Glibertarians.com 2018 Archive

Category: Regulation

  • Creosote Achilles and the Perils of Potrepreneurship

    In the fall of 2017, the outdoor cannabis harvest was a bumper crop for growers throughout the state of Oregon. This epic weed haul was the result of two factors; weather, and bureaucracy. The weather was spectacular for growing cannabis, particularly outdoors. A wet fall, winter, and spring (nearly 220 straight days of rain) meant there was plenty of water available. And the summer was warm and dry. Conditions that are favorable for growing trees with plenty of flower on them. The sunshine helped to ensure that flower would be potent. The other cause was bureaucracy. Normally inimical to the production of any good or service of value, on occasion bureaucrats manage to step on their dicks in such a way as to help the actual productive class. Such was the case in 2017 with the OLCC (the Oregon Liquor Control Commission).

    The OLCC is the regulatory pseudo agency (much like the fed it is a non-government organization with a government mandate) responsible for enforcing Oregon’s pot laws. In 2017, the OLCC declared open season for anyone with a license to grow marijuana when it announced that “due to a lack of allocated funds, enforcement efforts will primarily be focused on those growing cannabis without legal license to do so and on those with a recreational license. However, next year will see increased enforcement for medical growers.” In plain English and practical reality, this meant that as long as you had a medical license you could grow as much pot as you wanted. The statutory limits on the number of plants one could grow was out the window. Worst case, if you were caught, they’d cut down plants of your choosing until you were down to the legally allowed number. Every grower was growing as much pot as he could get in the ground that summer as cuttings are cheap.

    Fields of Green

    The resulting harvest was huge. And while the left may not understand or believe it, the laws of supply and demand are iron. If supply is greater than demand, the price falls until an equilibrium is reached. And the result was The Glut. A situation where outdoor weed wholesale prices fell as low as $300 per pound. If you could find a buyer and had good enough quality weed. There were rumors of weed going as low as $100/lb but that had to have been either exaggeration or for some really ditch weed bullshit. Either way, that was the first bump in the road.

    Once the harvest was in, properly dried and cured, and finally trimmed and packaged up, we had enough product that once The Glut ended we’d be able to fund our next phase. Right where we need to be to build our indoor facility and go through the process of getting the rec license that would allow us to expand. That’s where the next bump in the road occurred. We just need to wait for The Glut to recede and the price to come back up to our floor of $800 to $1000/lb. While it would put a crimp in our timeline, waiting even six months wouldn’t be catastrophic.

    An aside; indoor and outdoor pot flower are of differing quality. Indoor is higher quality and fetches a relatively higher price. But outdoor is far cheaper to produce and the aforementioned conditions were conducive to outdoor pot production. In 2017 we had both indoor and outdoor operations.

    End Product

    My business partner was impatient to take the next steps however, so was looking to expand beyond our established channel of buyers to sell all that outdoor product. The short version is that the buyer was a scammer that my partner thought he knew but didn’t. My partner took his stepson with him to the transaction, verified the guy had a med card, and gave the stepson the cash to count, made the transaction “selling” 80% of our harvest, and the best quality at that, and they left. Only to get home and discover the money was, as he texted me, “counterfeit.” I didn’t hear from him for 3 days and when I finally got the full story I have never been closer to murder than I was at that moment.

    Turns out the money wasn’t counterfeit. It was movie money that looked just this side of monopoly money for verisimilitude. I wasn’t even mad at the scammer (whom my partner didn’t even take a picture of the guy’s med card or his license plate and only had a phone number that of course turned out to be a burner). I mean, the balls to try that and get away with it? But my partner and his idiot stepson? Yeah. Them I was furious at.

    Does that look like legal tender to you?

    Anyway.

    As of February, we had only 20% of our harvest, The Glut was finally receding, and we were at a crossroads. We came up with a last-ditch plan of selling that final amount to finance continued expansion of existing indoor med operations of high THC plants, and to get legal for growing outdoor hemp as we did have a legit buyer for hemp flower by that point for processing for CBD products. Those funds from a large hemp harvest could then be leveraged to do the build out for a rec license grow. As described in my previous article, a rec license allows a much larger size grow operation than a med license.

    Another digression: Marijuana and hemp are the same plant, save that hemp has been bred primarily for its fibers in the stalk and has only trace amounts of THC but plenty of CBDs, even in the flower. Marijuana flower contains both, and various strains have various proportions. THC is what gets you high and CBDs are the actual medicinal chemicals, especially for seizures, muscle & joint problems, pain, and anxiety. CBDs also don’t get you high and won’t, generally, show up on a piss test. Getting licensed for hemp is far less expensive than getting a rec marijuana license and you can grow as much as you like. There’s a fee for a 2-year license and you must have proof that the plants are hemp and not marijuana, and that’s it. Far easier compliance and we have enough acreage on the farm it could be quite lucrative. THC flower is usually more valuable, esp. indoor grown. But there’s potential in CBDs, especially with hemp as the input costs are way lower, the regulatory burden is lower, and the labor costs are lower offsetting the lower sales price one can get per pound.

    Unfortunately, due to the remainder being lower quality and The Glut being so epic, it took a long time to move that product. The revenue hasn’t come in fast enough to buy the hemp plants needed to get the hemp license or get them in the ground for a spring or summer crop. The flow has been a trickle; just enough to keep the lights on and pay the basic bills while expanding the amount of indoor plants we can grow up to the legal limit for the number of med cards we have. There’s an outside shot that by next spring there’ll be money for hemp. But I don’t see it.

    The result is that two months ago I washed my hands of it and told my partner that as long as he kept things legal and he paid the lease payments on time for the farm, he could keep going, but that I was done being actively involved. I started looking for a job and found one. I started that the last week of June and I’m enjoying it.

    The saving grace, from a financial perspective, is related to the legal technicalities on having a rec license and the land we purchased for the business. The land use regulations related to marijuana are somewhat convoluted. There are both county regulations and state regulations. The state regulates the maximum square footage of flower canopy one can have per rec license. It also insists that no individual or entity may have multiple licenses on the same tax lot. The county regulates the zoning for tax lots, which determines whether you can grow indoor, outdoor or both. It also sets a minimum size for a rec license. Usually 2-5 acres. Further, to obtain a rec license, one must prove water rights. If they aren’t already registered on the deed, this isn’t as simple as digging a well. One must obtain those rights through a process that takes 1-2 years.

