Mountains of paperwork.

Upon the same mountain that used to bear the Old Man of the Mountains, there two ski areas, Cannon Mountain and Mittersill. Mittersill, started in the late 1940's, had a permit from the Forest Service to put trails and lifts onto US owned land. Later in the 1970's Mittersill went dormant and stopped running the lifts. The trails are still there, and hardy skiers have been using them, abet lightly. Now, Cannon Mountain wants to expand it's trail system and re open the old Mittersill trails. Sounds simple.
I attended a meeting last night at which a nice middle aged lady from the Forest Service spent a half an hour explaining all the paperwork that would be necessary. Lordy, there were environmental impact statements, assessments, obscure legal footwork of which no one had ever heard of, protection of a bird that no one had ever heard of, along with some odd weedy plant that even the Forest Service lady could not name. The Manhattan Project started with less paperwork than is now necessary to ski down an existing ski trail on federal land.
Environmentalists are like watermelons, green on the outside, Red on the inside.

GM sees brighter future (WSJ)

Strange article. The body of the article talks about cost cutting, and new union contracts, and GMAC's losses from playing in the sub prime mortgage market. Thousand of hourly job cuts,buyouts, and early retirements will realize billions of dollars of saving by 2011. The GM suits think they can cost cut the company back to profitability. Good luck Rick Wagoner.
There is a scary graph at the top of the piece, plotting GM profit or loss from 2007 back to 2000. From 2000 to 2006 the bar chart bumps up and down by a few billion a year. Make a few billion one year, loose a few billion next year. For 2007, the bar drops thru the floor with a $40 billion loss. That deep black hole was invented by GM's accountants last fall when they took $37 billion worth of "tax credits" off GM's books. A 40 billion loss in a company with a market capitalization of only $13 billion is not real accounting, it's play acting. Real companies cannot loose three times their net worth in only one year. In short this "loss" actually amounted to taking imaginary assets off the books. I'm sure the books looked a lot better in the year those imaginary assets were put on the books. In short the $40 billion loss is a correction of years of accounting jiggery pokery. Harsher critics might call it accounting fraud.
Not a single word about the new Chevy Malibu and the new Caddy CTS. The only thing that will make GM profitable ever again is good new cars that sell. Why didn't the GM people talk these cars up with the Wall St Journal people? Are GM's suits so removed from the car business that they never think about what they make? Or do the suits know these two expensively created new cars aren't going to sell? What kind of a car guy doesn't talk about new car designs? Or is it that the GM suits aren't car guys but mere bean counters?
Sell you GM stock ASAP, the General is doomed.

Electric Trolley cars are cooler than diesel buses

The electric trolley car ("light rail") is way cooler to ride on than buses. I don't know why, but it is true. Given a choice between the bus and the trolley, every one in Boston takes the trolley. (Boston still operates both). I'm not sure why this is true, the ride is no smoother, the old fashioned trolleys were fairly noisy. The slick PCC cars from the 1930's are whisper quiet, but the ordinary trolleys had a distinctive loud gear whine and the compressor for the air brakes banged away as loudly as a jack hammer. Street running city trolleys had no speed advantage over cars or buses at rush hour. Be that as it may, trolleys are cool, buses are last resort.
From an economic standpoint buses are way cheaper than trolleys, simply because they run on the public streets. The bus operator doesn't have to buy, build, maintain, electrify, fence, and mow his right of way, the government takes care of all that. The bus operator can change his route at will without laying new track.
The only objective reason to prefer the trolley is those rails. When you board a trolley you know where it's gonna go. Whereas a bus might go anywhere, and passengers worry that they got on the wrong bus and will wind up in the wrong place.

Yale meets University of Delaware

Not to be out done by a mere state university, Yale is now hiring "diversity councilors" to make sure Yale students are trained multi-culti's. At Delaware (my alma mater!) diversity training was pretty close to brain washing. ("All whites are racists. When did you become aware of your sexuality") An Ivy like Yale ought be be able to raise diversity training to truly Gulag levels.

What's gotten into kids these days? (WSJ)

"Glennette Scott was horrified when heer daughter Brianna, 3, started picking fights, throwing chairs, and having emotional meltdowns in pre school."

Could it be that 3 is just plain too young for preschool?

Do we really need more roads?

Contractors love roadbuilding contracts. Automakers like more roads. Real estate people want roads that raise the value of their raw land.
A twelve member federal panel issued a Surface Transportation report the other day. It called for jacking up the federal gas tax to pay for $225 billion a year in "infrastructure investment". Most amazing fact is that one quarter of the panel, including US Transportation Secretary Mary Peters refused to sign the report. Doubtless she fears the money would go for more bridges to now where. The vice chairman of the committee went on C-Span defending the majority spend-a-lot report. Turns out he is a lawyer. What does a lawyer know about surface transportation? Another member is a state transportation secretary. Where are the truckers, the civil engineers, the railroaders, the shippers, the bus operators and AAA on this committee?
And, with $4 a gallon staring us in the face, do we really think traffic is going to increase that much in the future? Especially as we already have interstate highways running the length and breadth of the land. No where in the US is far from an interstate. Do we want to double them up to carry more traffic? I don't think so.
Fuel costs are going to press the truckers into more piggyback (trailers hauled cross country on railroad flatcars) operations. That will keep the freight moving.
Traffic expands to fill road available. Build more roads, speeding up peoples commute, and they will take jobs further from home. It is impossible to build enough road to prevent rush hour traffic jams.

Medical Costs, FDA enhancement thereof

February Popular Science has a round up article on new treatments for various diseases. Two different researchers, on two different projects, are quoted saying they have no plans to commercialize the treatment because getting the treatment thru the FDA approval process is just too expensive.
FDA has been in a CYA mode ever since the thalidomide disaster in the 1960's. They always demand more tests, more clinical trials, more studies, more time, and more money. The small laboratory or independent researcher lacks the money, skill, endurance, and connections to even contemplate entering the obstacle course that is FDA drug approval trials. The classic technique for jacking up prices is to eliminate competitors. FDA is doing that for the pharmaceutical business.