Where Are My Keys?

Are you one of the 2% that can solve this puzzle?

It has been rumored that this was created by Einstein.  Good luck!  (No Googling, either!)

I remember having to solve logic problems like this on the LSAT.  Not my favorite type of question!

There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike.

The question is-- who owns the fish?

Hints:
1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Malls keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
9. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Princes.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

There are no tricks, pure logic will get you the correct answer. And yes, there is enough information to arrive at the one and only correct answer.

How can this be?

We've been told repeatedly that the blame for the Fiscal Cliff woes lies solely at the feet of Republicans.  How then, can this be happening?

With the federal government approaching the so-called "fiscal cliff," when federal income tax rates will increase across-the-board back to the level they were under President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama's disapproval has climbed 5 points in the Gallup poll since Christmas.

In Gallup's three-day tracking period that ended on Dec. 23, the poll's last day before Christmas, 37 percent said they disapproved of the job Obama was doing as president and 57 percent said they approved. That was the lowest disapproval Obama had enjoyed since Gallup's three-day tracking period that ended on Aug. 1, 2009.

Over the four days that Gallup polled after Christmas, however, Obama's approval dropped 4 points to 53 percent and his disapproval climbed five points to 42 percent. That is where it stood on Dec. 29, the most recent day of polling Gallup has reported in its presidential approval survey.

Not a bad sports weekend..

My Sun Devils put a whuppin' on Navy, the Broncos win their 11th straight to claim home field, and the Chargers fire Norv.

Made for good times on the couch.

Steyn takes Kurtz to the woodshed..

Another spot-on piece from Mark Steyn:

A week ago on NBC’s Meet the Press, David Gregory brandished on screen a high-capacity magazine. To most media experts, a “high-capacity magazine” means an ad-stuffed double issue of Vanity Fair with the triple-page perfume-scented pullouts. But apparently in America’s gun-nut gun culture of gun-crazed gun kooks, it’s something else entirely, and it was this latter kind that Mr. Gregory produced in order to taunt Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. As the poster child for America’s gun-crazed gun-kook gun culture, Mr. LaPierre would probably have been more scared by the host waving around a headily perfumed Vanity Fair. But that was merely NBC’s first miscalculation. It seems a high-capacity magazine is illegal in the District of Columbia, and the flagrant breach of D.C. gun laws is now under investigation by the police.

This is, declared NYU professor Jay Rosen, “the dumbest media story of 2012.” Why? Because, as CNN’s Howard Kurtz breezily put it, everybody knows David Gregory wasn’t “planning to commit any crimes.”

So what? Neither are the overwhelming majority of his fellow high-capacity-magazine-owning Americans. Yet they’re expected to know, as they drive around visiting friends and family over Christmas, the various and contradictory gun laws in different jurisdictions. Ignorantia juris non excusat is one of the oldest concepts in civilized society: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back when there was a modest and proportionate number of laws, that was just about doable. But in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And in this case NBC were informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it anyway: You’ll never take me alive, copper! You’ll have to pry my high-capacity magazine from my cold dead fingers! When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI, and the ATF take out NBC News and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.

Read the whole thing.

That wallet will get a bit lighter in a few days..

Something to look forward to as we go over the cliff:

 While the Senate bill ostensibly only raises taxes on the top 2 percent, the expiring payroll tax cut means that the middle-class would get hit hard too. The charts below from the Tax Policy Center show just how hard the plan would hit each group of earners. If the expiring payroll tax doesn't get you, the expiring Bush tax cuts will.

Even if President Obama and House Republicans finally agree to avoid the austerity from the sequester, the doc fix, and expiring unemployment insurance, as seems likely, this is still a poor rubric for a deal. Any bargain, grand or otherwise, that doesn't include a payroll tax cut -- or its equivalent, like Making Work Pay -- doesn't do enough to stop 2013 from being a year of too much austerity far too soon.

This will end well..

Did you know that 11 States have more people on some form of government dependency (government workers, welfare, pensions), than are employed by the private sector?  No?  You hadn't heard about this on a daily basis?  I wonder why?

Two factors determine whether a state makes this elite list of fiscal hellholes. The first is whether it has more takers than makers. A taker is someone who draws money from the government, as an employee, pensioner or welfare recipient. A maker is someone gainfully employed in the private sector.

Let us give those takers the benefit of our sympathy and assume that every single one of them is a deserving soul. This person is either genuinely needy or a dedicated public servant or the recipient of a well-earned pension.

But what happens when these needy types outnumber the providers? Taxes get too high. Prosperous citizens decamp. Employers decamp. That just makes matters worse for the taxpayers left behind.

Let’s say you are a software entrepreneur with 100 on your payroll. If you stay in San Francisco, your crew will support 139 takers. In Texas, they would support only 82. Austin looks very attractive.