    To give an example. If one purchases 40 acres in a county where the minimum size for a rec license is 4 acres you may not, then obtain 10 licenses from the OLCC. You can obtain one and lease out the other nine to other folks with a license. But if you want a second license you must buy another tax lot somewhere. Many of the larger operations are buying 5-10-acre plots with proper zoning building a minimum size rec grow, and then offering the rest as turnkey, then buying another parcel and repeating. That was part of our plan. But the number of parcels that are properly zoned in counties with relatively simple regulations is small. More importantly, the piece of land we bought has county water and therefore automatically has water rights.

    The land is valuable in and of itself. And the land is in my wife’s name and my name. It’s appreciated about 20% in value since we purchased it. And the company is leasing it from my wife and me. So worst case we have a valuable piece of property that has a current market value that is keeping pace with the rest of the money we invested and then some. Also, it’s a good place to go shooting whenever I want. We may even just keep it and build a country house as a retreat there.

    I learned my lesson. My next startup will be a side-hustle that I build until it replaces a significant portion of my income. I’ll have no partners, only employees, or minority ownership stakes if I need someone with special skills, but not a partner. And while I’m probably out $20-$40k counting lost income, it was worth the gamble as it was money I could afford to lose. I don’t regret taking the chance, though, and I learned a great deal about myself and managing people, and just how tough it is to start a business. I’ve always admired folks who run their own enterprise, but I do so even more now that I’ve taken a shot at it.

    End Note: I appreciate all the interest and encouragement as well as kind words. It’s helped immensely. This place really is a community.

  • Memphis Bike Lanes

     

    I don’t think bike lanes are a great idea…mostly. Don’t get me wrong: a smart, separate, and affordable way to share an interstate bridge in a town with commuting problems is one thing, but messing up the whole town with crazy little specialty lanes is a bad idea. Cruising around Memphis recently, I spent about ten miles on bike lanes and so many things came to mind:

    1) The biggest problem is that when there are bike lanes around town, folks decide that’s where bikes belong. You’re not a reasonable vehicle any more the second you peddle outside the lines: you’re off the reservation. Most car drivers have this idea that they own the road, so this is already a problem if you are a pedaler or pedestrian or any of the other annoying variants getting in the way of the great automobile. I’m not looking to be, but I now am a problem if I need to leave the bike lane.

    2) Bike lanes themselves make enemies: every guy who before was parking on the curb is mad, the commuter who has been funneled down to four lanes from six to make room for the bikes resents deeply, the shopkeeper whose clients must now mind a gap while parking and then dodge cyclists before they can even gain the sidewalk is incensed. Drivers generally hated bikes already; now they hate the lanes per se…and, by extension, they hate cyclists even more; that won’t help out in traffic land.

    3) Bike lanes subvert basic traffic law and dumb down everyone. They’re mindless, like an interstate: we pedal onto one and turn off the brain; bike lanes appear around town, and drivers don’t need to worry about cyclists anymore so they get to think less because (see 1 above and repeat after me) that’s where bikes belong. I already compete as a cyclist for the attention of those with whom I share the road, with their texting, their spilling their coffee in their laps, their screaming spawn in the back seat, their hood ornament, and all the other things they focus on instead of looking down the road a furlong or so and figuring out what they might need to prepare to do in the next five or ten seconds with the two tons of steel they’re slinging around town. Right-of-way…what is this thing you speak of, mad man? My buddy reports this typical move today: car overtakes him and then suddenly turns right off the road immediately in front of him…while he’s pedaling over 20mph…because he’s a cyclist and is just in the way…because that driver has lost touch with all the simple right and wrongs he learned when he was 15 from the nice pamphlet that the governor printed for us all, which we all had to memorize before we could get the pretty wallet cards with our pictures on them. I guess if he drives over an old lady in a cross-walk, she had it coming for being so hopelessly out of date; get with the times, grandma; walking is lame!

    4) Ye gods these damned bike lanes are dangerous…and ugly! They need not necessarily be, but they generally are. There’s all this extra paint that’s super slick in the rain. Bike lanes often come with tons of extra furniture: little stanchions that corral us off at intersections and such. But the biggest problem is maintenance: if there’s a bike lane, I belong in it, supposedly, and I shouldn’t opt out of the leaf piles, fallen limbs, broken glass, sand, gravel, wreckage (literally: headlamp lenses, grill shards, random sharp bits of injection-molded carnage), and any other flotsam that heavier traffic knocks out of the “real” lanes and into the little lane where the guys with the thin tires roll. For a few miles on one street in town, both east- and west-bound bike lanes are contiguous, both on the north side of the street: west-bound I’m pedaling against traffic; who’s going to look for me over there on the wrong side of the street when they cross my lane at an intersection…how is this stupidity improving cycling in particular or traffic in general?

    5) No one knows what the lanes mean; the signage is random, inconsistent, and at least somewhat ambiguous. How do we merge so you can turn right and I can carry on straight? Does the bike lane trump other rules? Is that cyclist a criminal or a mere jerk for wheeling out of his bike lane to avoid a stretch of missing, broken, lumpy…whatever type of failed pavement?

    We’re teaching ourselves not to think, exacerbating the tension between cars and bikes, and pitting ourselves against our neighbors with these lanes. There’s got to be a better way to design traffic to be bike-smart than what I’ve seen around Memphis.

  • I Fucking Hate New York

    So…

     

    I just took my five hour I Can Haz Sekund Amendment Nao? class, and my typical “go fuck yourself” tendencies have been whipped up to a jiggly wiggly timey wimey ball of hate.

    Now, any of the following things could be true:

    • The people teaching the class didn’t know wtf they were talking about
    • I might not have correctly understood what I was being taught, even though I got a perfect score on the test afterward
    • The people teaching the class could have been trolling everyone.  NY gun laws are completely beyond Poe, after all.

    But assuming the rage-hormones haven’t broken my brain, let me share my loathing of this state’s government with you.

