Nebraska – Page 7 – artdiamondblog.com

UNO Economics Students Embrace Entrepreneurship

“The company was founded with the thought that a recession would happen,” said Grant Stanley, founder of marketing analytics firm Contemporary Analysis.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

Grant was a student in my Economics of Technology and Economics of Entrepreneurship classes; Tadd was a student in my Honors Colloquium on Creative Destruction; Luis was a student in my Principle of Economics–Micro class. They have chosen an exciting path, and I wish them well!

(p. 1D) Grant Stanley was studying economics at the University of Nebraska at Omaha last year when he identified a business opportunity in the deteriorating economy.

A company making use of econometrics – a field that combines math, statistics and economics – could help small and midsize businesses make decisions in areas such as hiring, and sales and marketing techniques. Econometrics is widely used in education, government and large companies, Stanley said, but usually isn’t applied to smaller businesses.

Stanley thought the need for business forecasting and marketing analytics firms would grow as companies looked for help developing long-term strategies in order to survive an economic downturn.

So Stanley, who was only 20 years old at the time, started Contemporary Analysis, a marketing analytics firm, in March 2008.

“The company was founded with the thought that a recession would happen.”

Stanley courted classmate Tadd Wood, who also was 20 and studying economics, to help start the business, but it wasn’t an easy task. Wood already had a part-time job and was helping out in his family’s business.

“Tadd took months of, ‘Hey, want to hang out?'” before he agreed, Stanley said.

The young men met their third partner – Luis Lopez, 20 – through a friend over the summer, and the trio hit the ground running.

For the full story, see:
STEFANIE MONGE. “Pitching a startup in a downturn.” Omaha World-Herald (Monday, February 2, 2009): 1D & 3D.

“Members of the Contemporary Analysis team at a conference table in the home of Paddy Tarlton. From left are Luis Lopez, Nancy Jimenez, Grant Stanley, Tarlton and Tadd Wood.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited above.

How to Run a Business in Nebraska

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ book review quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) How exactly did Jack get to be so wild? It appears — and even the redoubtable Mr. Rottenberg acknowledges that the documentation is often sparse — that Jack got into the freight-hauling business and one thing led to another, including stage coaching, supervising the mails and helping to run the Pony Express. In his heyday, Slade was the boss of the Express’s fabled Sweetwater division, said to be the most dangerous stretch of the overland route, from Nebraska to Salt Lake City, 500 hard miles of hard country, hard men, hard weather and unfriendly Indians. One chronicler noted about Slade that “from Fort Kearney, west, he was feared a great deal more than the Almighty.”

Freight hauling was not the space program. A man could get into this line of work easily if he had the physical stamina and the nerve. But it was dangerous work. A man might run into some rough customers. Perhaps the most celebrated of these, in Slade’s case, was an ornery French-Canadian named Jules Beni, with whom he had a long-standing feud. Jules eventually shot Slade, in 1860, riddling him with bullets and leaving him for dead. But Slade was made of tougher stuff and would settle the score. A year later he killed Beni and carried the dead man’s ears around as a souvenir, pulling them out for display from time to time to the alarm of fellow saloon patrons. A previous account of Slade’s life was in fact titled “An Ear in His Pocket.” Now that’s a bad man!

For the full review, see:
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT. “BOOKShelf; A Desperado Rides Again.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., NOVEMBER 11, 2008): A15.

Reference to the book being reviewed:
Rottenberg, Dan. Death of a Gunfighter. Westholme Publishing, 2008.

Government Regulation Kills the River City Star

We enjoyed several cruises on the River City Star over the past many years. Apparently no more.
It is silly to think that Homeland Security regulations can make us significantly safer when traveling on the River City Star.
I judge the risks as small, and the best way to prepare for whatever risks there are, would be to take the sorts of steps advocated by Amanda Ripley in her book The Unthinkable. One of the main lessons of her book is that it is not primarily government regulations and professionals that make us safer, but the alertness and preparation of regular people.
Maybe Homeland Security disagrees with my assessment of the risks. But who are they to tell me what risks I am not permitted to take? (That’s what they are in effect doing when they increase the costs of sailing the River City Star to the point that it is turned into a non-sailing restaurant.)

(p. 1B) The River City Star will make its final voyage Thursday to a new home in Plattsmouth, where it will become a floating restaurant. Two new riverboats will replace it along Omaha’s riverfront.
The Star, previously called the Belle of Brownville, operated as an excursion boat for cruises for more than 40 years.
Larry Richling, the boat’s most recent owner, said he decided to sell the boat because federal regulations for boats capable of carrying more than 300 passengers became too costly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The smaller boats, each with a capacity of 149 passengers, fall in a different category with fewer regulations, he said, and will be cheaper to operate.
. . .
(p. 2B) “There’s nothing wrong with the boat. The boat is in fantastic condition,” Richling said.
Richling said he would have had to invest at least $500,000 in the River City Star to meet Homeland Security Department requirements, but those requirements won’t apply if it is permanently docked.

