10 November 2012

The Electric is Off! Blame From Hypocrites.


In 2012, there were two events which resulted in lengthy electrical power outages in West Virginia.

The first was the “derecho” of 29 June, which was the equivalent of a non-spinning hurricane.  It left 3/4 of the state without power for one or two weeks. Fortunately for our friends to the East, the barrier of the Blue Ridge attenuated the storm somewhat.  (The prevailing winds here are west to east.)

The second was the combination of Hurricane Sandy and a cold front which occurred early last week. A few areas of West Virginia are still without power.

I’ve seen a lot of colleagues, police officers and others who have been or still are out of power. (The power did stay on here at the head of the Valley of Coal Run.) From them, I have heard a lot of “darn it’s,” and a few “boy, that sucks.”

What I have not heard is any whining or deep angst or anger at the power companies. These people carried on with their lives. The hard-working powerline crews from faraway have received warm welcomes in Mother West Virginia.

Likewise, the most recent storm interrupted power in large parts of New Jersey, southeastern New York, Long Island and elsewhere in that area.

Oh, the humanity!

Those out of power (forgive me if I don’t use the word “victims”) are complaining bitterly. Actually, I don’t mean to be highly critical of them.   Theirs is a different culture. In a densely populated area, they are more dependent on a technological and social infrastructure and less prepared for some of the natural vicissitudes of life. They do not have the tradition of the long hunter or the stoic mountaineer.

But the people who should damn well know better who are also bitching and moaning include Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his ilk.

They have attacked the power companies. They point out that the electrical generation/distribution system could have been much more robust.  They point out that some substantial part of the power outages could have been prevented.

And that’s true.

So why didn’t the power companies prevent them?

Placing all the blame on the power companies is, at best, really, really simplistic.

Electric utilities are very capital intensive, usually monopolistic and therefore highly regulated. Government has something between an incentive and a mania to keep electric rates as low as possible. Indeed, electric rates in the United States are quite low just as our usage is quite high.

The current generation, transmission and switching systems work. They are antiquated, but they work.  They are not robust enough to resist disasters, but disasters don’t happen very often and upgrading the systems would be damnably expensive.

It would be politically inexpedient to increase electric rates drastically to beef up what the industry and the governments know is an antiquated system.

For that matter, doing what would be necessary might be unacceptable once the plans are publicized. New York City wants everything underground. New York City is right beside an ocean. Water runs downhill. If you get high water (like a storm surge) stuff underground is going to get flooded. If you’re unwilling to put it above ground, you’re screwed.  Mr. Physics rules.

Wouldn’t  it be refreshing if some politician, any politician, would say “Maybe, just maybe, none of us have thought ahead sufficiently.”

Permit me to add a few words about United States energy policy.

What energy policy? The so-called American energy policy Is Balkanized, part-profit-driven, part-ideology-driven Chaos.  It is not science-driven or reality-driven.

Consider:


  • New EPA regulations make construction of new coal-fired electrical generation facilities functionally impossible.



  • In the meantime, older coal plants are going off-line.



  • In the meantime, the demand for electricity is increasing. There are circumstances (for instance, if plug-in hybrid automobiles become popular) where electric demand can take a big leap upwards.



  • We swear that were going to become independent of foreign (and particularly Arab) oil. We’ve taken that oath for the last 40 years just as our imports from the Middle East have constituted a greater and greater share of our petroleum used.



  • We misrepresent petroleum reserves in the continental United States by ignoring the nature of the geology of the formations where the oil is located. Most of that so-called “abundant” oil will be very expensive to extract.



  • Wind power will never be a great portion of electrical production, but it can be some portion and certainly a greater portion that it  now is. The expense of producing electricity with wind has come down to the point that it nearly competes equally with coal. And yet now we’re hearing weird objections to wind power. After all, you have to put roads to the top of ridges and then scrape off a flat spot to put the turbine tower. Well, it would be nice if we could put them in the valleys, but it’s not windy there. There is also the Not-In-My-Backyard syndrome at work. A wind power project has been planned in shallow water off Martha’s Vineyard. That’s a really windy place. But it’s also a rich person’s paradise, and you would think some of those folks had been gut shot. Not in my backyard. We want power, but put the machinery some place else.



  • Our efforts at conservation are miserable. Did you know that strip malls are making a comeback? That’s because shoppers are becoming walk less willing to walk around enclosed malls.  They want to drive from store to store.



  • Our efforts at recycling are pitiful. In lots of areas, particularly metals production, using virgin material is frightfully energy inefficient. Aluminum, for example, is an extremely common element. But it is damnably hard to extract and takes a great deal of energy to separate from ores. Reusing aluminum, on the other hand, uses very little energy.


We are all responsible for this energy mass. Gov. Cuomo pointing fingers is hypocritical bullshit.

OK, a lot of what we’re doing is hypocritical bullshit, too.  Cuomo is not the only bullshit artist in the colony.

