CSpec

Would everyone not agree that the above violence is an indictment of US drug policy failure? Much like the brutal crime from mobsters and booze runners during prohibition.

Check out Tabarrok's post too. MR FTW...

You can always get a plain old state ID card if you don't want to drive. That said, a national ID card is a completely different issue with its own pitched battles.

License doesn't prove citizenship. And balthazar, you're ignoring the crux of the complaint: saying it's easy to fork over your passport (which is insane to carry at all times, and apparently unconstitutional) is like saying if you live in a police state, you have nothing to worry about if you did nothing wrong. And moltar is right that this will be especially bad under the madman sheriff in Phoenix.

Some insightful emails to a blog I read:

From a working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research "The current US ethanol mandate requires that about 5 percent of world caloric production from corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans be used for ethanol generation. As a result, world food prices are predicted to increase by about 30 percent and global consumer surplus from food consumption is predicted to decrease by 155 billion dollars annually." Harvard's Jeffrey Miron opines: "In other words, the mandate needs to generate at least $155 billion worth of annual benefits from reduced global warming to pass a cost-benefit test. Since ethanol use appears to increase GHG emissions, the mandate fails big time! Before the U.S. adopts costly new policies to reduce global warming, it should eliminate existing policies that contribute to global warming and make no sense from any other perspective."

Oh, duh. You were insinuating up to now that given current policy, kick em all out. The clandestine underworld we have now isn't good for anyone except mobsters, smugglers, and drug dealers. And by the way, that was the argument the author made in the OP to this thread.

It depends on the situation. If the child needs to work for himself and the family to survive, yes. Witness child labor in very poor countries (and the US 200 years ago). However parents will only go to that as a last resort. If you're referring to US fruit farms, I don't think that's an issue because I wouldn't think kids would be very good at manual labor. And anyway people in this country feel rich enough to extend charity to starving people on our doorstep, which these people are denied because of immigration policy.

You think these people would rather get paid a pittance than the lavish minimum wage??? Why do you think they work they way they do?

Ah, I was hoping someone would say that! I like your economist intuition, AAS. And Olds, you're conflating two completely different issues. You may think we're abusing people, but they entered into that employment voluntarily. The only reason to do that is because either it's better than their previous life, or it's not but it's the first step to moving up in the world's most dynamic economy. But anyway how is that an argument for deporting them? You claim to have empathy for these people who are much poorer than us, and your solution is to make them poorer.

Olds, you are missing the obvious here. That mechanic job is a union gig, which pays far above the market clearing wage with ironclad job security to boot. Why else do you think people would go so nuts to get it? And what does the minimum wage have to do with these migrant workers? They chose to risk their lives and endure terrible hardship just for the chance to work for that wage. What does that tell you?

Excuse me, the market forces are already at work: the workers are coming because there is clearly a very high demand for backbreaking manual labor. Who will take their place? Or do you want to just slash US economic output? How's this for a question: if you could offer the typical migrant worker job to all the people currently on the unemployment rolls, how many would take it?

Hmm. Olds, do you think these people prefer to be illegal aliens living a breath away from arrest and deportation? Do you think employers enjoy having federal thugs turn up to take away all their laborers? Maybe the immigration problem is a failing of current immigration policy. I don't see anyone here acknowledging that--people only bloviate in abstract terms about illegal this and that, and their only solution is to kick out everyone who is currently here illegally. Even if you could flip a switch and make these people instantly go back to their hovels, that is not a desirable outcome. (Of course actually accomplishing that would require a Stalinist witch hunt and purge).

Sigh. What do you think illegal immigrants do? They come here to work--they are fulfilling a vital need in the US economy. They don't show up and stab people all day. If you think we would somehow be made richer by deporting every illegal, you're delusional. AND it needs to be mentioned that these people risk their lives to give themselves and their children a better life, and they endure a life of fear and the shadowy and dangerous underworld to obtain vital services.

Oh really. This forum is replete with the use of the word "jap" to refer to Japanese cars. There is constant hatred hurled at China, its goods, and its people. People tend to bite their tongue when the subject of GM manufacturing in Mexico comes up, but you can tell they don't like it. How many "Buy USA" threads come up on a regular basis? The hedge of sometimes professing one's love for "our Canadian friends" merely reinforces my view that people (here and generally) don't hate foreigners, they hate certain kinds of foreigners at various points in history. The established Western and Northern Europeans hated the waves of Southern and Eastern Europeans in the late 1800s into the next century. They hated the Irish. They especially hated the Chinese laborers on the West Coast. Nowadays people hate Hispanics, and car fans never quite gave up their hatred for the Japanese invasion of quality products.

