Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

I noticed an article in Business Week yesterday, called Little Green Lies. It's about Auden Schendler, an environmentalist who got a job at Aspen Skiing Co, as their environmental advocate. It starts off talking about how he's achieved"a lot of sexy projects", but doesn't feel they did anything.

The real story, as I read the article, is how every time he tried anything that would actually work, he was stymied by executives who were either baffled and confused by his insistence, or would rather spend the money on something much more short-term or just that they're used to. The most flagrant example?

" Thwarted on guest rooms, Schendler switched to Little Nell's underground garage. Guests never saw it because valets park all cars. For $20,000, Schendler said he could replace energy-gobbling 175-watt incandescent light fixtures with fluorescent bulbs and save $10,000 a year. Unimpressed, Calderon again balked. If he had $20,000 extra, he would rather spend it on items guests would notice: fine Corinthian leather furniture or shiny new bathroom fixtures."

He finally did get them to convert the lights, two years later, and after getting a $5,000 grant from a local non-profit. That's right, a big profitable company had to get a donation from charity to install equipment that would pay for itself in two years, and then save them $10,000 a year every year after that. Much more than would have been made in new bookings due to leather chairs or shiny faucets, I'm willing to bet. That's a 50% return on investment, better than anything you can find on the stock market. Later they talk about partially funding a solar energy farm outside Aspen, which would have a "paltry" 6.5% ROI. So it'd pay for itself in 15 years.

But as you can see above, corporate honchos aren't thinking long term. Even if the things they are thinking are completely pointless and would make less money than simple efficiencies. The moral of this story is, corporate execs aren't going to change how they do things, even if changing simple things would be a better investment. And since they won't change on their own, they need to be required to change, which means government has to get involved.

The following is the text of an email I sent to NPR's Marketplace show today, after they had a hack from the WSJ editorial page spouting nonsense straight out of the "Fairtax" book. Here's the article in question.

And my letter:
This morning, on the Marketplace Morning Report, you had Stephen Moore on, praising the benefits of a national sales tax.  His ideas and numbers come entirely from the book "FairTax" by Neal Boortz and John Linder.  And unfortunately, most of what he quoted is inaccurate or false.  A 23% sales tax would not replace all of the government income, the percentage was picked as near the maximum amount people would tolerate as a sales tax.  A national sales tax, despite his claim, would be extremely regressive and complex.  Most families who are out of the top 1% spend most of their income each year, which would make their net tax rate at LEAST 23%, plus the increases in cost that would come from this kind of tax.  Whereas the richest few don't spend all their money, which would make their net tax rate far below the 23% the rest of us would pay.  That hardly qualifies as "fair" by any stretch of the imagination.  And his idea of a $20,000 rebate for the sales tax spent?  That would be at least as complicated as the current income tax.  The rest of the work of tax collection would then be pushed on to the companies who sell products.  It would require just as much work, and we would still require the IRS to investigate cheats and other things.

His entire presentation was misleading at best, and outright false at worst.  The entire idea of a "fair" national sales tax is snake oil, designed to cover up for a gigantic tax cut for the rich and a tax hike for the rest of us, not any kind of serious policy suggestion.

But when I see a news story about British police arresting a bunch of would-be terrorists after having them under survelliance for six months, I take that as a good thing, and a reason to be less scared, rather than a reason to be more frightened. But some people seem to take it as a moment of "HOLY SHIT PEOPLE WANT TO KILL US!" and think that means there's terrorists under every bush. No. There's not. There's a very small percentage of people who are willing to do this kind of thing and have the means to do anything. At least as long as they have other options, or we haven't say, killed all of their family by bombing.

Especially when the last "Terrorist threat" that the British police broke up was a bunch of guys who were going to blow us all up with liquid binary explosives that would take hours and extreme cold to mix in a very smelly way, with chemicals they didn't even have yet.

Here's the BBC's take, make sure you read the bit at the end.
And here's breathless fearmongering over at Bizarro world. Warning, the comments over at RedState are completely disconnected from reality.
And here's a bit of breathless fearmongering about the government from a different source.

My guess? I can't guess on the truth of the actual claimed plot until more info comes out. But I'm confident that the danger's been hyped. Terrorists are not going to kill you in your beds. Sleep well, citizens.

Okay, so ABC has this "docudrama" called "The Path to 9/11" that they're planning on airing tonight and tomorrow. Fairly unsurprising timing and stuff, right?

Now, the problem comes in that the film is full of scenes that didn't happen and pretty much a right-wing propaganda piece trying to lay all the blame on Clinton.

Scholastic has dropped it from an educational segment they were working on.
Several top historians are against it.
The director is an conservative evangelical from an institute dedicated to "transforming Hollywood from within."
Clinton Administration officials(.pdf) who were involved in what actually happened have called them on it.
A bunch of conservatives have called Disney on it, too.

Here's a blog with much of everything compiled, and here's another.

Gosh darn that liberal media!