4 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Reports have recently surfaced that hundreds of Louisville motorists have run out of gas with gas gauges that showed fuel remaining. Something in the gas, which has come from many different stations and affected many different types of cars, is causing the gauges to fail, leading to stranded motorists and expensive repairs, which in some cases last only until the next fill-up. This line caught my eye:
But the origin of the gasoline and the exact source of problem — whether it’s contaminants, anti-pollution additives or other substances — remain a mystery.
Anti-pollution additives are, of course, one primary contributor the refinery backlogs, fuel shortages and price increases. Could they be affecting pocketbooks even more directly?
At least one supplier now says the problem is sulfur. Marathon Ashland Petroleum now says:
MAP has determined that some regular grade gasoline delivered into its Kramer’s Lane Distribution Terminal, although passing all industry standard tests, contained trace amounts of elemental sulfur. This form of sulfur may affect gas gauge readings, with some car models apparently more sensitive than others.
All gasoline currently being supplied from MAP terminals has been tested and should not affect gas gauge performance.
Both regular and mid-grade gasoline purchased at many retail stores after May 3rd may contain elemental sulfur. This form of sulfur does not affect engine performance. Consumers experiencing unusual gas gauge readings are encouraged to monitor their mileage or to keep fuel tanks filled in order to prevent run-outs.
Customers are encouraged to call 1-888-263-3778. An acquaintance called the number and MAP agreed to refer him to a dealer for repairs. It will be interesting to see what MAP’s ultimate liability will be.
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4 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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According to today’s Courier-Journal notes that the University of Louisville, apparently caving to stident demands that it “ban the klan,” banned two KKK members from the UofL campus. According to a May 12 letter from Monica M. Jones, assistant director of student life, to the banned “racialists” [ed: that’s the Klan’s term - seem to have found an extra “ali” hanging around]:
Due to posting insensitive and offensive material on campus, this letter is to inform you that effective immediately, you are considered “persona non grata” from the entire University of Louisville campus until further notice from this office.
The article goes on to note that persona non grata are, among other things, barred from enrolling at UofL, a university funded with many of my tax dollars. These two yahoos are clealry more in need of an education than most, and should be roundly denigrated whenever possible. Last I checked, however, the First Amendment covered racist yahoos, as UofL apparently remembered, thus entering posterior-covering mode:
[Rae] Goldsmith [university spokesperson] said that the letter was not meant to say that the university was banning the two men for the content of their postings. Rather, she said, the letter was meant to notify them that they had violated university policy by placing literature on an outdoor campus map and were observed on campus at night without legitimate business at the school.
Were that what they meant, that is what they could have said. Students continue to press their demands that those who offend be banned from campus, and the university continues to find ways to ban offensive speakers from campus without tramping on the First Amendment (by, for example, removing concrete kiosks that many groups used to post flyers, both campus-affiliated and not). Isn’t the answer to this type of yahoodom more speech (Dave King is a big yahoo), not less?
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4 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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I’ve been playing around a bit with musicplasma, a self-described “vmusic visual search engine.” Type in a favorite artist and hit search. The site produces a visual web of related artists, and describes the results thusly:
The closer the artists are, musically speaking, the closer to each other they will be displayed on screen. You will be likely to appreciate artists close to the one you selected at first. The artists such as represented in clusters relate one to another through there musical style (Rock, Funk, Pop, Folk, Electro) but also similar epochs (60’s, 70’s…) The halo (circle) surrounding an artist’s name represents how popular he is… The larger the halo is, the more popular the artist is or the more representative he is of a musical style.
I type in Louisville natives and World Cafe regulars My Morning Jacket and get Fountans of Wayne, New Pornographers, The Thrills, Kings of Leon and Grandaddy in the inner circle, and Jet, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Raveonettes, The Flaming Lips, Spoon, Beulah and Death Cab for Cutie further afield. All reasonable choices, if not particularly novel. Certainly better than most related artist picks. The best feature, like other visual webs is to click on related spheres and see where you end up.
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4 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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The Advertiser Links on this WaPo page on Cicadamania are all related to Cajun cooking. A bit ironic, consider the Indiana man who suffered a serious allergic reaction after eating 30 cicadas sauteed with butter and garlic. Get your own recipes from the University of Maryland (the Indiana fellow appears to have been making The Simple Cicada, but Chocolate Chip Trillers sound better).
