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Since January, we have been experimenting with a new way of working. Two programmers and one designer form a team and take on projects in short, mostly two week, iterations. It’s been a great success so far and has resulted in a huge list of new features across all 37signals products. But after two full terms of new features, one of our teams decided to start the third term with a little spring cleaning.

The three of us had something different to bring to this term — each of us had been focusing mostly on customer support recently. Jamis and Jeff were fresh off terms in our support programmer role and I had spent the last few months working daily to help customers on our Answers forum. That gave us a unique perspective on our products. We came together having each experienced all of the little things that can be big headaches for our customers. So we spent the past two weeks fixing, polishing, re-writing, and improving the places that we’d seen the most confusion from customers first hand.

Here is some of what we were able to accomplish:

Sign up/Sign in:

• Re-wrote and re-designed the sign in error states so that we could explain in context why someone’s login may not be working.
• Improved the sign in link to make it more visible when creating new product accounts.
• Added better detection and prevention of duplicate signups.
• Cleaned up and fixed various display issues with 37signals ID email notifications.
• Modernized the sign in screens using CSS instead of transparent PNG images.

Basecamp:

• When inviting new users, detect duplicates. This warns admins that they may be trying to invite someone who is already on their account avoiding multiple sign in confusion.
• Stop trying to automatically create users on an integrated Campfire account and simplify the process—members enter chats as themselves, non-members enter as guests.
• Fixed that the responsible party pulldown for to-dos shouldn’t include people who can’t see private items
• Fixed a longstanding issue with reordering of To-do templates.
• Corrected the decimal precision of the total number of hours displayed on time pages.
• Resolved various display issues, from text formatting to icon alignment.

Highrise:

• Updated monospaced font styles to render more consistently and attractively across browsers and platforms.
• Updated and improved iCal and API authentication copy.

Backpack:

• Exposed better invoice options, such as the email address and ‘Bill to’ field on the Account tab.
• Introduced per-user iCal feed to fix a recurring time bug whenever DST changes.
• Fixed an annoying issue with editing multi-day events that could result in the start date being incorrectly set to next year.

Improving our products isn’t just about new features. Polishing, re-writing, fixing, and improving existing features can do just as much to make them better and more enjoyable to use. Many of these fixes were directly related to repeated questions or suggestions from our customers so we’ll be keeping an eye on support to measure their impact.

The word of the day is obviously “deflation.”

The dollar is rallying, markets are tanking, and crude oil has fallen below $70.

This is obviously great vindication for the likes of Gluskin-Sheff’s David Rosenberg, who has been a deflationista from the beginning.

In today’s note, he offers 11 points of evidence that that deflation is the primary trend.

Credit is contracting

Image: Wikimedia

Wage rates are stagnating

Money supply growth is vanishing

Image: Planet Of The Nerds

The U.S. dollar is strong

Image: Won Park

Commodities have peaked

Image: BPProductions.com

U.S. home prices are rolling over … again

Lumber prices tumbling (down nearly 17% from April 2010 highs)

Wal-Mart is cutting prices on 10,000 items

Image: Wikimedia

Home Depot just cut prices on flowers, fertilizers, lawn equipment and outdoor furniture

Image: Wikimedia

Taco Bell is offering two dollar combo meals

Image: Wikimedia

The April U.S. retail sales report hinted at deflation in groceries, electronics, apparel and sporting goods

Image: Wikimedia

Don’t miss:

Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bernanke–500.jpg

10 Reasons To Buy Bonds NOW >

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For Mac users, it’s been pretty hard not to get excited about Steam and what it means for the future of gaming on Macs. So how well does it actually work? As always, Tom’s Hardware comes through with the benchmarks. More »










Microsoft Windows – Apple – Macintosh – Steam – FAQs Help and Tutorials

by Duncan Hollis

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down its first-ever international family law opinion today in Abbott v. Abbott.  You can access the decision here.  In short, a 6-3 majority (authored by Justice Kennedy) found that the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of Child Abduction treats ne exeat rights (that is, rights to consent before the other parent takes the child to another country) as “rights of custody” rather than “rights of access.”  That interpretation has significant consequences as violations of custodial rights trigger a right of return under the treaty, whereas violations of access rights do not.  I’ve only had a chance to read the opinion quickly, so let me offer some initial reactions, and reserve the right to come back later with a more detailed analysis.

