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Monthly Archives: September 2007
The risk of exploration
Need a refresher course on just how risky it is exploring for oil and gas?
If so, check out this Wired article on Chevron’s venture to drill for oil 30,000 feet under the Gulf of Mexico.
I don’t know about you, but I think the folks investing in such ventures deserve every penny of profit that is may be generated from them.
More on “Book’em Horns”
The legal problems of current and recent Texas Longhorn football players prompted this Book’em Horns post awhile back, but yesterday’s news that yet another Longhorn football player had been arrested on criminal charges generated a new round of barbs toward the Longhorns, including the farked message below on the Godzillitron at UT’s Royal-Memorial Stadium. Things have gotten so bad that Austin sports columnist Kirk Bohls is wondering whether the UT football team has replaced the University of Miami as the bad boys of big-time college football?
Seaside in Texas?
First, the Wall Street Journal discovered the Hamptons of Houston. Now, this Wall Street Journal ($) article reports that the popular Seaside beach community just east of Destin, Florida is the model for several similar projects under construction on the Texas Gulf Coast:
Inspired by Seaside, the Florida-panhandle resort community that relies heavily on traditional architecture and planning, Mr. [Tofigh] Sherazi is overseeing development of a $1 billion, 260-acre beachfront community that seeks to reflect Galveston’s past. The first of the project’s four phases, 160 lots for single-family homes, is sold out. The development is designed to include a pedestrian-friendly mix of homes, shops and two hotels. “This is going to be a real town,” he said.
Beachtown, as Mr. Sherazi’s project is called, is part of a wave of New Urbanism on the Texas coast, from Galveston to South Padre Island. A planning movement that advocates walking over driving and borrows heavily from the design of traditional neighborhoods, New Urbanism has been largely overlooked on the Texas coast, even as it has flourished in Florida and beyond. [. . .]
. . . In addition to Beachtown, a 93-acre, $175 million urban village known as Evia is taking shape in Galveston. The work of local developers, the project will include a total of about 350 residential units, with 70% of the 222 lots for single-family homes sold.
Near Corpus Christi, the Sea Oats Group, of Atlanta, is developing a 64-acre, $250 million project called Cinnamon Shore that casts itself as a traditional seaside village, complete with a town center. Sales began in February, and 42 of 82 lots in phase one are sold. And on South Padre Island, a development in excess of $250 million called the Shores of South Padre also portrays itself as New Urbanist, though local developer Richard Franke’s plan to include high-rise and midrise condominiums indicates he is no purist. “It’s quite different from anything else in our area,” said Mr. Franke. [. . .]
James Gaines, an economist at Texas A&M University’s Real Estate Center, said beachfront property in Texas costs about a fifth of the price of similar property in California, in part because of its geography. Except for Galveston and a few coastal areas near Houston, none of Texas beachfront property is near a major urban center.
In an effort to market Cinnamon Shore, Sea Oats compared the cost of beachfront lots and beachfront homes in a number of markets. A lot at Seaside costs about $2.98 million, according to the company, but lots at Cinnamon Shore are going for about $625,000. In the same survey, the company said a beachfront home at Cinnamon Shore is valued at no more than $1.5 million, while a similar home could cost as much as $6.9 million across the Gulf of Mexico in Sarasota, Fla.
Wisconsin no longer confused with The Woodands
As noted earlier here and here, the University of Wisconsin apparently does not have enough substantive legal work to keep its lawyers busy, so the university has made a cottage industry out of threatening high schools around the country that use a “W” logo that resembles the one used by the university’s sports teams.
According to this article, it looks as if UW has proven that it has more money to waste on pursuing one of those frivolous lawsuits than my local high school here in The Woodlands. The Woodlands High School has agreed to change its “W” logo to the one on the left above.
I sincerely hope that the Iowa Hawkeyes kick Wisconsin’s ass on the gridiron this Saturday. ;^)
The Lerach deal
Former class action securities plaintiffs’ lawyer William Lerach finally cut a non-cooperation plea deal (Nathan Koppel’s WSJ Law Blog post is here) to resolve the longstanding criminal investigation into alleged undisclosed payments that Lerach and his firm made to class representatives and co-counsel in cases that they handled.
In certain defense and business circles, there is a fair amount of schadenfreude over Lerach’s demise — he had no reservation about alleging criminal conduct against business executives, such as he did when he claimed that Enron was shredding documents during the early stages of that company’s bankruptcy case (that claim turned out to be wrong).
However, before we get too sanguine about Lerach’s plea deal, let’s not forget the circumstances under which it has been obtained. The 61-year old Lerach was facing a horrifying trial penalty if he chose to fight the charges, and he almost certainly will lose his law license as a result of pleading guilty to a felony. And as Larry Ribstein has repeatedly pointed out, it doesn’t say much for our criminal justice system that the government is paying witnesses to testify against Lerach for the crime of paying his class representative clients. As Larry points out in his most recent post on the matter, the non-cooperation nature of the plea deal does not necessarily mean that the government isn’t providing Lerach some form of hidden incentive for his plea.
