EclectEcon

Along the Bay of Fundy, licenses for lobster fishing sell for about $750,000 for the right to set around 350 traps. Add to the price of a license, the costs of a boat, traps, etc., and it looks as if the financial investment in a lobster fishing business is around $1million.

In that region, the lobster boats are allowed to set their traps during about four months of the year. During that period, they make a LOT of money, but it has to be enough to cover their labour costs (for the hands that go out with the boat), fuel, and the opportunity costs of the financial investiment.

Lobster fishing is not easy work. There's good money to be made, but whatever is made must cover the implicit costs of the owner's time and capital. Just to cover all these costs, a lobster fisher would have to gross roughly $150,000 - $200,000 a year. That's a LOT of lobster!

The licenses have the effect of de facto creating property rights to lobsters, thus reducing the problem often caused by The Tragedy of the Commons. Without these licenses, there would be over-fishing and many fewer lobsters available in the future. Because of the creation of these property rights, and because the transactions costs for buying and selling the licenses are low, the licenses quickly find their way to the lobster fishers who use them most efficiently (a la The Coase Theorem). Without these licenses, there would be considerable misallocation of resources in the lobster fisheries.

But the restriction on supply via the creation of these property rights also creates massive rents to be earned by those who have the licenses. If the licenses sell for $750,000, the rent earned on a license must be somewhere between $50 - $100K per year, depending on the other costs and risks involved. Quite frankly, if I had that kind of money, I think I'd rather put it in an ETF.

Digression: I have decided after several tries that I really don't care all that much for lobster. The experience of eating one can be great fun among friends, but the taste itself doesn't do much for me. To be honest, I'd prefer a double-burger with cheese from Wendy's.

Something to decorate the office? [h/t JohnM via BenS]

The article is a bit dated, and I wonder whether it is even an issue any more. But in true Philistine Liberation Organization style, one of the commenters writes,

How exactly does what I watch, what I drink and What I listen to make me inferior to you? I watch NASCAR, sure its dumb, cars going around in circles but I enjoy it and that isnt hurting anyone. What do you watch? Opera? Ballet? Those dont hurt anyone either, but I fail to see how they are better then NASCAR. I drink Bud out of a can, its cheap, I like it, it is made in my state. Does your sipping a cosmo somehow elevate you above me? Are we not both still consuming alcohol? If we drink too much do we not both get intoxicated? As for Limbaugh, well, I dont listen to him either, but Im sure youd blanch at the country station presets on my radio, just as I would skip over your world music or indy rock or whatever you listen to. So we are different and have different tastes, how exactly does that make you better than me?

Last week, Ron sent me a copy of a mass e-mailing urging people to sign an on-line petition to protest recent changes to CBC Radio 2:

On March 19, 2007, CBC Radio 2 cancelled its excellent evening classical music programming, and the immensely informative Arts Report, and the award-winning Two New Hours. We consider that with these changes the management of our only national public broadcaster has compromised its tradition of providing stimulating and informed programming. We also believe that these changes are not consistent with the CBC mandate and the recent UNESCO treaty on cultural diversity.

The public voices of many dedicated and world-class Canadian writers, hosts, composers, producers and artists are being muted. If the changes are allowed to stand and the trend to continue, the CBC will have entirely squandered its unique capacity to represent the arts, with their inherent qualities of complexity, depth and order.

We, the undersigned, believe the new programming is a retrograde step, one that duplicates material readily available on other stations and compromises the cultural integrity of our public broadcaster. We respectfully insist that the current programming changes to Radio 2 be revisited, and the damage reversed by reinstating the type of intelligent, provocative and informative programming that has long been a hallmark of Radio 2.

My reaction to the changes was a bit different. First, I have always hated the so-called "arts report"; it is usually a collection of special pleadings from the arts community for more gubmnt support.

Second, I have been delighted that CBC Radio 2 has cut waaayyy back on its newscasts. There's no good reason for both CBC1 and CBC2 to run long newscasts, and given the biases of CBC news, the less news the better.

