Sierra College has issued its annual report to the community, outlining our efforts on behalf of the students and taxpayers of Placer, Nevada, El Dorado and Sacramento counties during the last year.
I hope you’ll download it, give it a read, and comment here with any other questions we can answer about your community college!
For some of my conservative friends, this probably won’t be the most popular post I’ve written. Most of you know that I bring a unique perspective to the issue of immigration as the dad of two legal immigrants. As I’ve watched the debate develop in the week since Arizona’s governor signed a new illegal immigration law, a few things have bothered me.
First, this new law has a variety of provisions which are appropriate, such as cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants. The lack of security on our borders is a grave national security risk to the United States. Illegal immigration needs to be brought under control by our federal government, period.
As we all know, there are major gaps in our border security right now. The real question here is: how far are we willing to go inside our borders, when American citizens are supposed to be guaranteed the presumption of innocence?
That’s the worrisome part of this new law: the potential violation of Fourth Amendment rights enjoyed by American citizens. The key legal wording is that law enforcement officers will be required to stop and question individuals that they have a “reasonable suspicion” are in the country illegally.
“Reasonable suspicion” is not the standard we have used for the 234 years of our representative democracy. We have always given law enforcement the right to make an arrest, conduct a personal or property search or obtain a warrant only if they believe there is “probable cause” that a crime has been committed.
Here’s the text from the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The bottom line is, this is an impossible law for our law enforcement officers to enforce, unless we want to see an America where it is common for police officers to stop people on the street and demand to see their papers without probable cause.
Worse – and here’s where my “dad” instincts come into play – I can’t imagine how you might develop a “reasonable suspicion” that doesn’t also meet the standard of “probable cause”…unless you base that suspicion on the color of the person’s skin.
I have yet to meet a single one of our dedicated law enforcement officers who want to be put into that position. And my son and daughter, as American citizens, deserve the same freedom that I have, to walk down our streets without being stopped and asked for their “papers” like they do in totalitarian regimes.
This great country of ours is a nation of immigrants, and each brick that has been laid in our history has contributed another color, another accent, another culture and another perspective to the beautiful house that is America.
President Reagan said it best:
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.
I remember watching President Reagan say those words and being incredibly proud to be an American that day.
We have nothing to fear from legal immigration – in fact, we have everything to gain. I am convinced we can have freedom and security without paying this heavy price.
Blockbuster is slowly dying. They just closed about half of their stores. Their business is shrinking constantly. They may be in “the death spiral.”
I think one of the key reasons is that they’ve consistently failed to build a positive relationship with their customers.
Their first real success came when they changed the economics of the video rental business. All the mom and pop stores would buy VHS tapes for $80 a pop and then rent them out for $4.99 a day. Blockbuster went and negotiated with the big studios and cut a different deal: sell us the tapes for $4 and we’ll give you a percentage of each rental.
That was the beginning of the end for the mom and pop video stores: Blockbuster simply made it easier for customers to conveniently get the product they wanted at the same price.
Having taken much of the new release business, Blockbuster then cut the prices on the old releases to as low as $1 a day. That left almost no revenue on the table for the mom and pop stores and they slowly went out of business.
The first customer relationship killer: as soon as they had little competition, Blockbuster turned around and raised all the prices back up to $5 a day.
Next up was Netflix. The concept of no late fees and a flat monthly fee to get movies delivered straight to your home was interesting. The only downside was not having the ability to be spontaneous: you really had to plan ahead. And it was tough at times to get the new releases, because Netflix had no special deals with the studios.
Blockbuster came up with an innovative response: their own DVDs-by-mail service that came with two coupons for free movies at the store. We signed up for that and it was great – if we planned ahead, we had the movies we wanted by mail. If we wanted to be spontaneous, we had a coupon. (We only watch 2-3 movies a month, anyway.)
It worked. Blockbuster’s DVD-by-mail service started growing like crazy, because of the innovative marriage of online with bricks-and-mortar.
But they couldn’t leave well enough alone. The next customer relationship killer: they sucked all of the benefits out of their service, at least for customers like us. They killed the coupons, and you had to take the DVD-by-mail into the store and exchange it (often sending back a movie you actually wanted to see in order to get the one you wanted to see tonight). They jacked up the pricing and dropped the number of DVDs-by-mail. We were, in effect, paying to watch movies we weren’t watching, so we cancelled.
