I just returned from a trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina where family tradition has us gather for Christmas every couple of years. I know they aren’t perfect, and there are not necessarily an unmitigated good, but I wanted to take a moment to appreciate our Interstate highway system. What a remarkable piece of work. That a sleep-deprived schmuck like me can barrel across a third of the continent while my family snoozes at my side is kind of breathtaking when you really stop to think about it. And I more or less take it for granted.

I’ll let Louis CK speak to this phenomenon (salty language):

Mike Kole has a pair of good posts on our evolving media and the progression of two outlets that are going from dying to dead. Newsweek is dead, and WXNT is dying.

For me, the wildcard is knowing the economics of these efforts. Are they entirely unprofitable or are the profits just lower than they have been traditionally? Kole’s description of WXNT, in particular, reminds me of the progression I’ve seen in local newspapers. They are confronted with the increasing fluidity of the Internet mediascape. And, by this, I don’t just mean that things change more quickly. I also mean that, since media has become digitized, content behaves more like a liquid than a solid. When something was fixed in a book, you had to labor to copy and/or transport it. Now, content can mostly just flow from place to place.

Confronted with this new challenge, it seems to me that newspapers have reacted in exactly the wrong way; and WXNT seems to be doing the same. Rather than focusing on the content least likely to be outsourced, they let that content go and offer the content that looks most like a commodity. They let go of the local content that requires shoe leather and effort and, instead, offer opinion, wire services, and – in WXNT’s case – nationally syndicated talk shows. (Now nationally syndicated sports shows, apparently).

The profit margins may well be better for that easy to produce, easy to obtain content in the short term. But, in the long term, you’re going to get undercut time after time with that stuff. Someone will offer it for less (or free), and margins will continue dropping. The locally produced stuff may be slower and more expensive, but it’s less replaceable. I don’t know whether you can make a profit producing that kind of content, but I have a strong suspicion it’s the only real bet for long term viability of our local papers and radio stations.

TPM had a post entitled “Tactical Reality” about the Connecticut mass murders that has had me thinking for the last couple of days. It refers to the subculture with these sort of “Red Dawn” fantasies where they will some day, soon likely, be called upon to heroically fight off the faceless terror with their weapons.

Apparently this subculture likes to use the adjective “tactical” a lot: “tactical” weapons, “tactical” scenarios, “tactical applications.” There is a tendency to deck out their weapons in “matte-black finish, laser site, flashlight mount, and other “tactical” accoutrements.”

The contributor, familiar with gun culture over recent decades, tells us that the prominence of this subculture in the overall gun culture is relatively new.

Most of the men and children (of both sexes) I met were interested in hunting, too. Almost exclusively, they used traditional hunting rifles: bolt-actions, mostly, but also a smattering of pump-action, lever-action, and (thanks primarily to Browning) semi-automatic hunting rifles. They talked about gun ownership primarily as a function of hunting; the idea of “self-defense,” while always an operative concern, never seemed to be of paramount importance. It was a factor in gun ownership – and for some sizeable minority of gun owners, it was of outsized (or of decisive) importance – but it wasn’t the factor.

They’ve constructed a reality for themselves in which the threat is imminent, and it seems as if their reality is bound to spill over into ours from time to time.

A friend of mine on Facebook made a very understandable observation about how hard the Connecticut shooting makes it to enjoy relatively mundane and insignificant but ordinarily happy events or occasions. From what I can tell about him, he’s a level-headed, clear-eyed individual, not typically given to sentimentality. Nevertheless, this one rattled him. I think it rattled everyone. I mean, a lot of the bad news you hear about you appreciate as negative on an intellectual level. But, a lot of it doesn’t slip through and hit you in the gut.

My response was that we have to try and let it go if we can. Not because of that kind of silly “if we don’t do ‘x,’ the terrorists win’ rationale that was overused after 9/11. But, because, at the end of the day, we’re tiny people on a tiny speck of rock for a comically short period of time in a soul crushingly vast universe. Any realistic perspective on the nature of the universe leads to madness or, at least, incapacitating depression.

So, we have to let our brains work their filters. Hopefully the brain lets enough of the bad stuff through for you to make rational decisions about how to go about your day and your life while letting more of the good stuff through so you can at least enjoy yourself from time to time.