    Stop!  Don’t Touch!

    If you don’t have a pistol license in NYS, you are not allowed to touch a pistol.  Not own, not carry, not buy or sell, touch.  Criminal offense if you do.

    Catch Twenty-one-and-three-quarters

    In order to get a license to touch a pistol, you must submit your paperwork for said license, including the receipt of the gun you have purchased.

    https://giphy.com/gifs/reactionseditor-l0Iy9D4PZKRZ6chcQ

    Yes.  You must first buy a gun without ever having touched it.  That’s the way things work here.  Now of course, just because you bought it doesn’t give you any of the normal benefits of what we would normally think “ownership” implies.  Like, YOU CAN’T FUCKING TOUCH IT.  Or, I dunno, take it home mebbe?  You give the gun store some money, they give you a receipt (only).  You submit the receipt with your license paperwork to the judge and maybe someday you might actually own something that is a little more solid than a slip of paper (which, much like the Constitution in NYS, can be used for wiping one’s ass).

    Here Comes The Judge

    Now the class-givers were very happy to be teaching my group of people, as we live in a county with a “good” judge, 2A-wise.  Because you see, each county in NYS has a judge who determines whether or not people have their pistol licenses granted, and which version is granted.

    Everything not permitted is forbidden

    For you see, you’re not getting a license to carry a pistol; no no, that would be silly.  You are getting a license to carry a pistol for a particular purpose only.  And guess what?  Self-defense is a separate listed category not granted by the other permitted reasons.  My judge will pretty much automatically grant pistol licenses for the purposes of hunting and target shooting.  This means I can carry a gun to a gun range, from a gun range to my house, to a hunting location and from a hunting location to my house.  That’s it.  I can also use it only for target shooting and hunting.  So, if I am carrying it to a lawful destination and I am attacked by a crazed hobo, I may not use the pistol for self defense if I do not have a self-defense license.  I can roundhouse kick his face off, I can crush his skull with a rock, I can blow his head off with a shotgun, but if I use my target and hunting license pistol to stop him then I am guilty of unlawful use of a firearm.  I may not (may not, see below) be prosecuted for the dead hobo, but I will be prosecuted for the gun felony.

    Ain’t nobody wants to see that *(euphemisms helpfully marked)

    Now, open carry ist verboten in NYS.  Which means, you may not expose your gun* in public.  This includes printing it through a shirt or jacket — that’s a crime.   Once you’re inside the (private) gun range, you can take it out* and begin using your gun.*  This also applies to hunting on a piece of private land.  But what about on public lands?   No, you may not expose your gun*, you must keep it concealed at all times.  Yes.  That’s right.  According to the law, you can use a properly licensed pistol for hunting as long as you don’t take it out of your range bag/holster/etc.  Now the NYS game wardens apparently did not want to be the victim of accidental discharges so they have magnanimously agreed to not charge people so long as the hunters are a) dressed like hunters, b) are able to explain what kind of game they are hunting c) it is the season for said game and d) the pistol is appropriate for the type of game being hunted.  Unless they just feel like charging you that day, of course.

    Post Code Lottery, NYS Style

    Now there is a pistol license that allows you to just (concealed) carry the damn thing, it’s called an “unrestricted” license.  One of the reason why my judge is considered one of the good ones is that after having has a specific-purpose license for a year, I can then apply for an unrestricted license.  There are more classes involved, and they’re not offered all that often, and there is a waiting list for them when they are offered, but if I get into one, my county’s judge has a habit of granting them.  Albany county’s judge apparently never approves unrestricted licenses.  Some of the counties where the Night’s Watch are located will grant the unrestricted license without having a year of the training wheel version.  Judges change.  There’s no guarantee that the next judge of Saratoga county will be any better than Albany.

    It’s getting all Sondheim up in here

    Remember way back when you “bought” a gun?  Well, if all goes well, in a few months you might be able to take it home, once you have all your paperwork in.  Well, “you” and “your” isn’t completely accurate.  When you go to Ye Olde Sheriff’s office with your petition, you include some envelopes addressed to four NYS residents of good character who have known you for at least year.  According to the trainers, this is not a rubber stamp thing.  There will be background checks run on them, and the judge will determine whether the relationship is adequate for them to provide “proper” character references.  The Westchester judge requires that one of these four must have known you for at least five years.  So if you’ve just moved here from out of state, I hope your pistol collection wasn’t too expensive.  Once the judge accepts your four, questionnaires are stuffed into the envelopes you provided (Huzzah for saving tax dollars!) and sent out.  Until those four people return those questionnaires, your application will not be processed any further.  If they are too late in returning them, the application is canceled.  If the judge doesn’t like what they read, the application is denied.  If the application is denied, you may not apply again until three years have passed since the denial.  You’ll need to go out of state for all your pistol-touching* needs.

    It gets better.  Better, not good.

    Once you do get a pistol license, you can now touch pistols.*  This will help make your second purchase a better one, since you’ll have some idea of ergonomics.  Once you purchase your next one, the gun store will give you another piece of paper.  “What?” you may be asking. “Don’t I have a license to carry a pistol home now?”  Hahahahahahano.  Well, technically yes.  You have a license to (concealed) carry A pistol.  A single very specific pistol.  Not “your” new one. This also works in reverse. Your pistol can only be carried by the licensee (i.e. you).  You can’t lend out a gun.  Another pistol-licensed individual can touch it* and they can use it for purposes for which their pistol license is valid, but they have to do so while under your direct supervision.  The good part is that you can amend your pistol license to also include “your” new pistol.  You won’t need any additional judge’s approvals or character references, just some signed and notarized forms.  It still will take a few weeks to process.

