It’s been a while since I exercised my guest-blogger privileges here. I figured that since I was on the scene, I might write a bit about the shit that’s currently going down in my town– although my neighbourhood, Lambeth, is fairly quiet so far.

I am only an adopted Londoner, but I’ve inhaled enough urban grime to have acquired a certain patina of Londonness for my soul. One of the characteristics of the species is that we do not let shit faze us. In times of crisis, a Londoner feels an instantaneous connection to the survivors of the Blitz. Our shoulders square, our bosom swells, our accent becomes ten degrees more clipped, and suddenly you could use our upper lip as a backboard to practise your Wimbledon serve.

To be honest, the unflappability of the current generation probably has more to do with the plethora of attacks by various Irish maniacs during the Troubles, which carried on intermittently into the mid-’90s (long enough for even a late arrival like me to become blasé). Still, when the July 7th bombs went off in ’05, we went straight into Blitz mode. Out into the street we strolled with a generalised air of “Terror? No, sirs; it’s been tried before by bigger bastards than you.”

(We’re kind of like Captain America in that respect. Our comeback to everyone, up to and including Galactus, is “Oh yeah? Well, I fought Nazis. And won, so there. Nazis, dude.”)

But then there’s the other Britain. If we’re Five Go Mad In Dorset, we’re also Mr Jolly Lives Next Door. (First link rife with overstated tweeness; second link definitely NSFAnyone.)

I mention this because shopkeepers on my street were told at around 3.30 today to close up and go home. This has happened in several neighbourhoods around town today, but there were enough attacks nearby last night to have people worried. It’s already clear that this isn’t your grandparents’ looting spree; shops in central areas, on busy streets with plenty of CCTV cameras, have been hit. The local tiny, cramped grocery shop was full of panic buyers– and someone more panicked than me had already bought all the Brita water filters. Damn.

On the other hand, the two theatres on my street both have performances tonight, and the kebab shop where all the police always go is still open. So there’s that.

The socioeconomic ramifications of all this have already been done to death by wiser heads than mine. The consensus seems to be that yes, of course the people doing this are repulsive– but they’re contextually repulsive; and if the top tax bracket can get away with practicing the Tao of Fuck You Got Mine, then are we really surprised when their low-end counterparts raise the ante?

I would not in any way defend the scrotebags doing this, obviously; but nor would I join the uniform chorus of string-’em-up that seems to be erupting on Facebook. A blanket judgement would miss the point, since it’s such a heterogeneous lot: there are kids out for a thrill, there are the angry ones out to destroy, there are the chancers out to grab stuff, and then there’s a hard core of professionals who are much more efficient at this whole stealing business. Only the first group will be delighted if you photograph or film them.

At any rate, it’s now 9pmish and the sky is going dark. Two ways tonight could play out:

• Nobody turns up. There are 10,000 more police on the streets tonight than last night, they’re empowered to use plastic bullets, and both these facts are well publicised. Those who were in it for the adrenalin may well have had enough.
• Everybody turns up for a series of enormous pitched battles and even more of the city gets trashed.

I very much hope it’s the first.  Over the past two nights, however, the violence seems to have spread to other UK cities including Manchester, Bristol, Liverpool and Birmingham, so even if London is quieting down, it’s definitely not over– although I think a night or two of heavy rain would end it.  Even British looters don’t have the commitment to hold an umbrella in one hand and a flatscreen TV in the other for the entire bike ride home.  Also, their new designer sneakers would get all soaked and squeaky.

Top of the list of Fictional Characters That I Wish Were Real right now:  Sam Vimes.  A good policing strategy for the Met might be:

1. Figure out what Sam Vimes would do
2. Do that.

Now, one might…one just might…point out that we’ve been cutting taxes on the rich for the last decade and all we’ve gotten to show for it is a net loss of five million jobs and a small group of very rich people who have gotten much, much richer…but instead, I think we should take all these people at their word. I think that we should treat these people as the job creators they really are, just like the Republicans in Congress say. And to that end, I think we should do exactly what the Republicans insist is the best solution for the economy, the best solution for just about anything. Let’s let the free market handle it.

