McFreedom

This analysis will be of little interest to anyone outside of San Carlos, CA. I need to figure it out myself in order to decide how to vote in the March 8, 2005 special election for Measure "T".

SCOOT is San Carlos' community-operated bus line. It runs routes early in the morning and in the afternoon, and does on-call door-to-door service other times. It's an interesting idea, and unquestionably a boon to people unable to drive. It's also used as a kind of "school bus" for the local kids. The problem is, it's expensive, and there's an upcoming election to implement a $59 "parcel tax" (paid annualy by each landowner in the city). That comes to $3.25 million dollars a year to operate this service (compared to an '03-'04 budget of $21.8 million, which was itself $4 million in the red).

The SCOOT website provides some ridership data from 2004. It shows a few interesting thing. First of all, they run no routes at all in July and August, only door-to-door. The "door-to-door" and "Caltrain commuter" numbers don't go up when the routes stop, which says pretty clearly that all the route riders are school kids. October was their peak total ridership month, and there's no partial month for school (as in September or June) and no major holidays (as in November or December). So it's probably a good, representative month of what SCOOT can do at its best.

In October they ran 3,623 "Door to Door" runs, 1,120 "Caltrain Commuters" and 12,160 Route riders for a total ridership of 16,903. A few thoughts on all of these: Especially the route riders you'd expect to be mostly round-trip excursions; two "rides" should map pretty well to one rider, going there and coming back. As well, on the routes, I think we should expect the vast majority of the traffic to be regular, weekday traffic - the same people riding the same routes, somewhere and back, Monday through Friday. These thoughts are useful to try to get at the number of people who actually benefit from SCOOT. If we assume that 80% of the route ridership fits this profile (and that's probably conservative), we find that there were about 232 kids who take SCOOT to school and back every day, providing 9,744 (58%) of the 16,903 total rides for October. It's likely that the other classes suffer from similar patterns of use.

If we charge these rides with 58% of the cost ($1.89 million), we see that we're paying $8,125 per pupil who rides the bus, anually. We could buy them all cars for that! Every year, a new one! America Bikes - an advocacy group trying to get people to bike more - claims national per-pupil busing costs were $521 per pupil in 2000. Presumably it's in their interest to make this number as large as possible, but it's utterly dwarfed by what we're paying.

The axiom behind SCOOT was that a fleet of small busses would be cheaper than setting up actual school bus service, and we'd get the added bonus of letting our less-fortunate residents use the busses when schools weren't. But this seems an awfully high cost.

You may have read a year ago about the controversy surrounding the global warming "hockey stick" graph. This graph purports to show the "temperature anomaly" from about 1100 AD to the present, with a sharp spike in the past hundred years. This clearly shows sudden global warming, presumably from man's polluting activities:

It's the product of one Dr. Mann, climatologist at the University of Virginia. Its production was no doubt a complex enterprise, but it was peer-reviewed and published in Nature, so it clearly isn't just the work of a lone crackpot. As we read two Decembers ago, a nonscientist (i.e., someone who isn't employed by a Univeristy) questioned Dr. Mann's methods. He'd been trying to get at the original data, and trying to reproduce the Doctor's results. Dr. Mann, while initially cooperative, had stopped helping not far into the enterprise.

Unfortunately, I didn't pay much more attention. The math both of these gentlemen were slinging around was far more than I was willing to devote the time necessary to understand (if I'm capable of understanding it at all). It was a classic case where one person says one thing, another says something else, and the layman has no way to choose between competing claims.

In these cases, my tendency is to side with the scientist. At least 90% of the people who attack mainstream science are, after all, wrong. I've spent time debating evolution with creationists and I can certainly attest that there are a lot of people out there who think they know something about a field while really just not getting it. I thought Dr. Mann's critic - Mr. McIntyre - had what seemed like interesting points, but, let's face it, Dr. Mann is peer-reviewed and Mr. McIntyre isn't. That's not a guarantee of rightness, but it's a good rule of thumb for following disciplines you don't personally understand - relying on the professionalism of those in the discipline to root out those who are wrong. That's how science works.

In the intervening time, they've set up dueling websites to explain their positions. Dr. Mann's is at RealClimate, Mr. McIntyre's is at Climate Audit. I know of these new developments because the Wall Street Journal had a front-page article (sadly, subscription only) this morning on the topic. It's lengthy, and mostly provides an overview of the controversy, but makes no assertions about who is right. I thus read most of it, thinking, "it'll be really interesting to see who's right here," because there just isn't enough information for a layman to make a decision. We just have to wait for the people who understand this stuff to come to a consensus.

Then, I got to the paragraph describing Mr. McIntyre's continuing relationship with Dr. Mann:

Mr. McIntyre thinks there are more errors but says his audit is limited because he still doesn't know the exact computer code Dr. Mann used to generate the graph. Dr. Mann refuses to release it. "Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in," he says.

What!? Dr. Mann, you lose. "My critics are intimidating me and I refuse to release my methodology" is never the refuge of good science. If Dr. Mann refuses to make public the way he makes his graphs, his graphs should be rejected out of hand by the scientific community until they're reproducible. In science, the way you shut people up is by proving them wrong, not by withholding your method so that they can't reproduce your results. Frankly, it calls into question not just Dr. Mann but the entire field of climate research that he can say this in public and not be hounded until he releases his methodology. This should increase our skepticism not just of Dr. Mann but any expert in the field that doesn't call for him to release his data.

