I have had a problem with "zero-tolerance" policies in our schools for some time.

We now have another perfect example of how stupid it is, and how badly it needs to be done away with.

In Colorado this week:

A local school district has suspended a member of the Young Marines youth leadership group after students saw drill props in her vehicle.

Marie Morrow, a 17-year-old senior at Cherokee Trail High School in Aurora, is serving a 10-day suspension. Her punishment could be extended at an expulsion hearing later this month.

Morrow is a student leader in the Douglas County Young Marines, a group dedicated to teaching leadership and life skills.

Cherry Creek Schools suspended Morrow after other students reported seeing guns inside her SUV, which was parked outside school while she was in class.

The school also called police, who seized the three drill team guns made of wood, plastic and duct tape. Police told Morrow to claim them in time for her after-school drill practice off-campus.

School administrators, however, were less understanding. The guns were declared "authentic representations of genuine weapons," triggering a mandatory expulsion statute in state law.

There’s no freaking excuse for this – ridiculous – willingness to place all judgment at bay. A young woman who has what amounts to a toy gun in her car – one that she has a legitimate, benign use for – may get thrown out of her school.

There are a few people worth contacting about this, starting with:

1) Cherry Creek School District

Superintendent: rmcintire -at- cherrycreekschools.org

Board of Education: ccsdboard -at- cherrycreekschools.org

2) Principal of the High School

Brooke Gregory

egregory -at- cherrycreekschools.org

3) Contact local elected officials in Aurora, CO and ask them to intervene.

State Senator Nancy Spence

nancyspence -at- qwest.net

State Representative Cindy Acree

cindy.acree.house -at- state.co.us

I went online to [cough…] Tires, selected the tires, ordered and paid for them, and arranged for them to be shipped to and installed at the local [cough…] Tires located about 2 miles from my house. The nice thing about my order? I saved $41.25 in sales tax – 8.25% – by ordering online.

For Christmas, Tenacious G acknowledged my inner guy-ness and let me get a 46" Panasonic Viera plasma TV, and a new Denon receiver (we needed something that switched HDMI, of course!) – all in all, about a $2K purchase, with a savings of $165.00 in tax that Amazon didn’t want to collect. At the rate of sales tax that my city collects – 1.75% of the 8.25% total – that’s $43.75 out of the city budget.

I’m about to make myself professionally unpopular. I work in online technology, which is driven by two engines – advertising and commerce.

One of those engines is becoming less effective (advertising) and the other is getting a subsidy from my kid’s school, which makes me unhappy. And ought to make you unhappy as well.

Let’s toss some numbers around.

The best estimates I can find for online retail in 2008 range from $130 billion to $175 billion. The Department of Commerce estimates it at approximately $130 billion, or 4% of all retail sales (up from 2.2% in 2004). Per the Census data for 2002, California represented about 11.6% of the retail sales for the nation, so figure that California had about 11.6% of an estimated $155.5 billion in total online retail sales for $18 billion in online retail sales.

The best estimates I can find suggest that less than 10% of online sales collect sales tax, so assume 90% are not taxed – for untaxed online retail sales of $16.2 billion.

At 8.25% – the base rate statewide (many local jurisdictions have higher rates) – we’re looking at $1.34 billion dollars in taxes that were avoided because people like me made economically rational choices.

Or to look at it another way, the Best Buy down the street from me would have had to sell the same TV and receiver for 9% less than Amazon to match their pricing. Meaning that not only does my kids school lose out on the money that might have been collected, but my neighbors high school age daughter can’t get a job because business at Best Buy is too slow.

To put this into perspective, the structural deficit in the California budget is now stated to be about $14.5 billion/year. Simply collecting the taxes on things people already buy would cover almost 10% of that – not chump change.

As a practitioner in the online space, I think it’s time to level the playing field as well. For a long time, I’ve argued that the ‘hidden subsidy’ makes online merchants lazy and prevents real competition between online and offline merchants. It makes a lot of online merchandising simply regulatory arbitrage.

I’ll add some thoughts on the California finance crisis and then the national stimulus bill later this week.
 

So I’ve been sitting and reading and thinking about the outcomes of the Iraqi election – hesitant to jump up and down in part because I was too enthusiastic about the elections before.

But after two weeks of watching the news and reading analysis from everyone from Michael Yon to Juan Cole, I’ve got to stop for a moment and talk about what a wonderful thing it is that Iraq has a politics, and more, that it’s emerging as a national politics.

The cast of parties and characters in Iraqi politics is as complex as family lines in a Tolstoy novel. While I look at them and listen to those who try and understand the shifting alliances at the heart of Iraqi politics, I won’t pretend at this point to be able to predict much about the political outcomes – and I’m skeptical of anyone right now who claims they can.

But I can put a stake in the ground and say one thing; that we’re seeing the emergence of a genuine Iraqi politics, and that the center of focus has shifted from the balance of militia power to the balance of political power, from bullets to ballots as they say.

