the Drain Doctor

I got a little carried away back in 2004. I assumed that when the clogged drain that backed up into our driveway got fixed, it stayed fixed.

Hah.

I found signs that it backed up again this morning, and proof this afternoon as a pool rose out of it when the washing machine drained. I called a complete bathroom renovation specialist in Adelaide, the Drain Doctor, and when he arrived I talked him through what I knew about the plumbing. He snaked back from the French drain, determined that the blockage wasn’t there, then went for the inside soil stack cleanout.

An aside: I don’t know how many other houses in our neighborhood have the peculiarities of our plumbing. The French drain is there because the driveway extends all the way to the back of our house, and is located right in front of our garage, which is in the basement. There’s a downward slope that used to pick up storm water from the street and take it down to the drain, in really heavy rain; fortunately, our driveway paving fixed that, but still any rain runoff from the driveway itself goes into the drain.

The drain, it appears, connects directly into our sewer pipe, with only a back pitch (it slopes up into the house) keeping nasty stuff from flowing up. Which means that when the main sewage line gets blocked, as it did tonight, the overflow went out back and came up the drain.

So the Drain Doctor guy snaked the line until we realized that he was hitting a blockage somewhere in the front of the house. We found another cleanout in the sump pump pit, which he opened up, and as it was somewhat, er, full, he realized he needed to snake both forward and back of the cleanout.

Which he did, over the course of about forty minutes. I take back everything I’ve ever said about plumbers: they earn their money. At the end, he sucked up all the stuff that came out of the cleanout into his own shopvac, poured his own Clorox into the sump pit to clear the smell, and left once he confirmed that we had clear running water going out the pipe.

The sad thing is, I’m pretty sure the blockage was caused by the previous owner, because tonight’s plumber pulled out some of the same things that our plumber in 2004 found—it just had never snarled up enough since then to be a problem, apparently. But it’s a good thing our pipes are clear, because I really feel like I need a shower.

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Grab bag: Premature snickering edition

Follow-up: Intrade confirms artificial inflation of McCain trading

I don’t know if Erik‘s seen this, but I found this report on Talking Points Memo interesting. Apparently Intrade’s internal investigation confirms that someone is artificially inflating the value of McCain (that is, the probability that he’ll win in November) by dumping huge amounts of money into the market in an irrational fashion. The CQ article says that it’s a single “institutional” member of Intrade and that they’ve been in contact with the investor, but that there’s no evidence that the rules of the exchange were violated.

I guess what this proves is that:

  1. Intrade is small enough to be manipulated, if you have a little spare change, and therefore its predictions aren’t trustworthy. Double-check any important prodictions with the Iowa Electronic Market and Betfair.
  2. There are McCain supporters out there who are willing to spend, and lose, large amounts of money to influence an outlying marker of the campaign’s success.

Shannon Worrell’s The Honey Guide is released

Looks like The Honey Guide dropped a little early. I happened to search for Shannon Worrell on iTunes last night and the album was already there; her MySpace page said it wouldn’t be available until this morning.

I’m listening now and it’s pretty wonderful. I’d listen to her sing the phone book, I think–her voice is that mesmerizing–and it’s nice to hear the voice again. The rest of it is deceptive. There’s more open space in the arrangements–quite a few of her old tunes were all vocal, all the time, and the very first track features an extended instrumental break–but there are more musicians in her band, I think, than ever before. It sounds like country, but that’s mostly the pedal steel–there are the same tight sinews underneath that powered her September 67 songs. And then there are the songs that are out of a different tradition: the echo, shuffling drums, and organ of “If I Can Make You Cry” feel like they came from somewhere unstuck in time near Louisiana. “Sweet Like You” is intimate and dreamlike.

But the lyrics. As always, Shannon’s songs are drenched in images, but where on Three Wishes she was tapping Greek myth and children’s TV, here the songs are swaddled in something simultaneously more personal and a little closer to Greil Marcus’s “old weird America.” The narrator of “Sweet Like You” wants to set her love floating down the James River. Kitchen tables rise and fly. Giant stars are removed from mountaintops. And lovers call from countryside bars because the bartender took their keys.

The Honey Guide is better than a note from an old friend: it’s a letter from a strange place. In its deepest waters it feels like a warmer version of Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood; in other places it feels like afternoon by a fire. Highly recommended.

Grab bag: Joe the Plumber’s 15 minutes

Unfortunate camera-mugging

Thanks to John Gruber for pointing to Austrian coverage of last night’s debate, complete with this bizarre picture of McCain. I think the caption says that he was reacting after he mistakenly turned the wrong direction to shake hands with the moderator. But there couldn’t be a worse image to sum up his debate performance last night:

Grab bag: Taste we can believe in

Voter registration vs. voter suppression

What does it say about our politics that one party regularly tries to engage new voters and the other regularly tries to suppress them? If you believe the complaints from the GOP, they’re just trying to stave off widespread vote fraud. But study after study has shown that there is no widespread vote fraud conspiracy, which surely the Republicans know full well. Salon’s article Behind the GOP’s voter fraud hysteria covers some of the studies, including the fact that from 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud, 20 were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once, while the GOP worked to ensure that thousands more were disenfranchised.

And that’s really what the voter fraud suppression efforts are about: disenfranchisement on a massive scale.

Hey, Republicans: how about you go out and register your own voters rather than suppressing newly registered ones?

Grab bag: People power