Ranked on the taker/maker ratio, our 11 death spiral states range from New Mexico, with 1.53 takers for every maker, down to Ohio, with a 1-to-1 ratio.

Some good points on David Gregory breaking the law..

From David French:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then your stunt is worth a thousand op-eds. In less than one minute of screen time, you demonstrated several things:

First, even “banned” magazines are ridiculously easy to acquire. How long did it take your producers to find that magazine? Five minutes? Ten minutes? There are millions upon millions of these cheap and easy-to-manufacture items in circulation, and “banning” them will have exactly the effects you so brilliantly demonstrated on national television.

Second, labyrinthine gun-control restrictions serve mainly to instantly (and often inadvertently) convert otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals. It’s a media-created myth that guns are largely unregulated in the United States. In fact, they’re so heavily and complexly regulated that it’s difficult for citizens to track jurisdictional differences or even sometimes to understand the laws in their own jurisdictions.  

Third, strict-liability gun offenses breed disrespect for the law. I tend to agree with your friends in the mainstream media — prosecuting you for holding an empty magazine in your hand would be a travesty of justice. You weren’t going to hurt anyone, you were merely using a prop for an argument, and — after all — the magazine was simply an inert hunk of metal. But the law is the law, and I’m sure you’ll agree that you should be treated exactly the same as any other (previously) law-abiding citizen caught with a similar item.

Was Washington D.C. made more dangerous because you held that magazine? Of course not. Would your prosecution deter a single “real” criminal? Of course not. In fact, it would be a silly farce. But does the law deter responsible citizens and make them less likely to defend themselves adequately? Yes. And that’s the real travesty.

People take Sirota seriously, why?

Keep in mind this isn't a parody from The Onion:

It’s been that way because my son loves the book, and I’m too much of a pushover to say “no.” I’m also thankful that he wants to read anything, so I go ahead and read it to him.

All of that, no doubt, is part of the calculus behind Chick-fil-A’s sponsorship of the book in the first place. They know parents will have trouble rejecting a stealth ad campaign — even one that brands the fast-food conglomerate to happy themes and bucolic images that are the opposite of what the sponsoring conglomerate embodies.

Such is the evil genius of wrapping “The Jolly Barnyard”in a Chick-fil-A label — that is, in a label of a company that is the antithesis of the farm in the book.

This is not an overstatement. Chick-fil-A, like most fast-food companies, is the retail expression of the factory farming industry — an industry whose hideous treatment of animals, vertical integration and rooting in monoculture is the opposite of the diversified family farm so beautifully glorified in “The Jolly Barnyard.” Perhaps worse, as a primary buyer — and, thus financial supporter — of the factory-farmed products, Chick-fil-A is one of the major fast-food players responsible for the demise of “Jolly Barnyard”-esque family farms.

But rather than own up to its record with a children’s book about its odious business model, Chick-Fil-A (not surprisingly) wants kids to think of it through a much more pleasant story.

They don’t want kids to equate a Chick-fil-A sandwich with inhumane treatment of chickens in crowded factory farms — they want kids to equate that sandwich with the page in the “Jolly Barnyard” where Farmer Brown feeds his chickens a treat while they roam free. They don’t want kids to equate a Chick-fil-A meal with the unsustainable and often unsafe monoculture practices of corporate agribusiness — they want kids to equate that meal with the agriculturally diverse operations of individuals like Farmer Brown.

In short, they don’t want my son and his fellow two-year-olds to equate Chick-fil-A with what Chick-fil-A really is — they want them to equate it with the very Jolly Barnyard it and its fellow fast-food behemoths have helped destroy. And so the company has re-published the 1950 classic under its name, and with its logo stamped right on the front cover. The message to tykes is clear: When you think Chick-fil-A, think “Jolly Barnyard.”

Who is The Parent, and who is The Child, Mr. Sirota?  You are the one who decides what you want your toddler to see (and not see).  If the child wanted to watch Pulp Fiction every afternoon, would you let him?  Why is this particular book any different?

By the way, how can you and your wife not know how the book got in your house in the first place?

Nice "parenting" happening in that home.

I get that you hate Chick-fil-A, Mr. Sirota (way to be "tolerant" of other people's viewpoints there!), but this is quite a stretch.

Delaying birth and death to avoid taxes?

Don't laugh, it has happened in the past:

In the summer of 2004 something very strange happened in Australia. The birthrate plummeted sharply in June. Then on a single day in July more babies were born than on any other day in the prior thirty years of Australian history. July 1, 2004 was a very popular day to be born.

What caused this dip and surge in births? Seven weeks before July 1, the Australian government announced a change in the tax code that would give families a $3,000 baby-bonus starting on the first day in July. It appears that as many as 1,000 births were "moved" until after the baby bonus kicked-in, according to a 2009 studyby Joshua Gans of the University of Melbourne's Business School and Andrew Leigh of the Australian National University's Research School of Social Sciences.