    You’ve fucking done it now (alternative title: Fuck Andrew Cuomo with red-hot pokers covered with syphilitic hornets1)

    This has all been about pistols.  Long guns are much less regulated…  unless you get a pistol license.  Because once you’ve deigned to ask to exercise your rights, the government now has carte blanche to fuck you over.  There are vast [dammit, why can’t I find that scene from David Lynch’s Dune where Duncan Idaho says “vast numbers.  VAST.”] numbers of ways that you can violate the terms of your pistol license.  I believe they’re all crimes. Most of them are misdemeanors with no/little chance of jail time, but they are still crimes.  Which means you immediately become a gun criminal.   And gun criminals aren’t allowed to own any guns, even guns not requiring any special permission (even in NYS) to own.  It’s kind of ingenious in a Kafka/Ayn Rand villain sort of way:  make it so those people that want to own guns are more likely to violate rules.  Make the rules carry little or no penalties to keep from generating sympathetic victims but then also use it to disarm them.  Ta da!  You’re disarming people who want guns without restricting the rights of those who don’t want to exercise those rights; as far as the gun-apathetic are concerned, no violation has taken place.  Brilliant!  Though not as brilliant as my idea of opening a hipster pop-up restaurant selling heated Red Baron frozen pizzas for $35.

    And one last “Fuck You”

    All his ranting has been concerning the laws of New York State.  But the title just said “New York.”  Why?  Well, one of the laws pertaining to gaining a New York State Pistol License is… It is not valid in the five boroughs of NYC.

    I wanted to find someone flipping off the NYC skyline, or the Empire State Building. This is the best I could do

     

    1 Hyperbolically speaking, of course.

  • GDPR & You Glibertarians.com

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    SP: “Hey, Webdom, do you know a good GDPR consultant?”

    Webdom: “Yes.”

    SP: “Can you give me her email address?”

    Webdom: “No.”

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    If you’ve ever signed up for an email newsletter, registered for a user account online, or purchased something from an online purveyor, you’ve undoubtedly been bombarded the last week (or longer) with emails like the one above. You’ve noticed the new cookie notice here on Glibertarians.com. You might have even read our Privacy Policy.

    I’m not going to get into the details of the mind-numbing array of things the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires to be in compliance. I’m not a lawyer and much of it is open to interpretation.

    If you’re interested there is no shortage of online resources, including the EU’s own website. Companies across the globe have been working on this compliance since the law was passed in April 2016.

    No, what I want to rant about is the fact that as of May 25, 2018, the provisions of the 2-year-old regulation are now enforceable.

    I hear you saying, “So what? It’s an EU law, and we aren’t in the EU.”

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

    You crack me up.

    The new regulation is supposedly to protect EU citizens and their “personally identifiable information” (PII) that may be collected, processed, stored, and transferred online.

    What the EU considers PII is much broader than what the US has generally considered PII. The EU insists that anything that could directly or indirectly be used to identify someone is included.

    Personal data is any information that relates to an identified or identifiable living individual.

  • Different pieces of information, which collected together can lead to the identification of a particular person, also constitute personal data.
  • Personal data that has been de-identified, encrypted or pseudonymised but can be used to re-identify a person remains personal data and falls within the scope of the law.

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    *****

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    So, how the heck is the EU going to enforce the myriad complex and heavily nuanced provisions of the law? Fairly and objectively.

    OK, I couldn’t even type that with a straight face.

    The EU provides this helpful information:

    Stronger rules on data protection mean

  • people have more control over their personal data
  • businesses benefit from a level playing field

    • Oh, good! Businesses are going to benefit!

    Well, Uncle Sam wants to help make sure that US businesses are also going to benefit. The EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework is the mechanism by which the EU can impose their laws and regulations on US businesses and non-profits.

    What’s that? Non-profits like the Glibertarian Foundation? Why, yes!

    The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has committed to work closely with the DPA (SP note: data protection authority in the EU) to provide enforcement assistance, which, in appropriate cases, could include information sharing and investigative assistance pursuant to the U.S. SAFE WEB ACT.

    Indeed, one of the key provisions of the GDPR is increased territorial scope. Because of this, any website that “processes” any data from anyone in the EU must comply. Your business website may only ever have one visitor from the EU and if you set a web browser cookie for any reason whatsoever, you must meet the requirements of the GDPR. Seriously.

    What’s the penalty for non-compliance?

    Infringement: the possibilities include a reprimand, a temporary or definitive ban on processing and a fine of up to €20 million or 4% of the business’s total annual worldwide turnover.

    Oh, and that fine is whichever is greater. No potential there for abuse or selective enforcement! But remember, this is not about grabbing money or controlling the world. Because the Forces of Evil said it’s not.

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    *****

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    So, what are US businesses doing? Most have been working on compliance for a long time now and are falling into line. Nobody really wants to lose their European customers and site visitors, after all.

    Except for a bunch of media outlets and businesses that apparently weren’t ready for the enforcement to start on Friday. But, the EU says, don’t worry! There will not be an effect on innovation or access. Oh, wait, other organizations have just decided not to bother complying, closing business segments or blocking access from European countries.

    Here at Glib HQ, we’ve determined that we have only one European registered user. We’ll miss you Pie in the Sky!*

    We all know who is making bank from the GDPR, as is usual from regulation: lawyers and politicians. On Friday, many lawsuits and complaints were filed against large American tech firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet. We can expect dozens more to be filed in the coming weeks, months, and, probably, years.

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    *****

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    Does my disgust and cynicism mean I am anti-privacy? Hell, no.

    I have many stylish and useful tinfoil hats, as you all know. I use VPNs, encrypted email, mask my phone numbers, block cookies, browse from different browsers and devices, use cash for everything I can, have a prepaid cell phone for certain uses. The list goes on.

    What I am is anti-government intrusion and regulation.

    Remember, kids, with the exception of this Glibertopia, “If the product is free, the product is me.” Don’t like what Facebook does with your data? Don’t use Facebook; but don’t insist your congress critter pass another law or allow the FTC to enforce a cumbersome and impossible-to-get-right regulation from across the pond. Individuals and their rights always lose when bureaucracy wins.

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    * Just kidding, Pie.

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  • The Hyperbole’s Homebuilding Hullabaloo – Part B: Permits and Foundations or ‘CAN YOU DIG IT!!!?!?’