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4 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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When thinking about Kroger for a previous item, I got to thinking about how bad regulation can lead to market opportunities. Kentucky liquor law classifies wine with distilled spirits for licensing purposes, and provides that
a premise for which there has been granted a license for the sale of distilled spirits or wine at retail shall not remain open for any purposes between midnight and 6 a.m. or at any time during the twenty-four (24) hours of a Sunday, unless . . . [t]he licensee provides a separate locked department in which all stocks of distilled spirits and wine are kept during those times.
In practice, this means that Kroger stores do not sell wine, because they don’t want to either go to the expense of providing lockable aisles for wine or to close completely between midnight and 6 a.m. and all day Sunday. Some stores, particularly Meijer, have a separate “Party Center” with its own entrance. This leads to perverse results - I can buy bourbon at the Rite Aid, but I can’t buy merlot at the Kroger. It’s also led to a cottage industry of wine shops locating next to Krogers. Many of these stores don’t provide particularly good selection or price, and some undoubtedly wouldn’t exist at all if you could get your Beringer or Kendall-Jackson with your porterhouse or chicken breast. Other examples abound - when I liven in Pennsylvania, the state did not operate decentralized DMV offices like many states do, and required a visit to Harrisburg for some transactions (many sine moved online, of course). This regulatory system led to DOT courier services, which would do the legwork for you. Would these businesses thrive in a different regulatory environment? Probably not. I always find it interesting the way the private market routes around bad regulation (and impedes in some small fashion the correction of the bad regulation, as it creates groups with a vested interest in maintaining the regulatory regime).
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4 years, 6 months ago,,
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Thursday’s Fox 41 10 pm newscast led with the teaser “Now at Kroger – milk, eggs and censorship.†Yet another media member confusing a private party’s decision with censorship. First the backstory: local Krogers, like almost every grocer in America, has racks of “free†publications featuring real estate listings, used cars for sale, help wanted ads, and the like (nothing is really free, of course – the publications contract with a third party for placement, and the third party pays Kroger a fee). Among the publications available were a newssheet from Louisville’s Southeast Christian Church, and three “alternative†news publications – the Louisville Eccentric Observer (think the City Paper available in DC and Baltimore), Velocity (the Courier-Journal’s version of LEO) and The Snitch (which focuses on crime and punishment). After a complaint, Kroger yanked Southeast Christian’s paper on the grounds that it didn’t accept religious or political publications, and that the religious paper took partisan political positions. Kroger indicated after protest that it would review all free publications. Shortly thereafter, the chain removed LEO, Velocity and the Snitch because these papers all featured, to one degree or another, sexually themed advertising for massage parlors and strip clubs (adult entertainment in Louisville being a controversial subject these days).
Almost immediately, cries of censorship arose (Southeast, while paying lip service to Kroger’s status as a private enterprise, says that Kroger “muzzled the free marketplace of ideas“), like they always do when a private enterprise is deemed to be suppressing speech, as when Michael Moore claimed Michael Eisner was censoring him. No, Kroger is not censoring Southeast Christian any more than Disney was censoring Moore; each was electing not to be a platform for distribution of another party’s views, which is at heart a business decision. The government can censor, both directly (prior restraints on speech) and indirectly (denying federal funding for private or quasipublic institutions that speak in ways unapproved by the government). Disney and Kroger can’t censor. The right to free speech doesn’t extend to the right to be granted a soapbox at someone else’s expense.
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4 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Tried the new McDonald’s Go Active! Happy Meal for Adults today. For $5 you get a salad, drink and a pedometer, all enclosed in a cardboard box that looks like a regular Happy Meal box that’s been sat upon by pre-Subway-diet Jared. McDs has been offering a free drink with a $3.99 salad for a while, so this new offering amounts to a $1.01 pedometer, which is probably a decent deal. Why would you ever buy the Go Active! more than once, however? How many pedometers does one need (they supposedly come in fashion colors, so that everyone in the family can make their own pedometer-related couture statement, but mine’s basic black)? Think I could get the ESPN mini video game from the regular Happy Meal instead? I could play Tony Hawk while I walk with my new pedometer. The salad’s still good, though - lately I prefer the new salads from Arby’s.
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4 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Forget all this war stuff, forget even LaToyaGate. Paul Caron asks the question we all want to know - what are the tax consequences of televised home improvement programming like Extreme Makeover:Home Edition? According to Newsweek,
the show leases participants’ homes, paying $50,000 for 10 days’ rental. Instead of cash, the show gives the family flat-screen TVs and appliances. Since the IRS allows tax-free rentals of less than 15 days, the homeowners don’t owe taxes on their new goodies. And by renting the home from the family, producers apparently believe the renovations are tax-free under a “leaseholder improvement” loophole.
