Via Sullivan, writer Mike Konczal reviews economist Donald Schoup's book about parking pricing with a clear enunciation of good and bad parking schemes:
We now have two ways to distinguish changes in the provisioning of government services. On one axis, there’s who controls the provisoning and the residual – is it in public hands or private hands? On the second axis there’s how much competition and market reforms are driving the reform versus how much there’s monopolies and single firms dictating the allocation and the real reform comes through private ownership itself. Graphing these for the parking debate:
[P]eople react strongly against privatization without market competition, and there’s three good reasons why they should. There’s the matter of who ultimately controls the residual, so if there are rents captured they go to private agents as opposed to the public. If monopolists provide too little of a good at too high a price, that surplus goes to private agents, instead of recycling to taxpayers. This has huge implications for whether the initial price tag is set right, for whether the government will get too little because of crony practices or because they are liquidity-constrained, and what mechanisms are in place for reevaluating the deal at points in the future. Chances are these will all be problems, as they were in Chicago.
And now the city has to pay Morgan Stanley for street fairs...it only gets better.
I caught a mention of this on the Marketplace Open this morning, and now Gulliver has picked it up. Apparently the Department of Transportation now requires more transparency in airline price advertising:
Beginning Jan. 24, the Transportation Department will enforce a rule requiring that any advertised price for air travel include all government taxes and fees. For the last 25 years, the department has allowed airlines and travel agencies to list government-imposed fees separately, resulting in a paragraph of fine print disclaimers about charges that can add 20 percent or more to a ticket’s price.
“Requiring all mandatory charges to be included in a single advertised price will help consumers compare airfares and make it easier for them to determine the full cost of their trip,” Bill Mosley, a department spokesman, said by e-mail in response to questions about the rule.
The government and the airlines are being guarded in discussing the full-fare advertising policy, since Spirit Airlines, Allegiant and Southwest have asked the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to block the proposed change, arguing that it violates their commercial free speech rights.
Yes, I suppose the First Amendment gives people the right to lie, dissemble, exaggerate, and defraud. Oh wait—regulation of commercial speech seems well-established in the U.S. Good luck, guys.
Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see if airlines change their booking software before the 24th. If you book flights between, say, Chicago and London, on aa.com, you can find one-way fares as low as—no kidding—$86 outbound. Of course, the lowest return fare is $466 (connecting through Toronto on February 14th), and taxes add another $204.30 for a total fare of $756.30. (Part of that includes the asinine £60 ($95) tax to leave Heathrow that probably won't die before the Olympics.)
The airlines will claim, of course, that they can't calculate the taxes and fees in some cases, like departing Heathrow, because they don't know from the start whether the customer will be subject to the tax. This is a technical problem that a competent programmer can solve, I think. Let's see after the 24th whether they solve it.
Chicago's Francis Cardinal George, the highest-ranking member of the Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, apparently thinks gays are like murderous racists:
George’s initial comments came in connection with a controversy over whether next summer’s gay pride parade would interrupt morning services at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in the Lakeview neighborhood.
“Organizers (of the pride parade) invited an obvious comparison to other groups who have historically attempted to stifle the religious freedom of the Catholic Church,” the cardinal said in a statement issued Tuesday. “One such organization is the Ku Klux Klan which, well into the 1940s, paraded through American cities not only to interfere with Catholic worship but also to demonstrate that Catholics stand outside of the American consensus. It is not a precedent anyone should want to emulate.”
Cardinal, I think you're outside of the American consensus in so many ways, it really doesn't take much to demonstrate this point. However, given the KKK's history of murder, thuggery, intimidation, voter suppression, and did I mention murder?, and the Gay Pride movement's history of being murdered, being beaten in the streets, being intimidated, and did I mention being murdered?, perhaps you want to change the comparison. In fact, opposition to gay rights, murder, intimidation, and so on, is a common theme in Catholic Church history and...well...I think you can see where this is going.
Any comment from the Church?