The Court uniformly accepts the use of foreign law to interpret treaties
First, as regular readers know, there’s a lot of controversy surrounding the use of foreign law by some members of the Court in recent years.  Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Alito and Justice Sotomayor were all called on in their confirmation hearings to denounce the use of foreign and international law in interpreting the U.S. Constitution.  I’d expect Elena Kagan to get similar questions when her nomination comes before the Senate this summer.  But, in Abbott the Court ignores this controversy, and thereby suggests its limited only to the use of foreign law in interpreting the Constitution.  Indeed, every member of the Court in this case–in both the majority and the dissent–end up citing and relying on foreign law as a significant part of their analysis of whether the ne exeat right is a right of custody or not.  The majority heavily relies on the fact that most foreign courts to consider the issue have found ne exeat rights are rights of custody to support reaching the same conclusion. Stevens’ dissent, in contrast, contests the uniformity and strength of those views, while emphasizing other foreign court decisions taking the opposite position.  Thus, whether it’s Justices Scalia, Sotomayor, or Stevens, the Court seems clearly willing to accept and employ foreign law decisions when it comes to interpreting U.S. treaties and the statutes that implement them.  Indeed, as the dissent notes, the Court was willing to do this in Abbott even if it meant overruling almost all the U.S. Court of Appeals’ decisions that had found ne exeat rights were not rights of custody. 

A victory for Justice Sotomayor
Second, the case represents a victory for Justice Sotomayor, who, as I’ve noted before, dissented in the leading Court of Appeals decision on this topic, Croll v. Croll.  Justice Kennedy’s opinion covers much the same ground as her earlier dissent.  Indeed, although I haven’t re-read her dissent closely, it’s my sense that the Abbott Majority adopts both her method of analysis and her specific findings on this question nearly in toto, whether in looking at the treaty’s text, its object and purpose, the negotiating history, and other foreign law decisions.

This was a treaty interpretation case, not a custody case. 
Third, although this was the first international family law case to come before the Court, the opinion ends up being more about treaty interpretation than the custodial fight that generated the case itself.  Indeed, the Majority ends its opinion by noting that even if the treaty provides a right of return when custodial rights are violated (including the ne exeat right at issue here), the Hague Convention also provides exceptions to the obligation to return a child if the child might (a) face a grave risk of harm or an otherwise intolerable situation, or (b) have reached an age and sufficient maturity to express a preference on being returned.  As a result, even as the Court resolved the ne exeat treaty interpretation question, it left open whether or not the child at issue in this case actually had to be returned to Chile.  And given that the child in question is around 15 now, I suspect that continued litigation on his return may soon become moot since the treaty’s provisions only apply to children under the age of 16.  Thus, the Abbott case is likely to have any lasting influence in terms of its approach to treaty interpretation rather than any resolution of the difficult custody fight that brought the case to the court in the first place. Which brings us to my final point.

The Court takes treaty interpretation seriously
Both the majority and the dissent expend a lot of time and resources to figure out what was, by all accounts, a close question of treaty interpretation.  Although in the past, many have questioned if the Supreme Court’s interpretative method aligns with the international law rules on treaty interpretation, I don’t think this case suggests a deep departure from the international law rules.  Indeed, even though it does not reference them, the majority’s method largely tracks articles 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, looking at the treaty’s text first, then the context (although I don’t think they ever call it that), the treaty’s object and purpose, state practice, the negotiating history, and the views of publicists on the question.  And, in those few areas where the Court takes into account factors left out of the VCLT (i.e., the Majority’s deference to the State Department’s view that a ne exeat right is a right of custody) the Majority does so with relatively little elaboration.  At the same time, the Court’s emphasis on the Hague Convention’s object and purpose may actually prove influential going forward.  The Court ended up its treaty analysis by suggesting that its interpretation made sense since, to hold otherwise, would have meant legitimizing many of the removals that the Court thought the Convention had been drafted to prevent.  That sort of approach runs counter to a purely textual interpretation and suggests, for better or worse, that the Court may demonstrate a more dynamic approach to treaty interpretation issues in the future.

