A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Frankfort is a town in Clinton County, 50 miles or so north of Indianapolis. They have been having a series of fora on illegal immigration. Frankfort is a town with a number of problems. One of the voices suggesting illegal immigration as one of the most significant reasons for the problems is Vern Kaspar a staunch conservative and owner of Kaspar Communications which at least includes one of the area’s FM stations.

If Frankfort decides to get “tough on illegal immigration,” I guess we can use them as guinea pigs to see how significant the illegal immigration problem was to Frankfort’s overall condition. Indiana will be the control. If Frankfort suddenly gets a lot better after they “get tough,” we’ll have reason to think that was the problem. If it doesn’t, then the problem – as I suspect – isn’t primarily with illegal immigrants.

My exposure to Frankfort is primarily through its debtors in the context of my collection efforts. To me, Frankfort’s poor population seems a little more entrenched and a little shadier than a lot of the other places I go. They seem to work less frequently and seem less interested in paying off the debt than debtors in other places I go, like Tippecanoe, Benton, White, Carroll, and Montgomery counties. Though, I suppose, Cass County and Logansport gives me the same vibe as Clinton County and Frankfort. And, frankly, the Latino population does not seem any more likely to shirk its debts. If anything, they work harder to get things paid. Just one collection attorney’s perspective. Hardly scientific.

My thoughts are that a community should do what it can to control its illegal immigrant population. It should do this without targeting its legal immigrant population. And, this should be co-equal with any number of other community priorities. My sense is that, in Frankfort, illegal immigrants are a particularly visible scapegoat for some fairly amorphous and intractable problems the community has and would have even if every immigrant in town had the proper papers.

Joe Nocera, writing for the New York Times, has a column discussing the concept of a la carte pricing for cable channels. He says that an FCC study suggests that people’s cable prices would go up under a la carte pricing, even if they selected far fewer channels.

I don’t really follow the logic though.

The reason is that unmoored from the cable bundle, individual networks would have to charge vastly more money per subscriber. Under the current system, in which cable companies like Comcast pay the networks for carriage — and then pass on the cost to their customers — networks get to charge on the basis of everyone who subscribes to cable television, whether they watch the network or not. The system has the effect of generating more money than a network “deserves” based purely on viewership. Networks also get to charge more for advertising than they would if they were not part of the bundle.

Take, for instance, ESPN, which charges the highest amount of any cable network: $3 per subscriber per month. (I’m borrowing this example from a recent research note by Craig Moffett, the Sanford C. Bernstein cable analyst.) Suppose in an à la carte world, 25 percent of the nation’s cable subscribers take ESPN. If that were the case, the network would have to charge each subscriber not $3, but $12 a month to keep its revenue the same. (And don’t forget: with its $1.1 billion annual bill to the National Football League alone, ESPN is hardly in a position to tolerate declining revenues.)

What this suggests to me is that for every hard core ESPN viewer, there are 3 others who are getting charged $3 apiece under the bundled system to subsidize the hard core viewer’s reception of ESPN. (Thanks guys!) The ESPN viewer is apparently getting a $12 value for $3. But, the money is coming from somewhere. What value are these non-ESPN viewers getting for their $9? If the channels weren’t bundled, would that money otherwise go to the History channel? Are some channels getting less than they would otherwise because of the bundling?

Maybe I missed something obvious or maybe the writer failed to explain a crucial detail, but I’m not yet prepared to write off a la carte pricing as a good option for cable subscribers.

Cops: Neighbor misses dog, shoots woman

A woman who was chasing her dog was fatally shot by a neighbor after the dog ran through the neighbor’s property, police said.

Posey County Sheriff James Folz said Melinda Lindauer apparently was trying to shoot the dog, which had ventured on her property near Wadesville, about 15 miles northwest of Evansville. Instead, the bullet struck 29-year-old Nicole Stroud, who was visiting her grandmother’s home Thursday.

Stroud was pronounced dead at Deaconess Hospital in Evansville. Deputies arrested Lindauer on preliminary charges of involuntary manslaughter and reckless homicide.

Charlie Averill: Taking Back Our Economy-Part 9 What Do They Really Mean?

What they say:

“We need labor market flexibility to run a profitable business.”

What they really mean:

* We want to use temporary employees instead of permanent employees; we want to contract the work out to other companies.
* We don’t want to pay overtime.
* We want to schedule employees at the last minute and on irregular shifts. And, we want to mandate overtime.
* We don’t want to pay health care or provide defined benefit pension plans.
* In short, we don’t want any binding commitments to our employees. We want to use them as we want, when we want, and pay them what we want.
* And, most importantly, we don’t want a union or the government interfering with our doing so.

The Slacktivist has a nice post on those annoying in-line ads the Indy Star is so fond of. Among other things, if these links become the norm in online newspaper articles, that will pretty much prevent those article from ever adopting useful linking practices.

In 1620 a band of religious separatists who weren’t happy with their situation in England (Church of England) or Amsterdam or Leiden (cultural influences) departed for the New World. For some reason, they planned their trip such that they arrived in Massachusetts in December. They found land that had been cleared by a prior Indian settlement and subsequently decimated by disease — most likely smallpox — and were able to settle there during the winter.

Fortunately, a native Patuxet named Squanto who had twice been kidnapped and enslaved by Englishmen was able and willing to translate for the Pilgrims and teach them how to raise corn and catch eel. Having survived their first year by the skin of their teeth and brought in their first harvest, the Pilgrims celebrated their first Thanksgiving 386 years ago.

So, today, as you enjoy your turkey and mashed potatoes and what have you, give thanks to God and/or Squanto as your preferences dictate.