For the full story, see:
CHRISTINE LAUE. “River City Star Going South; Boat Will Become a Plattsmouth Restaurant.” Omaha World-Herald (Thursday, December 4, 2008): 1B-2B.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the title was: “River City Star Making Final Voyage.”)

Obama Has Doubts About Justice of Current ‘Affirmative Action’ Laws

“Barack Obama at Harvard, where he was the first black president of The Harvard Law Review.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) Mr. Obama, a Democrat, has continued to support race-based affirmative action, calling it “absolutely necessary” when he was a state senator in Illinois and criticizing the Supreme Court for curtailing it in his time in the United States Senate. But in his presidential campaign, he has unsettled some black supporters by focusing increasingly on class and suggesting that poor whites should at times be given preference over more privileged blacks.

His ruminations about shifting the balance between race and class in some affirmative action programs raise the possibility that, if elected in November, he might foster a deeper national (p. 16) conversation about an issue that has been fiercely debated for decades. He declined to comment for this article.
“We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren’t getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more,” Mr. Obama said last week in a question-and-answer session at a convention of minority journalists in Chicago.
During a presidential debate in April, Mr. Obama said his two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, “who have had a pretty good deal” in life, should not benefit from affirmative action when they apply to college, particularly if they were competing for admission with poor white students.
. . .
Ward Connerly, a crusader against affirmative action, said he believed that Mr. Obama’s remarks would buoy support for his ballot initiatives in Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska in November that would ban preferential treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity and sex in government hiring and public education.
Last week, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, Senator John McCain, announced his support for those measures. . . .
Mr. Obama opposes the ballot initiatives, saying they would derail efforts to break down barriers for women and members of minorities. But Mr. Connerly said Mr. Obama had already helped the cause. “He’s advanced the debate,” Mr. Connerly said. “He’s brought it to a new level.”
. . .
A federal judge once asked a friend of Mr. Obama’s whether he had been “elected on the merits” as law review president, Mr. Obama told The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education in 2001. He said the question came up again when he applied for a job as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
Mr. Obama has not described how he felt then. But as a state senator, he spoke with empathy about accomplished minority students at elite universities who sometimes lived “under a cloud they could not erase.”
Over the past few years, Mr. Obama has also voiced sympathy for whites who feel resentful of race-based affirmative action and questioned how long such programs need to continue.
Even as he argued that timetables for minority hiring may be necessary where there is evidence of systemic discrimination, he also warned in his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” that “white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America.”
It was 2006 then, and Mr. Obama was a wealthy senator considering a bid for the presidency. He worried that race-based preferences, while necessary, might undermine efforts at building cross-racial coalitions.
Presaging his recent focus on class, Mr. Obama argued that whites were more likely to join blacks in supporting programs that were not racially based.
“An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific programs isn’t just good policy,” Mr. Obama said in his book. “It’s good politics.”

For the full story, see:
RACHEL L. SWARNS. “Obama’s Path on Preferences, Race and Class .” The New York Times, Section 1 (Sun., August 3, 2008): 1 & 16.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version has minor differences with the print version; the online version is quoted here, except for the article title. The online article title was: “If Elected … Delicate Obama Path on Class and Race Preferences.” The ellipisis in the online title was in the original.)

Supporters of Racial Discrimination Fear Allowing People to Vote

(p. A9) A total of 24 states allow voters to change laws on their own by collecting signatures and putting initiatives on the ballot. It’s healthy that the entrenched political class should face some real legislative competition from initiative-toting citizens. Unfortunately, some special interests have declared war on the initiative process, using tactics ranging from restrictive laws to outright thuggery.

The initiative is a reform born out of the Progressive Era, when there was general agreement that powerful interests had too much influence over legislators. It was adopted by most states in the Midwest and West, including Ohio and California. It was largely rejected by Eastern states, which were dominated by political machines, and in the South, where Jim Crow legislators feared giving more power to ordinary people.
But more power to ordinary people remains unpopular in some quarters, and nothing illustrates the war on the initiative more than the reaction to Ward Connerly’s measures to ban racial quotas and preferences. The former University of California regent has convinced three liberal states — California, Washington and Michigan — to approve race-neutral government policies in public hiring, contracting and university admissions. He also prodded Florida lawmakers into passing such a law. This year his American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) aimed to make the ballot in five more states. But thanks to strong-arm tactics, the initiative has only made the ballot in Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska.
“The key to defeating the initiative is to keep it off the ballot in the first place,” says Donna Stern, Midwest director for the Detroit-based By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). “That’s the only way we’re going to win.” Her group’s name certainly describes the tactics that are being used to thwart Mr. Connerly.
Aggressive legal challenges have bordered on the absurd, going so far as to claim that a blank line on one petition was a “duplicate” of another blank line on another petition and thus evidence of fraud. In Missouri, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan completely rewrote the initiative’s ballot summary to portray it in a negative light. By the time courts ruled she had overstepped her authority, there wasn’t enough time to collect sufficient signatures.
Those who did circulate petitions faced bizarre obstacles. In Kansas City, a petitioner was arrested for collecting signatures outside of a public library. Officials finally allowed petitioners a table inside the library but forbade them to talk. In Nebraska, a group in favor of racial preferences ran a radio ad that warned that those who signed the “deceptive” petition “could be at risk for identity theft, robbery, and much worse.”
Mr. Connerly says that it’s ironic that those who claim to believe in “people power” want to keep people from voting on his proposal: “Their tactics challenge the legitimacy of our system.”