As of now, I'm no longer predisposed to think Dr. Mann correct. He's not behaving like a scientist and does not deserve the benefit of the doubt I'd been giving him under the assumption that he was working out in the open. Kudos to Mr. McIntyre for continuing his fight. Even if he's wrong, we shouldn't be making society-reworking changes based upon secret research methodologies. Dr. Mann should open-source his product and let the sun shine in.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting editorial this morning titled "Ants and Grasshoppers," by Kevin A. Hassett, Director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. It's subscription-only, unfortunately, but it lamets the fact that the current Social Security debate is focused on when the system becomes insolvant, as if it wouln't be worth replacing if only it were sustainable.

He clearly makes the point that, if a private entity offered a retirement plan with the same features as Social Security, you'd be a fool to buy it: For the princely sum of 12.5% of your earnings per year, you receive a very small annuity from money invested in a single security (low-interest government bonds). If you and your spouse die before retirement, you only get any of the money back if you have school-age kids. You can't use any of the money you've saved to buy a house or to cover emergencies. You have to pay in at the same 12.5% rate whether you're 27 or 57, desipite the fact that 12.5% of your salaray is a lot more painful to cough up when you're young, underemployed and trying to get your life started.

He notes that, with these features, Social Security is clearly not designed to make people better off than they could make themselves: "It forces irresponsible 'grasshopper' individuals to save for their retirement along with responsible 'ants.'" But, he argues, it's poorly designed for that goal, too. "[T]oday's system forces the vast [rationally-saving-for-retirement] majority to endure a straight-jacketed program that reduces their lifetime welfare significantly, all for the benefit of a small minority" who wouldn't otherwise save. Mr. Hassett's solution is to endow private savings accounts, forcing people to perform the diversified investment that is in their own best interest, rather than depending on the long-outdated economic theory underpinning a system designed in 1935.

This piece is quite correct - it's a real shame that the current debate is framed in terms of the date of insolvency. As he concludes, "It does not matter if the current program runs out of funds in 2042, 2075 or never. Social Security should be reformed because a better policy exists today that will significantly enhance Americans' welfare."

Instapundit, and others, have been rightly criticizing Ward Churchill for saying things like, on September 11, 2001, "As to those in the World Trade Center...They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire... If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it." Much of the criticism has focused on the fact that, obviously, busboys, maintenence workers, and yes, even investment bankers should not have been intentionally targeted and killed.

But I think what's so interesting about Professor Churchill is that, in fact, what he says is internally self-consistent (even if he does personally seem to be a bit of a coward for all his rhetoric). Satya, an online-only (I think) magazine with articles about "Vegetarianism, Environmentalism, Animal Advocacy and Social Justice," posted an article interviewing him in April, 2004. They published a picture of him, wearing camoflage, a beret, sunglasses and holding an AK-47 in a very dramatic (but not very professional) manner:

The interviewer notes that "This issue of Satya is trying to push the debate about whether or not violence is an appropriate means to a desired end." While a lot of what is said is (of course), absurd, I was struck by a few things the Good Professor had to say on the topic of resistence. Some of it I even agree with, in an abstract way:

[I'm trying to encourage a] fundamental understanding of the nature of [your] obligation to intervene to bring the kind of atrocities that I’ve described to a halt by whatever means are necessary. The predominating absurdity in American oppositional circles for the past 30 years is the notion that if one intervenes to halt a rape or a murder in progress, if you actually use physical force as necessary to prevent that act, somehow or other you’ve become morally the same as the perpetrator.

Professor Churchill sems, in fact, to have combined the left-lunatic fringe (corporate America is directly killing millions of people all over the world) with a recognition that, if you believe this is happening, you have a moral obligation to actually do something to stop it:

You move on. Rather than a vigil, you hold a rally. When that doesn’t do it either, you march around, do petitions, letters, you hold alternative educational fora, you try to build bridges with people; you do whatever. None of that works...

‘Hey those brown-skinned folks dying in the millions in order to maintain this way of life, they can wait forever for those who purport to be the opposition here to find some personally comfortable and pure manner of affecting the kind of transformation that brings not just lethal but genocidal processes to a halt.’ They have no obligation—moral, ethical, legal or otherwise—to sit on their thumbs while the opposition here dithers about doing anything to change the system...

I’ve never fashioned myself to be a revolutionary [as you can clearly tell from his picture -BAT], but it’s part and parcel of what I’m talking about.

I think what he's saying here is actually interesting, because he seems to be calling the left to task for saying "Our country is directly murdering millions of people all over the world. Hey, I know, let's have a parade to protest it, with puppets!" He highlights the fundamental unseriousness of the US far left, accusing mainstream America of intentional murder yet being unwilling to risk their own comfortable lifestyles to oppose it. If you believe - as many on the far left seem to - that investment bankers in New York are manipulating markets in order to directly kill third world peoples, then you should cheer the destruction of the World Trade Centers. The idiocy lies not in appreciating this outcome; the idiocy lies in believing the underlying axioms in the first place.

Now, all of that said, he seems no more interested in actually participating in a revolution than anyone else. He's quite willing to pose dramatically with an AK, and exhort other people to take risks and give up their comfortable lifestyles in order to effect change, and yet doesn't quite seem to have managed it, himself.

The outrage against Professor Churchill needs to be focused on his core beliefs and not the logical conclusions that he draws from them. People who honestly believe the average American are guilty of "complicity of acquiesence" and are morally equivilant to "most Germans" during the Third Reich because of our "murder" of "millions" of "brown-skinned folks" should desire the violent overthrow of the United States of America. Just as we violently overthrew the Third Reich for its horrors. What we should be angry about is being accused of being murderers, not that he feels we should be punished for the murders he feels we've commited.