Whipped Cream Difficulties

The California legislature is considering a bill that would require all new table saws sold in the state to be equipped with something called “injury mitigation technology”. The basic idea behind this technology is that the saw will stop, instantly, whenever it encounters human flesh (or something like human flesh, but more on that later).

That sounds like a good idea if you’re not a libertarian like me, right? Who can be opposed to protecting fingers?

Well, the problem is that there’s only one company that makes saws equipped with “injury mitigation technology”, SD3, who markets the SawStop.

And the inventor of this technology holds 90 patents on it. By the way, he’s also a patent attorney. So no other company can use this technology without paying for the patents.

…adding finger-saving sensors could boost table-saw prices by hundreds of dollars per unit, says the Power Tool Institute, a Cleveland trade group.

And the way the SawStop works is that it basically fires a stop into the blade, which kills the rotation almost instantly. However, every time the SawStop goes off, you’re looking at a $175 replacement bill for the blade and other parts of the device.

And because of the way the SawStop works, it can be fired even without fingers being present; for example, if the wood is wet. (The wisdom of cutting wet wood is debatable, of course.)

Overlawyered has been covering the SawStop, and attempts to make it mandatory for table saws. It is interesting to see the LAT pick up on this issue.

My take?

1. Stupidity should hurt.
2. If the government wants to make it mandatory on table saws, fine; let them do so after the patents expire, or require the inventor to license the patents for free. After all, what’s more important; safety, or money? Come to think of it, if he was really concerned with safety, he’d already have made this offer to saw makers. Right now, this looks like rent-seeking.

Earlier this week, I noted the goings-on in the notoriously corrupt California city of Vernon. One thing I mentioned was the $1.6 million salary of one Eric T. Fresch, a Vernon city official until this past May and one of the people behind Vernon’s failed natural gas hedge.

Mr. Fresch was found dead Thursday night in Angel Island State Park.

According to the LAT, the coroner’s office does not suspect foul play.

Amy Brees, an Angel Island State Park superintendent, said rangers began searching for Fresch after receiving a call Thursday afternoon that he had been cycling on the island but never came home.
“He hadn’t returned on the boat he was expected to return on,” said Brees, adding that Fresch’s body was found in the water near the shore.
The island features a mix of trails and terrain, including some cliffs. Water is accessible from various points all around the island.

Also interesting: remember that audit?

The auditor said her staff could not reach him for an interview despite a deposition subpoena and repeated attempts by process servers to track him down.

The LAT has a story about a state audit report on the notoriously corrupt city. Some of the things in the audit were touched on the other day, like the natural gas hedge deal. There is some new stuff:

…the audit called into question the government reform plan Vernon enacted last year, after it was nearly disincorporated by the state Legislature. The auditor said the city has failed to develop policies to actually implement some of the reform proposals, and that other key initiatives — like increasing the city’s residential population — are still years away.

Since 2005, Vernon has paid out more than $60 million in taxpayer dollars under contracts that had no caps on total expenditures, the audit said. Some of the agreements reviewed did not even define specific work product.

The auditor also noted that Vernon provided “legally questionable” retirement benefits to some of its top officials. The California Public Employees Retirement System has already moved to slash some of those benefits, but it is unclear whether any legal action will be taken against the city or the individual employees.

And we have a couple of stories from the municipal beat.

Story #1: The last ballots cast in June’s election in the notoriously corrupt California town of Vernon have been counted…and Reno Bellamy has been declared the winner. Bellamy’s opponent, Luz Martinez, was endorsed by the Vernon Chamber of Commerce. Of course, the Chamber “has vowed to pursue further legal action”.

Story #2: A while back, the town of Moberly, Missouri, agreed to guarantee $39 million in bonds through 2025. The bonds were intended to help a Chinese company, Mamtek International, build a plant to manufacture sucralose in Moberly.

Guess what happened next? If you said, “I bet the project fell apart”, take two gold stars and advance to the next blue square.

The hook here is that Moberly is refusing to make payments on the bonds, basically claiming that they were “misled” by Mamtek. (Mamtek claimed they already had an operating sucralose plant in China; it turns out that plant never opened, and that Missouri state development officials were aware of this before the bonds were sold, but nobody told Moberly officials.)

In a related NYT story:

Surprised local taxpayers from Stockton, Calif., to Scranton, Pa., are finding themselves obligated for parking garages, hockey arenas and other enterprises that can no longer pay their debts.

This is particularly interesting:

Residents of Pennsylvania’s capital, Harrisburg, recently learned from a forensic audit that their city’s fiscal woes could be traced to a guarantee issued in 1998, for the bonds of a trash incinerator project. Every few years after that, the authority running the project issued more bonds, and the city guaranteed those as well.
The audit showed that the authority had been selling new bonds for the cash to pay its older bonds — saving unwitting residents from having to honor their guarantees for a time, but blowing up their debt from the incinerator to an impossible $310 million. That’s more than three times what residents owe on the city’s own bonds.

If you or I did this, they’d call it a Ponzi scheme, and we’d be going to Federal pound you in the ass prison.

Allegations of voter fraud left many unresolved questions even after officials counted the ballots in the first competitive election in years in the small city of Vernon.

Edited to add: More here.