It was Friday evening, Gawker writer Ryan Tate’s wife was out of town, and he was whiling away the lonely hours by watching 30 Rock when an iPad commercial popped up that touted the new Apple gadget as nothing less than a revolution. Tate got annoyed, fired off an email, and soon found himself in an email fight with Steve Jobs himself. Apple’s CEO is known to personally answer some of the emails that flood into the [email protected] address, and it seems that Tate’s pointed message goaded the exec into action. Tate, who has long taken issue with Apple’s tight rules on how apps can be written and what content is permissible, argued that the iPad couldn’t be considered revolutionary because “revolutions are about freedom.” Several hours later, Jobs fired back with his version of what the iPad offers: “Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom.” And it was on. Tate got pretty heated in some of his messages to Jobs, but in the aftermath he stresses his respect for Jobs and his methods. As Tate writes in his blog post digesting the whole affair:
Rare is the CEO who …

A piece on adjuncts in Inside Higher Ed has been attracting a lot of attention among academics of my acquaintance.  Its description of academic life is shockingly brutal–shocking even to me, who knows enough PhDs to be acquainted with the dismal facts:

When I began teaching at Columbia and Barnard in the 1960s, almost
all the positions in their German departments were tenure-track. I came
to SUNY New Paltz in the 70s, when there were only a couple of
virtually silent and invisible part-time adjuncts among the 35 teachers
in the entire Foreign Language Division. It was not until a few years
after the dawn of the new millennium that I, like Rip Van Winkle,
“awoke” after decades to a brand new reality: the number of
tenure-track faculty in my department had shrunk to a mere 10, while
some two dozen adjuncts were now teaching the bulk of our foreign
language courses. Yikes!

As everyone in academe now knows, the
professoriate has experienced a radical transformation over the past
few decades. These enormous changes have occurred so gradually,
however, that they are only now beginning to receive attention. The
general public has remained largely unaware of the staffing crisis in
higher education. As contingent colleagues around the country came to
outnumber the tenured faculty and as they were assigned an ever larger
share of the curriculum, they became an inescapable fact of academic
departmental life.

Nationally, adjuncts and contingent faculty — we call them ad-cons
— include part-time/adjunct faculty; full-time, nontenure-track
faculty; and graduate employees. Together these employees now make up an amazing 73 percent
of the nearly 1.6 million-employee instructional workforce in higher
education and teach over half of all undergraduate classes at public
institutions of higher education.

Now, he’s lumping together a bunch of different things:  I don’t really care if part timers and graduate students don’t get paid much . . . at least as long as the graduate students are on track to better jobs.  The core issue is full-time adjuncts, and whether the graduate students have a reasonable shot at a tenure-track position.

Unfortunately, the answer now is that they don’t.  Academia has bifurcated into two classes:  tenured professors who are decently paid, have lifetime job security, and get to work on whatever strikes their fancy; and adjuncts who are paid at the poverty level and may labor for years in the desperate and often futile hope of landing a tenure track position.  And, of course, graduate students, the number of whom may paradoxically increase as the number of tenure track jobs decreases–because someone has to teach all those intro classes.

I have long theorized that at least some of the leftward drift in academia can be explained by the fact that it has one of the most abusive labor markets in the world.  I theorize this because in interacting with many professors, I am bewildered by their beliefs about labor markets more generally; many seem to think of private labor markets as an endless well of exploitation where employees are virtual prisoners with no recourse in the face of horrific abuses.  Yet this does not describe the low wage jobs in which I’ve worked–there were of course individuals who had to hold onto that particular job for idiosyncratic reasons, but as a class, low wage workers do not face the kind of monolithic employer power that a surprising number of academics seem to believe is common.

It is common, of course–in academia.  Until they have tenure, faculty are virtual prisoners of their institution.  Those on the tenure track work alongside a vast class of have-nots who are some of the worst-paid high school graduates in the country.  So it’s not surprising to me that this is how academics come to view labor markets–nor that they naturally assume that it must be even worse on the outside.  And that’s before we start talking about the marriages strained, the personal lives stunted, because those lucky enough to get a tenure-track job have to move to a random location, often one not particularly suited to their spouses’ work ambitions or their own personal preferences . . . a location which, barring another job offer, they will have to spend the rest of their life in.

