Gas Prices Need to Rise Faster!

There's often a pretty simple principle at work when stores raise prices in the aftermath of natural disasters: Their supply chain is interrupted too. This article quotes a gas station owner in Muncie, Indiana, who had a three-day supply of gas in his tanks on Monday. For the past two days he could only buy 40 percent of his normal daily volume. He needs a steep price increase just to keep paying his bills. Let's say he normally sells 5,000 gallons of gas per day (I'm making these numbers up), earning a gross profit of 25 cents per gallon, or $1,250 per day. From this he pays $750 of overhead--rent, taxes, employee salaries, maintenance, etc--to keep his station running, leaving $500 of net profit with which he can improve his business (new state-of-the-art touchless carwashes and such) and pay his own living expenses. Along comes a hurricane which disrupts the entire supply chain, and he can only buy 2,000 gallons of gas per day. He needs to earn $750 per day just to break even, which works out to 37 cents for each gallon of gas in his daily inventory. He still needs to feed his family so he bumps up the price another 10 cents to earn a net profit of $200 per day. This is on top of his suppliers' own 25 cent price increase. Voila! He's an evil price gouger responsible for a 47 cent price hike with TV stations shooting his marquee for their stock high-gas-price-stories and politicians accusing him of criminal conduct. Meanwhile the station owner is living on 40 percent of his normal income, knowing that if his supply dries up completely for a few days he won't be able to pay his mortgage. On the demand side are those who rush out to fill up four 55-gallon drums with gas at the first hint of a shortage (described in the same article). This gas will likely sit in someone's garage while other people wait in line for 20 gallons to make it to work for the week. A faster price increase cuts down on such hoarding and waste. If the 55-gallon-drum-guy really needs 220 gallons of gas--maybe he's a business owner himself with a small fleet of trucks to run--he will gladly pay the higher price. Otherwise, he's more likely to leave the gas available for someone who needs it.

People who complain about price gouging and demand price controls are really asking for someone else to bear all the pain of a disaster rather than letting market pricing spread the pain equally.

Jumping to the Front of the Idiot Queue

Woman in front of gym TV: "We just have to figure out a way to stop these [hurricanes], whether it's global warming that's causing them or whatever!"

TV News anchor (repeatedly referring to a TV shot of a construction site crane): "I can't believe that crane withstood the hurricane-force winds of Katrina!"
(Yes, quite amazing for a thin, relatively aerodynamic structure designed to withstand massive shearing loads!)

Cindy Sheehan: George W. Bush to blame for Katrina!

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: George W. Bush and Haley Barbour to blame for Katrina!

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson: Oil companies should freeze gas prices!

CA Sen. Joe Dunn (explaining why California imposing gasoline price controls won't cause shortages): "The only reason we would have long gas lines is if this industry deliberately does that to the consumers of California. There is no competitive reason why, with price caps for example, we would have gasoline lines." (maybe "asserting" is a better description)

A whole bunch more economic illiterates: Cap fuel prices!

Hawaiian Legislature: Hooray! We've capped gas prices!

Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights: Oil Companies' Profiteering to Blame for Gas Price Spike!

Sorry, I just had to get those off my chest.

New Orleans - 1718 - 2005

New Orleans is gone. You can't take an entire city offline for 4-6 months and expect the entire population of people and businesses to return. Businesses will either close or relocate. People will need to find new homes and jobs in other cities. How many will return when the city is finally cleaned up? My guess is that the population of New Orleans--500,000 just a few days ago--will be less than 100,000 at this time next year.

This PBS interview (PDF) with John M. Barry, author of Rising Tide, on the Mississippi flood of 1927, has an interesting quote that explains why engineers couldn't close the breach in the levee protecting the city from Lake Pontchartrain:

Well, you've got to understand that when there's a crevasse, it's not simply the water flowing over the top of the levee as if it were overflowing a bath tub. What you get is tremendous turbulence, unbelievable forces at work, and in a great crevasse the river will gouge out a hole in the earth and the greatest crevasse on record, which was in 1927 about 15 miles north of Greenville, Mississippi, you know, the hole in the levee was about two-thirds of a mile wide. And they sounded it with a hundred-foot line and found no bottom. It was later they figured out that it was 130 feet deep.

No wonder the 3,000 pound sand bags disappeared as fast as they could drop them in the hole.

The Coming Phone Number Crisis

Bad news. We may run out of phone numbers again. Those of us living in large metro areas have experienced the pain of phone number shortages before. In the '90s they made us dial area codes for local calls and blamed the fax machines. Next they added new area codes and blamed the cell phones. Who's the next culprit, you ask? Pre-paid number-squatters. Let me explain: I opened a T-Mobile pay-as-you-go account last week and they promised to transfer my Cingular pre-paid number within 24 hours. Six days later it still hadn't been transferred so I called them today. The T-Mobile customer rep said she can't transfer my number unless I add minutes to my Cingular account. Why? Because "inactive" numbers can't be transferred. But, I protested, that number is still assigned to my old phone so if I never add minutes that number will be tied to my old phone forever! And if everyone does that you'll eventually run out of phone numbers! "I'm sorry. The FCC makes us do it that way," she said. "Besides there aren't very many pre-paid accounts yet anyway." Disaster is coming. Just wait.