The Air Force has released a report about a F-22 crash that killed the pilot:
Capt. Jeffey Haney had his mobility and vision restricted while flying an F-22 at 11,580 m feet and 1,925 km/h [true airspeed], at night, and then the jet cut off his oxygen supply. According to the accident report released last week, Captain Jeffrey Haney became distracted when his oxygen system stopped delivering oxygen. After initiating a descent, he allowed his F-22 to roll past inverted, unchecked. The fighter's attitude resulted in a vertical speed of 293 m/s.
According to the Air Force accident report (PDF), Haney "was recognized throughout his career for exceptional performance." On the accident flight, he was outfitted for cold weather (wore bulky clothing) and night operations (wore night vision goggles). That personal equipment would have "reduced mobility in the cockpit" and interfered with his "ability to look from side to side and down at the consoles" without bracing himself "on various areas in the cockpit." The applicable checklist for failure of the oxygen system includes activation of an emergency oxygen system. That system is actuated via a pull ring that requires 40 pounds of force to actuate and is mounted low and aft to the side of the pilot's ejection seat.
Right before the crash, Capt. Haney attempted to recover, pulling 7.4 G before slamming into the water at Mach 1.2.
The Air Force, naturally, blames the pilot, because the possibility that a $347m airplane has enormous design flaws doesn't exist in the defense appropriation universe. This continues the august tradition of military procurement that includes toy rifles that won't fire in jungles and over-reliance on GPS selective availability in UAVs.
Via Sullivan, a constitutional analysis of the Stop Online Piracy Act:
To begin with, the bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure. Based upon nothing more than an application by a federal prosecutor alleging that a foreign website is “dedicated to infringing activities,” Protect IP authorizes courts to order all U.S. Internet service providers, domain name registries, domain name registrars, and operators of domain name servers—a category that includes hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and the like—to take steps to prevent the offending site’s domain name from translating to the correct Internet protocol address.
This not only violates basic principles of due process by depriving persons of property without a fair hearing and a reasonable opportunity to be heard, it also constitutes an unconstitutional abridgement of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that governmental action suppressing speech, if taken prior to an adversary proceeding and subsequent judicial determination that the speech in question is unlawful, is a presumptively unconstitutional “prior restraint.” In other words, it is the “most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights,” permissible only in the narrowest range of circumstances. The Constitution requires a court “to make a final determination” that the material in question is unlawful “after an adversary hearing before the material is completely removed from circulation.”
(Emphasis in quoted blog post; references removed.)
I've already written to my representative in Congress; have you written to yours?
The T-Mobile acquisition is dead, dead, dead:
AT&T is ending its $39 billion bid to buy T-Mobile USA, citing fierce government objections.
"From the first day that this deal was announced, we have warned regulators, lawmakers, and consumers of the dangerous consequences of this merger," said Parul P. Desai, policy counsel for Consumers Union, according to its website The Consumerist. "Regulators clearly saw through AT&T's claims of better service and saw what we saw - a combined AT&T/T-Mobile would mean higher prices and fewer choices for consumers. It would mean a wireless market dominated by a powerful duopoly with little incentive to compete with other carriers."
In related news, Kim Jong Il is also dead, leading to the joke that god let Havel and Hitchens pick the third. (Hitch would actually be horrified by the suggestion.)
Jon Bon Jovi, however, remains alive.
I'm juggling a couple of clients today, so I can't write entire entries on any of these:
OK, back to the mines...
People in the UK travel much more by train than we in the US. Still, I think office centers at train stations would be great here:
Sitting in a proper office space after missing your train would certainly beat propping a laptop on your knees outside WH Smith as the pigeons wander round your feet. Regus has initiated a similar programme in France, where it is opening drop-in business centres in six stations, and it has plans for more developments in the Netherlands.
It sounds like a reasonable deal for business travellers—depending on the price charged for access.
Sadly, we in the US don't use rail services nearly enough to make this profitable. I can't imagine Metra spending any money on these services here in Chicago, for example, and even if they did, where would they put the office centers?