The politics aren’t necessarily what we wish they were – but they are what the Iraqi people are choosing, and that’s about as good as it gets.

The reality is that there is emerging a central Iraqi government with enough authority to, among other things, negotiate its own term for engagement with the US. And the reality is that what we need to do is negotiate our engagement with them in light of their and our best interests.

The problem is that we are likely to negotiate our engagement in light of our domestic political conflicts; that we’ll choose an Iraq policy based on backward-looking score settling between the pro- and anti-war factions in our own politics.

So far,Obama seems to be avoiding that path, and as a consequence I think we’ll see slow walking and sad talking on the part of a lot of the antiwar commentariat. As well as from the folks who think we need a wider war.

But as long as individual Iraqis lives are getting better…(and the indicators suggest that’s true):

BAGHDAD (1/9/09)– While Americans have been watching the value of their homes plunge in recent months, residents of the Iraqi capital find themselves in the exact opposite situation, with long depressed housing prices skyrocketing to levels that are now out of reach for most residents.

For those who were forced to give up their homes during the worst days of sectarian violence that wracked the country in 2006, the current boom in housing prices is especially painful.

Mohammad Sadun, 59, a worker at the Ministry of Transportation, sold his house in the al-Doura district in 2006 for about $34,000.

“I felt al-Doura would never come back to life again and that the insurgents would control it forever,” he said.

His former house is worth about $128,000 on today’s market.

…I can live with a pretty high level of domestic discontent.

Dead yesterday, singer Lux Interior, of the great 80’s punk/psychobilly band, the Cramps.

Mahubahay Gardens, Madam Wong’s, Club 88…all one with the Snowdens of yesteryear, I guess. Tonight I can smell those places…stale beer, wafting bathroom odors, sweat, smoke. I always understood immediately the impact of the taste of madelines; it’s the senses, not the mind that jar us into our pasts.

So I’m still wrestling with the disconnect between the economy I see on the street here in Torrance – which is strained, but not broken – and the level of hysteria I see in the media (including the blogs) about our current economic turmoil. Note that I’m unemployed as I write this, yet pretty comfortably optimistic.

This isn’t about current politics (yet). I’m in favor of the steps that Bush took and that Obama seems to be taking (with some pretty serious concern about the ‘quality’ of the spend in the stimulus package). But before I get there, I am trying to orient myself.

So here’s some data, and I’d love to trigger some discussion and insight from the crowd. Basic question: is panic really the right reaction?

Here’s a table of the incidences of negative chained GDP since WWII (from NBER). When there were multiple quarters with negative GDP growth, I summed them so that the ‘incident’ had a total percent change summing all the adjacent negative quarters. Note that some of these are single-quarter, and so not officially ‘recessions’.

Note that the current downturn (although not yet done) ranks 9th of 27 incidents…here is the table sorted by the percentage depth of the decline:

And that it will have to be twice as bad as it is to be as bad as 1980, and if is three times as bad, it won’t be as bad as 1957, which I don’t recall reading about as the nadir of the American economy.

My knee-jerk reaction is that there’s a lot to be concerned about, but that the economy has a lot of deteriorating to do before it becomes devastated.

Like I always say “things are never as good as you’re told they are, nor as bad…”

So we have a 2.8Kw-rated system from Solar City. I’ve been kind of concerned, because we seem to max at an output of about .8Kwh, which seems about 40% low, from what I’ve read.

So then  I went and looked at the bills.

Here’s Dec 2007 – Jan 2008:

Total usage 856 Kwh, cost $163.88.

Then we have Dec 2008 – Jan 2009.

Total usage – 464Kwh, total cost $72.09 – plus the $76 (including tax) that the solar system costs.

This is the first month where we’ve had stable usage (we were having
work done on the house in Dec.). For grins, I looked at the Dec 2006 –
Jan 2007 usage, and it was 909Kwh.

But there are a few odd things – figure we’ve averaged 7Kwh/day for 30
days – 210Kwh in total. Subtracted from last year’s bill, that brings
us to 646Kwh. Somewhere, we picked up an extra 200Kwh during the month.

We changed 3/4 of the 60w kitchen floods (6 of 8) to 15w CF floods. But
to counterbalance, we traded a 32″ CRT TV for a 46″ plasma (figure we
watch about 6hours/week).

But while puzzled, I’m certainly happy..

I don’t usually read Jerry Pournelle’s blog; I’ve read a couple of books he’s co-authored, but haven’t been excited enough about what he puts on the blog to devote scare attention to it.

I may consider changing that…

On one of my email lists, they cited a post he did on the challenge our educational system presents to the American future – and it’s not the challenge you think it is.

“I said that to make sure you’ll stay awake for the rest of my talk.
And understand, I know Bill Gates, and he is not evil nor does he have
any bad intentions; my conclusions about him are connected to what I
believe to be the worst threat to the country.”