And now, Redbox has come along. A simple Internet-connected vending machine with DVDs for $1 a day. Does it have the broad selection of Blockbuster or Netflix? No. But it’s cheap, convenient and easy. You can even “reserve” a movie from a particular machine on their web site so it isn’t sold out by the time you arrive. (Not to mention, there are other methods too: Hulu, iTunes, etc.)
Of course, Blockbuster has responded by lowering their prices again (now it’s 3 days for $3). Call me cynical, but I’ve been burned this way before. The minute Blockbuster gets the upper hand over their newfound competition, they’ll just jack up their prices and cut the value all over again. I really don’t want them to “win” this round.
So I’m not saying I’ll never rent movies from Blockbuster. When it’s in my interests to rent something from them, I will. But I almost smirk when I get asked to pay $10 to become a part of the Blockbuster Rewards loyalty program.
Loyalty is earned, not sold.
Bono pens an awesome piece in the New York Times about his latest trip to my favorite continent away from home, turning the volume up on the sound of hope as a new wave of hope begins to take hold in Africa.
Over long days and nights, I asked Africans about the course of international activism. Should we just pack it up and go home, I asked? There were a few nods. But many more noes. Because most Africans we met seemed to feel the pressing need for new kinds of partnerships, not just among governments, but among citizens, businesses, the rest of us. I sense the end of the usual donor-recipient relationship.
Aid, it’s clear, is still part of the picture. It’s crucial, if you have H.I.V. and are fighting for your life, or if you are a mother wondering why you can’t protect your child against killers with unpronounceable names or if you are a farmer who knows that new seed varietals will mean you have produce that you can take to market in drought or flood. But not the old, dumb, only-game-in-town aid — smart aid that aims to put itself out of business in a generation or two. “Make aid history” is the objective. It always was. Because when we end aid, it’ll mean that extreme poverty is history. But until that glorious day, smart aid can be a reforming tool, demanding accountability and transparency, rewarding measurable results, reinforcing the rule of law, but never imagining for a second that it’s a substitute for trade, investment or self-determination.
I for one want to live to see Mo Ibrahim’s throw-down prediction about Ghana come true. “Yes, guys,” he said, “Ghana needs support in the coming years, but in the not-too-distant future it can be giving aid, not receiving it; and you, Mr. Bono, can just go there on your holidays.”
I’m booking that ticket.
There’s a lot happening there. I’m hoping to take another look myself this fall.
I started to open this post with “if the founding fathers could see Congress today, I’m not sure they’d give them responsibility for interstate commerce or not” but perhaps that’s a little too snarky. In any case, “Congress shall make no law” is looking like the best phrase in the whole Constitution these days.
The new “financial regulatory reform” bill making its way through Congress has several provisions that would be seriously devastating to the job creating engine that is the startup world.
I’m convinced that some of the congressional representatives supporting these new regulations fully understand them and are ideologically opposed to the creation of wealth that we’ve seen in Silicon Valley over the last thirty years. Others just have no clue that in their efforts to “protect” people, they could kill – or at least seriously hinder – one of the greatest job creation machines this country has ever had.
Our church started holding an incredible annual concert and art exhibit for the community last year. It was an amazing production then, and now the amazingly talented team of young people is presenting Individually Inspired II on April 30th and May 2nd, 2010.
So if you’re local to the Sierra Foothills, come and enjoy original art, photography, music, poetry, drama and dance. The art and photography exhibit opens at 6PM and the concert begins at 7:30PM.
It’s a great evening, and admission is completely free. The event is at Foothill Christian Fellowship, at 1100 Sugar Pine Road in Meadow Vista. Call 530-878-0293 for more information if you need it.
I blogged before about Dreambox, a tech startup that makes interactive games to teach math to kids. They were acquired this past week by Charter School Growth Fund, and the acquisition was funded by Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings.
Mr. Hastings said that he thinks netbooks will be ubiquitous in schools in a few years, creating huge opportunities for online learning software.