The tax advisors Newsweek consulted were skeptical. So is Kerry Kerstetter:
My understanding is that, as with anything as lucrative as this, there are thousands of homeowners who apply to be on the show and to be selected is really no different than winning the lottery, and should be treated as gambling income for tax purposes. There could be some adjustments in the dollar values reported. I definitely wouldn’t report full retail values. However, to consider it as 100% tax free is beyond even an approach I would take. I wonder if ABC indemnifies the homeowners and will pay their additional taxes if they are audited and forced to include this income.
Tax-free treatment of short-term rental income is provided by Section 280A of the Code, which provides that
(g) Special rule for certain rental use
Notwithstanding any other provision of this section or section 183, if a dwelling unit is used during the taxable year by the taxpayer as a residence and such dwelling unit is actually rented for less than 15 days during the taxable year, then -
(1) no deduction otherwise allowable under this chapter because of the rental use of such dwelling unit shall be allowed, and
(2) the income derived from such use for the taxable year shall not be included in the gross income of such taxpayer under section 61.
I’m no tax lawyer, but I doubt the IRS will react too positively to this argument. Section 280A excludes deductions otherwise allowable as business expenses if such expenses relate “to the use of a dwelling unit which is used by the taxpayer during the taxable year as a residence.” Therefore, it is arguable at least that Section 280A should be subject to the requirement of Section 162 that such expenses be “ordinary and necessary.” Do humble, fixer-upper houses that have been on the market for years in the surrounding region really lease for more than $5,000 per day? As for the leasehold improvement loophole (most leasehold improvements are to non-residential property, and the “bonus depreciation” provisions added to the Code recently apply only to non-residential property), I doubt that the IRS will agree that it applies to adding a second-story addition tax-free. If it works, however, TV crews are welcome to lease my house for $75,000 for 15 days. My garage could use a leasehold improvement of a Bugatti Veyron coupe.
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4 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Our local Fox affiliate often features editorials on its 10 pm newscasts, generally fluff pieces delivered by station manager Bill Lamb. Last night’s was a plea to boost local tourism by inviting family to visit and showing them around town (my suggestion: bring family, just not during Derby Weekend). It did make me laugh, however, when Mr Lamb praised the soon-to-open Frazier Historical Arms Museum (which looks really cool, by the way) as “over 100,000 square feet of exhibits, spanning 1,000 years of American and European weaponry, armor and history… all presented in a dynamic, interactive fashion that captures the imagination.” An interactive arms museum sounds a little scary.
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4 years, 6 months ago,,
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Glenn Reynolds notes that the drug warriors haven’t been deterred from their pursuit of chemical menaces by the real war going on in Iraq. Steve Sturm responds to Glenn, arguing that the recent death of an 8 year old in a drug-related shooting disproves the larger point that (quoting the Deroy Murdock column Glenn links to) “Washington busybodies are knocking themselves out combating compounds that, by themselves, do not threaten public safety.”:
Was the accused shooter’s sense of right and wrong warped from his drug use? Was he under the effects at the time of the shooting? The news reports don’t say. It was reported that he was shooting at someone else but missed, hitting Chelsea instead - was his aimed impaired due to the influence of drugs in his system? I don’t know, but is it too much of a stretch to think that had the shooter not been exposed to marijuana (and whatever drugs he might have used), this sad story might not have taken place?
Of course, Mr. Sturm ignores some facts, both general and specific. The errant shot was fired at some teens with whom the shooters had fought earlier in the evening (the “hammer” - i.e. pistol - that the brothers Hall used was the successor to an actual hammer - think Stanley - that Raashed’s girlfriend tried to use on the same group). To say that this heinous act justifies the drug war because the brothers used marijuana within “the past week” seems extreme.
To go further and argue that every bad act committed by a hopped-up drug user justifies prohibition of all drugs due to “ripple effects” is even more extreme. I’d argue that a considered drug policy that evaluates chemicals objectively may well reduce crime. After all, isn’t it at least conceivable that marijuana users who can buy their supplies at the same place they buy their Smirnoff Ice might not be hanging around as many street corners, picking fights with teenagers? That’s a ripple effect, too.
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