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| Tony Branco |
Swickard: Getting home safely in self-driving cars
© 2017 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. “Baseball
is like driving, it’s the one who gets home safely that counts.” Tommy Lasorda
This last weekend there was a car accident
which involved a self-driving vehicle. The media had a great visual of this car
on its side. To our way of thinking that is never supposed to happen. It’s a
self-driving car which should be programmed to stay out of accidents.
The good news is that it wasn’t the
self-driving car’s fault. But the car ended up on its side. That is never good.
Seems the car ended up on its side after someone, a human, not another
self-driving car, didn’t yield when it was a yield situation.
Are we to assume self-driving cars
are not going to get into accidents? Of course they will have accidents because
they are out there with all of us humans. Regardless of the fact that
self-driving cars will not be texting or talking to a spouse, the human other
drivers do.
Like Los Angeles Dodgers Manager Tommy
Lasorda observed, it is the one who get home safely that counts both in the
game of baseball and driving. When I took a defensive driving course the mantra
was to arrive safely despite the actions of others. Even if you are a
self-driving car.
Imagine how hard it would be to sit
in a self-driving car as it gets into an accident. What can you say since there
is no one else in the car? In a regularly driven car you might resort to
colorful language for a driver that gets you into an accident but if you are
the only one in the car the best you can say is, “Shuckins!”
Obviously, some statistician can
point out that you will be many times safer if a knucklehead isn’t driving but
there is that media picture of a self-driving car on its side to consider. And
if you think that the self-driving car is doing something wrong, what can you
do other than gasp?
One time I was in a commercial jet
taking off from Dallas when as we were heading onto the runway I noticed that
the pilot had not engaged the flaps. Normally to take off or land the flaps are
extended. Someone traveling with me noticed I was agitated.
I mentioned the flaps to which this
person just shrugged. Then the pilot announced, “Most times we use flaps to
take off but for you pilots there are a few times when we have a no-flaps
takeoff. This is one of those times.” I went whew.
So, it may take a bit of trust to
ride in self-driving cars, especially in traffic with the usual amount of human
knuckleheads. I guess we could get used to it or perhaps some of us never will.
It could be that we can consider what Will Rogers wrote, “When I die, I want to
die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like
all the passengers in his car.”
Swickard: An Overdue New Mexico Celebration
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| Sheriff Pat Garrett |
© 2017 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. There is a celebration missing in
New Mexico. Naturally our tourist industry would love to have another festival
where tourists come celebrate with us. Better, this celebration would be about a
real New Mexico hero. Unfortunately, New Mexico does not currently celebrate
this man and he should be celebrated.
Over the years New Mexico has
developed a large celebration involving famous western outlaw Billy the Kid. Me,
I would rather celebrate lawmen than outlaws. So why not celebrate Sheriff Pat
Garrett? There is so much misinformation about Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, which
is why Pat Garrett still is not celebrated.
No longer. A new book is out written
by David G. Thomas: Billy the Kid’s
grave: a history of the Wild West’s most famous death marker. It’s Volume 4
of the Mesilla Valley History Series.
The author is the son of former New Mexico
State University President Gerald Thomas. David Thomas is a careful historical researcher
combining a background in history and competition chess. What David learned as
a chess master translates to his history research. He researches history like
it is a chess match.
There are many parts of the Billy
the Kid story that I had wrong from traditional sources. David Thomas’s book clears
up several inaccuracies that I had embraced. I am thrilled to really see what
happened.
Nothing is more so than the actual location
of Billy the Kid’s grave. Previous reports are now shown to be wrong. It took a
researcher of David Thomas’s ability to prove the location. There’s a wealth of
this kind of research in the book. I was most interested in Pat Garrett.
Over the years, I have called for
some celebration of this lawman who was a Sheriff of Lincoln County then later
of Doña Ana County. He is a New Mexico hero with plenty of blemishes.
Regardless, he deserves a
celebration at least equal to that of Billy the Kid. This is difficult because
people are stuck in their ways of thinking from popular movies where Garrett is
the villain and Billy the hero.
