Ladder to personal prosperity

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

The next penis bomber

When we fly, we have to take off our shoes because of the Shoe Bomber.

When we fly, we have to show our junk or let it be felt up by the TSA because of the penis bomber.

Memo to al Qaeda: Please don't put a charger up some moron's ass, as in Man on Fire, and send him onto a plane. (As if please ever worked...)

The terrorists sometimes get more effect from not blowing up a plane.

Update (11/24): Patrick Smith of Salon has two more examples:

The scanners are also the latest turn in what is an unwinnable arms race. First came Sept. 11 and suddenly pointy objects are contraband. Then came Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," and TSA decreed that all passengers must remove their shoes. Next we had the London liquid bombers, and suddenly your shampoo and toothpaste are consigned to 3-ounce containers. Then came the Christmas Day underwear bomber, and as a result we're being body-scanned and groped.

Dust in the wind

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Shorter traffic report

You're fucked! All the roads are bad. Deal with it.

It's amazing that we as a nation spend any effort whatsoever encouraging people to make hour-plus commutes on a regular basis. I've spent more than five hours over the past two days bobbing along in traffic. Doing that on a regular basis would drive me (heh) stark raving loony.

Hackneyed hackney hacks

It's bad policy to select the technology to meet mileage goals in a cab fleet. The result is what matters, not how it's achieved.

At the same time, the negotiated bargain between cabbies and the city of Boston to allow a fare increase in exchange for agreement to accept hybrids as mandated should now be repealed. They sued to get out of their side of the bargain? Fine. They shouldn't get the extra money.

Gov. Patrick's message on the gas tax

There's a lot of meat here missing from the Globe's story. I particularly value the breakdown of where Deval proposes to spend the revenue:

• 4 cents to roll back the toll increase on the Turnpike and Tunnels;
• 6 cents to maintain existing MBTA services, and avoid fare increases over the next few years;
• 1.5 cents to Regional Transit Authorities;
• 1.5 cents to targeted regional road projects;
• 3 cents to southern, western and northern rail projects;
• 1 cent for innovative gas and toll solutions;
• And 2 cents to begin to stop the costly practice of paying for transportation personnel from capital funds

There's also a portal to the Patrick administration's transportation plans here.

By the way, if that 1 cent for "innovative gas and toll solutions" is for GPS-surveilled mileage taxes, I'm still against that part of the plan.

Light dawns on Marble-head

Mine, that is. How could I have missed something so blindingly obvious and simple!

What the wingnuts mean by the word socialism is one thing: taxes. It doesn't go any deeper than that into theories of economic organization, though some of them may allude to some fragment of something they once heard about.

My evidence: the tantrums pitched in commentary on this story of Deval Patrick's proposed 19 cent per gallon increase in the gas tax. The frothing rabid conservatives don't want their lifestyles to change, but they want to drive on roads that are smooth, well-marked, and plowed in winter. Paying for it? That would be evil socialism.

Most of them have an emotional age below three years.

Beats a monitoring anklet

The proposal to monitor our miles driven using GPS and to charge user fees based on miles driven is wrong on so many counts that I can't see why it would ever be proposed.

• It greatly increases potential state surveillance in a time when there's already a huge lack of privacy. Oh, sure, these GPS devices only record your whereabouts, but every gas pump in the state can download your worldline - how secure can that be? And you certainly couldn't claim that a warrant would be needed to access the information.
  
• It punishes light, gas-efficient vehicles by removing consumption from taxation. A per-gallon gas tax already provides good capitalist incentives to avoid gross and inefficient consumption. This would take it away. You Prius drivers? You're screwed.
  
• It heavily subsidizes heavy vehicles' road use, since they are much more damaging to the infrastructure. That motorcycle you're riding could drive over the roads and bridges of Massachusetts without ever causing any damage. Even wear would take many, many years. Appropriate taxes and user fees on semis - to cover their costs - would make rail more attractive economically.
  

If you have to do congestion pricing, there are ways that are much less damaging to good environmental policy, to civil liberty, and to sound economic incentives. Say it ain't so, Deval!

Update (2/20): President Obama is not going ahead with this. Joy!

The future of journalists

I've been thinking about some wild speculation on the future of journalism, but meanwhile I just noticed something about the future of journalists. I had previously noticed that Mac Daniel, once of the Globe, is now spokesman for the Turnpike Authority. Today, I was reading along about the sheer brazen gall of a man who put his 4-year-old son on the Massport payroll. When the story got to the testimonials to the guilty man's character, my attention was flagging, but I skimmed down to the bottom and found a familiar name, Matthew Brelis, speaking for Massport.

Brelis used to report for the Globe, too. I knew him when he worked in the western suburbs. My memory is that he worked for a different paper, but I could be wrong. While I wasn't a fan at the time, he moved up, and eventually started reporting on aviation, including the 9/11 attacks.

Who knows, this may be one reason reporters are no longer eager to dig. Their industry is shrinking, and they never know when they'll need a job.

Easier for our [stupid, whining] customers

The Turnpike Authority, in its infinite wisdom, thinks we're idiots. As if I were a gentleman, I'm returning the favor.

"Rather than establish a new toll months before the new increases are set to take effect in January, it was decided it would be easier for our customers to simply open the U-turn with a new toll in January," said Turnpike Authority spokesman Mac Daniel.

The real motivation here is outcry suppression. To reverse this stupid policy decision, I recommend outcry.

This is one of those occasions when a private business really would do better than a public authority. They'd spin it, too - introductory discount!!! - but they'd get the beneficial service up and running immediately.

(I do think it's relevant that Mac Daniel is a former Boston Globe reporter. However, it doesn't seem to have affected this story, which is refreshingly direct.)

Margin of safety

If the pumps fail in a noreaster, how long before the tunnel is flooded and impassable? How long do I have to get out of the tunnel before I'm swimming? What if the leak volume rises by an order of magnitude?

What I'd really like to see is a graph of pump output volume and precipitation over the past three years. C'mon, it's pretty obvious that the single slurry-wall construction technique used on this tunnel has failed. Twenty years ago, a municipal water pipe might have contributed significantly to this problem, but that's mostly fixed by now, right?

This is ground water, and it's unlikely ever to be fixed within design specs, which means a shortened safe structural lifetime. Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff's offer of $300 million to get out of jail is a pittance.

(Image from a March 2005 report from the Federal Highway Administration that expected leaks to be fixed by the end of the summer of 2005.)