Response to "Driving illegally in Texas"

I think the only positive aspect of illegal aliens obtaining drivers licenses is the fact that they pay a small fee to state government. If their situation is such that not having a license gives them some hardship then maybe we can start to resolve the issue. First let me say I am for overhauling the whole immigration system to allow more people into our country. Having said that we must get our borders under control. Giving out licenses is like giving street gangs guns because they are just going to get them anyway. It is a process of enabling. We enable illegal's to stay in our country. We enable them to drain our economy of billions of dollars every year. This is another effect of an out of control migration into our country.
Reference, http://conflictsoftexas.blogspot.com/2008/11/driving-illegally-in-texas.html.

Clean energy to Texas

I was reading an article today about how a few companies have joined the Austin clean energy partnership (http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/12/04/1204energy.html). If these companies lend real technologies and support to this cause could mean a great many possibilities. These companies have top engineers that are wired to problem solve and create solutions to real problems. These folks work on minute cutting edge technologies that create huge leaps for their companies and their industries. We as residents could reap huge benefits as a pilot community for energy savings down the road. With a partnership with state higher education, these high-tech companies, and some state and federal funding and support could pave the way for future energy independence. This is the type of small scale research that could make inroads flying under the radar until a major breakthrough is developed. My experience working in semiconductor gives me the knowledge that these engineers are really smart people that normally jump at a chance to work outside of their normal technologies. Dell, Freescale (a spin off from Motorola), and Microsoft have the best of the best working on their technologies. Allowing them an allotment is a win-win situation for the companies. They refresh their engineers and give them a senses of community involvement, the company gets some great press, and the research gets top engineering minds to look at opportunities from an advanced perspective. Austin gets a leading look at what is around the corner and could possibly be a pilot city for new solar or other energy system that once put into place could save millions. This development won’t come overnight, maybe not even in the next decade, but if it develops it will happen in our backyard. Texas was once the oil capitol of the world, I wonder if the next energy development will be in our lifetime in our city. Lets hope these companies follow through lending real support and not just their name.

forgotten costs of illegal immigration

In texasgov-sulap.blogspot.com Sulap Brings up a huge topic that I never heard addressed at any point in the campaign season. What current steps are we taking to stop the huge flooding in the side of our Titanic? What is the entire cost of our inability to keep people out of our country? Estimates are scary. Criminal immigrants make up about 25% of our federal prisons at about 21K per year on taxpayers. That is about $500 billion federal funds per year and an additional $500 million for the nation's states incarcerations. That doesn't account for the welfare costs, labor market effects, wage effects, and drain on our education system. Why do people have such a hard time spending a couple of million on a wall. Sulap points out that the wall between India and Pakistan has dramatically reduced tensions between those countries. Implicit and explicit costs of Billions if not trillions of dollars is what is really killing our economy. I'll take the $25 billion to big 3 over a little wall any day. Drugs and crime are just a minor problem, look at the thousands of possible terrorists that are in our country right now waiting to really do some damage and that wall doesn't sound so bad does it. Some statistics were referenced from www.usillegalaliens.com.

More laws to protect us from each other.

Having now read a little history of Texas and more articles and blogs than I can count I am starting to see the Libertarian twist in the state. What got me thinking about this was some national attention recently and some local discussions about banning texting while driving. The lack of a motorcycle helmet law, state gun laws, and a general feeling I get from media coverage gives me a real “original 13” feeling toward Texas. Yes Texas has the two party thing happening, but there is definitely a defined defense for keeping personal freedoms within that game. There is some serious partisan attitude here in Austin that is stronger than anywhere I’ve ever lived and even with that there is still some room for personal freedoms.
Now don’t get me wrong I think texting while driving is crazy, I like everyone else has seen or been behind someone who is erratic and downright dangerous while texting. However is that any different than helping your kid in the backseat find his toy he just dropped, or putting on some makeup ( c’mon girls own up). We don’t have laws that restrict these things because they would be worthless. How many citations are there for kids not in their car seats? Yet we have all seen that as well. Another item is seatbelts, anyone ever been pulled over for that? So how are we going to police an item that is either unseen or can be unseen is seconds. Yes we could wait until the accident has happened, but unless we can get a time stamp for a text or have visual evidence it would be almost impossible to prove unless confessed (yeah right). I guess my idea is to find the story about an idiot texting while driving who goes Evel Knievel over the guardrail and send it to the “Darwin Award” website (http://www.darwinawards.com/) for submission. We can’t regulate stupid, and as much as lawyers need work in this terrible economy we don’t need to add any stress to law enforcement or the courts.