    Previously on H3

    Lots were surveyed and the corners of the homes carefully staked out, we learned (hopefully) that while the association which runs the development likes to tell people what and where to build, they don’t like having any responsibility for screw-ups, and thus CYA became their primary objective.  With the stakeout ‘approved’ the next step is to submit the building plans and permit fee and wait for our building permit. The evolution of this process has followed a similar path as that of the stake out process only more so, more redundant regulations and requirements, more costs, and little if any benefit to the homeowners. And thus, to avoid sounding like a broken record allow me to back burner that and jump ahead to the next stage, where we will encounter perhaps the most game-changing innovation to hit the home building trade in my memory.

    Foundations

    Pa, I can’t move level those this damn pigs Transit!

    A strong building starts with a good foundation and any foundation starts with someone pulling up to the job site in a dump truck with some type of excavating equipment in tow. In 1988 it was a hillbilly towing a rubber tired backhoe with a two-foot bucket, today it’s a citibilly hauling a track hoe with both a two and a four-foot bucket.  In both cases we would meet the excavator and pull strings from those precious corner stakes, paint lines for the digger to dig on, set up batter boards, and determine a benchmark, usually a nail in a nearby tree, that we can use to determine the depth to dig the basement, footer trenches, and drainage lines. How we know that they’ve dug to that depth is where the game changer shows up.

    As Mike S and NoDakMat have probably guessed it’s the Quad Laser. Well, it’s lasers anyway. In this case a self-leveling rotating horizontal laser. In 1988 we used a transit level which had to be manually set up and calibrated and checked and re-checked often. These are delicate instruments and they need to be carefully handled, bump one and your nice flat footer trench is now eight inches deeper at one end than the other. Also, they require a man to look through and read the story stick that another man is holding. Men make mistakes, the holder may hold the stick at an angle or the reader may get confused and decide the ditch is two inches high when it is actually two inches low. You get the picture. A self-leveling laser level not only self-levels, natch, but it requires no one to read, and in some cases (where the receiver can be attached to the boom of the excavator) needs no one to hold a stick, and most importantly it stays level and doesn’t get confused. The same laser level is used to set the footer forms and grade stakes after the digging is done. And again it turns a two or three person job into a one or two person job and while not eliminating human error it greatly reduces the potential for possibly costly mistakes.  A 12″ thick footer cost more than an 8″ thick one, and if you think the crusty old bricklayer curses on a normal day, wait until you tell him that the footers are off grade and he needs to gain or lose an inch or two.

    Game Changer

    But wait there’s more, before the masons can start laying block and yelling profanity-laced tirades at their bricktenders, we need to reestablish the house corners. Remember those carefully surveyed corner stakes we were required to pay for? they’re long gone. So now the same guys who weren’t competent enough to pull strings and measure offsets are now going to pull strings and measure offsets with the added bonus of plumbing down into a big hole and some ditches.  In 1988 this required someone on a ladder trying to hold a plumb bob line to a point on a string without moving either, another person down on the footer marking where the plumb bob centers out, or where it would center out if it ever stopped swaying. Go ahead, try and hold a plumb bob steady from the top of an 8′ ladder to more or less a point in space that’s an arm’s length away, add in a nice wind for extra fun. Repeat this step and with two corners now marked you can pull tapes and calculate diagonals or rely on the old 345 rule to set the other corners. Today we no longer rely on thousand-year-old tools, today we use, you guessed it, lasers. In this case, the 5-way laser, with this tool one man can set the corners easily with a precision a three-man team in the past would rarely achieve.

    Between the lasers and improvements in excavating equipment what once took a week or more can now be done in a couple of days, with greater accuracy and fewer men on the job. Thanks go to the government for requiring us to adopt these new products and technology with their rules and regula….oh wait, that didn’t happen. Amazingly saving time, effort, and money was enough of an incentive. Imagine that.

    Permit

    The Quint Laser

    Okay, back to bellyaching about paperwork. After the stake out, covered in part one, we submit a set of plans along with a check of course ($150 in ’88 near $2000 in ’18), In ’88 the plans were five pages of, well, plans… site, foundation and floor, elevations, a section, and a typical construction detail. They were mostly drawings with dimensions and some labels here and there, they were clear, easy to read, and any home builder would be able to construct a house from them. They were drawn up by a home designer my dad knew. I forget all the details but he was studying to be an architect or engineer when life caught him unawares and he had to quit school and punch the clock. He drew house plans for extra money, drew them by hand, some of our clients would ask for the originals or a crisp print of them and have them framed.

    The set of plans we recently submitted are eight pages. the basic plans are still there, hidden under blocks of texts and boilerplate details – schedules for light, ventilation, finishes, doors, and windows, diagrams for electrical, plumbing and HVAC, design load specifications for joist, trusses, and rafters. I draw them with a CAD program, they are jumbled and crowded, nobody will frame a copy of them. Like the stake out survey it’s all CYA on the associations part, no one reads all that fine print, but they have a checklist if it’s on the checklist it better be on the plans. None of this adds value to the home, it only wastes my time and a lot of paper and ink.

    We are required to keep the official stamped set on the jobsite but no one uses it. I make separate sets for the framers, stripped of all the filler so that they are readable. The electrician and plumber don’t need me to tell them what size wire and pipe to use or where to route it. You don’t need to tell a short order cook to fry the egg in ½tsp of butter for 2.6 minutes a side on a 253° griddle, and you don’t need to tell a carpenter to put studs 16 inches on center and what the rough opening for a 3/0 int door is. 98% of residential construction follows tried and true industry standards, in those rare times it doesn’t I make sure to discuss it on site with the tradesmen.

    Lastly, we have a meeting with the homeowner and a representative from the HOA. In ’88 it took, maybe five minutes, the rep would give the property owner a copy of the rule book and welcome them to the community and hand Dad the magic red laminated paper that allows us to start building. Lawyers must have gotten involved because in ’18 it’s an hour-long slog, the rep goes point by point over various and sundry rules and the owner and builder have to initial each page, the welcome to the community now seems more like a warning not to make any trouble. Luckily my dad takes care of that stuff he’s been through 60 of them and even when we are building a spec house when there is no homeowner and it’s just him, he still has to jump through the same hoops every time.

     

    That’s it for Part 2, next time we’ll get into some proper building, making sawdust and swinging hammers, we’ll have our first inspections and maybe just maybe, we’ll learn a little bit about ourselves along the way.