For the full commentary, see:
JOHN FUND. “The Far Left’s War on Direct Democracy.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 26, 2008): A9.

University of Nebraska Foundation Contributes to Racial Discrimination

Some of us believe that the government should not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or religion. Unfortunately, governments in the past and present have sometimes mandated or practiced discrimination. Examples from the past would include the Jim Crow laws that mandated racial discrimination against Afro-Americans.
A present example would be the mis-named “affirmative action” laws that mandate racial discrimination against whites.
In the article quoted below, note who has taken a stand on which side of this issue.
Is it appropriate for the University of Nebraska Foundation to be donating $25,000 to support the continuation of racial discrimination?
Note also the opposing positions of two 2006 Republican candidates for Senate: David Kramer is leading the drive to continue racial discrimination, while Pete Ricketts is contributing to ending racial discrimination.

(p. 1A) LINCOLN — Leaders of the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative called their anti-affirmative-action push one of the most successful petition drives in recent state history. But it’s not yet known whether their proposed ban will go before voters in November.

“The citizens demand the opportunity to vote on the use of race and gender preferences and discrimination in state hiring, state contracts and state education,” said Marc Schniederjans, treasurer of the group that said it submitted more than 167,000 signatures Thursday.
. . .
David Kramer, spokesman for the opposition group Nebraskans United, said he wasn’t disheartened by the number of petition signatures or over the prospect that petition organizers said they planned to submit more signatures today.
. . .
(p. 2A) Connerly’s American Civil Rights Coalition provided $370,750 of the $467,250 raised by the Nebraska petition group as of June 25. According to state records, the next largest donors were Paul Singer, a New York businessman, $50,000; William Grewcock, a former executive with Peter Kiewit Sons Inc., $25,000; and failed GOP U.S. Senate candidate Pete Ricketts, $25,000.
For Nebraskans United, the largest donations toward that group’s $308,167 war chest have come from Omaha billionaire Warren Buffett, $50,000; philanthropist Richard Holland, $50,000; Dianne Lozier, Lozier corporate counsel, $50,000; Wallace Weitz, president of an Omaha-based mutual fund management company, $50,000; the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, $36,250; the University of Nebraska Foundation, $25,000; and the Nebraska State Education Association, $25,000.

For the full story, see:

MARTHA STODDARD. “Petitions Turned In; Fight Far from Over.” Omaha World-Herald (Fri., July 4, 2008): 1A-2A.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online title of the article is “Anti-affirmative-action petitions turned in; verifying to begin.”)

Federal Subsidies for “Those Who Choose to Live Far from a City”

Source of graphic: the online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1A) WASHINGTON — Opponents of federal air travel subsidies make two points: that subsidized airports are relatively close to regular commercial air service and subsidized flights are used by only a few people a day.
Both are true in Nebraska.
For example, U.S. taxpayers spend nearly $1.4 million a year so that fewer than two dozen travelers a day, on average, can fly out of Grand Island rather than drive the 100 miles to Lincoln.
Taxpayers also chip in $748,635 annually to maintain two daily flights from Alliance to Denver, even though only about a half dozen people a day board the planes.
. . .
(p. 2A) Groups such as Taxpayers for Common Sense and Citizens Against Government Waste say that although the subsidies might have made sense 30 years ago, to prevent communities from losing air service overnight, people know what they’re getting into today if they choose to live far from a city with regular air service.
It’s a matter of prioritizing public spending, said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
“People have the right to food and clean water,” Ellis said. “We don’t need to make sure it’s a chicken in every pot and air service in every community.”

For the full story, see:
JOSEPH MORTON. “Rural travel subsidies still up in the air.” Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, February 24, 2008): 1A & 2A.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Federal spending on Essential Air Service
——————————————————————————–
Year   # of communities    Total funding for subsidies *
1998   101   $50
1999   100   $50
2000   106   $50
2001   115   $50
2002   123   $113
2003   126   $101.3
2004   140   $101.7
2005   146   $101.6
2006   151   $109.4
2007   145   $109.4
2008   142   $125
*Figures in millions
Source of data: Government Accountability Office; U.S. Department of Transportation
Source of version of table above: very slightly modified from the online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited above.