What puzzles me is how this job market persists, and is even worsening, in one of the most left-wing institutions in the country.  I implore my conservative commenters not to jump straight into the generalizations about how this always happens in socialist countries; I’m genuinely curious.  Almost every academic I know is committed to a pretty strongly left-wing vision of labor market institutions.  Even if it’s not their very first concern, one would assume that the collective preference should result in something much more egalitarian.  So what’s overriding that preference?

















Education – Higher education – Tenure – Colleges and Universities – Rip Van Winkle

As a massive oil spill and its underwater plumes continue to threaten fisheries in parts of the Gulf, charter captains are in an immediate pinch: their prized red snapper season is about to open on June 1 for just 53 days, but clients are foregoing fishing trips because they are worried about whether it is safe to visit the coast and fish in the Gulf during the oil spill. Offshore fishing outside the closed spill area remains good, and fishing captains are ready to accommodate customers.

Read the full post »

[JURIST] The US Supreme Court [official website; JURIST news archive] on Monday ruled [opinion, PDF] in Abbott v. Abbott [Cornell LII backgrounder; JURIST report] that a ne exeat clause, which prohibits one parent from removing a child from the country without the other parent’s consent, confers a “right of custody” within the meaning of the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction [text]. The Hague Convention requires a country to return a child who has been “wrongfully removed” from his country of habitual residence. Under Art. 12, a “wrongful removal” is one that occurs “in breach of rights of custody.” The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held [opinion, PDF] that ne exeat rights do not constitute “rights of custody” within the meaning of the Hague Convention. Reversing the decision below, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote:

Because Mr. Abbott has direct and regular visitation rights, it follows that he has a ne exeat right under article 49. The Convention recognizes that custody rights can be decreed jointly or alone and Mr. Abbott’s ne exeat right is best classified as a “joint right of custody,” which the Convention defines to “include rights relating to the care of the person of the child and, in particular, the right to determine the child’s place of residence.” Mr. Abbott’s right to decide [his child’s] country of residence allows him to determine the child’s place of residence, especially given the Convention’s purpose to prevent wrongful removal across international borders. It also gives him “rights relating to the care of the person of the child,” in that choosing [his child’s] residence country can determine the shape of his early and adolescent years and his language, identity, and culture and traditions. That a ne exeat right does not fit within traditional physical custody notions is beside the point because the Convention’s definition of “rights of custody” controls.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in dissent and was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer. The case was remanded to the lower court.

The case was brought by petitioner Timothy Abbott after his ex-wife, respondent Jacquelyn Abbott, removed their son to the US from Chile without his permission in 2005. He argued that his ne exeat right gave him joint authority over the child’s place of residence and that removing the child from Chile violated this right.

The rumored and highly likely Google TV project, which is supposedly in the works as a partnership between Google, Intel and CE manufacturers, has just gotten its name thanks to a new report from the Financial Times. The “Smart TV” platform, as it will be called, apparently, is slated for launch within a couple of days at … (read more)

The New York Times’ David Carr has an interesting column on how the Internet changes headline writing. A century ago, headlines meandered down the page like a “wedding cake,” Carr writes. Some magazines like the New Yorker and New Republic still hold fast to two-word punches. But the trend online is toward short, keyword-heavy descriptors that trade cleverness for clarity.

This makes sense. Twenty years ago, if I bought a magazine, its editors could afford to write witty and indirect headlines that offered more of a mood than a complete picture, because after all, I bought the magazine. Nobody owns our time, online. Selecting an article to read on the Internet is like running through a bazaar while the merchants shout their wares. For online headline writers, the wares are the news, and they don’t waste time selling through witty indirection.* What’s more, since many readers get their news through search engines, putting key words in the headline maximizes the chance that Google’s robots will identify your story and place it toward the top of a relevant search page.

