Jan 5 2009 7:51AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (3) |
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Is there a technical solution to the vote-counting problems plaguing the Minnesota senatorial election? The problems are spelled out in the Wall Street Journal article “The Minnesota Recount Folly: We've Been Down That Road” by Trent England, director of the Citizenship and Governance Center at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation. He recounts vote tally fluctuations in several counts of ballots cast during Washington State 2004 governor's race. England seems to suggest that some chicanery was involved in obtaining a final vote total that ultimately resulted in his side losing: “Election workers in King County (where Seattle is located) ‘enhanced’ 55,177 ballots to make it easier for tabulating machines to read them…. Nine separate...Read More

Dec 22 2008 9:58AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (13) |
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Paul Krugman’s column last Friday on Bernard Madoff poses this question: “How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?” He explains that over the past generation the financial services industry has claimed an ever larger share over the nation’s income, adding “Yet, at this point, it looks as if much of the industry has been destroying value, not creating it.”

Krugman cites the financial costs: “In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8% of America’s GDP, up from less than 5% a generation earlier. If that extra 3% percent was money for nothing—and it probably was—we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste...Read More

Dec 17 2008 9:14AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (3) |
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Krisztina Holly has an interesting take on innovation in a Huffington Post blog item titled “The Innovation Ecosystem.” Had she been a venture capitalist at the end of the Mesozoic Era, she writes, she would have placed her investments with the adaptable mammals—not the dominant dinosaurs of the time, which of course were on an evolutionary path to extinction.

She then cites Thorstein Veblen’s 1898 questioning of “whether the rules of natural evolution can be applied to economics.” It’s still a relevant question, she says, as US government and economists work to avert mass extinction of US auto companies.

Shou...Read More

Dec 16 2008 8:58AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (32) |
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Does NASCAR need a bailout, with its Big Three automaker sponsors facing tough economic times? As sportswriter and producer Robert Weintraub puts it in Slate, “…even if Ford, GM, and Chrysler get the cash they want from the taxpayers, they are going to have to pull back heaps of sponsorship dough from stock-car racing.” Weintraub, a fan of the sport who has produced a television show about it, says that now “is the right time to put the sport out of its misery.”

Why? Well, for one thing, today’s drivers lack the rodomontade of yesterday's drivers. Weintraub writes, “…the most visible part of NASCAR, the driver...Read More

Dec 2 2008 7:43AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (18) |
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Do you favor a bailout for the Big Three auto makers? How about for a little fourth? That would be Tesla Motors, which has asked for $400 million of a $25 billion loan package—the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Incentive Program (ATVM)—for the auto industry that Congress approved in 2007. Should Tesla get the loan?

In “Only the Rich Can Afford It. Should Taxpayers Back It?” Randall Stross writing in the New York Times says no way. Alluding to the “2008 Bailout of Very, Very High-Net-...Read More