Government – Page 103 – artdiamondblog.com

Unintended Consequences of the Government’s Pushing Ethanol

Source of graphs: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) Shopping at a Whole Foods Market in suburban Chicago, Meredith Estes said food prices have jumped so much she has resorted to coupons. Charles T. Rodgers Jr., an Arkansas cattle rancher, said normal feed rations so expensive and scarce he is scrambling for alternatives. In Oregon, Jack Joyce, the owner of Rogue Ales, said the cost of barley malt has soared 88 percent this year.

For years, cheap food and feed were taken for granted in the United States.
But now the price of some foods is rising sharply, and from the corridors of Washington to the aisles of neighborhood supermarkets, a blame alert is under way.
Among the favorite targets is ethanol, especially for food manufacturers and livestock farmers who seethe at government mandates for ethanol production. The ethanol boom, they contend, is raising corn prices, driving up the cost of producing dairy products and meat, and causing farmers to plant so much corn as to crowd out other crops.
The results are working their way through the marketplace, in this view, with overall consumer grocery costs up roughly 5 percent in a year and feed costs up more than 20 percent.
Now, with Congress poised to adopt a new mandate that would double the volume of ethanol made from corn, ethanol skeptics say a fateful moment has arrived, with the nation about to commit itself to decades of competition between food and fuel for the use (p. C4) of agricultural land.
(p. C4) “This is like a runaway freight train,” said Scott Faber, a lobbyist for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, who complained that ethanol has the same “magical effect” on politicians as the tooth fairy and Santa Claus have on children. “It’s great news for corn farmers, but terrible news for consumers.”
. . .
The price increases for corn have had a broad impact, both because farmers are planting more corn and less of other crops and because livestock producers are scrambling for feed substitutes. For instance, soybeans acreage planted this year was about 16 percent less than in 2006.
Feed costs have increased 25 to 30 percent in the last year, according to David Fairfield, director of feed services at the National Grain and Feed Association. He attributed virtually all of the increase to the demands of the ethanol industry
One consequence of the higher feed costs is rising competition for malt barley between livestock farmers, who want it for feed, and brewers, who need it for beer. Mr. Joyce, the Rogue Ales owner in Newport, Ore., said he has been forced to raise prices to pay for the additional costs of ingredients.
Mr. Rodgers, the Rison, Ark., rancher, said he used to feed his cattle a mixture of corn gluten and soybean hulls. But he said he cannot get corn gluten anymore, and the cost of soybean hulls has risen to $150 a ton from about $105 a ton.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW MARTIN. “The Price of Growing Fuel.” The New York Times (Tues., December 18, 2007): C1 & C4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Jack Joyce, the owner of Rogue Ales in Newport, Ore., says the cost of barley has skyrocketed, forcing him to raise prices.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Incentives Matter: Capital Punishment Deters Murders

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ commentary quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Recent high-profile events have reopened the debate about the value of capital punishment in a just society. This is an important discussion, because the taking of a human life is always a serious matter.
Most commentators who oppose capital punishment assert that an execution has no deterrent effect on future crimes. Recent evidence, however, suggests that the death penalty, when carried out, has an enormous deterrent effect on the number of murders. More precisely, our recent research shows that each execution carried out is correlated with about 74 fewer murders the following year.
For any society concerned about human life, that type of evidence is something that should be taken very seriously.
The study examined the relationship between the number of executions and the number of murders in the U.S. for the 26-year period from 1979 to 2004, using data from publicly available FBI sources. The chart nearby shows the number of executions and murders by year.

For the full commentary, see:
ROY D. ADLER and MICHAEL SUMMERS. “Capital Punishment Works.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., November 2, 2007): A13.

Britain’s “Novel Immigration Problem”: Too Few Polish Immigrants

“Polish women selling sausages at the Borough Market in London. The British have also grown to enjoy Polish food.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the International Herald Tribune version of the article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) LONDON, Oct. 18 — When Piotr Farbiszewski landed here three years ago, he had enough money in his pocket to live for two weeks.
A successful technology consultant in Warsaw, he and his wife, Ela, a schoolteacher, had come to London to try it on for size; if they liked it, they would stay. To earn money, he worked as a builder while she flipped hamburgers.
They decided that they liked London, and within a year, Mr. Farbiszewski was a senior programmer at a software company. In March, the couple bought a small terraced house outside London, where they plan to raise a family.
“We’re very happy here,” Mr. Farbiszewski, 31, said. “The quality of life is better, the economy is stronger, there is less bureaucracy, it’s a multicultural society and the lady in the supermarket will smile at me. People don’t smile at each other in Poland.”
The Farbiszewskis are small players in one of Europe’s most successful immigration stories. Since Poland joined the European Union in 2004 and Britain, unlike France and most other members, welcomed Polish workers, an estimated 1.1 million Poles, mainly young, have come to Britain. Today, they are the third-largest group of immigrants in the country, behind (p. C5) Irish and Indians.
Britain has benefited. On Tuesday, the Home Office estimated that immigration added £6 billion ($12.3 billion) to the nation’s economy last year. According to David Blanchflower of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, East European immigration has also reduced inflation pressure by increasing the supply of goods and services.
Indeed, Britain may soon face a novel immigration problem. As Poland’s economy has improved this year, immigration has slowed, which economists say could cause labor shortages in British industries.