Specifically, I think we should tie the top income tax rate to the unemployment rate. Say, a baseline tax rate of twenty-five percent, with a baseline unemployment rate of five percent. Every percentage point below that, the top tax rate decreases by thirteen percent (down to a minimum of one percent, a purely token rate.) And of course, every percentage point the unemployment rate goes up above five, the top tax rate increases by thirteen percent (up to a maximum of ninety-nine percent; after all, nobody should be denied the right to make a living.)

Naturally, the specific numbers could be haggled a bit, the tax loopholes closed here and there to make sure that they’re not shirking their duties as job creators, the exact unemployment figures that we use to calculate this tax rate precisely detailed to avoid fraud. But in theory, this should be exactly what the nation’s captains of industry want. They have an incentive to put the nation’s unemployed back to work, we have a way to balance the budget in times of economic stress, and the Republicans get to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to free-market economics and their worship of America’s ultra-wealthy as the people who make America great.

I don’t know why, but something tells me they won’t go for it…

Ezra rightly identifies that a power set like Storm’s would provide a unique and indispensable service to businesses and governments, but that’s because Storm has a power that’s both fairly rare (weather control) and dramatically useful in a way that regular human business can’t easily duplicate. Most mutants, though, don’t have powers of that sort. How many mutants are just big strong dudes? Answer: lots of them. And in the real world, if you’re a big strong dude with no other skills (assuming these mutants wish to use their powers for profit), you’ll end up in manual labour of some sort, and then you will see resentment. How many normal-human construction jobs does a Colossus or a Strong Guy replace? For that matter, how can professional couriers be able to compete with mutants who can fly under their own power?

I strongly suspect that unions would, in these circumstances, put strict hiring quotas on mutants (and most likely gene-wide, because how can you prove that you aren’t strong or can’t fly?) and then we’re just back to square one – and that’s before you get to the psychics, who would inevitably be barred from any number of professions, and genome-based resentment on either side of the coin would almost certainly follow. And with that, the dream of shared prosperity becomes restricted to those outliers, the mutants who don’t potentially threaten human prosperity and who can provide useful services to humans. That’s not equality, and in the real-world scenario it’s why Magneto is right.

EDIT TO ADD: In comments Fistfulloffists says: “Even a society made up entirely of mutants would, realistically, suck.” Which isn’t entirely inaccurate, because all-mutant societies would almost certainly have some degree of labour immobility. Are you a big strong guy? Then society most likely demands – either explicitly or simply through cultural conditioning – that you go be a labourer. Energy blasts? Welcome to the energy sector. Indeed, there were more than a few hints in the comics that Genosha (pre-genocide) was somewhat like this. Which could arguably make mutant societies less able to progress – what happens when an Einstein or an Edison just happens to be a being of living steel and therefore most immediately and obviously useful at manual landscaping? As another example, Hank McCoy’s mutation isn’t that he’s a smart guy – it’s that he’s physically agile and powerful, and his brains are sort of a genetic non-mutation bonus. Hank is an example of what existing in a non-power-normative – e.g., human – society can do for a mutant.

Groupon sells coupons, not invisible condoms or no-hangover martinis. I have no doubt that Groupon can be quite profitable, but coupons have been around for a hundred years. Groupon competitors will spring up, just as they have in the real world. Retailers are going to get skeptical about whether coupon shoppers are potential return buyers or actual skinflint cheapskates, just as they have in the real world.

That’s not really a fair comparison. Traditional coupons are valued and printed on the basis that a certain percentage of them (I remember reading a while back that it was less than one in four) will be used, but have to account for the possibility that they will all be used, which is why most of them offer a relatively low rate of savings (usually about 12-20% of retail cost, although occasionally you get lucky and get a coupon for 20-30%).

Groupon, however, values its discounts on the basis that everyone who buys into it will use it and pays in advance for the privilege; it’s not a coupon so much as it is a floating group purchase rate in which anybody can participate, and most sellers working through Groupon are lowering their profit rate but not eliminating it entirely on the basis that selling more stuff to more people for less profit individually means more profit overall, especially if even a small fraction of them become return customers.