    It’s always something

     

    3  This is not a footnote, it’s an exponent as in H ‘cubed.’ There will be no footnotes in this article.

  • The Best Article Ever Written For Any Website On All The Intertubes – Part I: Introduction, Caveat, and Stakeout

    Introduction

    Thirty years ago, I helped my father build a house. I worked with him for the previous few summers on smaller projects…decks, screened-in porches, fences and the like, but that year I was finished with school and so for the first time I had a hand in the construction of a home from start to finish. I learned how to set up a transit level and surveyed the site with Dad, we discussed views, elevations, and placement options when the plans were still sketches, and later I walked through the completed home, room by room, checking for undotted I’s or uncrossed T’s before packing up the last of our tools and leaving the home to its new owners. This spring we will start building our sixtieth-ish*.

    ‘That’s really sweet The Hyperbole,’ the impatient glibers may ask, ‘But what does any of that have to do with Liberty, Limited Government, Beer, Pizza, Board Games, or Boobs?’ Good question, I’m glad you asked. Turns out we built all but one of those homes in the same gated, HOA-run community, and over the years I have watched as rules, regulations, fees, and fines skyrocketed, at times it seemed as if the powers that be were actively trying to discourage new construction.**. In the same time, I have also witnessed the development of new tools and products. Some of those changes added value to the final product, some of them only made it cost more. I imagine you can guess which was which.

    And so I figured that I would write a few articles comparing the building of that first home back in ’88 with this year’s model. Focusing on the above-mentioned observations, with the odd anecdote tossed in here and there, like the story of the building inspector who would walk through doorways and down stairwells with his thumb placed on top of his head with his fingers extended upwards*** to check headroom clearance. As per Brett’s instructions, I will try to use sentences and paragraphs but I can’t promise anything, I never done too good in writin’ class.

    Caveat

    My father likes to oldmansplain that when he was a kid the phrase “Why don’cha make a federal case out of it?” was a common rebuff when someone made too large of a deal over some perceived insult or slight. As he points out**** it was a rebuff because very few things were federal issues, today it’s a meaningless phrase because everything is a federal issue.

    Except, remarkably, residential home building which has largely stayed a local issue. To get a building permit In one county all you may need is the approval of your proposed septic system, in the next county over you might need to submit plans showing every little detail down to the color of the tile in the guest bathroom. Thus when I bring up a code change, some of you may have always lived under stricter codes, while others of you may not even have to comply with the old code that is being changed. In short, don’t take any of what I say as a general rule. Always check with your friendly and helpful local building code enforcement department official and get all necessary permits before you build that deck. Unless you can’t easily see it from the street and you can put on your shocked face and say “I need a Permit? For a tiny little stoop? I had no idea!” believably, if so get cracking, those post holes aren’t going to dig themselves.

    Stake Out

    Richard Dreyfuss #metoos all over Madeline Stowe while Charlie Sheen’s more talented brother watches and Forest Whitaker languidly mast…What’s that? …Oh, STAKE…OUT, not Stakeout. That makes a lot more sense. One of the first steps in building a house is figuring out where you are going to build it, as I mentioned above, back in 1988 my father and I surveyed the property to make this determination, by survey I mean in both the ‘looked over the grounds’ and in the ‘found corner pins, pulled strings down property and/or backset lines’ sense. Thus we made sure the house we intended to build fit on the lot in the orientation we wanted. In 2018 we still do the same but we ‘approximate’ more, ‘Close enough’ has replaced ‘lets double check.’

    You see, in ’88 after siting the house we would carefully stake out its’ footprint, so that the guy with the back-hoe knew where to dig and so that the representative from the HOA***** could verify that we were building where we should, and most importantly, so that WE could verify that we were building where we should. What could be more embarrassing (and costly) for a home builder than to build over a backset line or on the wrong lot? but much like how drug companies will kill their customers without government oversight, greedy builders will build on wrong. So now, In ’18 we are required to have a state licenced surveyor stake out the house so we figure ‘close enough’, it saves us a few hours but cost the homeowner $300-$500 in surveying cost.

    Uh…Dad, I think we have a little problem.

    This change happened fairly early on, perhaps in the mid 90’s. The association hired a local architectural firm to take over the inspections that up until then were done by a board member or volunteers on what was called the Environmental Control Committee. Turns out the lackey that the Architect sent out to do the inspections was an idiot******, and approved a number of jobs that encroached on backset lines. The association could have hired someone competent or required surveys in cases where the building is very close to the backset lines. Instead, they went one size fits all, whether you are trying to stuff a 10-gallon house on 5-gallon lot or you are tossing a hot dog of a home down a hallway of a lot, you are required to pay for a survey.

    Some of you may be thinking “What’s the big deal it’s just a few hundred dollars? and it’s a good idea to get a professional survey anyway.” Yes, it’s not a ton of money but bear in mind we don’t even have a building permit and haven’t moved one shovelful of earth yet. And if like 90% of our clients you recently purchased the lot the property itself will have been surveyed, the title companies make sure of that. The professed purpose******* of the stake out is to ensure that the proposed house fits on the lot, something a properly drawn plot plan does. And guess what? we have always been required to include a plot plan with our permit application. The stake out survey is a redundancy at best. It doesn’t protect the property owner, it only shifts liability from the builder to the surveyor, and allows the HOA to act like they are doing something by approving the stakeout, without having to actually check the stakeout.

    That’s it for Part One. If there is any interest in Part Two, I will delve into the permit process, and discuss Excavating, foul-mouthed masons, lasers, and more!!….

    Not sure if only the links posters get to sign off with a song or not [ED: go right ahead!], but if it’s cool here’s The Woggles covering Chubby Checker.

    *I haven’t kept count.
    ** And in some cases they were.
    *** Imagine an inverted Little Rascal’s high-sign.
    ****Repeatedly, Jesus wept, do all old people tell the same damn story over and over?
    ***** For a while it was a retired realtor who was also one of the first full-time residents of the community, in short, he knew what he was doing, the idiots that came after? not so much.
    ****** He once questioned whether the window in a bedroom met the egress size requirements, it did, also there was a patio door right beside it.
    ******* You may think it’s about ensuring that the house is actually built where it should be, it’s not. More on that in Part Deux, if there is a Part Deux.

