Daily Archives: May 26, 2004

Pettitte injured as Stros sweep Cubs

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Andy Pettitte strained his left forearm after pitching four innings, but the Stros’ recently maligned bullpen pitched well as the Stros beat the Cubs for the second straight night at the Juice Box, 7-3. Pettitte gave up a run on two hits, and the Cubs were only able to muster two runs off of one (Mike Gallo) of the Astros’ five relievers. Miceli, Lidge and Dotel were throwing smoke in the last three innings as they struck out six of the last nine Cub batters in the game. The Stros listed Pettitte as day-to-day, but with that type of injury, I would be surprised if he doesn’t miss a start to two.
Lance Berkman hit his seventh yak in the last nine games, and both of the Jeffs — Kent and Bags — also cranked dingers. The Stros raked Greg Maddux hard as it is starting to look like Maddux — who, along with Roger Clemens, is one of the best pitchers of his generation — is going to have a hard time maintaining a spot in the Cubs rotation when all of their flamethrowers come off of the disabled list.
The Stros take a day off on Thursday and then begin a three game weekend series at the Juice Box with the Cards on Friday night behind Clemens. The Stros are 26-20 and a game behind the Reds in the NL Central race.

WSJ on the Presidential election

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The Wall Street Journal ($) is doing a particularly good job in reporting on the polling pertaining to the upcoming Presidential election. This article reports on the WSJ’s latest data and analysis. The entire article is highly informative reading, and the following summarizes the WSJ’s analysis:

George W. Bush and John Kerry may be speaking to all of America, but their campaign advisers are focusing on a narrower slice of the population and targeting the candidates’ messages to voters in states that were decided by a narrow margin in 2000. These battleground states may tip the outcome again in November.
To take the pulse of voters in many of these key states, Zogby Interactive, a division of polling and research firm Zogby International, is conducting online polls twice a month through Election Day in 16 states selected by WSJ.com. Participation in the polls is controlled and the results are weighted, Zogby says, to make them representative of what a poll of the overall U.S. voting population would find.
Results of the first poll, conducted May 18-23, show Mr. Kerry leading in 12 of the 16 states in this poll, including five states that Mr. Bush won in 2000. Mr. Bush leads in four states, including one — Iowa — that voted Democratic in 2000. The 12 states in which Mr. Kerry leads have a total of 148 votes in the Electoral College, while the four in which Mr. Bush is ahead have 29 electoral votes.
Mr. Bush won eight of these 16 battlegrounds in his 2000 victory, but if the election were to be held tomorrow, it looks unlikely that the president would fare as well. But more than half of the states that Mr. Kerry leads fall within the polls’ margins of error. All of the states that Mr. Bush leads are within the margins of error.

In short, although the election is five months away, Mr. Bush is in trouble. However, Mr. Kerry is not a strong candidate and is having difficulty capitalizing on Mr. Bush’s problems. Looks like a close race is shaping up. Stay tuned.

Update on the Clarett case

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On Monday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued this decision denying former Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett‘s challenge to the National Football League’s rules that prevented him from participating in this year’s draft. Here are the prior posts on the Clarett case.
For a variety of reasons, the Second Circuit’s decision is questionable, including its complete dodge of the issue that Americans are generally free to make their own decisions on employment opportunities, even if those decisions are bad ones. As usual, Professor Sauer over at the Sports Economist has the best analysis on the decision, in which he observes the following:

The decision is evasive on two major counts. First, apart from mentioning the NFL’s claim that the rule protects young players from physical harm, the decision wastes nary a sentence on the issue. The reason is clear – since labor law trumps antitrust, there is no need to judge the reasonableness of the restraint. Second, in announcing this in unabashed terms, the court tiptoes around the real issue here:

In the context of this collective bargaining relationship, the NFL and its players union can agree that an employee will not be hired or considered for employment for nearly any reason whatsoever [emphasis added] so long as they do not violate federal laws such as those prohibiting unfair labor practices … or discrimination.

That the restriction is discriminatory is obvious. But youth is apparently not a protected class, unlike minorities or the elderly. I find this odd.

As if North Korea didn’t already have enough problems

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Randy Parker over at ParaPundit has this interesting post in which he points out that the shortage of females in China — coupled with North Korea’s crippled economy — presents the real prospect that Chinese men will import substantial numbers of North Korean wifes in the coming decades. Read the entire post, as Mr. Parker notes that the social and economic implications of this development are potentially ominous, but also potentially positive:

The shortage of women in China may end up posing an existential threat to the Pyongyang regime more powerful than anything US policy makers are likely to do. North Korean leaders might react to this threat by engaging in market liberalization reforms aimed at raising North Korean living standards enough to reduce the level of desperation of North Korean women.
The regime in North Korea faces a more general economic threat from China because of rising wages in China. The higher the wages go the greater the incentive for Northeast China factory managers and other businesses to turn to the black market to supply cheap North Korean labor. This will pull both men and women out of North Korea. Will that destabilize the regime more or less than the selective removal of women from North Korea?

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution for the link to this post.