The Connecticut shooting and reports that the shooter had a personality disorder but no criminal history got me thinking about Indiana’s involuntary commitment process for people with mental illnesses. I don’t have a lot of experience here but have looked at the statutes from time to time. Generally, the procedures are available at IC 12-26.

A law enforcement officer can take someone believed to be mentally ill and dangerous to a mental health facility for immediate detention. That’s good for 24 hours. If the doctor thinks there is cause to keep the individual detained, an application for emergency detention can be filed. This extends the involuntary commitment to 72 hours.

If the physician thinks the person is mentally ill and dangerous or gravely disabled, the physician is to prepare a report that will be filed with the court. The report must state the physician’s opinion that the person is mentally ill and dangerous or gravely disabled and requires continuing care and treatment. The report is filed with the court which can either release the person or order a hearing. The hearing has to take place within two days. If, after a hearing, the court agrees, a longer commitment can be ordered under IC 12-26-6 (temporary commitment – not more than 90 days) or IC 12-26-7 (longer than 90 days.)

If you think a guy is mentally ill and he’s doing things that scare you, your options are more limited if you don’t have a physician going along with your opinion that the person is dangerous. There are some protective order options in the Indiana Code, but the specific ones mainly deal with protection from family members and fears of workplace violence. Of course, the courts do have their general equitable powers. But, at the end of the day, there is always the concern that, if a guy is so mentally ill he’ll do you violence for no good reason, he might not be overly obedient to a court’s injunctive order telling him to stay off the property or whatever.

The Associated Press has an article on a study on the Toll Road deal by a government studies professor out of William & Mary.

“These transactions have important consequences for intergenerational justice because they enrich current citizens and governments at the expense of future citizens and governments by transferring future revenue to current budgets,” Gilmour states in his report.
. . .
“It is easy to see why current politicians view asset leases with up-front payments as wonderful, allowing them to spend today without raising taxes or appearing to incur debt,” Gilmour said. “In short, the ITR lease is a great deal for current residents of Indiana, but it offers little to those who will live in Indiana in future decades.”

Presumably this means that people who are now criticizing the national debt because “won’t somebody please think of the children,” were also against selling off the toll road, but that’s not quite how I remember it going down.

Whether the toll road sale was a good deal or not pretty much hinges on whether there would have been political will to raise tolls. Historically there had not been. My sense at the time was that the sale was a solution in lieu of developing that will. Aaron Renn has said that the numbers on the deal were favorable to Indiana. I trust his judgment on such things better than my own or Professor Gilmour’s.

Still, I’m philosophically against selling off public infrastructure. The way I saw it at the time:

I’m against selling off Indiana’s infrastructure. It’s just not a good idea to eat your seed corn. Mitch Daniels reminds me of one of those kids who gets set up with an annuity through a lawsuit from when they were a minor. They see an ad on daytime television from a company that will pay a lump sum purchase on the annuity. The kid is being ripped off, the company’s only paying 50% of what the annuity is worth, but he doesn’t care, he just wants a pocket full of money right now so he can buy that bitchin’ Camaro he’s had his eye on.

Another thing that caught my eye was that the AP story quotes Troy “I’ll never vote for DST” Woodruff as the INDOT chief of staff. As you might recall, Indiana owes the implementation of Daylight Saving Time to him. It passed by one vote – that vote was his; after he said he wouldn’t vote for it. It would be uncharitable of me to suspect he got taken care of after he got his arm twisted and lost his seat.

Over the weekend, I was putting together a new shelf and, for entertainment while I was doing it, fired up Netflix and turned on a Ken Burns documentary about the West from a few years ago. (Yes, Amy also razzed me for my choice of background entertainment.)

It had, as you might expect, a healthy dose of “Native Americans were here first but Europeans did not regard their claims very highly.” That is an uncomfortable topic. In the past, I thought it was uncomfortable simply because it feels a lot like you’re blaming me for the sins of my fathers. I’m supposed to feel bad, even guilty, for the bad things that happened to people 150 years ago?

But, it’s not just guilt. I don’t have a lot of patience for the shaming of white people. In the case of the Native Americans, in a lot of cases, we took it from people who had taken it from others not that long ago. But, it’s valuable to think about, I think, because it puts front and center questions about the nature of property. And I think that’s another reason we don’t like to think about it. We get uncomfortable looking under the hood and examining the nature of property. It’s something magical and fairly immutable.