  • Beyond the Pale

    Not long ago I saw an article that amused me. It was a bunch of eggheads puzzling over the mystery of how humans were able to domesticate dogs. I had to laugh. Clearly none of those guys had ever domesticated a wild animal. Any mammal that lives in social groups, and some birds, domesticate easily. Don’t hit them with a stick and give them food. I dare you to try and get rid of them after that. I have rescued and raised cottontails, raccoon, and red squirrel. I know people who have had pet flying squirrels, grey squirrels, foxes, and I once dated a girl who raised a whitetail doe. The damned thing lived in the house and slept in the bed with her every night. Don’t ask.

    Anyway, the real question is not how did we domesticate dogs, but why. My wife jokes that we did not domesticate dogs, they domesticated us–or as she says dogmesticated. I think it is closer to enslavement. Hold on while I check my grocery list. I think they need more chews and treats, maybe even a bag of food that runs around $50….

    I’m back. The answer, of course, is simple. Having a pack of wolves hanging around your paleolithic camp at night is a good idea when you live in a world where all manner of beast and man are trying to eat you. It is nearly impossible to sneak up on a camp of sleeping people without sounding the alarm by waking the wolves. They were the original burglar alarm. In that world, people didn’t move around all that much. Wander outside your tribe’s territory and you were likely going to be put on a spit. Contemporary primitive cultures live within strict boundaries. Many people I have met in the more backward parts of the world live out their whole lives never traveling more than a few miles from the spot where they were born. I once tried to explain to a Bolivian who wanted to know where I was from by telling him how long it would take to get there by canoe. “Two years that way,” and I pointed north. That made sense to him.

    Beyond the pale. Ever wonder what that means or where it came from? Europeans didn’t have the extinct Eurasian wolf to domesticate, so they would build a fence around their village that was bristling with sharpened sticks or thorns. That was called the pale. Try to get past it and you were likely to be impaled. It was often whitewashed, which is why we use the word ‘pale’ to describe a color. At night, if someone got inside the pale, their silhouette could be seen more easily against the white background. The expression ‘beyond the pale’ refers to going outside the safe zone or going too far.

    I am saying that there was never a golden age of gamboling about the fields and dales. Throughout all of human history, people lived within strict boundaries. Go outside those boundaries and some dude named Trog was going to bring your nutsack home to his wife so that she could tan it and make a little purse out of it. Travel has always been restricted. In fact, I would contend that people have more freedom of movement today than at any time in history.

    I have heard people blame travel restriction on the rise of nation states and the modern idea of borders. Human history is mostly a chronicle of ethnic or cultural groups invading their neighbors. Travel restrictions were always there; nation states arose from the need for greater security. Borders were not drawn arbitrarily. They mark the edges of cultural territories. Restricting who may or may not cross those borders was and is a matter of life or death.

    The open borders advocates around here have gotten me on the fence once or twice, but looking at contemporary events around the world got my feet back on the ground. I agree that freedom of movement is an inalienable right. One has freedom of movement so long as they do not trespass. If one believes in self-ownership, that every person’s mind, body, and conscience are their own property and no one else’s, then by logical extension they must accept that the fruit of one’s labor is their own property also. I decide who is welcome to set foot on my property and who is restricted from doing so. If a group of like minded people own property collectively, then they decide who may or may not set foot on it. I have no problem with the principle or practice of a nation preventing trespass so long as they do not restrict movement out of those borders or prevent one of the collective owners from re-entering.

    There are other factors at play besides security, of course–the welfare state being the largest of those. Ideology is a concern of mine, as well. I am not a multiculturist. All cultures are not equal and the spectrum is quite wide. Flooding our country with people who do not accept the principle of inalienable rights or private ownership is worse than a bad idea. There are many individuals despite being from inferior cultures that would be a great credit to our country, and we should allow them in, even encourage them. Allowing just anyone based solely on their culture or ethnicity on the other hand is…unwise. A merit based system really is the only sensible policy in my mind.

    I know this is one of the more contentious subjects around here, so y’all have at it. I’ll make popcorn.

  • A Follow Up on The Evil That Regulation Can Do

    A Follow Up on The Evil That Regulation Can Do

    Back in September, I posted about an act of actual evil. Where an anonymous vote of a State body stopped a hospital expansion, including addition of services that did not exist in the area. Despite the efforts of a local reporter and yours truly, we never were able to pin down who torpedoed the approval.

    I wanted to update everyone on the situation. It got better. And the best part of the story is that the scum who opposed this have now come out in the open:

    A representative for state Sen. Dave Syverson, R-Rockford, who also serves as a Mercyhealth board member, spoke against Swedes’ expansion plan on Tuesday. So did other representatives of Mercyhealth, including its CEO Javon Bea.

    So the dirtbag politician with the conflict of interest (he serves on the board of a local competitor health group) that had been opposing this from behind the scenes, has now stepped into the light, to show his true asshat colors. And the CEO of the same competitor came in to throw around some slander and BS in an attempt to avoid competition:

    Bea said he is “against unnecessary duplication” of SwedishAmerican’s 10-bed Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. “They have higher death and disability rates because for 10 beds they cannot employ the entire range of pediatric subspecialties on-site,” he said after testifying before the Review Board.

    Bea said SwedishAmerican will send its sickest babies to Wisconsin, forcing parents and families to travel. SwedishAmerican is a division of UW Health.

    “Families will have to figure out how to take care of babies for months at a time,” Bea said.

    Mercyhealth has 52 NICU beds that are part of its $505 million new hospital campus at Interstate 90 and Riverside Boulevard, which is expected to open in January.

    Born said the claims that SwedishAmerican would operate a substandard Level III NICU are “insulting and absurd.”

    “It’s insulting because of SwedishAmerican and UW Health’s long-term commitment to quality and safety,” Born said. “It’s absurd because a Level III NICU at SwedishAmerican would be held to the same standards of any other Level III NICU in the state.” [emphasis added]

    Allow me translate Mr. Bea’s complaint…

    “Hey, competition?! Dammit. I guess having a State Senator in our pocket wasn’t enough to stop it….so here, let me throw out a defamatory smoke screen and run away.”