Carr writes that, “Google’s crawlers and aggregators like Digg quit paying attention after
60 characters or so, long before readers might.”  But Digg and Google aren’t providing aggregation services for robots or aliens. They’re keeping things short because on the Web, because human audiences ruthlessly scan lots of content in little time, and short, descriptive headlines do better than long-winded “wedding cake” titles that amount to short paragraphs.

“People who worry that Web headlines dumb down public discourse are probably right,” Carr says. Really? I like wit and puns and alliteration as much as the next guy. But knowing headlines are often about making the reader see the copy editor’s wit. Descriptive headlines are about making the reader see the story’s purpose. The “public discourse” is a fort under multi-variable assault from cable news and hysterical media entertainers and all the old villainous culprits. One hopes it can at least withstand a battery of prominent keywords.

_________
* Incidentally one reason why I write many headlines in the form of questions is that it’s a way to touch the heart of the story without resorting to boring newsy statements. For example, if the story is that Democrats and Republicans have reached an agreement on leverage limits in financial regulation, rather than stretch for cleverness with something like “Dems and GOP, Together, Sing ‘Take It To the Limit’” it’s more valuable for readers to see a headline that acts as a kind of lede or prompt: “Will the Bipartisan Deal on Leverage Limits Work?” That headline tells you (1) the news that there is a bipartisan deal on leverage limits and (2) that this is an analytical story that will evaluate the news. It’s more literal, of course, and less whimsical and maybe even more boring. But it’s also arguably more useful for the Web’s speedy readers.

Google – New York Times – Web search engine – New Yorker – New Republic

Another year, another potential snaps scandal brewing on the pageant circuit: It seems Miss USA 2010 knows her way around a pole.

One day after taking the crown in the 2010 Miss USA pageant in Las Vegas, a Detroit radio station has released pictures it says are of Miss USA Rima Fakih dancing in a station-sponsored striptease contest. The 24-year-old daughter of Lebanese immigrants beat out 50 other women to win this year’s competition. Fakih is the first Arab-American to ever claim the Miss USA title, but one in a series of pageant queens to be the subject of a potential naughty photo scandal.

Channel 99.5 FM’s “Mojo In The Morning” has published several images of the former Miss Michigan in shorts and tank top dancing seductively on a platform surrounded by other women. The dance was part of a contest put on by the station nearly three years ago.

“Congratulations to Miss Michigan, Rima Fakih who was crowned Miss USA on Sunday night! Rima is a Dearborn resident and the first Arab American to wear the crown. Much like Miss Michigan Kristen Haglund who won Miss America in 2008, Rima is a Mojo In The Morning listener who has joined us in studio and at events. Check out Miss USA Rima Fakih when she won Mojo In The Morning’s “Stripper 101″ contest in 2007…” read a message posted to the show’s website on Monday.

HTC unveiled the new Android-powered Wildfire today which is their new entry-level device set to replace the Tattoo. The Wildfire will be available in Europe and Asia by Q3 2010, but there is always the chance for any HTC device to show up in the U.S.

Highlights of the Wildfire include Android 2.1 with Sense UI, 3.2 inch QVGA display, 528 MHz processor, and 5 megapixel camera with flash. Customers will be able to choose from four colors including red, black, white, and gray.

For a closer look at the HTC Wildfire, see Engadget’s hands on report.

HTC Wildfire specs include:

• Android 2.1 with HTC Sense
• 512 MB flash
• 384 RAM
• 106.75 x 60.5 x 11.99mm
• 3.2-inch QVGA TFT capacitive touch screen
• WCDMA/HSPA: 900/2100 or AWS/1900 or 850/2100 MHz
• GSM/GPRS/EDGE: 850/900/1800/1900
• 802.11b/g Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR
• GPS/AGPS
• 3.5mm audio jack and microUSB
• 5 Megapixel camera with auto focus and LED flash
• 1300 mAh battery
• 440 minutes of talk-time on WCDMA, 490 on GSM
• 690 hours on standby for WCDMA, 480 for GSM
• microSD memory card slot, SD 2.0 compatible
• Proximity sensor, G-sensor, Compass, Light sensor, FM radio, Optical joystick
• 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7225 chipset

Gallery

Android Central forum user doc31 was lucky enough to get some hands-on time with the HTC EVO 4G.  There’s answers to some of our questions, some pictures from the camera, oh, and did I mention a video showing it in action?  Check out the thread in the EVO forums here, and follow the break to see the video as well as some samples from the camera.

read more

Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton pledged Monday that he will be a full partner as lieutenant governor if he is elected on the ticket with Republican Michael Fedele.

