Mickey Kaus gives another great example of absurd and outrage inducing union work rules:

Antiquated work rules hurt BART finances by ramping up overtime, BART officials said.

They point to rules requiring that two workers remove seat covers and backing for cleaning. A utility worker unsnaps the cushion. A journeyman mechanic is called in to remove two screws for the seat backing.

Among cleaning crews, a worker in one job classification cleans inside stations and another worker in another classification cleans outside the roof line of stations.

I had been having problems with the My Documents folder on our Living Room laptop that is connected to our network wirelessly. The main problem was that I could not access any files that had been changed since some time in late April!

Because we use Small Business Server 2008, folder redirection was set up so that the My Documents folder actually resides on the SBS 2008 box. Because the laptop connected wirelessly, I had Offline Files activated so that if the laptop were disconnected from the network, I could continue to work on documents.

I discovered that by turning off Offline Files (conveniently reached in Vista by typing “Offline Files” into the search bar) the problem was solved. (I had previously tried leaving and rejoining the domain, but that did not work.)

In the wave of the popping of the housing bubble and and resulting damage to financial institutions, I have heard many calls for “more regulation.”

First the standard point from government skeptics: why more regulation and not better regulation? I have seen surprisingly little evidence or arguments that a lack of certain regulations resulted in the runup in housing prices or the sensitivity of financial institutions to weakness in the secondary mortgage market. Most of the calls for more regulation appear to be 20-20 hindsight that “something” should have been done by the government to prevent these problems.

Despite the vacuity of calls for more financial regulations, I am open to the possibility that a better regulatory structure might improve the operation of these markets. It is certainly conceivable that even radical changes might be useful. Unfortunately, most of the specific proposals made seem like really bad ideas, e.g. reinstitute the Glass-Steagal separation of commercial banking and investment banking.

Giving regulators more discretion only seems like a good idea if we believe regulators know more, or are wiser, or have fewer conflicts that affect their judgment than market participants. The insights of the public choice economists suggest regulators are likely to be worse than market participants in all these areas. One possible exception that comes to mind is that there may be suboptimal controls on individuals’ ability to receive extraordinary current compensation while their companies at being set up for future failure. Although this is a classic agency problem that seems better addressed by a robust market for corporate control than increasing regulatory discretion.

I was also struck today by the fact I have heard no real proposals for political reform. Surely some large part of the recent financial problems were caused by a Congress that, for example, created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged lenders to hold their stock as capital, implicitly backed their debt with a government guaranty and encouraged more sub-prime lending. Are there structural reforms we should be considering to make the political system respond more to what is in the long term interest of the entire country rather than those of vocal interest groups? I supposed campaign-finance reform would be such a proposal, but by all accounts it has not succeeded in altering this dynamic and is a remarkably unimaginative proposal.

What about incentive pay for elected representatives based on various measures of national well-being in the future, to the exclusion of other compensation? Perhaps each piece of legislation could have such incentives built into it? Or perhaps taking seriously enumeration of powers in the constitution? I would like to see more ideas for political reform along these lines.

Mickey Kaus recently asked the following rhetorical question about the lack of union concessions in the government financed GM reorganization:

Why should the government tax unskilled workers making $18 an hour, who haven't bankrupted their employers, in order to protect unskilled workers making $28 an hour, who have bankrupted their employers, from having to take a pay cut?

The obvious answer is that they shouldn’t.

But, I was surprised to see this argument, because its logical extension is that there should not be any government expenditure that doesn’t benefit the least wealthy taxpayers as much as the portion of their tax dollars that are being used for it. In other other words if a dollar is taken from a poor taxpayer for a program, that person should get at least a dollar’s worth of utility from that program.

That is a pretty tough standard to satisfy. Almost all industry subsidies, scientific research, public works, and transportation programs would fail such a standard. Resorting to more ephemeral justifications like these programs benefit the entire country and such benefits flow indirectly to the poor taxpayer would also justify the GM bailout.

So I welcome Mickey Kaus as a supporter of the minimal state!

A number of blog posts from Ian Dixon, Chris Lanier and Ben Drawbaugh over the past week or so have cause me to rethink where I think the Windows Media Center platform is headed. In three words: away from extenders. Not just stand alone Media Center Extenders, but Xbox 360 Media Center Extenders as well. I think they will be replaced by dedicated PCs running some version of Windows that is designed to function more like a consumer electronics device that a conventional PC.

Here are the pieces of evidence and arguments that have led me to this conclusion (albeit one I’m not that certain of):

• HP has discontinued their media center extenders and MediaSmart TVs. Linksys extenders have also been discontinued.
• When Netflix Watch Instantly functionality was added to the Xbox 360 last Fall, and to Media Center recently, there was no support for Media Center Extenders.
• The Zune Marketplace will be available on the Xbox 360, but not Media Center.
• Chris Lanier writes:

  More so, I don’t see Microsoft investing the time to use Media Center as the core for the home.  Media Center isn’t dying, it isn’t coming out of Windows, but I continue to think the focus will shift.  Microsoft will still work with partners on Extenders (I’ve been assured of this), but they will still release products and features that forget these Extender’s even existed.  They will connect your life, but they will not connect your life using Media Center.

• Reports I read previously concerning Windows 7 and TV shows recorded with OCUR tuners suggest that other PCs in a Windows 7 Homegroup will be able to play DRM laden TV shows recorded on a Media Center PC (something that is impossible now).
• However, even Chris Lanier agrees with Ben Drawbaugh that Media Center is likely to be integrated into Windows Home Server relatively soon.
• Ian Dixon points out that we will soon be seeing a retail PC designed as a set top box in the form of the  Mediaconnect TV box.

In my mind all of these developments point toward the extender model of multiroom Media Center use being replaced with set top PCs in each room that do the work of Media Center Extenders.

Why? Architecturally, the extender model has always been something of a kludge, with extenders running as different users users on the Media Center PC when operating. This has led to many difficulties with extenders like each having its own library of music, the inability to fast forward or rewind audio content on extenders, and many add-ins not running on extenders.

The advantage of the extender model was that (i) you only needed one PC and each extender was relatively inexpensive, and (ii) key data and infrastructure was all in one place (like recordings and the schedule of TV shows to record). These advantages are what have made Media Center the best multi-room solution for TV available at any price.

If there really are cheap CE-style (i.e. really cheap, simple and reliable) PCs coming then this will negate rationale (i) for the extender model. With the coming of Homegroup in Windows 7, I suspect we see the beginning of the negation of advantage (ii) of the extender model if these advantages of centralization can be duplicated using Homegroup in some way.

Using a set top box instead of an extender means that Microsoft will no longer have to dedicate resources to making the extender kludge work and can instead devote those resources to coordinating the media related activities of multiple PCs on a network. A pursuit that may well be useful in contexts beyond whole-home AV.

I don’t think extenders will disappear any time soon, but I think the evolution of hardware technology and the advances in Window 7 point toward their eventual replacement by a consumer electronics-style set top box PC that serves the same purpose.