For the full story, see:
JULIA WERDIGIER. “As the Poles Get Richer, Fewer Seek British Jobs.” The New York Times (Fri., October 19, 2007): C1 & C5.

The Government’s War on Working Bodega Cats

“Holly scares the rodents away at home, a deli in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A28) Across the city, delis and bodegas are a familiar and vital part of the streetscape, modest places where customers can pick up necessities, a container of milk, a can of soup, a loaf of bread.
Amid the goods found in the stores, there is one thing that many owners and employees say they cannot do without: their cats. And it goes beyond cuddly companionship. These cats are workers, tireless and enthusiastic hunters of unwanted vermin, and they typically do a far better job than exterminators and poisons.
When a bodega cat is on the prowl, workers say, rats and mice vanish.
. . .
To store owners, the services of cats are indispensable in a city where the rodent problem is serious enough to be documented in a still popular two-minute video clip on YouTube from late February (youtube.com/watch?v=su0U37w2tws) of rats running amok in a KFC/Taco Bell in Greenwich Village. Store-dwelling cats are so common that there is a Web site, workingclasscats.com, dedicated to telling their tales.
But as efficient as the cats may be, their presence in stores can lead to legal trouble. The city’s health code and state law forbid animals in places where food or beverages are sold for human consumption. Fines range from $300 for a first offense to $2,000 or higher for subsequent offenses.
. . .
In October, a health inspector fined Mr. Martinez $300 and warned him that if Junior was still there by the time of the next inspection he would be fined $2,000.
“He wants me to get rid of the cat, but the rats will take over if I do,” Mr. Martinez said. “I need the cat, and the cat needs a home.”
Because stores do not get advance notification of an inspection, Mr. Martinez is trying to keep Junior in his office as much as possible. Many bodega owners reason that a cat is less of a health threat than an army of nibbling rats. “If cats live in homes and apartments where people have food, a cat shouldn’t be a threat in a store if it’s well maintained,” Mr. Fernández said.

For the full story, see:
KATE HAMMER. “To Dismay Of Inspectors, Prowling Cats Keep Rodents On the Run At City Delis The New York Times (Fri., December 21, 2007): A28.
(Note: ellipses added.)
“Oreo roams at a deli in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

“Public Works Will Just Keep Going Round and Round and Round”

“Environmentalists like Takuo Sugisawa say that restoring bends to the Kushiro actually might cause more damage.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A4) KUSHIRO, Japan — In the early 1980s, engineers straightened out stretches of the Kushiro River, which had meandered some 100 miles under Hokkaido’s big sky here in northern Japan, flowing through green hill country and rural towns, winding through the nation’s largest wetland and this port city’s downtown before emptying into the Pacific Ocean.
Later in November, work is to start again. But this time bulldozers will be moving earth to put curves back in a stretch of the river that had been straightened out, restoring its original, sinuous, shape.
. . .
. . . Trust Sarun Kushiro, a private environmental group that was a member of the committee that endorsed the project but voted against it, said that the reshaping would have little positive effect and that the construction itself would harm the environment. Stanching the flow of sediments from farmland and forests upstream, at their source, is more important, it argued.
And in a case of the left hand’s not knowing what the right hand was stirring up, the Ministry of Agriculture had a project farther upriver that was sending mud and sand downstream, where Mr. Yoshimura’s ministry is to curve the river, said Takuo Sugisawa, 61, the trust’s secretary general. To rehabilitate farmland that had gradually become wetland, the ministry was draining existing land and moving earth there.
“The sediments flowing from upriver will quickly pile up where the river will be curved,” Mr. Sugisawa said, adding that they would eventually bury the Kushiro wetland. To prevent that, workers will eventually have to remove the sediments that are bound to pile up in the recurved stretch, he said.
“So in the name of river management alone, they will be able once again to create public works in the form of removing soil,” he said, walking along an asphalt road and across a bridge built to let trucks and bulldozers move earth for the curving project. “Public works will just keep going round and round and round.”