Third, I rarely listen(ed) to CBC2 at night. But I'm certainly willing to give up evening classical music if that means we can also get rid of the arts report.

Further, with web radio and satellite radio, there is far less reason to have the taxpayers of Canada support the performance and broadcast of classical music. CBC2 has traditionally represented a distinctly non-egalitarian redistribution from the taxpayers at large to elitist snobs. But with these technological developments, those of us who want to listen to classical music can easily pay for it and find it ourselves.

While we're at it, why don't we just shut down all of CBC Radio 2 and sell off their broadcast frequencies and equipment?

Related Digression: The television coverage of the World Curling Championships on CBC has been far less than satisfactory.

What on earth is this stuff and what is it used for? My younger son, Adam Smith Palmer, quite enjoyed discovering its existence while we shopped at Kroger's.



Speaking of Kroger's, where he and his wife used to live, we could readily find plonk (cheap table wine) for $2-$3 a bottle at the local Kroger's -- something cherished by those of us in the Philistine Liberation Organization. Now that they live in the suburbs, the cheapest wine we could find a the local Kroger's was $5.99/bottle. I will refrain from making comments about suburban snobs who fail to understand the pleasures of drinking plonk while sitting on the catwalks of water towers. At the same time I fully understand the marketing decisions made by Kroger's.

I've read stuff by maybe 10 or 20 of these writers. More, if any of them penned limericks on washroom walls. As a member of the ignorantia [Philistine Liberation Organization], I haven't even heard of a bunch of them.

The 50 greatest British writers since 1945
What better way to start the year than with an argument? The Times has decided to present you with a ranking of whom they consider the best postwar British writers, and are awaiting your responses

1. Philip Larkin
2. George Orwell
3. William Golding
4. Ted Hughes
5. Doris Lessing
6. J. R. R. Tolkien
7. V. S. Naipaul
8. Muriel Spark
9. Kingsley Amis
10. Angela Carter
11. C. S. Lewis
12. Iris Murdoch
13. Salman Rushdie
14. Ian Fleming
15. Jan Morris
16. Roald Dahl
17. Anthony Burgess
18. Mervyn Peake
19. Martin Amis
20. Anthony Powell
21. Alan Sillitoe
22. John Le Carré
23. Penelope Fitzgerald
24. Philippa Pearce
25. Barbara Pym
26. Beryl Bainbridge
27. J. G. Ballard
28. Alan Garner
29. Alasdair Gray
30. John Fowles
31. Derek Walcott
32. Kazuo Ishiguro
33. Anita Brookner
34. A. S. Byatt
35. Ian McEwan
36. Geoffrey Hill
37. Hanif Kureishi
38. Iain Banks
39. George Mackay Brown
40. A. J. P. Taylor
41. Isaiah Berlin
42. J. K. Rowling
43. Philip Pullman
44. Julian Barnes
45. Colin Thubron
46. Bruce Chatwin
47. Alice Oswald
48. Benjamin Zephaniah
49. Rosemary Sutcliff
50. Michael Moorcock

Jack sent me this. No reference is provided.

Yesterday, I was challenged in the comments to explain how I could think that good and popular mean the same thing. Here's my answer.

I may not think something is very good, and you might. But so what? Maybe we just have different tastes.

For example, when it comes to chocolate, regardless of price, I am very happy to eat North American Cadbury chocolate, or Hershey's milk chocolate; and I much prefer them to French, Belgian, or Swiss chocolate.

More generally, if something is popular, it is undoubtedly good in the minds of those who buy it. In this case, "good" means "all things considered", including price, quality, etc.

But most importantly, who sets the criteria by which something is judged "good"? Is it the elitist snobs of the NYTimes? or is the philistines of the world? My preference is to let each person decide for themselves what they think is good.

