The California State Assembly has voted down a bill that would have banned public schools from naming their sports teams after Indian tribles.

Of course, the idiots are going to make another try:

Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, immediately moved for reconsideration. [...]

Goldberg contends that use of tribal names by public schools is offensive and contrary to the state’s obligation to provide an equal education for all.

Indians can feel embarrassment, anger or ridicule over the use of such names at campus sporting events or rallies, according to supporters of AB 2115.

Has it not occurred to these idiots that people don’t name their sports teams after things that they consider ridiculous? And why do these people seem to have no problem with sports teams that are named for groups of white people> The Notre Dame Fighting Irish, the Green Bay Packers, the New England Patriots, the Dallas Cowboys, the Montréal Canadiens, the Vancouver Canucks, the Syracuse Orangemen, and dozens of other less-famous teams are named for groups of people, some of ethnic (or at least cultural) basis.

Nobody suggests that the New England Patriots are named in order to “ridicule” patriots, and you’d be laughed off the stage if you were to seriously suggest that Irish people would feel “embarassment” at a Notre Dame football game because of the team’s name.

Yet it’s automatically assumed that any team with a name inspired by American Indians is a jab at Indians’ culture. In the idiots’ world, any reference at all by a member of the majority to a minority group is a slur, until proven otherwise. What a bleak world those people must live in.

Recently, Nicole and I have noticed that there are a number of bank branches going up in Front Royal. Like three. There are three bank branches under construction at the moment in Front Royal; these supplement the two that have been constructed since last fall, which in turn support the eight bank branches (and one credit union) that formerly met the needs of the Front Royalty. All together, that’s thirteen banks (and one credit union) for a town that has, counting everyone living within ten miles, 54,000 souls — or one retail financial institution for about every 3,800 people. There’s not fourteen of anything else in Front Royal. There are not fourteen gas stations; there are fewer than fourteen fast-food restaurants. There are not fourteen motels; and Front Royal is a town with a conspicuous abundance of motels, catering to tourists visiting Shenandoah National Park.

These are all responsible, profit-generating instutitions, apparently getting into the market there for the long haul. All of the newly-constructed and under-construction banks are solid, free-standing structures, built of brick, and with multiple drive-through lanes. There must be enough money to be made in the retail banking game that the potential business is well worth the competition.

Which leads to our main point: the incomprehensibility of banks’ seeming hatred of their customers.

It’s no secret that banks, generally speaking, don’t treat their customers well. Do a Google search for “bank” and “poor customer service” and you’ll get a couple of thousand results, from all over the world. The general consensus seems to be that banks only want to deal with very wealthy individuals, and that the average person with a few thousand dollars in a checking account just isn’t worth their time.

Which, again, makes me wonder why so many banks are interested in doing business in Front Royal, which is hardly a hideaway for the Rich and Famous. Could it be that charging people large fees for holding on to their money is actually profitable? Is it possible that the banks have been lying when they say that they can’t make money on retail banking? Corporate America less than truthful? Can’t be.

Perhaps uncharactersitically, I think this is not entirely a bad thing.

When I was a wee tot, school was a radically different place from the rest of the world. There was no commerce other than the occasional book fair. The food in the school cafeteria was its own cuisine, rarely found anywhere else. The school lunch — priced at $0.30 when I started elementary school and $1.05 in high school for substantively the same meal — was, aside from pencils sold by the Pep Club, the only thing for sale in the school. The lunches consisted of that strange rectangular pizza, mashed potatoes with incredibly rich gravy, soggy french fries, Jell-O with things like celery embedded in it, and spaghetti that had been carefully cut into 1-1/2-inch segments, so you had to eat it with a spoon.

Some of this food was bad — some of it incredibly bad, and unhealthy — and some of it very good. Anyone who has attended public school in the United States knows what I’m talking about. What’s important is that it was all roughly the same, and that it was all different from what you got outside the school.

Now, I rather get the impression that, in a lot of schools, the cafeteria sells pretty much what you cen get elsewhere; I’ve even heard of some that have subcontracted their foodservice operations to fast-food outfits, turning the cafeteria into a kind of food court.

I’ve got nothing against Coke and McDonald’s and Taco Bell — frankly, a lot of the traditional school-lunch meals aren’t any better on nutritional grounds. But I am concerned that, if kids don’t get exposed to anything but fast food for lunch and their harried mothers’ microwaved masterpieces for dinner, a lot of them are in danger of growing up thinking that that garbage is all there is.