For the full story, see:
NORIMITSU ONISHI. “KUSHIRO JOURNAL; Forced to Run Straight, a River Must Now Twist.” The New York Times (Weds., November 7, 2007): A4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
A part of the Kushiro River where curves will be added back. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Source of map: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Private Airlines “Are Pulling Along a Slow-Moving Government Agency”

"Delta Air Lines uses G.P.S. technology to reduce the time its planes spend on the runway." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 — At Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Delta Air Lines said its jets take off an average of 10 minutes after pushing back from the gate — three minutes faster than in previous years.

Using new technology, planes take off following a narrow route, so that that jets right behind them taking different routes do not have to wait as long. That makes the system move a bit faster.

“The pilots say, ‘Wow, this is kind of neat,’ ” said Joseph C. Kolshak, executive vice president for operations at Delta.

Delta, and also Alaska Airlines and U.P.S., is demonstrating pieces of the possible future of the nation’s air traffic system, hinting at what aviation might be like — if the airlines and the federal government can get the details worked out.

All three airlines use refinements based on the constellation of G.P.S., or global positioning system, satellites. Many of these save at most a few minutes. But in a crowded system plagued by delays, that may be enough to help smooth out bottlenecks.

The carriers’ use of satellite navigation and other tools and techniques represents a step toward replacing a 50-year-old system of radar and radio beacons.

In the process, they are pulling along a slow-moving government agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, that is eager for better air traffic control systems but short on money and the authority to put changes in place.

It is a revolution in technology, but also in politics. Previously, the F.A.A. usually bought new systems on the ground and told airlines to equip themselves to use them; now the airlines are taking the initiative to outfit their planes, with safety regulation from the F.A.A.

Airlines are even developing their own approach patterns for airports, which has almost always been a government job.

U.P.S. Airlines, working with Aviation Communications and Surveillance Systems, based in Phoenix, is developing a landing pattern based on separating planes by time, not distance, so they land at the briefest safe interval.

“We’re going to create the future, because we think we know (p. C5) where it’s going to go,” said Karen Lee, director of operations at U.P.S. This is in contrast to the traditional way of doing business, typified by “the F.A.A. tells us what the roadmap is,” she said, then “we’ll start building the stuff to do it.”

For the full story, see:

MATTHEW L. WALD. "For Airlines, Hands-On Air Traffic Control." The New York Times (Weds., September 5, 2007): C1 & C5.

"A device that U.P.S. installed in the cockpit of one of its cargo planes to display traffic information." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Fraternal Odd Fellows Helped Each Other Without Depending on the Government

The officers’ banquet of the annual convention of the Sovereign Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. Source of the photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Before the New Deal and the Great Society, voluntary mutual assistance organizations provided insurance and help in the face of life’s setbacks. One such fraternal orgainization was the Odd Fellows.

(p. 12) Since his installation as top Odd Fellow, Mr. Robbins has warned that this order, dedicated to caring for the widowed, the orphaned and the needy, is in a “state of crisis.” Members are dying by the thousands, local lodges are closing by the dozens, and actual participation among the 289,000 members is dropping. If the people sitting before him do not heed his call to replenish the ranks, they will be the Odd Men and Women Out — defunct, extinct, done.

“Unless we can do something to turn the membership losses into significant gains in the next couple of years,” he says later, “we may be at a point where we can’t recover.”

Once we were a nation of joiners, and so many joined the Odd Fellows, a fraternal organization whose name stems from an English journalist’s observation in 1745. He found it “odd” to see “fellows,” rather than the aristocracy, helping widows, orphans and one another. The name stuck, oddly.

In many communities, you can still find an old I.O.O.F. building, a place of some mystery, where the rituals would include acting out the story of the Good Samaritan. Members were to apply that story to real life by aiding their brothers and sisters, chipping in to pay burial costs, for example. You merely had to express belief in one Creator to be eligible; atheists and pantheists need not apply.

Odd Fellows tended to frown on alcohol, loved bestowing medals on one another, and reveled in seeing their sword-carrying, uniformed brothers, the chevaliers of the Patriarchs Militant, march in Main Street parades. In their small worlds, Odd Fellows mattered.

Then came social changes to dull the appeal of fraternal organizations. Tighter government regulations forced the Odd Fellows out of their signature cause, orphanages, while baby boomers found all the pomp and secrecy to be, um, silly.

. . .

A toast then, to all national leaders of the world, as is Odd Fellows custom. Another toast, to all fraternal leaders of the world. Dinner, remarks, benediction, recessional to the strains of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Odd Fellows and Rebekahs everywhere, good night.

