Cash for Clunkers

Cash for Clunkers is a prime example of the law of unintended consequences in action. It reduced the supply of running used cars at a time when recession-minded buyers increased the demand for used cars. Anyone understanding the simple economic principle of supply and demand could foresee an increase in used car prices as a result.

It was also a colossal waste of real assets and highly destructive to the environment.

Whoops—'Cash for Clunkers' Actually Hurt the Environment - Takepart.com

Back in 2009, President Obama’s “Cash for Clunkers” program was supposed to be a boon for the environment and the economy. During a limited time, consumers could trade in an old gas-guzzling used car for up to $4,500 cash back towards the purchase of a fuel-efficient new car. It seemed like a win for everyone: the environment, the gasping auto industry and cash-strapped consumers.

Though almost a million people poured into car dealerships eager to exchange their old jalopies for something shiny and new, recent reports indicate the entire program may have actually hurt the environment far more than it helped.

According to E Magazine, the “Clunkers” program, which is officially known as the Car Allowance Rebates System (CARS), produced tons of unnecessary waste while doing little to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The program's first mistake seems to have been its focus on car shredding, instead of car recycling. With 690,000 vehicles traded in, that's a pretty big mistake.

Other People's Money

Sooner or Later ... - Glenn Reynolds

Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money. Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be.

Technology and Global Markets

As 2012 Comes To An End, The World Has Never Been Better - Ralph Benko

In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too.

...

Let it not be thought, however, that the laws governing Hippie Capitalism are somehow kinder, gentler, or more renewable, than that of Republican Square Capitalism.  To most everyone’s surprise it turns out that the laws of economics, being laws of nature, apply to all equally.  The law of supply and demand, like the law of gravity, applies to Progressives as well as conservatives.  (This is a fact mostly unnoticed, or at least unforgiven, by Progressive policy makers.)

Some years ago, Kvistad noticed that international suppliers were beginning to sell chimes almost as good as Woodstock’s, and more cheaply. The necessary response, as it turned out, did not involve redeploying to the city dump in search of more discarded lawn chairs.  “We had always manufactured our chimes right here, near Woodstock,” Kvistad told me.  “It was very gratifying to be able to provide work to skilled artisans here in my home town.  Yet it was clear to me that if we continued to make them here we soon would be out of business and providing no jobs at all.  So I sought out and found reliable, high quality, ethical suppliers — in China and Indonesia — and… between natural workforce attrition, people moving on or moving away, and retraining my team to handle the complexities of managing an inventory built abroad, I was able not only to keep jobs here in America but to generate more highly skilled, better paying, jobs right here.  It was a positive, not a negative, sum game.  (Emphasis added.)  We also sell in Europe, Canada, and are opening up a distribution center in the UK.  All of that goes to create more American jobs.”

Kvistad’s action provides empirical proof, as if more were needed, of Tamny’s Law (named for the editor of Forbes.com Opinion who has reiterated this observation ad infinitum, and, one hopes, will continue to do so until the policy elites come to grips with reality): “Technology erases unnecessary work so that we can constantly migrate toward more productive pursuits. We destroy jobs to create better ones.”

Michael Saylor Channels Joseph Schumpeter In His Vision Of An Abundant, Cyber Future - John Tamny

Saylor writes of an agricultural revolution that was thousands of years in the making, and that smothered productivity for so much individual effort geared toward growing and finding food. The United States used to be very much an agrarian society, yet Saylor writes that agriculture workers as a percentage of the U.S. labor force today are less than 1%. Put simply, the mass destruction of farming jobs allowed for the redirection of precious human capital toward more productive, higher value work.

So while Americans were the certain beneficiaries of farming advances that freed up their labor, Saylor writes that 36.7% of the worldwide labor force is still stuck in agriculture. That sad number is about to shrink, however. As Saylor puts it, “I believe that mobile computing is the tipping point technology for the larger Information Revolution.” In our pockets in the form of smartphones is increasingly powerful software that will drive “an explosion of start-up companies that will enter markets that previously had high barriers to entry.”

Removing Fedora

I'm removing Fedora from the family desktop in favor of Ubuntu:

1. First, read the uninstall instructions from Fedora.
2. That explains that the Windows recovery disk is needed. Find that.
3. You may also need the admin password. Find that if needed. 
4. In order to avoid getting half way through and ending up with an unbootable system, insert the disk and restart the computer. At the first screen press Enter. Then press F12 to select the option to boot from the CD/DVD. If it boots from the recovery disk and everything looks good, restart the machine back to Windows.
5. Follow the Fedora uninstall instructions to start diskmgmt.msc.
6. In the Disk Management GUI, two partitions have a blank field for the File System. One is nameless with 500 MB and another is named E: with 23.11 GB.
7. Follow the instructions to delete these two partitions.
8. Use the instructions to start diskpart.
9. I followed the instructions to extend the volume for C: but got the error message:

   DiskPart failed to extend the volume.
   Please make sure the volume is valid for extending.

10. Come back to this later since it isn't absolutely required. It just wastes space.
11. Restart the machine and hit Enter at the first screen. Then press F12 to boot from an alternate device. Select the CD/DVD drive and boot to the setup utility. 
12. It's a complete mystery to me how fixmbr was completed, but after booting from the disk and looking for the right options as described, the machine successfully booted to Windows XP.
13. After booting to XP and checking that I could successfully reboot to XP without any problems, I went back into diskmgmt.msc.
14. At first I tried creating a partition from the 500 MB unallocated space and then extending that into the 23 GB space. Same error as above.
15. Then I figured out that the 23 GB region was already allocated as a partition. I deleted that partition so it became unallocated, and automatically merged with the prior 500 MB region.
16. I selected that region and created a single new E: volume using the menus in Disk Management.

Install and Set Up Ubuntu

Then install Ubuntu via Windows through the wubi download. The installer automatically located the E: volume, so I installed it there.

Then I just needed to configure the network printer.

1. Open System Settings
2. Click on Printers
3. Using all of the defaults from the menus didn't work.
4. Change the device URI to http://192.168.1.130
5. For Make and Model, click Change
6. Select Brother (forward)
7. Select Brother HL-2170W Foomatic (forward)
8. Apply the settings and print a test page.

To make Ubuntu the default OS at boot time, see these instructions.

In order to set the hostname, start a terminal and do 'sudo vi /etc/hostname'.In there, change the host name to new name. The do 'sudo vi /etc/hosts' and change the 127.0.1.1 name to the same thing.