Aren Cambre's Blog

Amazing: Massachusetts lets for-profit companies advertise on its capitol!

Up close:

The Celtics and Bruins are for-profit commercial firms owned by Wycliffe Grousbeck and Jeremy Jacobs. For-profit as in the same kind of corporate entity as Exxon, Microsoft, and Citibank.

I’d love someone to do an open records request and see how much Wycliffe and Jeremy paid Massachusetts for this. I’ll bet nothing!

This appears sleazy. But what else should I expect from the state of the Kennedy dynasty and John Kerry?

(EDIT: Replaced first video with much better one.)

This video, shot from a San Francisco streetcar, is from 1906, just a few days before the San Francisco earthquake:

Note the huge numbers of pedestrians on the road, the dangerous interactions between various transportation modes, the lack of efficiency, and the layers of clothing.

I don’t know how many of those buildings survived the 1906 earthquake except–of course–the building at the end.

Here’s a similar scene today:

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…and this guy claims he has a video of the same area from 2005:

Well, kind of: “Our business now too many times is a fat kid in a t-shirt in his mother’s basement eating Cheetos and writing his blogs.” (source)

I’m not fat, I live in my own house, and I don’t eat Cheetos, but I do wear t-shirts. Oh, and my blog was the source for one of his station’s broadcasted stories.

I was interviewed by BBC World Service last night. Reporter Jeff Baird, an American BBC employee from Oregon, saw that Fark.com linked to a news article about my Texas speed trap report. Lawrence Pollard did the actual interview.

We did it over Skype. I didn’t have good equipment, so I had to put my face about 4″ from the microphone on my son’s Asus netbook. If you listen to the interview, you’ll hear disturbances in the audio. I guess I leaned too closely or breathed into it?

The Russian subway bombing prevented them from playing it in the London breakfast show, but it played a few times before their dawn.

The interview.

The full 27 minute segment I was on. (I think I am towards the end.)

This plain text belies my excitement, but this was a major high for me. I cannot believe I’ve been broadcasted on wordwide media.

I am amazed at how much media attention my speed trap article is getting (original article, follow up article).

First WFAA, Dallas, TX’s ABC affiliate interviews me.

Then a major Texas city newspaper interviews me (but as of yet hasn’t published anything).

Then I hear the Houston, TX CBS affiliate played the WFAA piece.

Then I get a call from a well-known national-scope newspaper asking for an interview. I discussed with the reporter, and we agree not to do an article for now. The reason is that my prospective doctorate research is on related subjects, and this speed trap piece is hardly serious research. I don’t want to discuss my doctorate research with anyone in the news until I have publishable data, so because of that we agreed to wait to review anything until then.

Then just now I got a call from an international radio network and am scheduled to do an interview tonight. (I’ll reveal the name if they air it.) [EDIT: It was the BBC World Service. More info and a the interview.]

Wow.

Just found this transaction on a Target receipt:

• $20 – gift for a 6 year old girl
• Crap that doesn’t matter:
  • $1.50 – gift bag that will be thrown away
  • $2.50 – card written by someone who knows neither the giver nor the recipient
  • $2.50 – tissue paper for the gift bag that will be thrown away

So in this case:

The total gift’s price was inflated by a third.

Why do we buy cards we didn’t author, tissue paper, and gift bags? Do the recipients ever care?

Above is my interview with Dallas’s WFAA channel 8, broadcast on March 23, 2010, which was about my Texas’s Worst Speed Traps article.

WFAA also talked to Keller Police Chief Mark Hafner. He disputed that Westlake is a speed trap. (Westlake contracts policing to Keller PD.) He says, “When we took over policing in 2002, Highway 114 had 3-4 fatals a year. In the last 2 years, we have not had a fatal accident on highway 114.”

I pulled all Westlake auto fatalities from 1996-2008 on a graph. Remember that Keller took over policing in 2002. Here’s the graph:

(Important note:1996-1998 really did have 0 fatalities, but no ticket data was available from the state.)

