Daily Archives: December 15, 2006

BlawgSearch

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BlawgSearch.gifThe blawgosphere — that is, the world of law-related blogs — has really come of age over the past couple of years as a research source, so it is becoming increasingly important to have a tool that facilitates research contained in blawgs.
BlawgSearch is a search engine that Tim Stanley and the folks at Justia.com have developed that focuses one’s search on blawgs (Tim’s blog post on BlawgSearch is here). It is in beta right now, but Tim and his crew are adding blawgs on a daily basis. While using it on a variety of issues over the past couple of days, I have found the coverage to be excellent already and far more focused than blawg searches on more generalized engines. Check it out and include it in your bookmarks. This looks like a winner.

Those darn “four-legged fire ants”

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feral hog.JPGThis earlier post reported on the emerging market for the meat of feral hogs, which are a fixture of rural (and, increasingly, suburban) Texas.
The Chronicle’s Shannon Tompkins takes the discussion of earlier post several steps further and provides this excellent overview of the feral hog phenomenom in Texas. The battle between humans and hogs is a fascinating story involving a myriad of subjects — including biology, ecology, farming, hunting and game policy — and it appears that the hogs are winning that battle!

Phoenix’s light rail boondoggle

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Metrorail car-Houston4.jpgThe dubious economic nature of Houston’s light rail system is a common topic on this blog, so I took interest in this insightful Warren Meyer post that ponders why a light rail system is being built in Warren’s hometown of Phoenix, which is one of the few metro U.S. areas that may be even less conducive to such a system than Houston.
Given the inefficiency and inflexibility of such systems, Warren wonders who supports such boondoggles and suspects that a few powerful businesspeople are using the rail line in an effort to jumpstart the misguided goal of establishing a dominant downtown area in the decentralized Phoenix metro area. Add in a few high-minded environmentalists and many others who are simply ignorant of the enormous cost relative to the benefit of such systems and, as Peter Gordon wryly-noted awhile back:

“It adds up to a winning coalition.”

Unfortunately, as another Phoenix-area resident — Nobel Laureate Ed Prescott — reminded us recently, once such coalitions are successful in establishing a governmental policy subsidizing such boondoggles, it is much more difficult to end the public subsidy of the boondoggle than to start it in the first place.
By the way, Houston Metro’s subsidy of its light rail system has other perverse effects, such as the lack of security for one of the transit options that actually makes sense for the Houston area.