Update: Ted Frank argues that Lerach’s plea deal is, all things considered, not so bad for him, after all. On the other hand, Peter Henning is not so sure.
An enduring myth of regulation
The New York Times is shocked to discover that big, established businesses often attempt to manipulate governmental regulation to their advantage over entrepreneurial startups. This hidden cost of regulation is one that I noted awhile back in regard to the proposed XM-Sirius merger. Many well-meaning folks — usually those without much experience in business matters — believe that regulation is good for the consumer because most established businesses generally abhor such regulation. However, established businesses typically use a part of their superior resources to manipulate regulation to their advantage and against the threat of beneficial competition from new companies. A big, well-established business can absorb the high cost of regulation and pass it along to the consumer. A thinly-leveraged start-up generally does not have that luxury.
Warren Meyer, who actually confronts this phenomenom as he runs his small business, makes the same point here and provides the following insightful quote on the subject from the late Milton Friedman:
The justification offered is always the same: to protect the consumer. However, the reason is demonstrated by observing who lobbies at the state legislature for the imposition or strengthening of licensure. The lobbyists are invariably representatives of the occupation in question rather than of the customers. True enough, plumbers presumably know better than anyone else what their customers need to be protected against. However, it is hard to regard altruistic concern for their customers as the primary motive behind their determined efforts to get legal power to decide who may be a plumber.
Thom Lambert also chimes in.
A dose of Americana
Will Veber over at Road Tips reports on his trip (with pictures) to one of the last bastions of pure Americana — the Iowa State Fair.
Until Proven Innocent
Jeffrey Rosen reviews Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson’s book on the angry mob that nearly lynched the lives of several young men in the Duke lacrosse team case:
At least ìmany of the journalists misled by [former DA Mike] Nifong eventually adjusted their views as evidence of innocenceî came to light, the authors conclude. Thatís more than can be said for Dukeís ìactivist professors,î 88 of whom signed an inflammatory letter encouraging a rush to judgment by the student protesters who were plastering the campus with wanted posters of the lacrosse team and waving a banner declaring ìCastrate.î Even when confronted with DNA evidence of the playersí innocence, these professors refused to apologize and instead incoherently attacked their critics. In the same spirit, the authors charge, the president of Duke, Richard Brodhead, fired the lacrosse coach, canceled the season and condemned the team members for more than eight months. The pandering Brodhead, in this account, is more concerned about placating faculty ideologues than about understanding the realities of student life on his raunchy campus.
Does the foregoing remind you of the actions of another group of self-righteous crusaders?
What makes us healthy?
Gary Taubes, a writer for Science magazine, is the author of the soon-to-be-released book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease (Knopf September 25, 2007). He provides a don’t miss preview of his book in this past Sunday’s New York Times:
Many explanations have been offered to make sense of the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of medical wisdom ó what we are advised with confidence one year is reversed the next ó but the simplest one is that it is the natural rhythm of science. An observation leads to a hypothesis. The hypothesis (last yearís advice) is tested, and it fails this yearís test, which is always the most likely outcome in any scientific endeavor. There are, after all, an infinite number of wrong hypotheses for every right one, and so the odds are always against any particular hypothesis being true, no matter how obvious or vitally important it might seem. [. . .]
The dangerous game being played here, as David Sackett, a retired Oxford University epidemiologist, has observed, is in the presumption of preventive medicine. The goal of the endeavor is to tell those of us who are otherwise in fine health how to remain healthy longer. But this advice comes with the expectation that any prescription given ó whether diet or drug or a change in lifestyle ó will indeed prevent disease rather than be the agent of our disability or untimely death. With that presumption, how unambiguous does the evidence have to be before any advice is offered? [. . .]
Richard Peto, professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at Oxford University, phrases the nature of the conflict this way: ìEpidemiology is so beautiful and provides such an important perspective on human life and death, but an incredible amount of rubbish is published,î by which he means the results of observational studies that appear daily in the news media and often become the basis of public-health recommendations about what we should or should not do to promote our continued good health. [. . .]
All of this suggests that the best advice is to keep in mind the law of unintended consequences. The reason clinicians test drugs with randomized trials is to establish whether the hoped-for benefits are real and, if so, whether there are unforeseen side effects that may outweigh the benefits. If the implication of an epidemiologistís study is that some drug or diet will bring us improved prosperity and health, then wonder about the unforeseen consequences. In these cases, itís never a bad idea to remain skeptical until somebody spends the time and the money to do a randomized trial and, contrary to much of the history of the endeavor to date, fails to refute it.
Read the entire article.