    So justice was delayed, but denied, in this matter. I have to give credit to the Rockford Register Star reporter – Georgette Braun – for shining some light on the dirtbags in this story. (This was the reporter I had contacted and found out we had both been stymied in our attempts to find out who had voted which way last year).

    And an extended middle finger to both of you, Dave Syverson and Javon Bea.

    This is a bittersweet result – while this individual injustice has been rectified, the intrusion of the State into this field is still there, ripe for continued abuse by preventing of medical care being expanded.

  • Nothing. Left. to. Cut.

     

    I have this ongoing conversation with the wife. She works for the federal government here in Canuckistan, and I’ve worked on a few government contracts over the years. I walk the delicate line of telling her that, while I respect what she does, there’s no reason that the government should do it. Which is not to say that it should not be done, just that it could be done through other means.

    At least it wasn’t unintentionally left blank…

    I’ve posited that you could cut the size of the federal government here by 60% and hardly anyone would notice. How would I do it? First, cut the 20% of programs that no one will miss. I’ve worked on some of these projects in the past. On one, I was working on a public-facing website to provide data ostensibly for “the public good”, at a cost of millions of dollars. One day, one of my colleagues got the idea to pull the website statistics to see how often and from where it was being accessed. Turns out, in the previous year, it had been accessed exactly twice from IP addresses outside of the department. Hardly anyone would miss that program.

    Second, I’m sure that there’s 20% savings to be found by cutting bureaucratic overhead. When the wife tells me about her day, most of it relates to how she’s working against the bureaucracy to try to get her job done. In my small consulting business, I’ve increasingly moved away from doing federal government contracts – the overhead is just too much. It’s much cheaper and faster to find and perform work for private clients.

    Third, I’d cut 20% of the people. If you look around your own workplace, you can identify a certain percentage of people who don’t pull their weight, or worse, contribute negatively. You know, the ones who are constantly at cross-purposes with the rest of the team, or the ones who spend all of their time commenting on Glibertarians.com, or the ones who just aren’t good at their jobs. I once led a team on which I didn’t have the authority to hire and fire (yeah, it sucked). I spent inordinate amounts of time trying to get contributions from non-performers. Then, one day, I just stopped. I ignored them. And, you know what? Our productivity went up. Strange, that. It happens everywhere, but the existence of public-sector unions exacerbates this situation.

    I wouldn’t do it all at once. I’d do it gradually, say over 12 years. I think that doing it more gradually would lessen the degree to which people would notice it (which is, hardly at all).

    Anyhoo, in the case of the U.S. federal government, I came across this neat-o website that breaks down U.S. federal government spending (I’m actually shocked that it’s a .gov website because it’s pretty well done). According to it, the U.S. government spent $3.85 trillion last year. I started looking at it like a minarchist softball coach, and here’s what I came up with:

    Social Security: $916.1B (23.0%) – CUT

    National Defense: $595.3B (14.9%) – CUT to $584.6B
    I opted to keep national defense spending, except for “Defense-related activities”, which sounds an awful lot like a slush fund for defense contractors. If you eliminate foreign interventions and limit spending to national defense, this number should be much lower. Since I’m not getting that fine-grained in this analysis, let’s leave it for now.

    Medicare: $594.5B (14.9%) – CUT

    Income Security: $514.7B (12.9%) – CUT to $144.8B
    Here, I’ve eliminated everything except federal employee retirement and disability. If you’ve already made those commitments to your employees, then you’ve got to keep them.

    Health: $511.3B (12.8%) – CUT

    Net Interest: $240.7B (6.0%) – KEEP
    You gotta pay the bank. Although there’s something to be said for the government skipping out on loan repayments and tanking their credit rating so that they can’t borrow any more. Picture your favorite congresscritter walking into a pawn shop or payday loans joint.

    Veterans Benefits and Services: $174.5B (4.4%) – CUT to $167.2B (4.2%)
    Here, I cut “Other veterans benefits and services”, because it sounds like more government cheese for contractors. In general, I think that you should look after military vets, to the extent that they can be injured during their service, but I’m sure that there’s more here to cut. For example, the largest slice of this category is $86.8B for “Income security for veterans”; most of the veterans I know are eminently employable.

    Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services: $108.1B (2.7%) – CUT

    Transportation: $92.9B (2.3%) – CUT

    Administration of Justice: $57.1B (1.4%) – CUT to $52.1B
    This is one of the fundamental roles of government, although if you end the war on drugs, I’m sure you could cut a bunch here, too. I did cut $5.0B for “Criminal justice assistance”, which is described as transfers to state and local governments for something or other.

    International Affairs: $45.3B (3.5%) – CUT to $13.9B
    Here, I’ve cut out everything except “Conduct of foreign affairs”. The rest looks like cash that will end up in the pockets of the Mugabes of the world.

    Natural Resources and Environment: $37.8B (1.0%) – CUT to $26.6B
    Honestly, I don’t know what most of this actually is. Maybe it’s within the domain of government, and maybe not. But “Other natural resources” (slush fund) and “Recreational resources” sure aren’t.

    General Science, Space, and Technology: $30.2B (0.8%) – CUT

    Community and Regional Development: $21.2B (0.5%) – CUT

    Agriculture: $20.1B (0.5%) – CUT

    General Government: $18.6B (0.5%) – CUT to $11.9B
    Here, I’ve cut “General purpose fiscal assistance” and “Other general government” as slush funds.

    Energy: $3.7B (0.1%) – CUT to $0.2B
    Here, I’ve cut everything except “Emergency energy preparedness”.

     

    So, let’s add everything up here. Let’s see … carry the 1 … Sweet Feathery Jesus, it’s worse than I thought. We’re down to $1.28 trillion, or to about 33% of the current budget. And, I’m fully aware that there’s still lots of waste in there.

    Earlier, I stated that most people wouldn’t notice if you cut the government by that much. Sure, some of the things that I’ve cut here would be noticed by people, but this is analysis is really only about cutting program spending, not eliminating bureaucracy and ineffective people. You know what people would notice? More money in their pockets. You’re welcome! I’m sure your rebate checks are already in the mail.