Mizpah.





04 November 2012

All My Verdicts: All My Sorrows, Soon Forgotten


The ethical rules for lawyers bar advertising verdicts or the results of specific cases.

The rationale is that such advertising creates unrealistic expectations in potential clients and amounts to comparing one’s services favorably with those of other providers.

My own 35 year record of advertising is quite anemic. I’ve done some Yellow Pages, but I quit that a few years ago. I do “sponsorship” ads here and there, the sort which support or congratulate schools, the Boy Scouts and so forth.

I like to do radio on election day.  I have to wonder if my ranting about voter apathy pisses more people off than creates positive impressions. Not that it matters – voter apathy pisses ME off.

We’ve never gotten into tchotchke. We don’t do pens, calendars, refrigerator magnets and crap like that. It’s just entirely too tacky.

Oh, I do give out flag American flag lapel pins, but those are not festooned with the law firm name. I just like to spread those around.

But as a zealot of a vigorous First Amendment and a vibrant Marketplace of Ideas, I’ve always questioned limitations on truthful attorney advertising. Mind you, there’s no question that a lot of it is often so idiotic that it’s counterproductive. I recall one classic some guy ran a few years ago: “Don’t take a knife to a gunfight.” That’s good literal advice, but the metaphor just doesn’t go anywhere.

I have a buddy who spent 2 bushels of cash developing a cartoon tiger for television ads. His tagline was “Put the Tiger on your team,” or something like that. The bar authorities got on his case because that seemed to compare his services to other lawyers, so he changed the tagline to “We’ll fight like a tiger for you.”

I hope that no potential client ever believe that my buddy was going to  morph literally into a tiger, drag the opposition into the jungle and devour them. Anyway, with the language tweak, he kept the tiger.

Recently, the State Bar reminded everyone in its weekly mass e-mail about the prohibition against publicizing verdicts. And again, I had to wonder, if a lawyer tells the truth, what’s the harm?

Then, in connection with a case, I was getting some background information on a lawyer I don’t know. This attorney’s website had a whole list of verdicts in case results.

I became a believer in the bar really quickly.  You see, you can’t tell the whole truth about a case in a one paragraph synopsis.  And you certainly can’t tell the truth about what you did.  Cases are way too complicated and the nuances of good lawyering are way too subtle.

This guy reported some apparently good results:

State versus A: charged with murder. Verdict – not guilty.

That sounds pretty good. I have to wonder about the facts of the case because that much information doesn’t tell me a hell of a lot. Did the police charge the wrong person? Was there an affirmative defense that had to go to trial? Did the prosecutor goof?  What skill did this lawyer bring to the case?

State versus B: charged with DUI. The breathalyzer gets thrown out by the court and the state surrenders. Okay, the client is happy.  Was the breathalyzer untrustworthy? We don’t know. Why was it thrown out? Again, did good lawyering have anything to do with it?

State versus C: “We got the charges reduced.”  To what the defendant did?   Did the defendant still have a good defense that wasn’t tested? What did the lawyer do?

There were lots more. There was talk of charges reduced and big-money verdicts.

And that’s what lawyers are supposed to do. We’re supposed to represent people’s best interests and tell their story when nobody else is telling their story. And sometimes we tell it real well but their story is so bad that we get a bad result. And sometimes, we tell it ineptly but the case really is a winner from day one despite our lack of skill.

As it turns out, publicizing the result of the case doesn’t say a whole lot about what level of skill the attorney used.  Some of the best lawyering is done in complete darkness.

Case in point: I was talking to a friend who is a really, really top-notch trial lawyer last week. He was telling me about a case he settled. When he told me the facts, I thought it was worth a certain amount. Then he told me why he was able to settle it for about three times that amount. And he would be out of his mind to publicize that case because that would reduce his effectiveness in the next case. I know about it it is a teaching point. Nobody else needs to know about it.

The practice of law is not a public, newsworthy activity. It’s not something we should be doing on the front page. 

There are lots of metaphors and images used in advertising. There’s my buddy the tiger. In every television market, some lawyer has claimed the moniker, “The Hammer”: “I am the Hammer and they are the nails!”   [“I am a vain asshole, and this is my commercial!”]  There even those who have a “NT GUILTY” vanity plate à la The Lincoln Lawyer. Matthew McConaughey he could pull it off. The average lawyer can’t.

I suppose I’ve had my share of good results, and I can make a nice mental list. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to talk about them. My effectiveness, to the extent I’m ever effective, comes from getting things done, quietly, not from bragging about it. 

If you will find some character metaphor for me, don’t go looking for Tigers or Hammers. I prefer something like “The Shadow.”

Remember from the old radio drama: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”

I’m okay with that.


A minor contest: Can anyone tell me the source of the second phrase in the title of this post? Without using Google? The first one who can gets a book of my choosing from the Endless Bookshelf.®