As JB (my favourite drug dealer) wrote to me in e-mail,

[N]eoliberals love to sublimate truth, taste and many other human qualities by appealing to some transidealistic criterion that is reducible to nothing more than, "because I say" or "because I will not listen to you". People who disagree are ipso facto part of the problem, not the final solution. The telltale sign of the intellectually bankrupt are ad hominem arguments.

This is probably a trivial example, but it frosts me anyway. The NYTimes recently had a lengthy article about why English chocolate and candy bars are so much better than the same brands produced in the U.S. [h/t to BenS]. The article is titled, "The World's Best Candy Bars? English, of Course".

The article is replete with quotes from people who go way out of their way to get English versions (vs. US versions) of certain candy bars. From these instances, the writer concludes that English candy bars are better? What about all the people in the US who avoid English candy because "it tastes sort of funny"?

If English candy and chocolate is so dad-blamed good, why does Hershey still survive? And why do the US candy manufacturers (and the Chinese ones, too) continue to produce what the NYTimes considers an inferior product? Surely, if English candy is so much better, the process by which it is made should have emerged as the competitive victor in the US as well.

That fact that it hasn't suggests that perhaps most people in the US prefer the US versions of the chocolate and candy bars. And if they prefer the US versions, that suggests that in their minds, the US versions are better, despite the continuing anti-US biases of the NYTimes.

Digression and warning to readers: I have to admit that reading the article made me rush down to the corner variety store to sample a few different chocolate bars. Oh well, I can always go back on the diet tomorrow....

Addendum: Of course one might expect anti-US elitist snobs to write nonsense like the NYTimes piece. They also tend to put down things like light beer, plonk, and fast food, all of which pass the market test with flying colours.

Earlier this week, we had occasion to dine at The Globe Restaurant in Rosemont, Ontario, maybe an hour or so NNW of Trono. It was superb -- excellent food and excellent service -- so much so that Ms. Eclectic has now declared it to be her favourite restaurant.*

But the point of this posting comes from a brief historical statement about the Globe:

In the early days, Rosemont boasted four hotels, one of which was the Globe. One night, a fire broke out in the hostelry built where the Anglican church now stands. The wife of the owner of the Globe rose from her bed, and grabbing her husband's shotgun, ran outside in her nightgown and mounted guard over the well — the main source of water for the village, but located on her husband's land. She stood there, daring anyone to fetch water to aid her chief rival for business until the building was past saving. The pump she guarded so valiantly is still to be seen outside — a tribute to the competitive instincts of our forebearers!

Interesting that the Globe owner's wife valued a reduction in competition more than the competitor valued saving its hotel. Wouldn't one expect that otherwise the competitor would pay enough to induce her to let them use the water to save the hotel?

Not necessarily. The transaction costs may have been too high -- it may have been next to impossible to make a deal quickly that would stand up in court and not be deemed "unconscionability under duress". Also, maybe they just plain hated each other, and she received considerable utility from seeing the rival hotel go up in flames.

Can you imagine trying that today? "I have a monopoly of the water supply and you can't have any to put out a fire," would not go down well with most politicians, I'm afraid. At the same time, some municipalities do, I've been told (anyone have a reference here?), have private fire departments, and if you don't pay in advance for their protection, they will watch your house burn rather than put out the fire.

Fire protection provides a good example of anticipating risks and deciding to negotiate ways to bear the risks or to pay someone else to bear them. In this case, the competitor could, possibly, have paid the Globe owner in advance for the right to use the Globe's well in the case of a fire. Failing that, the competitor might then have decided to dig its own well or take other precautions... or self-insure, as it apparently did.

*I liked the food, and the service was great, but I have several other "favourites", including The Red Pump, The Albion, McDonald's, and Kelsey's; but remember, I'm the chair of the PLO.

Tim Hortons (iconic donut and coffee chain in Canada) is once again running its "Roll Up the Rim to Win" contest. You buy a coffee (or other drink), get a paper cup, roll up the rim at the indicated place, and have a one-in-nine chance of winning a prize. The bulk of the prizes are food or beverages, but there are a some big-screen television sets, some Ipods, and 30 cars to be won.

