February 1, 2011 – Daily Brief

Not just head turning. Gales of laughter.

According to Petz, home sales are down. I guess it takes more than a cute name to move houses . . .

This means what? The cute name could be moving plenty of houses… As a marketing campaign it was absolutely brilliant!

I think I just made my head bleed from scratching it so hard in trying to understand your response, Mr. Petz.

Did you listen to the SOS speech last night?

@#$%$# is that you George?

It took you this long to figure that out? I love ya, Petz!

Petz thought this boat was leaning to port.

Global warming, evolution and the Big Bang are all sound theories to me, so you decide!

That’s why I thought you were an aka for Jeff-Is global warming man made?

I thought that the people had already spoken when Arnold placed a similar measure on the ballot. Brown’s proposal has two parts – One, the people vote to increase taxes and Two, the Legislature votes to cut expenses. Should we vote for One when there is no guarantee that Two will be accomplished?

50% through tax cuts 50% through temporary tax increase. If they vote it down 100% through tax cuts. Where do you think it will come from guy who works in education off the tax payers dime. Care to take a pay cut?

Show how much you know. I don’t get a salary. Based on my time and on my minimal stipend I get far less than minimum wage. Is the 50% cuts guaranteed? Not a bit. But since Brown suggested it, you take it for granted. I would put our fifth graders against your logic any day of the week.

Is it just me, or does Phil give off a pretty large “I know you are but what am I” vibe?

Phil aren’t you on one of the local school boards? Do you support the school cuts that would come with no new taxes and cutting spending another twenty-five billion dollars?

That was then, this is now. Another vote is called for. The situation is worse than before, circumstances change. Why do you hate democracy? But I agree it has NO chance of passing until the legislature does its part and makes cuts and eliminates waste like medical fraud and expenses for illegal aliens. Zero chance. Zip. Nada.

I’m no geologist, although I did take an environmental biology class in college in 1990. My education included what seemed to be very sound and effective scientific arguments regarding how increased co2 emissions have impacted the ozone layer, which back then was thought to cause issues around 2020 (as we now witnessed, their original ozone hole estimates showed up 20 years earlier). The theories and arguments then, as now, are sound BUT, they are theories in that that will continue to be challenged.

Petz thought the ozone hole was “caused” by chloroflourocarbons, not CO2 emmissions.

That would be correct. That is why R-12 has been virutually outlawed as a refrigerant and replaced by R-134a, a hydro-flouro-carbon. All to allegedly save the ozone layer. CO2 emisions are loved by plants and are considered a greenhouse gas – not a destroyer of the ozone layer.

I stand corrected. I meant chloroflourocarbons and not co2. I was in college 2 decades ago, cut me some slack!

Coincidentally, someone just e-mailed me this link which shows the hole in the ozone, which is supposed to improve in the coming decades. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=49040&src=eoa-iotd I found this quote of interest: “The recovery [of the ozone layer] might be accelerated by greenhouse gas-induced cooling of the upper stratosphere.”

@Al Ferdman, agreed. Silly me, I thought driving WITHOUT A VALID DRIVER’S LICENSE was violating a “specific” traffic law.

Having a cracked windshield or a busted headlight also violates a “specific” traffic law. Doesn’t automatically make the person at fault or negligent.

Exactly Nate, clearly this person should be fined and any other appropriate measures that go with driving without a license. But if he did not do anything specific to his driving behavior that was negligent to cause the accident then he shouldn’t be charged with those deaths IMO. Sometimes an accident is just that, an accident.

No License means no insurance. No License and No insurance means you should not have been driving in the first place. But that is OK as long as you don’t do something else wrong? Sorry, not the same as a cracked windshield.

All true, but does that make him responsible for their deaths, as a matter of fact, if he did not cause the crash?