This is false. The real hero was lawman
Pat Garrett while Billy the Kid was a criminal who murdered people including three
New Mexico lawmen. Over the last forty years I’ve written this several times.
The Billy folks always point out that Garrett was known to visit taverns. And
was a rotten gambler.
While having human failings, Pat
Garrett performed heroically when duty called. If Pat Garrett was living today
he would provide plenty of stories for the tabloids about his drinking and
gambling.
But when duty called, Sheriff Pat
Garrett didn’t shrink back. He performed his duty. Like the stories about the
police and fire personnel on September 11th, Garrett ran toward danger, not
away from it.
We remember Pat Garrett mostly
because he is currently depicted as the villain in the Billy the Kid movies. However,
Billy’s character, by actual western standards, was that of a coward, cheat and
horse-thief. The community in 1881 heaved a collective sigh of relief when Sheriff
Pat Garrett finally got Billy the Kid in Ft. Sumner that July 1881 night as David
Thomas’s book conclusively documents.
As we think of Garrett, let us
reflect on these facts: Garrett only used his guns to bring peace to New Mexico.
Billy killed at least seven people in cold-blood. Garrett raised a family. His blind
daughter Elizabeth was a nationally recognized opera singer. In 1915 she wrote
New Mexico’s official song, “O Fair New Mexico.”
We should have Pat Garrett Days.
Perhaps tourists would not buy Pat Garrett trinkets the way they buy Billy the
Kid trinkets, but decent folks would appreciate community values being
celebrated.
I cannot right the wrong done to Pat
Garrett and to the generations of Garretts still in our community other than
tell the truth about him. We need a Pat Garrett celebration to make up for the
fact he was murdered foully and treated in death even worse.
David Thomas has written a history book
for the ages which tells the truth about Billy and Pat Garrett. I believe Las
Cruces should be the center of the Pat Garrett Days Western Celebration.
Swickard: Two big problems with the minimum wage
© 2017 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. “The real
minimum wage is zero.” Thomas Sowell
It’s not in the best interest of
consumers when governments price-fix the price of labor. Technically, price-fixing
is when participants in a market buy or sell a product, service, or commodity only
at a fixed price.
Besides causing higher prices, price-fixing
a minimum wage raises employment barriers for unskilled workers since workers
trade productivity for wages. If what a worker must be paid does not return an
equal economic productivity, they cannot be employed.
The media bombards us with heart-wrenching
stories of abject poverty for people making the minimum wage. But people live by
the month, never by the hour.
There is no amount guaranteed other
than the hour worked. The workers are injured when businesses, reacting to
rising labor costs, trim the workforce hours or workers.
Consider if someone is making $7 an hour
for thirty hours a week. Their gross pay is $210 a week. If the minimum wage
rises to $9 an hour, since the business labor costs may be fixed, that business
may cut minimum wage employees to fifteen hours a week which is $135 a week.
The government requirement is an
hour, not a month. We live by the month. Of course, minimum wage earners may be
the first cut since they have the least job experience. Then their minimum wage
is zero.
Price fixing has been illegal in our
country since the Sherman Act in 1890. When has any government price-fixing worked?
Soviet Union price-fixing caused low prices for groceries in empty grocery
stores.
In World War Two our government
froze wages so for businesses to hire someone from a competitor they had to
offer something else of value. It was health insurance which was not used much before
then.
Over the years, the health insurance
industry grew into one sixth of our economy as our resources were given to
Insurance and pharmaceutical companies along with lots of lawyers, lobbyists
and politicians. Smaller amounts went to doctors and hospitals. Finally, we
people became just the giving units to the high and powerful.
Price-fixing by our government on
domestically produced oil brought us the gas shortages and higher prices for
energy in the 1970s along with the increase of economic power for the Middle East
Oil Cartels.
President Reagan stopped the
price-fixing and oil prices went down. The more governments price-fix, the
worse it becomes for their citizens. Economist Milton Friedman wrote, “The most
important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes
place unless both parties benefit.”
My biggest concern in these Minimum
Wage increases is that it precludes some people, usually very low skill or no
skill workers from even getting a job since they must return in productivity
what they are paid or the business will fail at some point.