Statistics and political polling

I am currently taking a Statistics course and seeing the real world uses everyday. The election polls that we here about over, and over, and over again really seem to use those formulas as much as possible. Ralph K.M. Haurwitz discusses this in his article “the lowdown on higher ed” http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/highereducation/entries/2008/10/28/odds_overwhelmingly_favor_obam.html. He references a UT professor who I’m sure is much smarter than I and has much more data than I could ever hope to look at. He utilizes a software that predicts future events used in investing. The prediction in the data on the web page of the company says there is a 88% chance that Senator Obama will win the election. The professor says the software is incorrect and that actually there is a 99% chance Mr. Obama will win. Basically Professor Love states that because of a bunch of algorithms that rely on random sampling the results are much higher that Mr. Obama will win.
I am more of a common sense kind of guy that looks at people a little more simply. On one hand I can see that a certain percentage of Obama supporters are younger voters that can’t really be polled because they only have a cell phone and no home phones which are used for polling calls. That could make up a huge percentage of votes that can’t really be counted. Along with the normal undecided voters that are unaccounted I can see an X factor that represents many votes for Obama. Lets look at the other side though, Senator McCain has an issue with his own party in that many Republicans don’t have a great feeling about him, his central voting record, and some of his policy stances don’t follow party lines. Those represent many voters that will eventually vote for McCain just to keep Obama out. Also, there are some of the undecided voters that will swing to the McCain side as well. I look at polls a lot like I look at weather forecasting. Many times these things are right, but in the case of polls I think that many, ok most have been wrong. Kerry was going to win in a landslide, McCain had Bush in 2000 by huge numbers, even this year Hillary Clinton was way ahead of Senator Obama through much of the primary. Don’t even get me started on the media and the fact that the only reporting they’ve done in the past two weeks is to report on each other’s polls and what that means. NBC’ references an ABC poll, CNN reports on a CBS poll, and ABC leads their news with a CNN poll that is there “breaking news”!!
Statistics should be focused on real data, that is numbers, populations, sales, dividends, and other real data that doesn’t rely on a human choice which can be overstated, understated, and even lied about. As for me, I think I will move to Fiji and see if I can fire up a coup.

Since when did we belittle citizens to win an election?

This latest round of political propaganda from the Obama and McCain people is the “Joe” discussions. I realize that as far back as the beginning of our country nasty rhetoric against each candidate has been prevalent in our political scenery. Bush-Kerry, Jefferson-Adams, and Lincoln-McClellan to name just a few were ugly name calling campaigns that attempted to destroy the character of the candidate for a few more votes. But my question is when did we allow our political system to attack a citizen for asking a policy question to attempt to understand a candidate’s position. I frankly don’t care which side it came from, we have gotten to a point in our society that we are so power hungry to get into office that we will not stop until some of our citizens are laid across the train tracks. I don’t like either side of the media, the Sean Hannity’s and Keith Olberman’s should not be able to be on national TV spewing their anger. Ed Morrisey writes in his article Obama’s goon squad attempts to destroy Joe the plumber
(http://urbangrounds.com/2008/10/17/obama-vs-joe-the-plumber/) that Obama’s people and the media are trying to destroy Joe’s credibility just from a question the man asked Obama. We as citizens have become numb to this type of TV so much whereas we don’t see this as abnormal, nor do we have the ability to do anything about the situation simply because the whole system now is about the corporate dollar. If we chose the specifically address the sponsors of these networks then something may happen, but to notify the news organizations would yield nothing. I bet if we had some qualified candidates we would see a relevant campaign. As for Morrisey, he defends his argument in the standard conservative way trying to criminalize Obama’s “goon squad” and their efforts in destroying an average citizen. It is sad that our Presidential contest, with two unqualified senators (are these the best two candidates we can really come up with?), have come to a point where the rhetoric will undoubtedly result in a country worse off in four years. Morrisey does his part in continuing the task of ensuring the American citizen blocks out all information and hopes for the best.

BUSH: The movie.

As I was looking through media for material to write on I came across this quasi-article about the new Bush movie. It has bothered me for some reason that there was a movie coming out on Bush ever since I heard Oliver Stone was doing it, I just could not put my finger on why it bothered me. The article in Texas Monthly “Everybody must get Stoned”( http://www.texasmonthly.com/2008-10-01/feature2-1.php ) brought up some interesting viewpoints, some that were swirling around in my head and some that were new and engaging. It is an interesting lineup of local Austin people sitting down to review not the movie but the why, when, who, and how the movie should and should not be. These folks discuss whether the movie should have been made now or waited ten years and whether it will help, hurt, or be a non-factor in the upcoming election. My take on the principle of the movie is that it shows a lack of respect, regardless of ideology, to a man that had a few more issues to deal with than any other president except maybe Lincoln or Roosevelt.