Banning by statute (or school board policy, or whatever) certain foods and activities in school probably isn’t a good idea, either; it’ll just make them forbidden fruit, and that much more attractive when they are available. Ultimately I believe that it should just be unthinkable that kids should be eating Fritos and drinking Cokes in school as a matter of course. So many of our social regulations these days are regulations of the sort that used to be unspoken, and just understood to be the rule by which society operated. They’re beneficial; but when you need a Bureau of Junk Food to make sure things are up to snuff, well, that’s when you start trying to declare ketchup a vegetable and getting generally silly.

Unless some action is taken, though, a lot of kids might grow up never having learned to use a fork, having eaten everything directly out of a bag or wrapper.

In this week’s New Yorker, there’s a story in the “Talk of the Town” section called “The Goldilocks Effect”, that points out that, generally, beyond a certain point, the larger a company gets, the more inefficient it gets.

It suggests that inefficiencies inherent in the structure of large corporations result in diminishing economies of scale, as different parts of the company pursue their own goals, communication between units gets more difficult, etc.

However, the story seems to miss an important and fairly obvious point.

JetBlue is different from other airlines. It doesn’t issue paper tickets. Its planes have leather seats and DirecTV. It serves no meals. It flies out of airports that the major airlines shun, like Long Beach. The most important difference of all, though, is that JetBlue is profitable. Since the beginning of last year, the airline industry has lost more than twelve billion dollars, while JetBlue has made millions. [...]

Commerce Bank is different from other banks. Its branches stay open until 8 P.M.; its customers get lollipops and dog biscuits; employees wear red on Fridays. Commerce doesn’t raise money for loans by issuing commercial paper. Rather, it gets most of the money from ordinary depositors’ checking and savings accounts. It has never made a major acquisition. And, while many big banks are struggling, Commerce, which recently opened branches in Manhattan, is one of the fastest-growing banks in the country. Last year, it increased revenues by forty-one per cent and earnings by thirty-two per cent, while world bestriders like Bank of America and J. P. Morgan Chase saw revenues and earnings fall.

A few years ago, JetBlue and Commerce might have seemed like eccentric experiments, anachronisms left over from the days before companies were thought to need “global reach.” The unquestioned doctrine of the past half decade was that a company had to get bigger to get better. “I cannot overemphasize the importance of sheer size and scale in today’s environment,” Ken Lewis, NationsBank’s president, said in 1997, justifying his company’s $62-billion merger with BankAmerica. It was, after all, the heyday of the supersized Value Meal, the lane-hogging Suburban, and the Starbucks venti latte.

But the main difference between the venti latte and United Airlines is that the venti latte, for being larger, delivers more value to the customer. United Airlines does not. (more…)

Amtrak is famous for losing money nearly everywhere it operates except the Northeast Corridor, the largely-electrified main line between Washington and Boston. And, if you’re familiar with Amtrak, you’ll know that almost all their trains are largely empty — except in the Northeast Corridor. In the Northeast Corridor, it’s not uncommon on some trains to have to sit in the aisle for the whole journey.

One of those overcrowded trains is the Clocker. It’s a train aimed at commuters, operated under a very complicated arrangement with New Jersey Transit.

Anyway, today’s New York Times carries a story about a club car that’s attached to the 5:42 p.m. Clocker out of Penn Station in New York (as well as the 7:59 a.m. service from Princeton Junction in the other direction).

These cars are leased by Amtrak to a private club, the 75 members of which pay $1,200 each in annual dues. Both Amtrak and the club are reluctant to specify just how much this lease costs, but the Times estimates it as “as much as” $70,000 annually. Members also have to pay the normal Amtrak ticket price for each journey; their $1,200 just means that they’ll be able to sit down once they’ve paid.

Ordinary commuters — the ones standing in the aisles — are not happy. They say that the seats should be available to all riders.

But Michael Bonner, the Amtrak official who oversees the Clocker service, said that — despite what overcrowded riders might think — the club was not taking away precious seats that should be available to everyone first come first served. On Clocker trains, most riders between New York and Princeton have New Jersey Transit monthly passes costing $274 a month. New Jersey Transit pays Amtrak to provide the service to supplement its own, under an agreement that specifies a certain number of cars per day. If the 200 Club did not exist, he said, the club’s extra car would almost certainly not remain on the trains.

[...]

“When the Clocker trains leave here in the morning, we don’t have a coach left in Philadelphia,” Mr. Bonner said. “There’s nothing I can do. I don’t have any more equipment, and they just keep building like crazy out in Jersey.”

The 200 Club is not accepting new members at this time, and Amtrak doesn’t have any cars left to lease you, if you try to start your own club. So you’re stuck.

And this is what’s the matter with Amtrak.

Either this arrangement makes money for Amtrak, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t make money, Amtrak should either get out of the deal or raise its lease rates. If it does make money, Amtrak should order more cars immediately.