I won’t go into the main body of what I talked about, but my
conclusions were simple: I believe that the worst threat to the United
States is our failure adequately to educate the smartest 25% of our
students; that there are no hopeful counter trends; and the result will
be disaster. Add to that our failure to train or teach skills to the
lower half of the population, and the disaster is made worse. These
trends have related causes.

The underlying cause is our attempt to provide every public school
child with a university prep education. Bill Gates becomes involved
because his foundations promote the idea that “every American child
deserves a world class university prep education”; and the attempt to
do that insures that very few American children will receive a world
class university prep education, and most of the smarter children will
receive an education that is indifferent at best. The failure of our
schools to educate the smart kids will put the United States into a
terrible competitive position that will only get worse. We will
continue to live off our capital, both intellectual and financial.

    
That hit me pretty hard.

Last week, I went to a dinner featuring Stephen Squyers, one of the
managers of the Mars Rover program, where he presented the state of the
rovers and some cool images and video – massively cool, as a matter of
fact.

(sidebar: a surprise guest was some older, white-haired guy with a bit of a deserved swagger in his walk.)

In the discussion afterward, he was asked what – given an unlimited
budget and as a #1 national priority – he would do to further explore
Mars. he outlined an ambitious, multi-trillion dollar program to build
a long-duration base on Mars which sounded immensely attractive to me,
at least.

But I had one concern.

“Look in 1961, Kennedy had the infrastructure from World War II and the
Cold War to build on. Engineers, factories, laboratories. So dumping a
few billion into the machine to go to the Moon was adding fuel to an
existing engine. Do we have the engine today to do this, even with the
kind of funding you’re talking about? Do we have the trained talent,
not just for the top 5% of the jobs in the program, but literally at
the nuts and bolts level??“

He believed that we do.

I’m not so sure.

And while I don’t think that’s as bad as Pournelle makes it out to be, I think it’s a damn bad thing that we need to correct.

Until tonight, I really didn’t get the culture of celebrity. I grew up in Beverly Hills, hung out with the children of people who were on TV and in the movies, grew up to be interested in politics, and have met and talked with a former President, a Governor (plus I worked for one) and a dabbling of other elected officials (I negotiated with Barbara Boxer over purchasing a surplus school site when she was a County Supervisor). They’re all people, and I’ve always been a little bemused by the chest-clutching regard in which they are held by some.
Then…
…tonight I went to a dinner organized by the indefatigable Bob McBarton, at which the lead investigator (boss) of the Mars Rover program (Spirit and Opportunity) was going to talk about the current state of the rovers and the program, and Mars.
Bob took me aside as I came into the Beverly Hills steakhouse where we met. “You’ll never believe who’s going to be here,” he opened. I looked at him cooly. “Who??”
“Buzz Aldrin!!”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, really.”
I’ll admit I was kind of excited at the prospect of meeting the second man who ever walked on the moon.
Then as the group moved to sit at the large table, a jaunty, white-haired man with a leather blazer walked in and took a seat. Could it be him, I wondered? He took out an iPhone and a Blackberry and proceeded to start playing with them. Maybe…I tried to remember the pictures from the books I have at home, and drew a blank.
Then we all introduced ourselves, and yes, he was Buzz Aldrin.
I suddenly felt giddy. That man had walked on the moon. Those eyes had looked over a strange horizon and seen the Earth. Those hands had held moondust. Those feet had left footprints that I imagine every month on the full moon that I can look up and see.
Steve Squyres led a humane, intelligent, and interesting discussion of the Rover program and the state of the rovers today (including the recent problems with Spirit). And the whole time I was watching Aldrin, turning my eyes slightly to the side so I could try and measure his reaction and interest.
We took a break and I walked up, said hello, and shook his hand. I cannot think of any other time I have done that.
I was weak-kneed with fanboyhood. I Twittered and Facebooked and emailed the world. Buzz-Goddamn-Aldrin is sitting ten feet from me!! He raised his eyes from his iPhone when I asked a question!! I’ll never wash this hand again!!
Suddenly I got the impact that celebrity has on people. I was, in fact deep in the throes of it.
I wanted to walk out into the restaurant and grab the diners by their collars and shake them until they realized that the second man to ever walk on the moon was sitting at a table among them.

We all acknowledged his presence; Bob went around the room and we all told what we’d been doing in July 1969. I spent the week on my mom’s sofa, missing school, glued to the TV.
When it came to Aldrin, Bob went to skip him, but he interjected regardless: “I was out of town with two other guys.” A line he must have used a million times, delivered perfectly – level, flat, and knowingly funny.
And that showed me something about celebrity as well.

Commenting ought to be working, so please do!!

I’ve emailed all the active authors with a new password when they can use to login and then, I’d ask, create their own.

To change your password just log in, click on your name in the upper right-hand corner of the dashboard, then click on the ‘change password’ link.

If you’re still having problems, email me at blog09 at armedliberal dot com.

We had an outage last night because I didn’t do good capacity planning and we ran out of disc space (we’re still almost out, but I’ve asked for the allocation to be upped…).

As we get things sorted I’ll update this post.