"We estimate that over 1,000 births were "moved" so as to ensure that their parents were eligible for the Baby Bonus, with about one quarter being moved by more than one week," Gans and Leigh write.

According to the researchers, most of this temporal shift was due to changes in the timing of induction and cesarean section procedures. When they looked at an increase in the baby bonus that took effect two years later, on July 1, 2006, they found that the same pattern—births moving from June to July.

Now, some of this could be due to fudging the dates, so that births occurring just prior to the eligibility date were recorded as taking place afterward. But Gans and Leigh found evidence that babies really were held-in-uteri until they were eligible for the tax break. Babies born after the eligibility date, for example, had higher birth weights than those born earlier.

...

This isn't just something peculiar to Australia. Economists Wojciech Kopczuk of Columbia University and Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan studied how mortality rates in the United States were changed by falling estate taxes. They note that while the evidence of "death elasticity" is "not overwhelming," every $10,000 in available tax savings increases the chance of dying in the low-tax period by 1.6 percent. This is true both when taxes are falling, so that people are surviving longer to achieve the tax savings, and when they are rising, so that people are dying earlier, according to Kopczuk and Slemrod.

"Death elasticity" does not necessarily mean that greedy relatives are pulling the plug on the dying or forcing the sickly to extend their lives into a lower taxed period. According to a 2008 paper from University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Doctor G. Stuart Mendenhall, while tax increases give potential heirs large economic incentives to limit care that would prolong life, distressed patients may "voluntarily trade prolongation of their life past the end [a low tax period] for large financial implications for their kin.

"Whether these incentives are explicitly specified in wills or communicated to their power of attorney over the dinner table, they are clearly present and affect the ability of all involved parties to make unbiased decisions," Mendenhall writes.

Now I'm not suggesting that in every single instance, folks are either pulling the plug on Grandma, or sticking a cork in pregnant mom.  I do think that in some instances, those that will be affected the most by changing tax rates are the same folks willing to go to extreme measures to preserve (or create) wealth.  If the tax rates on estates roll back from a $5 million threshold to a $1 million threshold, I bet we'll see statistically significant "blips" on the radar.  It's happened for things as basic as seeing a new millennium, why wouldn't $4,000,000 have a similar impact?

In 2010, after a year in which the estate tax was zeroed out altogether, Congress passed a law that set the estate tax at 35 percent and exempted all estates under $5 million, adjusted for inflation. That law expires in January 2013 when the exemption will fall to $1 million and the tax will rise to 55 percent.

Many families are faced with a stark proposition. If the life of an elderly wealthy family member extends into 2013, the tax bills will be substantially higher. An estate that could bequest $3 million this year will leave just $1.9 million after taxes next year. Shifting a death from January to December could produce $1.1 million in tax savings.

It may seem incredible to contemplate pulling the plug on grandma to save tax dollars. While we know that investors will sell stocks to avoid rising capital gains taxes, accelerating the death of a loved one seems at least a bit morbid—perhaps even evil. Will people really make life and death decisions based on taxes? Do we don our green eye shades when it comes to something this serious?

There is good evidence that there is some "elasticity" in the timing of important decisions about life and death.

It's well-known that people can delay death, for example, in order to live through significant dates—birthdays, holidays, anniversaries. In the first week of 2000, local New York City hospitals recorded an astonishing 50.8 percent more deaths than in the last week of 1999, according to the New York Times. Apparently, a significant number of people delayed their deaths in order to see the new millennium.

"Don't nominate any idiots"..

Advice that needs to be taken this time around:

Alaska	Mark Begich	Serious Risk
Arkansas	Mark Pryor	Some Risk
Colorado	Mark Udall	Some Risk
Louisiana	Mary Landrieu	Serious Risk
Massachusetts	John Kerry	Only if vacant
Michigan	Carl Levin	Low Risk
Minnesota	Al Franken	Serious Risk
Montana	Max Baucus	Some Risk
New Hampshire	Jeanne Shaheen	Some Risk
New Jersey	Frank Lautenberg	Only if vacant
New Mexico	Tom Udall	Low Risk
North Carolina	Kay Hagan	Serious Risk
Oregon	Jeff Merkley	Some Risk
South Dakota	Tim Johnson	Serious Risk
Virginia	Mark Warner	Low Risk
West Virginia	Jay Rockefeller	Low Risk

So there you go. Out of twenty seats, we’ve got five excellent shots at pickups, five that could happen if things break our way, four that aren’t all that likely, but not outside the realm of possibility, two retirement opportunities, and four ‘safe’ seats.  This will probably all change once retirement announcements start to trickle in (on both sides), but this isn’t a bad list, this far out.

So don’t nominate any idiots.

2014 should be an interesting election year.