There’s obviously demand for the service — and, if $1,200 a year per seat is enough to pay for another car on the train, it’d be easy to provide it. $1,200 a year is a couple of bucks each way for a daily commuter.

In a rare bit of heartening news about copyright, it appears that the Library of Congress has rejected the music industry’s recent blatant attempt to kill off Internet ‘radio’.

However, this probably only means that the music industry will come up with something even more idiotic. The thought processes of these people are illustrated well by a comment made on Marketplace (about 21:50 into that stream) by John Simpson, executive director of Sound Exchange — the music industry organization that was set up to collect the crippling royalties the CARP plan would have imposed:

If governement wants to subsidize a new business, an emerging business that is fine. I don’t think the music industry should subsidize [internet radio] like we have traditional radio over the last 70 years.

They apparently see radio as something that they are subsidizing, rather than the single most important promotional tool for their product.

Commercial radio in the USA was born on November 2, 1920, when KDKA started broadcasting in Pittsburgh. RCA got into the recorded music business (by purchasing the Victor Talking Machine Company, whose logo was a dog listening to a gramophone, a logo that RCA continues to exploit to this day) in 1928. EMI was formed by a merger of HMV and the Columbia Gramophone Company in 1931.

If anything, it’s radio that made possible large-scale businesses built on recorded music, not the other way round.

In a story about the new U.S. farm subsidy bill on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday this weekend, we came across a stunning display of illogic. The story focuses on the fact that the majority of the subsidies — 70% — go to just 10% of farm owners, and that the primary beneficiaries of the subsidies are not small family farmers, but huge corporations. But all isn’t lost, however:

While small farms draw the littlest checks, they may depend on them more than their larger neighbors. That’s because some of the biggest, most efficient farms can produce crops so cheaply that they could weather low prices and stay profitable even with no subsidies at all.

And this “logic” is being used to justify the continuance and increase of subsidies.

We pointed out the other day that AOL Time Warner’s merger was failing because of a total failure of the company to actually exploit the much-vaunted synergies inherent in such a merger. Rather, we said, turf wars were the order of the day.

The Wall Street Journal now has a story about royalties to be paid by online ‘broadcasters’ of music, pointing out much of the same stuff. (Paid subscription required: it’s well worth it.)

Publicly, America Online has left the issue in the hands of the Digital Media Association, a three-person outfit in Washington, D.C., that is the leading advocate for the Webcasters fighting the royalty proposal.

“I consult with AOL regularly,” says Jonathan Potter, executive director of the association. America Online is on the board of directors of DiMA. He says the royalties for small broadcasters should be based on a percentage of their revenue, and that eventually online and offline radio should be treated equally.

Meanwhile, Warner Music Group has aligned itself with the powerful RIAA and its SoundExchange, a 22-person division that is leading the battle to support the proposed royalty rates. “Warner has been very supportive of our efforts,” says Mr. Simson of SoundExchange. SoundExchange had originally sought higher royalties but now says the Copyright Office’s recommendation should be respected.

The question is, will AOLTW make more money by squeezing their customers (and by killing off a nascent industry that publicizes their product), or will they make more money by letting go, and taking advantage of greater revenue streams and greater margins that might be the result of taking advantage of new technologies?

Our view is that they’d make more money by taking advantage of the technology. More to the point, nearly every opinion I’ve seen on the matter — every opinion from someone who doesn’t have some personal vested interest in the continued dominance of the music industry as we know it today — sems to be in agreement.

Now, if you’re Vivendi, or News Corp., or some other large music-industry player without a significant stake in the online world, you would naturally want to kill off online music; you don’t have much to gain from the alternative.

But AOL Time Warner has more to gain from a shift to online music (and TV, and movies, and so on) than they have to lose. Steve Case & Co. know this; that’s why AOL bought Time Warner in the first place.

Unfortunately, Steve Case & Co. are not being allowed to call the shots there any more; instead, people whose reputations are based on the continued success of the old-fashioned media properties are in charge, and they’re sacrificing the company’s future for their own egos. The shareholders are, as they should be, up in arms. We’ll see in the coming weeks and months whether they’re smart enough to see through the idiocy of the management-originated rumors that the company is considering spinning off the AOL online services.

Eugene Volokh recounts a recent experience while eating out.

SF Chronicle story:

Jeffrey Figueroa, 13, admits he shot a spitwad at his Walnut Creek school last fall and that it hit another student in the right eye, requiring surgery.

But the seventh-grader and his parents said today that he never should have been convicted of two felonies — let alone charged — for what they call a schoolyard accident. He faces spending up to eight years in a juvenile prison.