For the full story, see:

DAN BARRY. "A Grand Gathering, but One With a Solemn Note." The New York Times, Main Section (Sunday, August 26, 2007): 12.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

"The Independent Order of Odd Fellows, dedicated to caring for the widowed, the orphaned and the needy, is in a “state of crisis.”" Source of the photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Government Biologists Spend Big Bucks Protecting Wrong Fish

“Without DNA tests, the rare greenback cutthroat trout, left, and the Colorado River cutthroat fish are difficult to tell apart.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 26) DENVER, Oct. 13 (AP) — State and federal biologists, who are smarting from research showing that they may have been protecting the wrong fish the past 20 years, are regrouping in their efforts to restore the rare greenback cutthroat trout to Colorado waters.

Tom Nesler, the state biologist, had hoped to see the fish removed from the endangered species list during his career. He concedes that might not happen if it turns out some of the greenback populations biologists thought they were saving are actually the similar but more common Colorado River cutthroat trout.

A three-year study led by University of Colorado researchers and published in August found that out of nine fish populations believed to be descendants of original greenbacks, five were actually Colorado River cutthroat trout.

The recovery effort was thought to be near its goal of establishing 20 self-sustaining greenback populations.

“Hey, science happens,” said Mr. Nesler with a shrug as he discussed the findings.

. . .

The Colorado Division of Wildlife has spent an average of $320,000 annually for the past five years to restore the greenback. Most of the money has come from state lottery revenue; no state tax dollars have been used.

. . .

“Science is not about proof and certainty,” he said, “it’s about testable hypotheses.”

For the full story, see:

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. “After Possible ‘Oops,’ a Trout Rescue Project Regroups.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., October 14, 2007): 26.

(Note: ellipses added.)

High-Tech Meters Increase Parking Efficiency

"Fred Mitschele with his high-tech meter." Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Hight-tech parking meters like the ones described in the article quoted below, could be used to make real-time changes in parking prices. Higher rates during busier periods, would assure available spaces, which would reduce wasted time searching for parking spaces, thereby reducing congestion, and pollution.

(p. 14) If drivers want to use cash, the meters, which connect to a wireless network, can send text messages to the drivers’ cellphones to remind them to add more money.

The meters also communicate with traffic officials who can track which meters are being used and which ones need to be ticketed and serviced. To ensure that drivers do not skip out without paying, sensors the size of hockey pucks buried in the asphalt detect when cars pull in. A camera inside the meter takes pictures of license plates to help with enforcement.

. . .

The meters are just one example of how telecommunications are increasingly being integrated into toll and fee collection. E-ZPass, for instance, relies on radio frequency tags, cameras and networks to transmit data.

For the full story, see:

KEN BELSON. "MOTORING; Wait a Minute. My Parking Meter Is Calling." The New York Times, SportsSunday Section (Sun., September 9, 2007): 14.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

Chinese Price Ceilings on Diesel Fuel Cause Shortages

“Looking for usable coal at a cinder dump in Shanxi Province in China. Inadequate coal in the north limited power production.” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.
The article quoted below uses the word “tariff” in the sense of “price.”

(p. C4) HONG KONG — The Chinese government issued an “urgent notice” on Wednesday to the country’s power generators, coal companies and railways to address an electricity shortage that has led to rationing in more than a third of China’s provinces in recent weeks.
The rationing, mostly achieved by telling factories that their power will be shut off for a day or two each week, coincides with the annual frenzy of factory production to meet orders before shutting down for the Chinese New Year holidays, which fall in early February this year.
. . .
Power executives and government statements attributed the electricity shortfall this winter to a confluence of problems. Many of the problems appear to have their roots in the government’s imposition of a long list of price controls in recent months in an attempt to tamp down inflation, which reached 6.9 percent at the consumer level in November.
Trucks did not deliver adequate coal stockpiles to power plants before winter snows arrived in northern China, partly because of nationwide diesel shortages. Refiners had cut back on the production of diesel because price controls were forcing them to sell the diesel for slightly less than the cost of the crude oil needed to make it.
. . .
Low electricity tariffs, particularly for residential users, have been another problem.
The central government issued an official “suggestion” to provincial governments last fall that they not allow increases in electricity tariffs charged to customers, as part of national price controls.
Provincial governments have responded by freezing tariffs, and even reducing them in the case of Guangdong Province in southeastern China, the home of much of the country’s export-oriented light industry.
The low tariffs have made it uneconomical for oil-fired plants to operate, and many have stopped doing so.
“It makes absolutely no sense for anyone to run a diesel- or oil-fired plant. They’re all shut down,” said a power company executive in China who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of commenting on regulatory policies.
The executive added that even when ordered by the government to resume operating at a loss, many state-owned oil-fired plants had not done so, scheduling maintenance and repairs instead.

For the full story, see:
KEITH BRADSHER. “Pinched by Price Controls, Power Plants in China Scale Back.” The New York Times (Thurs., January 24, 2008): C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)