I think you're all missing the point: why is restricting immigration a good thing? Anti-immigration zealots tend to object to it on the grounds that it's currently nominally illegal, but I think that's just cover to advocate ridding the country of brown and yellow people.

You think that will work? How well is the drug war going (which by the way is causing all the violence south of the border that Arizonans are scared of).

Uhhh, no, the author was saying that the visa caps are absurdly low which forces people who want to lift themselves out of desperate poverty to do so illegally. The way to remedy this without a massive and harmful police-state situation is to allow far more to come in legally. "But it is impossible to secure a 2,000 mile land border against economic migrants. So long as there are jobs to come to, they will find a way."

Wrong on immigration Lexington MUCH as I admire his prose style, George Will is horribly wrong this morning. Of Arizona's atrocious new law that allows the state police to arrest anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant, he says: Arizona's law might give the nation information about whether judicious enforcement discourages illegality. If so, it is a worthwhile experiment in federalism. On the contrary, empowering the police to stop and demand papers from anyone who looks vaguely Mexican will make life unpleasant for Hispanics while wasting time that officers could more usefully spend pursuing real criminals. More generally, I find the "let's secure the border first" argument unconvincing. Serious people from both parties make it: Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), whose home state touched off the controversy, said: “I think a lot of people, including some Democrats, understand that until we have a more sincere effort to control borders and enforce the law, the conditions to pass comprehensive immigration reform don’t exist.” Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) concurred. “Clearly, it’s time to get the borders secured. Then I think you can talk about immigration reform,” Nelson said. But it is impossible to secure a 2,000 mile land border against economic migrants. So long as there are jobs to come to, they will find a way. The only way to relieve pressure on the border is to allow a realistic number of migrants into America, ie one that bears some resemblance to the demand for their labour. When demand falls, (as in the current recession) fewer come, and many go home. In the medium term, trying to secure the border before you address immigration reform is like trying to stop dust flying into your vacuum cleaner without turning off the suction.