Often work hours are cut for the
already employed low-skill workers which reduces their gross amount of monthly money.
We used to work a standard forty hours a week. Lately it’s thirty-two or twenty-eight
hours.
The living wage is touted but what should
be the amount? If it’s tied to $15 an hour and full employment of forty hours a
week, that’s $31,200 a year. The government requiring a living wage means low-skill
workers will never be employed since they cannot return that much monetary value
to their employers.
Now, if the government doesn’t like
what I, as an employer, pays, they are free to add any amount they want to the
paycheck of my employee. But I have three factors always: markets including
prices for my goods, labor costs to produce those goods and the return on
investment that keeps me in business.
If you take the cost of labor over
the possible return from the sale of my goods, I must either trim the
work-force or close the business. That’s Economics 101.
As President Ronald Reagan said at
his first inauguration, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution
to our problem; government is the problem.” Amen to that.
Swickard: A better solution using an engineering idea
© 2017 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. Our nation has been talking about
the problem of immigration into our country involving people without legal
status for decades. No one has done anything about it. Much of the talk has focused
on the country of Mexico since many people coming into our country without
legal status come from Mexico. Many, not all.
As I said in last week’s column, the
politicians for and against immigration solutions have been and are mainly using
the controversy for their own fundraising. Politicians on both sides don’t want
resolution of immigration issues because they themselves are making so much
money fundraising on the fears.
For all these years, what we know is
that many people from other countries are bypassing our legal immigration
processes. Over the years one of the plans is to build a wall. And it would
appear a doer rather than just a talker, President Donald Trump, is set to build
a wall between our country and Mexico.
Don’t do it President Trump, I have
a better plan. The wall is a thumb in the eye of Mexico. Plus, we are building
a wall with no utility other than stopping people entering our country outside
of legal processes.
It won’t work. China found that
after building the more than five-thousand-mile Great Wall of China. It didn’t
work because invaders just bribed the Chinese guards to go through the wall
when they wanted. Sounds like the problem Americans have with Drug Cartels
bribing our authorities.
I do not like win-loss political solutions.
A wall does nothing for our country other than provide jobs building it and
bribes for our authorities from Cartel members to get past the wall.
There is another way to spend that
money and spend it on a better win-win solution. Rather than just build a wall
on the border, build a fifteen-foot raised six-lane super-freeway along with an
easement on our side for two-way railroad track construction, multiple pipelines,
powerlines and cellphone towers.
The cost of just building a wall is similar
to building a fifteen-foot-high super-freeway which would act as a wall. We get
the benefit of an easement on our side. My friend, former State Senator Lee
Cotter, a civil engineer, first mention this to me a couple weeks ago. I really
like the idea.
One of the great improvements of our
time is super-freeways. President Dwight Eisenhower was an Army Lieutenant-Colonel
in 1919 when he was joined a convoy of equipment and men from the nation’s Capital
to San Francisco. It took the eighty-vehicle convoy sixty-two days averaging a rate
of six miles per hour.
He vowed that if he was ever in
charge, he would build superhighways. At the time, Germany was doing so with
its Autobahn. Eisenhower was lifted out of obscurity at the start of WWII to
become the Supreme Commander of the military and then the 34th President of the
United States.
Now coast to coast travel on
freeways is only a few days. So why not put another path across the Southern
Border which would allow better transportation along with more access to our
country’s markets for Mexico and to Mexico’s markets for our country.
Queen Elizabeth II said, “At its
heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical
solutions.” I agree, engineering solutions are much better to use than political
solutions. Our nation, using engineering sent people to the moon and returned
them safely. While politician President John Kennedy started the quest, it was
engineers that achieved that mission.
Just having a wall out in the middle
of the area with nothing around it will still require constant monitoring which
would also be what the freeway would require. A fifteen-foot rise would make it
harder to just walk across the border, but it would not be impossible. Having
traffic and regular rest stops would make it attractive to our citizens and
would be heavily monitored for anyone trying to cross without authorization.
Let us build something useful to use
on both sides of our southern border while still being a barrier to those who
would enter our country without legal status. It is an engineering solution
rather than a political solution. I like win-win solutions.
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