Obviously, if he would not have been driving, he would not have been in the accident. Should he be charged with the deaths? Don’t know enough to say. But, that was not my point. I was referring to the comment made by the District Attorney and her rational. Seems like a germane question would be; Did they charge him at all? Sounded like they let him off with a free pass.

I would agree that the guy should not get a “pass” and that there should be legal consequences specific to his decision to be on the road without a license and without insurance, but those consequences do not, in my opinion, default to being charged with deaths if you are not found at fault for the accident. I think a good question would be this, if an unlicensed driver is rear ended through no fault of their own, but passengers in the rear ending car die is the unlicensed driver suddenly to blame for those deaths by default because he has no license? I don’t think so.

And Alan, your original point that the chosen wording by the district attorney sounds off is valid. I think this is a case where the context of the quote is needed, and I believe her context was that he violated no specific traffic laws in direct correlation to the accident, which is what she is charged with determining.

Maybe if we didn’t treat being here illegally so lightly and held the unlicensed and uninsured responsible, we wouldn’t have this problem. Jeez, we all now have to pay uninsured and under-insured protection because the dweebs don’t follow the law. And we feed them and give medical attention and some are even demanding the right to vote!

Spineflower, what you are saying about not going easy on illegal or unlicensed unisured etc is all true to an extent, but we don’t then in retrospect pile on murder or vehicular manslaughter charges just to make an example out of them if the charges have no basis in what took place. They are 2 very distinct issues. Also, with regards to this driver, has there been a statement anywhere backing up the notion that he was an illegal? I’m not sure if there has been or not, but I don’t assume every unlicensed driver is also here illegally.

A correction: No license does not necessarily imply no insurance. A vehicle is insured by its owner. Liability is carried back to the owner, not the driver. This is why rental car companies sell you the additional insurance… your insurance doesn’t cover rental cars (explicitly… you may have special coverage at an additional fee), it only covers the cars that you choose to insure… regardless of who is driving it, unless they’re explicitly excluded in writing. Two cases in point: When my wife and I were dating, I was driving her car and wrecked it (damn deer jumped out in front of me!). Her parent’s insurance covered it, but going forward I was forever prohibited from driving any car they owned. Other case is when I lived with two roomates… my insurance company required that I either pay for co-insurance to have them additionally named (at an additional premium) or specifically excluded.

Correction yourself, Todd! You generally do not need to purchase insurance when you rent a car as long as you have regular auto insurance. Of course car rental agencies don’t want you to know that. Double check with your particular insurance carrier to be sure, as I have with mine (Allstate). In California you cannot drive without insurance, so no rental agency would let you walk away without insurance if what you said was true. In the example you cited, your in-laws’ coverage may have kicked in because you did not have insurance yourself. http://www.insure.com/car-insurance/rental-car-basics.html http://www.smartmoney.com/spending/rip-offs/10-things-your-rental-car-company-wont-tell-you-19615/?page=4

First car (truck) loses control. Car with family (which weren’t in proper safety restraints with pouring rain.) over reacts and hits truck. Third car going 15 miles under the speed limit breaks but hits hits car with family. No alcohol, no drugs, no excessive speed. Not having a license is a ticket. It doesn’t say whether he has no license at all. I have driven to the gym without a license because I left it in my other pants. The fact is we don’t know the facts, but that doesn’t stop people from filling in the blanks with their own information.

Fair point RM, I apologize for my lack of clarity.

You are Correct!!!!! He was driving below the speed limit also. There was no speeding involved.

Actually, if your insurance does not cover collision damage, then you are strongly suggested to add that coverage to a rental.

It was midnight (not noon, shocked at a Signal error) and there was heavy rain. While he wasn’t exceeding the maximum speed limit, a possible argument that he was driving too fast for conditions. It did say he was “unlicensed”. I think its safe to say that doesn’t mean he simply didn’t have it on him.

