Click on WORD or PDF for full content
WSJ OpEd on the government creeps you’ll meet on the way to repairing storm damage to your home.
Like many people whose houses were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, my family and I have been living in a rented house since the storm. Unlike some whose houses were totaled, we could have repaired things and been home toasting our tootsies by our own fireplace by now. What happened?
Two things: zoning (as in “Twilight Zone”) and FEMA.
Our first exposure to the town zoning authorities came a couple of weeks after Sandy. We’d met with insurance adjusters, contractors and “remediation experts.” We’d had about a foot of Long Island Sound sloshing around the ground floor of our house in Connecticut, and everyone had the same advice: Rip up the floors and subfloors, and tear out anything—wiring, plumbing, insulation, drywall, kitchen cabinets, bookcases—touched by salt water. All of it had to go, and pronto, too, lest mold set in.
Yet it wasn’t until the workmen we hired had ripped apart most of the first floor that the phrase “building permit” first wafted past us. Turns out we needed one. “What, to repair our own house we need a building permit?”
Of course.
Before you could get a building permit, however, you had to be approved by the Zoning Authority. And Zoning—citing FEMA regulations—would force you to bring the house “up to code,” which in many cases meant elevating the house by several feet. Now, elevating your house is very expensive and time consuming—not because of the actual raising, which takes just a day or two, but because of the required permits.
Kafka would have liked the zoning folks. There also is a limit on how high in the sky your house can be. That calculation seems to be a state secret, but it can easily happen that raising your house violates the height requirement. Which means that you can’t raise the house that you must raise if you want to repair it. Got that?
There were other surprises. A woman in our neighborhood has two adjoining properties, with a house and a cottage. She rents the house and lives in the cottage. For 29 years she has paid taxes on both. The cottage was severely damaged but she can’t tear it down and rebuild because Zoning says the plots are not zoned for two structures, never mind that for 29 years two property-tax payments were gladly accepted.
Kafka would have liked FEMA, too. We’ve met plenty of its agents. Every one we’ve encountered has been polite and oozing with sympathy. Even the lady who reduced my wife to tears was nice. The issue was my wife’s proof of income. We sent our tax return to FEMA, but that wasn’t good enough. They wanted pay stubs. My wife works as a freelance writer and editor. She doesn’t get a pay stub. Which apparently makes her a nonperson to this government agency. …
Tulsa World with more on the problems caused by ethanol.
For more than two decades, special interests have persuaded Congress to mandate Americans buy ethanol whether they want to or not. As a result, 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop is now used for ethanol rather than food.
The ethanol mandate means that ordinary Americans pay more for a poorer quality automobile fuel and more for groceries. Ethanol proponents claim these costs will bring us environmental benefits and energy security. They are wrong.
A good first question about a mandate is “how good can a product be if you have to force people to buy it?”
The answer: not very good. Ethanol is vastly inferior to gasoline.
Consider these glaring drawbacks: Its energy density is a third lower, reducing cars’ emissions. It attracts water, so it cannot be transported in regular gas and oil pipelines, reduces lubricants’ effectiveness, and shortens engine lives. It is caustic, corroding engine parts and dislodging contaminants from fuel tanks.
While ethanol doesn’t make gasoline cleaner, the more intensive farming and water needs of ethanol refining harm the environment. …
Whadayaknow? A law prof has suggested candidates take the New York bar without the third year of law school. TaxProf has the story.
The third year of law school has long been a punching bag for critics who argue it’s a waste of time and drives up the costs of a law degree, but there have been few serious attempts to do anything about it. Until now.
Legal educators and top New York state court officials will gather on January 18 to discuss whether to allow candidates to sit for the New York state bar examination after just two years in law school. The idea was floated by Samuel Estreicher, a professor at New York University School of Law, who believes skyrocketing law school tuition and diminishing job prospects for new lawyers have created a climate favorable to reform. …
Estreicher laid out his proposal in an article, The Roosevelt-Cardozo Way: The Case for Bar Eligibility After Two Years of Law School, in the New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy. (The title refers to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, both of whom obtained their law degrees when two years was the norm.) He described two benefits to the two-year option, not least that the cost of becoming a lawyer would be reduced by one-third and that, with lower student loan debt, graduates would be in a better position to take lower-paying jobs representing low-income clients. Second, an optional 3L year would give schools incentives to create third-year curricula of more use to students, he wrote; if students saw no real benefit to the 3L curriculum, they would sit for the bar exam instead. …
Patricia Salkin, dean of TouroCollegeJacobD.FuchsbergLawCenter, fears the two-year option wouldn’t satisfy legal employers’ demands for practice-ready attorneys. “If students spend the first and second years taking core courses, when are they going to develop the practical skills that firms say they want?” she said. “And for the students, will the firms hire someone with only two years of law school, even if they pass the bar?”
The answer to that question, at least for the law firms, judges and federal agencies that tend to hire a large chunk of NYU graduates, is likely no, said dean Richard Revesz. He predicted that few NYU students would be interested in the two-year option. “I’m not a fan of the proposal,” he said. “I think it would not be beneficial, but I’m interested in hearing a lot of viewpoints.” Revesz said he is skeptical that a two-year option would be an added incentive for schools to revamp curriculum, given that many — including NYU — have already changed their 3L curricula or are weighing such reforms.
The Economist reports a new understanding of why exercise is good for us.
ONE sure giveaway of quack medicine is the claim that a product can treat any ailment. There are, sadly, no panaceas. But some things come close, and exercise is one of them. As doctors never tire of reminding people, exercise protects against a host of illnesses, from heart attacks and dementia to diabetes and infection.
How it does so, however, remains surprisingly mysterious. But a paper just published in Nature by Beth Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre and her colleagues sheds some light on the matter.
Dr Levine and her team were testing a theory that exercise works its magic, at least in part, by promoting autophagy. This process, whose name is derived from the Greek for “self-eating”, is a mechanism by which surplus, worn-out or malformed proteins and other cellular components are broken up for scrap and recycled. …
And The Economist reports why many financial ”advisors” are not.
HAVE you ever met anyone who has grown rich just by saving? Probably not. But you may well have met someone who has grown rich looking after other people’s savings. That dark secret lies at the heart of “Pound Foolish”, Helaine Olen’s excellent book, a contemptuous exposé of the American personal-finance industry.
With icy logic, Ms Olen, a journalist, demonstrates that much of the advice given by moneymaking gurus on television or in print is either fatuous or based on ridiculously optimistic assumptions about future investment returns. Take the idea that saving the cost of a daily latte and investing the proceeds in the stockmarket would make you rich. Saving $3 a day, or $1,100 a year, might be a sensible economy measure but it won’t build a fortune.
Such faddish ideas are the financial equivalent of miracle diets. A belief in instant riches lured millions into buying internet stocks in the late 1990s or overpriced houses in the middle of the past decade, when any personal-finance adviser worth his salt should have been advising clients to run in the opposite direction. But optimism sells, and realism tends not to.
As well as bad advice, the gurus have plenty of expensive products to flog—from courses that teach people how to become better real-estate investors to branded goods like a $49.99 canvas laptop bag or a $34.98 silver leather wallet. By the time clients have bought all the books, attended the courses and stocked up on the accessories, someone has definitely become rich, though probably not the saver.