Fedele introduced Boughton as his running mate, saying that they intend to capture the nomination at Saturday’s Republican convention in Hartford.

But Boughton said after the announcement that they are planning a whole new structure for the lieutenant governor’s office than Fedele has had under Gov. M. Jodi Rell.

“I think he hasn’t been frankly utilized the way he should have been utilized in the previous administration,” Boughton said. “We’ve made a commitment that we’ll never run the lieutenant governor’s office like that again. You’ll be hearing from me. I’ll be vocal, and I’ll be Mike’s full partner in managing this state. … The bottom line is this will be much, much more than a ceremonial post. And I think the taxpayers deserve more, for $110,000 [per year in salary], than somebody that cuts ribbons and kisses babies.”

While Rell and Fedele have appeared at numerous news conferences together over the past three years, Rell has repeatedly refused to publicly endorse Fedele for governor. That has caused some consternation among Fedele supporters and questions among Republican voters.

“Certainly, that’s her decision,” Boughton said when asked about Rell’s non-endorsement of Fedele. “But you know what? Frankly, I’m not a big believer in endorsements. … It’s the endorsement of the voters that is the most important thing. The rest of it is just window-dressing.”

When asked, after Boughton’s comments, if he has been underutilized in the Rell administration, Fedele said, “Well, we all have our different styles. When I wasn’t being used, I went out and did my own stuff, which is economic development and reaching out to veterans and things of that nature. As you know, constitutionally, this is a part-time job. I have not worked it as a part-time job. I have been a full-time lieutenant governor. … There was more in me than I probably was utilized for. But again, that’s a different style.”

Concerning Boughton’s future role if they win the election, Fedele said, “The lieutenant governor in the Fedele administration is going to be at the table, all the time, rolling up sleeves and basically not taking any time off, to get the work done.”

(In photo, Lt.Gov. Michael Fedele, right, and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, left, answer questions from the media after Fedele announced Boughton as his running mate outside the Capitol in Hartford. AP Photo/Jessica Hill)

Lynne Kiesling

On Friday at Environmental Economics, Tim Haab wrote about the implications of New Source Review for innovation in a regulated industry, and how to represent it in the standard Pigouvian model (do go read the whole post, it’s very useful). The basic question is this: does the stifling of innovation that results from New Source Review regulations change the fundamental analysis of the question of pollution?

I have some quibbles with how Tim frames the “externality” question — in particular, I prefer the “markets don’t fail, they fail to exist” formulation of the fact that some uncompensated cost is present, rather than “market failure” — but his post makes a really important point with respect to New Source Review and the Pigouvian model:

The technological improvements resulting from removal of New Source Review may shift the private supply curve to the right, and may reduce the emissions per unit of output, but that doesn’t solve the fundamental externality problem.   So even though the technological improvements may reduce per unit emissions, emissions may actually increase from the decreased costs of producing electricity (decrease per unit emissions, but increased units). Regardless, with or without the NSR regulation, there will still be emissions and those emissions will remain unpriced (inefficiently) by the market. ‘

While I agree that existing regulations may have reduced the incentive for innovation, their existence doesn’t change the fundamental market failure–emissions are not rationed through prices.  For a market to work efficiently, ALL costs and benefits of production and consumption must be internalized.  In such cases, emissions will be efficiently rationed.

I take issue with a couple of these points. First, if the Pigouvian model is the correct way to model the pollution question, it is incorrect that “ALL costs and benefits of production and consumption must be internalized”. For an illustration of why this claim is not correct, ask yourself this question: how much do you pay your neighbors for the lovely flowers they plant in their front gardens, and if you did pay them, would that induce them to plant more flowers? Of course you don’t pay your neighbors for the external benefit you derive from their lovely gardens, and I think it’s a safe generalization that your neighbor-gardeners have more intense preferences over their gardening decisions than you do over their decisions. What does that imply? It implies that even if you did pay them as compensation to internalize your benefit, if your marginal benefit is small relative to theirs, your payment is unlikely to change their decision at the margin of how much gardening to do. In other words, the only uncompensated costs and benefits that are important for achieving the optimal level of abatement (of a cost) or increase (of a benefit) are the costs and benefits that are Pareto relevant, that would at the margin change the behavior of the relevant party.