Sorry, I see no correlation. Do you? Except maybe a lack of a correlation between fatal wrecks and tickets–although I admit that you can’t draw much of a conclusion from this limited data. Plus TX-114 was recently rebuilt in the area, but I can’t find answers yet on how this affected Westlake’s portion. (EDIT 3/26/10: According to State disputes Westlake speed limit (Fort Worth Star-Telegram),TX-114 reconstruction through Westlake was completed in late 2002.)

But wait, there’s more!

Let’s narrow down Westlake fatalities just to TX 114:

1 fatality on occasional years on Westlake’s TX-114, a far cry from “3-4 fatals a year.”

We went to Alec’s school and saw his class’s drawings and stories. They were all about Kindergarten-appropriate topics. Flowers, car rides with mom, bright colors, rainbows, etc.

…except, of course, for my son, who drew death, volcanoes, fire, and hellish colors:

I was way freaking impressed.

I wrote this in response to someone who celebrated the recent Republican earmark ban proposal:

Can I offer the contrarian opinion? ;-)

Certainly bad earmarks should be stopped. Bad earmarks increase spending, are pork, or are stupid. Examples range from Alaska’s bridge to nowhere to a recent $98,440 appropriation to Granbury Historic Opera House Theater by Chet Edwards. (Why does that Democrat represent the heart of Texas???)

But there are good earmarks. “Carve out” earmarks tell agencies how to spend already-allocated funds. They give Congress a check against the same unaccountable Washington bureaucrats Rick Perry is running against. With no earmarks, a 2011-2013 Republican Congress (!!!!!?) would be hamstrung in fighting Obama administration retaliation–where Obama’s minions would likely starve the reddest districts of their fair share of federal funds.

I prefer more nuance, which is why I oppose the 2008 RPT platform’s Earmarks plank (see http://betterplatform.org/plank/earmarks). The earmark debate is among several examples of the 2008 RPT platform’s ineffectiveness. In this case, the platform micromanages details, distracting from the root problem: runaway spending. Additionally, this is among several places where the platform ignores the capitalistic concept of return on investment (ROI), wasting scarce political capital on changes that have little benefit or may make things worse.

Total earmark bans have a bad ROI. In addition to throwing out the baby with the bathwater–i.e., throwing out the good earmarks with the bad ones–they are impermanent: House rule changes just take a simple majority to overturn. So mark my words, any bans will melt within 12 months at most, and in the meantime there will be many ways to get around it.

We must focus on the real problem: out of control spending. Earmark abuse is just a symptom of the problem. If we could get the federal government in austerity (reducing spending and paying more debt), that would eliminate funds for the bad earmarks.

Something that distinguishes conservatives is willingness to roll up our sleeves and attack root problems. Liberals just attack the symptoms. The health care debate is a good example: liberals want to ram through a “quick fix”, statist approach, but conservatives advocate more permanent, longer-term, market-based solutions that are healthier but won’t have the “quick fix” immediacy.

This dichotomy is easy to understand–attacking the root problem is tough. It doesn’t produce quick results. But it has intellectual integrity, and it will produce a better solution. On the other hand, attacking the symptoms–the liberal method–assures continued political relevance because the symptoms will keep manifesting over and over and over.

So to summarize: With you, I celebrate attention to abuses. But I am concerned that this measure is political candy that goes too far and doesn’t meaningfully advance the conservative agenda. I want Republicans instead to focus on runaway spending. With meaningful fiscal reform and austerity, earmarks will take care of themselves.

EDIT: I was interviewed on Dallas’s WFAA channel 8 for this. See the video and article at Small North Texas town tops list in speeding-ticket revenue. Also see my response to the video.

Texas Municipal Wall of Shame: the 40 most prolific speed traps, ordered by total ticket revenue per citizen.

I am not certain, but I think this covers all tickets written from 2000-2008.

This was calculated from data from the Texas Office of Court Administration’s Trial Court Judicial Data Management System.