I did a brief Google search and was unable to find any reports that people have tried to counterfeit winning cups or rims to claim prizes. Nor have I been able to find any reports of steps taken by Tim Hortons to detect and prevent counterfeiting. I guess the expected benefits of counterfeiting a winning rim are less than the expected costs, and it surprises me just a bit. Probably the main problem with counterfeiting rims for the valuable prizes is that you have to know what they look like in order to reproduce them, and there are so few winning cups, and the images of the winning rims are not readily available, effectively reducing the risk to Tim Hortons that there will be any counterfeiting.

For a description of an ambitious art project based on the epistomology inherent in the losing cups from the Tim Hortons lottery, see this.

Ms. Eclectic and I went to A&W for breakfast this morning. She had bacon and eggs and pronounced them fine. I had a ham and egg and cheese sandwich, and it was sub-mediocre. Let's face it, nothing lives up to McDonald's Egg McMuffin.

What struck me was that the theme is all 50s, with photos from A&Ws back then, when A&W was in its hey-day. And the music was all hits from the 50s and maybe very early 60s — like that used in American Graffiti. I liked the music, and kept feeling as if I wanted to get up and sing and dance along with it.

Maybe if/when I retire from my present job, instead of becoming a Wal-Mart greeter, I'll get a job at A&W.

.

Stephen Pollard is clearly a member of the Philistine Liberation Organization:

'Why should any government bother with the Arts?'

Naturally, I'll be arguing that it shouldn't.

I am, in most ways, a non-intellectual. Not really an anti-intellectual (despite chairing the Philistine Liberation Organization); just a non-intellectual. I'm pretty ignorant of lots of things, and I love to watch sports and shoot-'em-ups on television, and I am blissfully unaware of the content of many of the classics in literature. Here, via Craig Newmark and from the NYTimes, is a list of the top ten novels or books or something of all time:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Yawn. I've read two of them and wasn't all that impressed by one of the two. I have a vague notion about maybe four more, but for those four I'm not about to rush out to buy the books, rent the movies, or scan the classic comics versions. And I don't really care if I never hear of the other four ever again.

As the NYTimes article says, there are always questions and challenges when a "top ten" anything list is compiled (just look at the NCAA BCS football arguments!), but I must say I didn't think I was as ignorant as this list makes me seem --- I haven't even heard of a couple of these books. If they're such good books, how come they're not more popular, huh?

Finally, about three years after the fact, I've come across the music video "One Thing" by Finger Eleven. It was voted the best music video of the year in Canada at MuchMusic.

Look carefully for the orchestra conductor, but don't blink.
(Hint: if you don't want to watch the whole thing, fast-forward to about 1:40 and watch about 15 seconds there.

One of my all time favourite Wendy's commercials was uploaded to YouTube recently: Parts is Parts.

Update: here it is, embedded, thanks to Kip's instructions. [man, am I ever ignorant sometimes!]



For the past couple of decades, Ms. Eclectic and I have always referred to processed food as "Parts is parts".

Today's Clement editorial cartoon [h/t to Jack; apologies for no link] in the National Post shows angry young men (presumably radical Muslims) carrying signs that say, "Death to Mozart", reacting to the situation described here.

That's pretty funny. But here are some pertinent facts that make it even funnier:

The production — which was also mounted by Deutsche Oper in 2003 — is intended to shock. Mozart never included the severed-heads scene. Indeed, Idomeneo's original libretto never even mentions Islam or Mohammed. But when Idomeneo, the king of Crete, breaks a vow to Poseidon and the sea god sends a monster to the island as punishment, the director of the Berlin production chose to have the title character slay the monster, then stagger on stage carrying the four heads and proclaim, "The gods are dead!"