Groupon is simply more efficient than coupons for all parties involved, which is why the speaker’s sentiment – while florid – is reasonably accurate.

No, I’m serious. Set aside the automatic “but it’s an upgrade!” reaction that comes second nature to geeks. (I’m not saying I don’t have it too. I have a Blu-Ray player, and I don’t even have a hi-def TV to watch the discs on. Long story.) I’m asking whether we actually need a new format, now or ever. Sure, the picture quality is better. Put two TVs side by side, one playing a DVD and the other playing a Blu-Ray DVD, and people will be able to tell which one is which. But it’s not the same as the difference between VHS and DVD. It’s not between “okay” and “amazing”, it’s between “amazing” and “near-perfect”.

Do we need “near-perfect”, though? Already, some films are having problems being converted to Blu-Ray because the format is so perfect that you can see imperfections in the film used to shoot the original master edition. The differences are so small as to be almost subliminal. DVD is immersive enough; Blu-Ray improves, but can you put a dollar amount on the exact improvement…and more importantly, is that dollar amount equal to the difference in price between DVD and Blu-Ray?

Perhaps I have a slightly different perspective on this than some fans, because I’m a Doctor Who fan. We get our series one story at a time, eight stories a year, and there are twenty-six years of stories to go through. It took them almost literally the entire life of the format to release all the existing episodes of the classic series on VHS, and by the time they put out the last one (“Invasion of the Dinosaurs”, if memory serves me right) they’d already started putting out the DVDs. Which means I’m very familiar…perhaps uncomfortably familiar…with buying the same thing twice.

As a result, I can’t help but think that Blu-Ray is mostly–not entirely, but mostly–a way to get you to buy the same thing three times. Let’s face it; at a certain point, even the best movie stops making money for the studio, because the market’s saturated. Everyone already has it. The only solution is to find a new way to repackage it, so you’ll buy it twice. And improvements in technology are a remarkably convenient way to do that. And, to get back to the question at the beginning, the question in the title…at what point does the improvement become incremental enough, insignificant enough, that it’s not worth buying into the new format? Is Blu-Ray that point?

Oh, I should have mentioned at the beginning, this is one of those columns where I don’t actually have an answer. (Except for myself, of course. I have one Blu-Ray disc, and I got it as a gift. The player was on sale for cheap. I won’t buy any DVD over ten bucks anymore…after all, I’ve got plenty to watch, and the prices always come down eventually. For me, market saturation’s a big saver!)

Sterling’s profit model – which essentially consists of doing the bare minimum necessary to compete in the league – simply wouldn’t fly in European leagues because the Clippers, in a Euro-style system, would eventually sink to whatever second tier existed, at which point the Sterling model fails because the expense of running a team as large as the Clippers wouldn’t be satisfied by the revenues generated by a second-tier team. Admittedly, Sterling could then rejigger his system to do even less and allow the Clippers to do the bare minimum to compete at second-tier – but then they’d eventually slip to third-tier, and at that point your worth-hundreds-of-millions-team is not actually worth hundreds of millions any more, and you’ve run a profitable enterprise into the ground.

Discuss.

Consider this part.

More notorious even than his miserly ways are Scrooge’s cynical words. “Are there no prisons,” he jibes when solicited for charity, “and the Union workhouses?”

Not necessarily. As Scrooge observes, he supports those institutions with his taxes. Already forced to help those who can’t or won’t help themselves, it is not unreasonable for him to balk at volunteering additional funds for their extra comfort.

What Levin does here is conveniently forget to include the response to Scrooge’s question:

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

What this serves as is an indictment of Levin’s entire philosophy. The role of social welfare is traditionally condemned in libertarian circles: better that social welfare be provided by private agencies, say they, as it is in the best interests of all concerned to prevent desperation and abject poverty as much as possible. Well, Scrooge is given a chance to contribute towards the social welfare and he says “go screw.” Apparently, in Scrooge’s eyes, the welfare policies enacted by Victorian-era England (which is, I dunno, a socialist utopian paradise all of a sudden) deny the need for private charity even when clearly insufficient, and give the lie to the theory of private social welfare systems so beloved by the right.