Nate, there was no “slamming” apart from comments about the stupid way they phrase the decrease in murders (up 50%, down 75%, etc… year after year when it’s always about the same). I don’t understand how saying crime is low, like it always is, is a slam. I was using “significant” in the usual statistical sense–a result is significant if there’s a less than 5% chance it occurred by chance. With all the crimes, I looked if any of the 2010 rates fell outside the predicted interval of occurrence based on rates from 2000-2009; none of them did. And of course statistical significance is different than societal significance, so interpret as you will (which was the whole point of my putting up numbers with minimal interpretation).

Property crimes are down significantly almost to 2000 levels with 20,000 more people and no increase in staffing budget cuts across the board.. How is that not a big deal? I bet if the numbers went up you and everyone else sit behind their keyboard slamming the new captain claiming the sky is falling. Weak… Real weak. Give the department their due they do a excellent job and this year even better.

Your prediction is wrong because that very scenario played out last year. Look at my post from Feb 28 2010 where I still said that year to year changes were meaningless even though all Part I crimes went up with the lone exception of grand theft auto. Even if enforcement was exactly the same and there was the exact same number of people in SCV, the number of crime reports would vary a lot from year to year. I was pointing out that it looks like we have more natural fluctuations than directional change in crime rates–controlling for population. I also said crime was “mercifully low, as usual” and praised the department for publishing the numbers. I’m in no way anti-Sheriff like you seem to imply.

Your point is that since random fluctuation explains the decrease, one cannot call them significant and therefore take credit for them. Unfortunately, some people who didn’t pay attention in math class aren’t following you.

Larceny, grand theft and Burglary all down significantly… What are you not seeing?

Those crimes were all more than one standard deviation below the mean, but that isn’t so unusual (that’s what the error bars are showing on the graph–where we expect the results to be 68% of the time, but 32% of the time they’re outside those bounds). For burglary to have been significantly down (in the <5% probability to be caused by chance sense), it would have had to be below 0.00334 reports per person; it was .00335 reports per person, so I probably should have said it very closely approached a statistically significanct difference from expectation. They didn’t issue the population for 2010 so I used the 2009 estimate since that’s what the Sheriff’s Dept. does. But if say a thousand people moved into Santa Clarita in 2010, that will change the numbers and the burglarly rate will have been significantly lower in 2010 than expected. (If the population declined as it did from 2008 to 2009, the opposite will happen.) None of the other crimes come as close as burglary, but that’s still good news and I’ll be happy to change that one detail on my post with the new population estimate.

Donut sales are up! Oh wait, they don’t pay for their donuts…

cute and clever.

As usual IHeart, you nailed it. But since the SD’s have to take the hammer blow on the random fluctuations up I tend to allow them to have kudos on the random fluctuations down.

Tim I see your point, but I think it is the nature of the acts that differentiates them in terms of their simplicity. Had she intentionally plowed her car into the people, or held a tarp over someones head and suffocated them the way he did with the dog she’d have been in jail more immediately as well. The fact that it was an accident muddies that situation in terms of what was she doing at the time of the accident, was it specific negligence and what charges are appropriate. The case of the dog killing is a little bit more clear cut.

Good points but 7 months (and counting) to figure something out?

Well Tim, I agree that this particular case has seemingly moved in a strange and snail like fashion, I just didn’t see the automatic correlation between the 2 situations. But again I get the point you are making.

Tim should know better… The dog case (on the surface) is pretty cut and dry. Considering the dog’s owner was a witness to the act, it is pretty un-defendable (if that’s a word). Hence the no-contest plea. The guy didn’t have any defense whatsoever. He was caught in the act. Whats particularly curious is why the press didn’t get any wind of this till nearly a month later???? My guess in the July 4th incident is that there is so many conflicting witness statements, that for every person who says “the light was red” that there would be someone saying “I saw it, it was green.” No way could you get a conviction out of that. Basically, without some sort of indisputable evidence emerging, and lacking any proof of intoxication, I doubt you’ll ever see this case brought to trial.

Agree completely, this act was extremely vicious in nature.