Blindly Imitating a False Vision of Ancient Sculpture

“Trojan Archer from the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark in The Fountainhead railed against the mindless imitation of the classics, as embodied for instance in the Parthenon. In sculpture there has also been blind imitation of white classical figures, such as one that has recently been installed next to the Arts and Sciences Building on my campus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
One imagines that Rand and Roark would have been amused by the article quoted below, that shows that the classical sculptures were actually rich in color.

(p. D8) The Venus de Milo: white. The Apollo Belvedere: white. The Barberini Faun: white. The passing centuries may have cast their pall of grime, yet ever since the Renaissance rediscovered antiquity, our Platonic ideal of classical statuary has been bare marble: bleached, bone white.
The Greeks and Romans did not see it that way. The current show “Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity” — through Jan. 20 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum on Harvard University’s campus — makes a bold attempt to set the record straight. On view are replicas painted in the same mineral and organic pigments used by the ancients: pulverized malachite (green), azurite (blue), arsenic compounds (yellow, orange), cinnabar or “dragon’s blood” (red), as well as charred bone and vine (black). At first glance and quite a while after, the unaccustomed palette strikes most viewers as way over the top. But few would deny that these novelties — archers, goddesses, mythic beasts — look you straight in the eye.
. . .
By the 18th century, practitioners of the then-new science of archaeology were aware that the ancients had used color. But Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the German prefect of antiquities at the Vatican, preferred white. His personal taste was enshrined by fiat as the “classical” standard. And so it remained, unchallenged except by the occasional eccentric until the late 20th century.

For the full story, see:
MATTHEW GUREWITSCH. “CULTURAL CONVERSATION With Vinzenz Brinkman; Setting the Record Straight About Classical Statues’ Hues.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., December 4, 2007): D8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

USDA Sugar Allocations and Tariff System “Keeps the Price at a Fairly High Level”

Sugar beats unloaded in Scottsbluff, Nebraska at Western Sugar in 1999. Source of photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article cited below.

In the article excerpted below, why does Chet Mullin of the Omaha World-Herald care only about beat growers, but not about sugar consumers?

The International Sugar Organization predicts a sizable global surplus of the sweet stuff this year. If the prediction comes true, will it hurt sugar beet growers like those in Nebraska’s Panhandle?

The answer is no, according to Paul Burgener, agricultural economic research analyst at the University of Nebraska’s Panhandle Research and Extension Center in Scottsbluff.

"We have allocations (for sugar production) and we also have a tariff system for imports, and between the two, the USDA manages supply and keeps the price at a fairly high level," Burgener said.

For the full story, see:

CHET MULLIN. "Sugar surplus won’t harm beet growers." Omaha World-Herald (Tuesday, July 17, 2007): 1D & 2D.

Omaha’s Westroads Mall Stops Good Guys From Shooting Back

John Lott earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in economics. What he says below is not popular, or politically correct, but it is probably true. And if it is true, and if we fail to act on its truth, then more good people will continue to be killed, who could have been saved.

The horrible tragedy at the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Neb. received a lot of attention Wednesday and Thursday. It should have. Eight people were killed, and five were wounded.

A Google news search using the phrase "Omaha Mall Shooting" finds an incredible 2,794 news stories worldwide for the last day. From India and Taiwan to Britain and Austria, there are probably few people in the world who haven’t heard about this tragedy.

But despite the massive news coverage, none of the media coverage, at least by 10 a.m. Thursday, mentioned this central fact: Yet another attack occurred in a gun-free zone.

Surely, with all the reporters who appear at these crime scenes and seemingly interview virtually everyone there, why didn’t one simply mention the signs that ban guns from the premises?

Nebraska allows people to carry permitted concealed handguns, but it allows property owners, such as the Westroads Mall, to post signs banning permit holders from legally carrying guns on their property.

. . .

The law-abiding, not criminals, are obeying the rules. Disarming the victims simply means that the killers have less to fear. As Wednesday’s attack demonstrated yet again, police are important, but they almost always arrive at the crime scene after the crime has occurred.

The longer it takes for someone to arrive on the scene with a gun, the more people who will be harmed by such an attack.

Most people understand that guns deter criminals. If a killer were stalking your family, would you feel safer putting a sign out front announcing, "This Home Is a Gun-Free Zone"? But that is what the Westroads Mall did.

For the full commentary, see:

John R. Lott, Jr. "Media Coverage of Mall Shooting Fails to Reveal Mall’s Gun-Free-Zone Status." FOXNEWS.COM (Thurs., December 6, 2007).

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: I am grateful to Luis Locay, for forwarding me Lott’s commentary.)