It goes downhill from there. Really. It’s kind of sad.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the fact that Palin claims energy issues as her particular sphere of expertise just amazes me, and similarly it amazes me that nobody important bothers to point out that, on her professed area of expertise, she is a goddamned idiot.

To be fair, for quite possibly the first time ever, Palin actually includes a few numbers in her screed: specifically, domestic American petroleum consumption. Unfortunately, this does not get her a cookie, because if you’re going to talk numbers about consumption and then say “well we gots to drill more of them wells you betcha,” you need to link it to that other number, which is production.

The United States has an estimated 21 billion barrels of remaining uncollected oil reserves.¹ Were it all to become suddenly available tomorrow, the USA’s consumption rate of 19.5 million barrels per day wouldn’t allow it to last long. This is because a consumption rate of 19.5 million barrels per day is also a consumption rate of 7.1 billion barrels per year. So basically, the United States has nearly three years’ worth of oil reserves handy at its current consumption rate.

Of course, that figure isn’t really that meaningful either, because there is still no magic straw given to us by a friendly genie² that gets all the oil out. Oil wells do not show up overnight. Even if the United States government expedited the leasing process, the oil companies still have to drill exploratory wells, develop a production plan from that exploration, and then install production wells. That’s a six-to-nine-year process to reach basic production.

And even when you reach basic production, you don’t reach peak production that quickly any more, because all the easily drilled oil deposits are now empty. Oil is sometimes in the ground in a big single pool; the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia, for example, was mostly a big-ass single pool. But the big-pool deposits are mostly gone, so you can’t just stick a well into the ground and get all the oil from a single field. What’s left in the ground at this point is the harder-to-reach stuff: far-offshore fields (which take more than six to nine years to successfully explore and drill, one might add) and land-based fields which are kind of like Styrofoam except instead of air pockets there are oil pockets. These do not produce oil at “traditional” production rates. It will be in the neighborhood of fifteen years before anybody sees more than a relative dribble.

And finally, unless Sarah Palin plans to nationalize the oil industry like some sort of socialist or something, that oil is just going to go onto the free market anyway, where all the other countries in the world – like, say, India and China – will compete for its purchase. And frankly, at this point they can more easily afford it than the United States can.

So to sum up: Sarah Palin’s “drill” plan involves ignoring how much oil is actually in the ground, how quickly it can be drilled, how easily it can be accessed, and the basic reality of the global oil market. And this is where she thinks she is an expert.

Dear Rachel Maddow: please, just take all of this, put your Rachel Maddow style on it, and do a five-minute segment. You can’t tell me you don’t want to make fun of Sarah Palin again. You would be lying if you said that.

1. CIA World Factbook, following from World Oil and Oil and Gas Journal. British Petroleum’s most recent publicly available statistical analysis – in 2007 – puts it at 30 billion, but most consider that an outlier.
2. Genies hate the Middle East for bottling them, so clearly they would be on America’s side. Well, if they existed, anyway.

Because gas prices will never be high again!

Well, how about GE?

HOW YOU LIKE ME NOW, YOU PRUDENT INVESTMENT-HAVIN’ MOTHAFUCKAS? HOW YOU LIKE ME NOW?

EDIT: Just to clarify as some people have complained: the financial crisis isn’t hitting me or my family directly in terms of investment, but capital availability issues have the potential to royally fuck me and many, many people I know over but hard. Rest assured that this post contains exactly zero schadenfreude.

I may not be as informed as you, but I can draw opinion on what I do know about this and the whole “bailout” buzz word now.

When a horse breaks its leg, you don’t coddle it and tend to its weakness as it will NEVER get better. You shoot it so something better can take its place.