“I think we’re on the edge of a real inflection point where the hardware becomes so cheap that Web learning is really throughout the schools,” he said. “But what I noticed is there’s really not that many people working on the software.”
DreamBox was started last year — I wrote about it at the time — and creates personalized lesson plans, hidden in games, based on which concepts children understand or need to work on.
“What makes their product so impressive is it adapts to each student’s learning, and that’s the Holy Grail of this field,” Mr. Hastings said.
There is major innovation on the horizon for public education. This is one of those quiet, early signals.
As many of you know, I was very involved in working to create a level playing field so we had the opportunity to keep our local tax dollars local for the Sierra College Nevada County Campus expansion project. A few of you have asked why we couldn’t make that happen for our new solar energy project, so I dug into it, and here are some answers.
As a reminder, this new solar array will take 20% of Rocklin and 90% of the Nevada County campus off the grid. The college makes zero upfront investment in the solar array and simply agrees to buy the power it generates. We save between $75,000 and $100,000 in the first year with lower energy costs, and we have contracted price increases at well below the rate of inflation we’ve seen from PG&E. It’s a win-win.
Obviously, there are legal limits on the amount of detail that can be released about a bidding process, but here’s what I can share, thanks to our staff.
The final two companies, AMSOLAR and Borrego Solar, were interviewed by our staff and two trustees (though I was invited as a member of the Facilities Committee, I was unable to attend the interviews). Staff recommended to the committee to negotiate first with AMSOLAR, since they were offering the best overall pricing, and if a deal couldn’t be quickly finalized, to proceed to a negotiation with Borrego. The committee approved that process.
Government contracting is a complicated process wrought with legal technicalities and complications. I think Sierra College did a great job of running an open, transparent and competitive process.
To keep local tax dollars local, you have to have a local partner that will step up and do the work to make it possible. That didn’t happen here, as much as we tried.
Ultimately, we’re excited to form this partnership with AMSOLAR so that we can achieve significant savings in our energy budget, do our part to reduce reliance on foreign sources of oil and make our planet a little cleaner.
If you have any questions, leave a comment – glad to answer if I can!
Photo Credit: AMSOLAR
George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen pens a piece in the New York Times this week making the point that other countries, including our neighbor to the north, are taking the lead on getting their fiscal futures under control.
Consider the tax burden on high earners once the Bush administration’s tax cuts expire next year. Add up the federal, state, city and sales taxes for a lawyer in New York City who earns $300,000 a year. Depending on the circumstances, this individual could be facing marginal tax rates in the range of 60 percent. Higher income tax rates would discourage hard work and encourage tax avoidance, thereby defeating the purpose of the tax increases. …
The macroeconomic evidence also suggests the wisdom of emphasizing spending cuts. In a recent paper, Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna, economics professors at Harvard, found that in developed countries, spending cuts were the key to successful fiscal adjustments — and were generally better for the economy than tax increases. Their conclusion was based on data since 1970 from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The received wisdom in the United States is that deep spending cuts are politically impossible. But a number of economically advanced countries, including Sweden, Finland, Canada and, most recently, Ireland, have cut their government budgets when needed.
Most relevant, perhaps, is Canada, which cut federal government spending by about 20 percent from 1992 to 1997. The Liberal Party, headed by Jean Chrétien as prime minister and Paul Martin as finance minister, led most of this shift. Prompted by the financial debacle in Mexico, Canadian leaders had the courage and the foresight to make those spending cuts before a fiscal crisis was upon them. In his book “In the Long Run We’re All Dead: The Canadian Turn to Fiscal Restraint,” Timothy Lewis describes Canada’s move from fiscal irresponsibility to a balanced budget — a history that helps explain why the country has managed the current global recession relatively well.
To be sure, the spending cuts meant fewer government services, most of all for health care, and big cuts in agricultural subsidies. But Canada remained a highly humane society, and American liberals continue to cite it as a beacon of progressive values.
See, who says we can’t learn a few things from the rest of the world?
Illustration Credit: NYT
This is CLASSIC Don Knotts. There won’t ever be another comic quite like him. Enjoy your weekend!
(Feed, e-mail and mobile readers: the embedded video is above. H/T to @NoelPiper for this video!)