Statistically Famous

I avoid TV news whenever possible, but that's tough at the gym. Today during my lunchtime workout Fox News featured a man who has been struck by lightning four times. "Your chances of being struck by lightning are just 1 in 3,000," breathlessly intoned the anchoress. "And your chance of being struck twice is only 1 in 9 million! I'm not even going to try to calculate the chances of being struck four times like this man!" Don't worry ma'am we can do that heavy liftin' for you. A specific person has just 1 chance in 3,000 x 3,000 x 3,000 x 3,000 (or 81 trillion) of being struck by lightning during his lifetime. That's pretty unlikely. However, the chance that someone, somewhere in the United States will be struck by lightning four times so Fox News can fill 10 minutes of air time is significantly higher--about 1 chance in 270,000. Why? Because there are roughly 300 million people in the US which gives us 300 million chances in 81 trillion that one of them will score the quad. And the chance of this happening to someone in the world rises to roughly 1 in 13,500 (six billion chances in 81 trillion). Further, the 1 in 3,000 chance we started with is averaged across a mostly risk-averse population. If you enjoy watching thunderstorms from the top of the Empire State Building you're guaranteed to be struck more than four times--a lot more! This guy lays steel water pipes for a living, which seems like a more strike-prone profession than most, especially if you don't know when to knock-off!

Why Blogs Beat The MSM: Exhibit 9,872

The NARAL smear ad that associates John Roberts with abortion clinic bombings gives us a great example of just how bad the MSM is at providing useful and relevant information. Here's the Washington Post version published the morning after the story broke. Headline: Ad Campaign Says Roberts Backed Violent Protesters. So right off the bat anyone who is simply scanning the paper gets the message pushed by the NARAL ad. Read the article and what do you learn?

• A repeat of the headline message, and a generic denial by Robert's supporters
• A convoluted summary of the legal situation referred to by the ad
• A description of the message and text of the ad
• He-said, she-said style quotes from supporters of both Roberts and NARAL
• A claim by "Robert's allies" that he has never supported violence

Browse over to Powerline's post on the story from the same morning and you learn the following additional information that the Post deemed unimportant:

• The legal case referenced by the ad (Bray v. Alexandria Clinic) and a link to the Supreme Court's decision in the matter
• A clearer (in my opinion) explanation of Robert's role in the case
• The Bray case had nothing to do with bombing or violence of any kind, or with supporting a clinic bomber. The clinic bombing mentioned by the ad occurred eight years after Bray--and therefore the NARAL ad is a flat-out lie.
• Why the government filed a brief supporting the protesters: Because a Supreme Court decision against them could have started a chain of legal inference leading the courts to eventually overturn all federal laws excluding abortion services from medical assistance programs (such as Medicaid, I'm assuming) on the grounds that exclusion of abortion services is discriminatory toward women.
• The real story is that pro-abortion groups are willing to brazenly lie to prevent even the chance of any restrictions on abortion

UPDATE: Mini-kudos to the Post for finally getting most of these facts straight in it's editorial today.

Stick to the Point on Iraq

Today someone sent me this email (supposedly from a policeman) comparing the causalty rate in Iraq to the homicide rate in Washington, D.C.:

INTERESTING THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:

If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater of operations during the last 22 months, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000. The rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation's Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq.

Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of Washington, D.C.

Whoever made these calculations is quite wrong on some points and sloppy or misleading on others. Washington's homicide rate peaked around 80 per 100,000 residents in 1991 and was in the mid-forties or so from 1998-2003 before dropping a bit lower in 2004.

The killed-in-action rate in Iraq for US troops (with 1820 deaths as of this writing and assuming an average of 150,000 troops over 2.3 years) works out to 527 per 100,000 per year. Most of them were killed by bombs, not firearms, so perhaps the "firearm death rate" could be 60 per 100,000, but even if correct that's certainly a misleading way to describe things. A bigger problem is that it doesn't include the troops of other nations or Iraqi police and civilians. It also doesn't consider the problems inherent in comparing a small city with an entire country the size of California. The fighting and terrorist attacks in Iraq are concentrated in a few cities which are very dangerous while much of the country is relatively stable and prospering.

What we really should care about are the relative consequences of not having invaded (or withdrawing to soon), which are obviously in dispute. But there are two indisputable points which (I think) can clarify one's thinking on the war. First, we simply don't yet know the long-term consequences of the war (positive or negative). We may begin to see a clearer picture in five or ten years when the current players have passed from the scene, a bit more in 20-30 after their memoirs have been studied and digested, and will perhaps have the final word in 50-100 years. The late Stephen Ambrose wrote in the acknowledgments to Undaunted Courage that he decided to write the biography of Meriwether Lewis in 1993, despite a comprehensive work having been published in 1965 by Richard Dillon, because a significant amount of new research had come to light in the intervening 30 years. Think about that. The Lewis and Clark expedition has been one of the most studied episodes of early American history, especially when you contrast its scale with a major war. Yet after 170 years new information about the expedition was still being discovered! Another example: Yesterday marked 60 years since the bombing of Hiroshima. The full set of radio intercepts that formed the basis for Truman's assessment of Japanese military strength and political will, on which he based his decision to drop the bomb, was not released to the public until 1995 (the first, redacted version was made available in 1978). Various additional papers from the Joint Chiefs of Staff which shed light on the decision (and the alternative costs of invading Japan) continued to trickle out over the last decade.

That's why the left's early and frequent proclamations of failure in the Iraq war are foolishly irresponsible at best. Not only is there ample contrary evidence, but the outcome is under decision right now! And that brings me to my second point: Whether you originally believed that removing Saddam Hussein from power would help destroy militant Islam or not, Iraq is where the Islamists have chosen to fight! So who do you believe? Those on the left who have declared the rationale for the war fraudulent, the effort doomed to failure, and victory irrelevant to defeating militant Islam? Or the Islamists themselves who through their words and actions have declared reclamation of Iraq essential to their survival?