The problem is that General Motors is not a horse. You can get a new horse quite easily at the horse store, because there are lots of horses. General Motors, on the other hand, is the ninth-largest corporation in the world. It employs a quarter of a million people in the United States directly and god knows how many indirectly. If GM went out of business tomorrow, the other auto companies can’t pick up the slack because they’re hurting too.¹ This is to say nothing of the fact that GM’s primary income stream is not in fact selling their cars, but the car loans they arrange so that people can buy their cars – want to see what happens when a giant creditor goes bankrupt?²

Shooting GM in the head simply isn’t an option: it’s too big and its loss would do too much damage. I’ve seen economists suggest that the loss of GM alone could swing the current American recession into a full-blown depression. You can say “well, we shouldn’t have companies that are too big to fail,” and that’s a valid point of view, but that doesn’t make the economic-violence plan an equally valid answer in response to the current crisis because you can’t do, say, a Ma Bell-style corporate megasplit if said corporation is suddenly nonexistent.

Moreover, shooting GM in the head isn’t even a good comparative idea, because unlike the horse, there’s no reason GM can’t be saved. Its decline was the result of accounting culture taking over the management of the company from the engineering culture that ran it up until the mid-70s (which is also the reason most of their cars are comparatively shitty nowadays). Affecting the management style and roster of GM is something the federal government can do with a bailout. After all, a bailout is, in its purest essence, a loan – and any loan officer worth their salt can require reasonable preconditions for that loan.³

Finally, it’s worth noting that the scandal of the Wall Street buyouts from a rational perspective isn’t that investment firms went buck-wild, because the government let them go buck-wild and voters in turn didn’t bother paying attention and let the government let the firms go buck-wild. The Wall Street meltdown is the result of negligence in all quarters, pure and simple, and nobody has any excuse because really smart people with economics degrees were saying “hey, guys, this is going to end up fucking us in the ass” years ago and nobody paid attention.

No, the scandal of the Wall Street buyouts has been the response from all concerned, from Henry Paulsen initially offering what amounted to a blank cheque to Wall Street firms refusing to trim fat as they got their paydays to the public’s offended face that these investment firms weren’t fiscally responsible when nobody was paying attention (and remember, the average member of the American public has a negative savings rate nowadays, so who the hell are they to complain about others’ fiscal negligence)? It’s the combination of offended self-importance and sheer ignorance of the problems at hand exhibited by just about everybody, be they in charge or not, that irritates me. It’s one of the reasons that Kel Mitchell’s “FIX IT!” analyst character on Saturday Night Live is so painfully unfunny – it’s too on target.⁴

1. The Japanese companies are hurting less because they planned for this in the long run, but there are limits to one’s ability to plan.
2. Hint: you really, really don’t.
3. Also note that the history of government bailouts of the private sector, at least in the United States, is one of eventual government profit as the loans are eventually paid off.
4. The other reasons, of course, being that Kel Mitchell is not good, and the writers writing the character are not good.

As an Ontarian, I am deeply, deeply familiar with CAW president Buzz Hargrove’s seemingly inexhaustible ability to spew stupid bullshit, but Hargrove’s bullshit is not only stupid but short-sighted: every solution he has boils down to “the government should give auto workers money,” and he’s happy with that strategy regardless of whether that money goes directly to auto workers or to auto companies who will trickle it down to said auto workers. It’s almost like the right wing decided they needed the most stereotypical left-wing labour boss they could imagine, then went to a lab and had Buzz Hargrove grown in a tube.

Of course, the Ontario government particularly shouldn’t give auto companies money to maintain their operations in Ontario, because there is simply not enough money in the coffers to do that successfully, because people are buying less cars. They are especially buying less of the shitty gas guzzlers that for years have been the mainstay of Ontario’s auto production (the list of GM and Ford cars manufactured in Ontario reads like a Consumer’s Digest warning list). Consumer advocates have been saying for years that Ontario manufacturing needed to diversify before things got bad, but Buzz Hargrove wasn’t interested in that because skilled manufacturers might not necessarily be interested in joining the CAW if they weren’t making cars.

Now, things are bad, and it’s going to take a massive effort to turn Ontario’s economy around, and government investment will be vitally necessary to do it. But giving money to car companies, especially in Ontario’s case, is just a bad idea.

Canadians should be thankful for the essentially risk-averse nature of Canadian banks. If anything gets us through this shitpile, it’s going to be that.