This must be a pet issue for me because I’ve written about it before, with respect to inefficient energy efficiency consumer subsidies, with respect to externality accounting, and with respect to the fact that Alex Tabarrok got a flu shot because he wanted to get kissed.

As a coda: I do not think that the Pigouvian model is the correct model, because it ignores the reciprocal nature of costs; in other words, it ignores the fact that the pollution problem is a problem of conflicting uses of a scarce common-pool resources, and the people with those different uses are imposing costs on each other. The polluter is not the only one creating a cost.

Second, I think Tim’s right about his interpretation of NSR and the Pigouvian model, but I also think that the Pigou model of a per-unit tax on output from a polluting firm is not the best model to use to see the effects of NSR, unless the policy you are analyzing is a per-unit output tax. I think a fuller answer to his astute student also includes the following:

If the policy is an emissions tax (e.g., a per-ton tax on sulfur dioxide or greenhouse gases), then NSR regulation artificially keeps abatement costs higher than they would be in the presence of the technological innovation. Thus at the margin, the NSR regulation does affect the firm’s choice, and the amount of abatement/emissions, because if the tax rate is higher than the abatement cost, then the firm will choose to abate. Thus NSR means that less abatement takes place under an emissions tax, by keeping abatement costs higher.

If the policy is a tradeable permit system, then NSR regulation artificially keeps abatement costs higher than they would be in the presence of the technological innovation. A firm’s abatement costs determine its demand for permits in the permit market. Thus at the margin, the NSR regulation increases the firm’s willingness to pay for permits, and leads to higher costs of achieving the abatement/emissions target.

Simon Thomas, Vicepresidente Senior de Marketing y Ventas de Nissan en Europa, ha dado a conocer los primeros precios de los cuatro primeros países que recibirán al Nissan Leaf, que será comercializado a partir de noviembre o diciembre de este año. El directivo de Nissan recalcó que el precio será de menos de 30.000 Euros en la mayoría de los países de Europa, el precio final tras restarle los incentivos que cada gobierno europeo está preparando.

Mientras en el resto de los países de Europa los precios se irán conociendo conforme se acerque la fecha de lanzamiento, los cuatro primeros países (Reino Unido, Holanda, República de Irlanda y Portugal) en vender al Leaf lo harían a los siguientes precios:

• El precio en el Reino Unido será de 23.350 libras (27.471 euros), tras restarle los incentivos del gobierno.
• El precio en Holanda será de 32.839 euros. Los compradores holandeses se beneficiarán de un ahorro en impuestos de entre 6.000 y 19.000 euros durante cinco años.
• El precio del LEAF en Irlanda será de 29.995 euros, incluyendo incentivos gubernamentales.
• En Portugal, el precio será de 29.955 euros, incluyendo ayudas del Gobierno.
• Todos los precios incluyen la batería

En el caso del Reino Unido, el gobierno ha anunciado recientemente que reembolsará el 25% del precio de compra de un vehículo totalmente eléctrico a cada comprador, hasta un límite de 5.000 libras. En el caso de Holanda, los impuestos de matriculación y de circulación serán gratuitos, así como en Irlanda y Portugal.

A medida que se vayan difundiendo el resto de países, con sus correspondientes precios, los mantendremos informados principalmente con las opciones de compra del Leaf en España.

Fuente | Prensa Nissan
.

After see-saw action in the morning, the bulls are definitely making a serious move right now.

The Dow is off another 160, or more than 1.5%. The NASDAQ is also oss 1.5%.

Oil is below $70 now, a major level, and the euro is below $1.23.

CNBC correctly observes that today is unusual in that the selloff seems to have happened just as Europe closed, the oppsotie of what’s been happening in recent weeks.

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