UT team develops ambidextrous computer chip

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This Wall Street Journal ($) article reports on the development of an experimental computer chip at the University of Texas that is like a chameleon in that its able to change its function according to the task at hand.
Steve Keckler, a UT computer scientist and a leader of the design effort, believes that the chip can be configured to perform as a specialized chip for devices such as cell phones and digital music players or even serve as a powerful central processor in a desktop or other general-purpose computer. The team hopes to have a prototype of the device finished in about a year and ready for commercialization by the end of this decade. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Defense Department agency, is funding the UT team’s development.
If the chip works as planned, it will run at a top speed of 10 gigahertz and perform one trillion operations (meaning individual computing tasks) per second. In comparison, Intel Corp.’s current top-speed Pentium 4 processor runs at 3.4 gigahertz and delivers 6.8 billion operations per second. The anticipated performance has led the design team to dub the device a “supercomputer on a chip.”
The UT team has nicknamed their design “Trips,” for Tera-Op Reliable Intelligently Adaptive Processing System. The term tera-op refers to the targeted one trillion operations per second. The system would divide individual processing cores on the chip into tiny sections that could change automatically for several predetermined functions. The idea is that the processing cores would morph as instructions flowed in. Each chip could contain many processing core, which would enable a single chip to perform multiple functions simultaneously while optimizing for each. Conventional chips generally do only one thing at a time. Moreover, the distributed architecture of the UT team’s design would reduce clock delays, which limit the performance of conventional chips.

Spitzer v. Grasso

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This Holman Jenkins, Jr. WSJ ($) Business World column examines New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer’s latest propoganda campaign . er, I mean, lawsuit in which he seeks to recover a substantial portion of the rather large $200 million in compensation, pension and related benefits that the New York Stock Exchange Board of Directors bestowed on Richard Grasso, the former president of the Exchange. The entire column is good reading, and here are a few tidbits to pique your interest:

The board was chock full of the country’s leading business people, folks like Goldman Sachs Chief Henry Paulson, Bear Stearns’ James Cayne and former New York Comptroller Carl McCall. They voted unanimously to approve Mr. Grasso’s pay knowing full well its magnitude, Mr. Spitzer’s subsequent attempt to lay down a smokescreen for their benefit notwithstanding. Mr. Spitzer lauded himself Monday for taking on the national problem of overpaid CEOs. By leaving the board out of his suit, though, he’s given directors everywhere an all-purpose defense. To wit, I was too dumb, lazy, clueless, indifferent, gullible etc. to know what I was doing.

Mr. Jenkins then examines the nature of the NYSE, the reason that its members paid Mr. Grasso so well, and why they turned on him quicker than a New York minute:

The NYSE is owned by seat holders who show up on the premises every business day. Their livelihood depends on the place. They elect its board. They know what a telephone is for. They have every means and incentive to wield their collective clout to make sure their interests are being served.
Now some NYSE “specialist” firms will tell you they were afraid of Mr. Grasso; they didn’t really know what was going on. If pressed on why they bungled a matter so close to their own interests, they shrug their shoulders like an errant teenager and say they aren’t sure why they didn’t keep a closer check on things.
So we’ll answer for them: They stood back because Mr. Grasso was serving their needs marvelously. Consider the years 1995 through 2000, when the handful of small, little-known businesses that control floor trading pocketed profits of $2.12 billion. The average yearly return on their invested capital: a princely 21.35%. Mr. Grasso’s retirement payoff after 35 years at the exchange may have been gross and unsightly, but it was a small fraction of the riches he helped to preserve for the New York Stock Exchange’s most privileged constituents.
It’s also perfectly obvious why they turned on Mr. Grasso in his moment of political mugging. Anything that brings scrutiny on the inner workings of the exchange, willy nilly, is an invitation to powerful customers who’ve been fighting to eliminate the specialists in favor of a cheaper, more transparent electronic trading system.

Finally, Mr. Jenkins then turns to the motivation of Mr. Spitzer, who has made quite a name for himself extracting “settlements” from various businesses:

New York’s Attorney General, heir to a local real estate fortune, has specialized in presenting his wealthy business targets with both a problem and a solution, the latter involving writing a big check with their firm’s money. He may not exactly provoke gratitude (except among CEOs more than usually afflicted with Stockholm Syndrome) but he’s seen as someone with whom business can be done.
His political ambition is zeppelin-like, lurching over Manhattan in unmoored, alarming fashion. He was obviously eager here to limit his political risk by portraying the NYSE’s famous board as victims rather than culprits in the Grasso pay scandal. But no judge or jury will fail to understand that he’s giving them a pass for his own political interests.
Mr. Grasso understands this too, and has semaphored that he will drag them into court, forcing them to choose between pleading gullibility, inattention and incompetence or undermining Mr. Spitzer’s case. True, even a court victory might not get Mr. Grasso his good name back, but more than a few would applaud his show of resistance to a budding demagogue.

Spitzer’s case against Grasso is beyond absurd. No one held a gun to the head of the NYSE Board or its compensation committee when it approved Mr. Grasso’s compensation and related benefits. The NYSE is not bankrupt, so its creditor interests are not in a position to challege the Board’s decisions regarding management compensation. Perhaps the Board members made a bad, lazy or incompetent decision in compensating Grasso to such a liberal extent, but that’s a reason to replace Board members, not to persecute Grasso.
Spitzer’s purge on Wall Street has become so misguided that Mark Haines of CNBC joked the other evening that “the government might as well throw all of Wall Street in prison and release anyone they find innocent.” Mr. Jenkins hits the nail on the head in pointing out that the real purpose of this lawsuit is the promotion of a demagogue’s agenda rather than the protection of any public interest.
Finally, the always insightful Professor Bainbridge comments on this foolishness here. Professor Ribstein’s equally interesting observations about this mess are here.