Hydrogen tries again Has the lightest and most abundant stuff in the universe found a new role in energy? The Economist HAVING soared on the promise of carbon-free motoring, the idea of the “hydrogen economy” crashed and burned when it collided with reality. Hundreds of experimental hydrogen-powered cars—once hailed as the best solution for reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil for over half its consumption—are now gathering dust in manufacturers’ parking lots. Hydrogen’s main attraction is that when it is “burned” in a fuel-cell or an internal-combustion engine, the only emissions are heat and a wisp of water vapour. Using hydrogen as a fuel—actually, it is more accurate to refer to it as an energy carrier, since producing hydrogen requires energy from another source—therefore has the potential to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. As America has abundant supplies of coal and natural gas from which hydrogen can be made, what’s not to like about it? Several things. First, making fuel-cells compact and cheap enough to drive an electric vehicle is far from easy. Over the past 20 years, Honda—arguably the furthest down the road—has been through at least three iterations of its fuel-cell design, and is still one or possibly two generations away from having something practical to offer the motoring public. By comparison, getting a conventional internal-combustion engine to burn hydrogen instead of petrol is relatively easy. Even so, such efforts have also come to naught. From the beginning, the cloud hanging over the whole hydrogen enterprise has not been the power source as such, but the intractable difficulty of distributing and storing the stuff. It is not hard to see why. Hydrogen atoms are the smallest and lightest in the universe. The next heaviest element in the periodic table, the inert gas helium, is used for detecting cracks in pressure vessels and the like. Even though helium atoms are four times chunkier than hydrogen atoms, they are still small enough to find all the weak spots as they worm their way through the crystalline structure of solid steel several centimetres thick. If hydrogen were used as a crack detector (it is not because of the fire hazard), it would escape four times faster. Devising a fuel tank to constrain hydrogen has always been a challenge. To have a useful range of 480km (300 miles) or so, an electric car using a fuel cell instead of a battery pack would require around 9kg (20 pounds) of hydrogen. Storing hydrogen as a gas or liquid in a vessel containing “reversible” crystalline metal hydrides is one way to carry it around. Another is to use high-tech pressure vessels made of carbon-fibre. Some researchers are working on sponges made of carbon nanotubes that soak up hydrogen. Whichever technology is chosen, a vessel for storing hydrogen on-board a car costs hundreds of times more than a conventional petrol tank. Meanwhile, transporting hydrogen from its production facility has presented other difficulties. Natural-gas pipelines cannot be used because hydrogen makes the steel tubing brittle and attacks the welds. Special production processes are needed to make pipes for carrying hydrogen. For that reason, few exist. The alternative is to liquefy the hydrogen at great expense and transport it in road tankers refrigerated with liquid nitrogen. Either way, the hydrogen fuel finishes up costing way too much. And all this assumes that hydrogen can be made cheaply and without producing large amounts of carbon emissions. So far, it can’t. Such annoying realities have an annoying way of making themselves felt. When they finally did, General Motors ditched its fleet of 100 Chevrolet Equinox fuel-cell cars after a two-year trial. Likewise, BMW withdrew its own test fleet of 100 cars with internal-combustion engines modified to run on hydrogen. The final blow was last year’s announcement by Steven Chu, America’s Noble physics laureate turned energy secretary, that he was cancelling funding for research into hydrogen-powered vehicles generally. Ever since, carmakers have been placing their low-emission bets more on plug-in hybrids, clean diesels or pure electric vehicles. Does that mean the hydrogen economy has been finally laid to rest? Yes, as far as motoring is concerned. But the industrial use of hydrogen—as an energy carrier that is both clean and free of foreign influence—seems to be gaining favour in business circles. Dr Chu’s policy shift that axed research on hydrogen cars simultaneously poured $1 billion of stimulus money into a clean-coal project called FutureGen that the Bush administration abandoned in 2008. Though it appears to all intents and purposes like a state-of-the-art power station, FutureGen is actually a huge hydrogen production facility in disguise. The FutureGen project—to be built in Mattoon, Illinois, by a consortium of coal-mining companies and electric utilities in partnership with the American government—will be the world’s first coal-fuelled power station to produce near-zero emissions. The 275-megawatt demonstration plant is designed to prove the feasibility of producing electricity and hydrogen from coal, while simultaneously capturing the carbon dioxide and sequestering it in deep underground reservoirs. If the demonstration plant works as well as hoped, the plan will be to build combined electricity and hydrogen generating stations in locations where there are geological formations containing saline water overlain by a thick caprock serving as a seal. Geological surveys show America has enough saline rock formations to store three trillion tons of carbon dioxide—enough for the next 500 years at the country’s current output from human activities. The hydrogen produced in a fully integrated, combined-cycle plant like FutureGen promises to be 25% cheaper than today’s hydrogen. More intriguing still is the chance to produce not just pure hydrogen, but also hydrogen-rich liquids and synthetic natural gas (SNG), which can be transported cheaply using the existing network of pipelines and road tankers. Delivered to a local filling station, such liquids can be readily reformed on site into pure hydrogen for powering fuel cells. In SNG’s case, the gas can also be compressed and used to fuel cars with internal-combustion engines. Although hydrogen’s distribution problem might then have been licked, the storage problem remains. However, it is less of a problem for fixed installations than vehicles. A number of niche markets have been identified—for instance, apartment blocks, office buildings, stores and neighbourhood wireless towers—that would pay a premium for stand-alone blocks of clean and silent power. In late February a Silicon Valley start-up called Bloom Energy—in stealth mode over the past eight years while burning through $400m of venture capital—unveiled details of the fuel-cell powered generating “boxes” it has installed at Bank of America, Coca-Cola, eBay, Federal Express, Google and Wal-Mart and over a dozen other firms that want chunks of electrical power that are both environmentally friendly and isolated from the vagaries of the grid. Bloom’s self-contained generating units, costing around $750,000 per 100-kilowatt block, produce silent, low-emission power for less than ten cents a kilowatt-hour. Thanks to a 30% federal tax credit, that works out as much the same as a combined-cycle gas-turbine plant—but without the noise and fumes. The current generation of Bloom boxes use natural gas, ethanol or biogas to run their fuel cells. They could have an even smaller carbon footprint if fuelled with hydrogen. The choice of fuel depends on how environmentally correct the customer wishes to be. It may be premature to report that the death of the hydrogen economy has been greatly exaggerated. But hydrogen still has too much potential as an energy medium to shuffle quietly off the scene.

So is this basically a production Sequel, with a battery instead of hydrogen?

Regal... far more practical and less brash and vulgar.

Good point.

Yes, that was mentioned in the original article. Airlines are taking a huge hit in uninsured losses, and the fact that insurance companies don't cover it means there's a paucity of research on the effects on aircraft.

Supposedly some airports in Britain will open on a limited basis tomorrow. Once air space is open it will take at least a few days to get everything back to some semblance of normalcy. The BBC published an email from a couple stuck in Hanoi that were told they shouldn't expect a flight until the 28th...