But, with some exceptions, title to real estate in the U.S. originates with a grant from the United States Government. The government got it by taking it from someone else or sanctioning, after the fact, the taking the grantee had already accomplished. Property does not exist without the framework set up by the government and without its sanction. Without the legal framework, you don’t have property, you have stuff you have managed to acquire for awhile and which no one has yet taken from you.

Americans, by and large, get very uncomfortable with the idea that property is a blessing of government. We like to pretend that government is a necessary evil (sometimes not even that) and don’t like to recognize that government is a fundamental underpinning for our whole way of life. When it comes to property, you’ll get some happy talk about natural rights or being endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. But such talk is entirely inadequate for explaining why it is that the Native Americans don’t dominate the real estate market. The reason is that we alienated the hell out of their right to property and nature’s law didn’t lift a finger to stop us.

Rob Fishman, writing for Buzzfeed, has a long article on how Google killed Google Reader. The reader itself is still there, but it’s sharing functionality was taken away in October 2011 as part of Google’s disastrous Google Plus plan.

Readers of this site might remember that I used to have a “News of Interest” widget on the sidebar. Judging from the click throughs, this was a fairly popular feature. I have a bunch of news feeds aggregated through Google Reader. Back before Google disabled it, I could click a share button when I saw a news story I found more or less interesting, and the link would show up in the widget. This was an easy way for me to say “you might like this” for stories that didn’t really merit an independent blog post or about which I didn’t have a lot to say. Apparently there were related Google communities surrounding these sharing functions. (I didn’t know much about those).

In any event, it all went away with Google’s ham-fisted effort to move everyone on to a new Facebook. This was, apparently, part of a new philosophy at Google where they were trying to consolidate their products and focus their efforts. The company got huge in a fairly simple way: by having a good search engine and allowing you to use it without having to endure a bunch of screaming bells and whistles while you did. Remember the idea of a web portal? You would go to a site, maybe set it as your browser’s start page, because it had search functionality. But it would also throw out news stories, stock prices, maybe an e-mail service.

For me, these were awful because they usually took forever to load. I tended to use Altavista because it was a little lighter; then I caught wind of Google with a search box and not much else. Sooner or later everyone else in the world caught wind of it too and bailed in favor of Google as well. Meanwhile, Google kept rolling out great products you could use in addition to the search page if you wanted – maps, reader, scholar, earth. None of them seemed to get in the way of the other, so you could take a sort of a la carte approach.

The Google Reader – Google Plus stunt, however, showed a more humorless side of the company and a darker approach to things. Instead of continuing with its organic approach to product development, the company broke a product people liked in order to impose its will that they move to Google Plus.

I have long been neglectful of Prof. Larry DeBoer’s (Everybody’s Favorite Economist ™) Capital Comments. November’s installment explains the “fiscal cliff” and why going over it is a bad idea.

Come Jan. 1, the Bush-era tax cuts expire, so everyone’s tax rates will increase. The two-year cut in the Social Security payroll tax will expire, raising taxes some more. The Alternative Minimum Tax won’t be adjusted for inflation, so millions of people will see their taxes rise still more. Automatic spending cuts will kick in, reducing both defense and entitlement spending. Extended unemployment insurance will expire; so two million people will lose benefits. And Medicare payment rates to doctors will be cut.

All told, it yanks about $500 billion out of the economy. That’s bad. But it cuts the deficit, that’s good, right? Well, yes, but it’s a matter of competing priorities. Pick you poison – slow or receding economy on the one hand or large deficits on the other. Right now, the deficits are the lesser poison because there is a lot of idle capacity in the economy. Demand created by the government isn’t pushing out or competing much with private sector demand so, at the moment, printed money isn’t driving inflation. In fact, interest rates are very low.

Yank the deficit money out of the economy, and businesses will have less reason to produce goods and services, will cut production, and you probably end up in vicious circle territory.

It’s a nasty choice: recession and unemployment now, or high interest rates, inflation and slower growth later.

DeBoer recommends coming up with a plan now that tackles deficits when the economy has recovered, not while it’s in the process of recovery.