Such post-modern revisionism of classic texts has become trite. We might well object to this one on artistic grounds. Still the decision whether to mount it or not should be left to tastes of the Deutsche Oper and its audience, rather than the possible rage of a mob. [emphasis added]

The editorial continues in a scathing tone:
he German press agency DPA said Berlin police so far had recorded no direct threat to the opera company, although one patron had passed on an anonymous concern about security. And when the company's directors asked police for a security report, police advised that the possibility of "disturbances" could "not be excluded." All of which makes the company's decision worse: It is crumpling in the face of a potential threat, not even an imminent danger.

When artists, writers, politicians and even ordinary citizens start to self-limit their basic rights to avoid provoking the irrational anger of Muslim street protestors, then rights to such things as free assembly, thought and speech become meaningless. What would Solzhenitsyn, Sharansky and Havel — men who spoke their minds in the face of totalitarian repression — think of such pusillanimity in the face of a tyrannical ideology?

Fortunately even most German politicians are disgusted with the cancellation.

Wolfgang Schaeuble, who as interior minister is Germany's top security official, told a news conference, "This is crazy ... I will not accept that there will be violence because people don't like some pictures [or images on stage]." He said non-Muslims have gone too far in accommodating Muslim sensibilities.

Peter Ramsauer, chairman of the Bavarian Christian Social Union caucus in the German parliament, went further still. He called the cancellation decision "pure cowardice."

Update: Also see Rondi's comments here and here.

You may recall that a week or so ago, I lamented that there were no internet radio stations playing Christmas carols this time of the year.

I was slightly incorrect.

A friend who deserves to remain anonymous sent a link to a website that plays different renditions of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, continuously.

Just to make sure it was real, I actually listened for a while. The Dolly Parton version was pure Dolly Parton. Ditto the Ringo Starr version.

Let me hasten to add that I don't personally think Rudolph qualifies as a Christmas carol, at least not in the traditional sense; at the very most, it is a Class B carol.

Many members of The Philistine Liberation Organization have argued persuasively that The Sound of Music was the best movie ever made. In fact, a discussion of this argument is scheduled for the next PLO Conference.

So you can imagine the delight of some PLO members as we learned that The Sound of Music was going to be televised this evening. Correspondents were Rondi Adamson, Alan Adamson (co-blogger at Curling), along with EclectEcon.

EclectEcon: The best movie ever made is on tv tonight on many different channels at 8pm.

Time to fire up the old microwave (to make some popcorn)!

Alan: A night for a major PLO party!

My TV Guide says 7pm. Would not want anyone missing what there is to be done with Maria!!

Rondi: It's on at 7! Yes, I've known about this all week and have been REALLY looking forward to it. Following the PLO theme, I thought I would have CheezWhiz and crackers, rather than something as classy as popcorn.

Alan: I have to confess, after my generally positive experience with King Kong, I am thinking of tuning in tonight.

Rondi: I'll be very happy to have converts of any kind, even if they're not whole-hearted! (Hey, you can blog about it!)

EclectEcon: This entire exchange is definitely blogable. Any objections?
confession time: I'll probably watch the NFL instead.

Alan: please blog - my guess I will be back and forth between the nfl and SoM

Rondi: None from me. You might want to mention I'll be partaking of some pretty classy Cotes du Rhone, as well. I'm not a *complete* rube! Mmm...cheez whiz and red wine...

(Al, you'll see, at the end, it doesn't indicate in any way, shape or form, that the von Trapps walked to Switzerland in 24 hours! That is, if you stay awake...)

Alan: I am sure I will be asleep at the point of their amazing trip from Salzburg to Switzerland. I am willing now to accept that the movie makes no commitments about how that magic heppened. Or how long it took.

EclectEcon: Well, I didn't mean I'd live-blog it! Rondi, you should do that.

But live-blogging is generally more successful if it is well-advertised, as in, "Hey folks, next Xday at 7pm I'll be live-blogging the Sound of Music."

Rondi: Nah, the Sound of Music is best enjoyed in a relaxed manner...

Alan: Man is it good!! Ollie [his cat?] and I are totally hooked now.

Rondi: It is awesome.