my end of the bargain

The recent story of HP's internal spying is interesting, to say the least. To briefly sum up what seems to have occurred, the press at some point disclosed information to the public on HP's corporate strategy that, presumably, only members of the board of directors (as well as the CEO and other top officers) should have known. This leaking upset the Chairman of the Board, Patrica Dunn, so she used an outside investigative compnay to find out from where the leaks where coming. The tactics used by this investigative effort were highly suspect and included bugging internal e-mail and listening into personal phone calls.

If you're like me and you also take the above set of assertions as true, you question the corporate culture of HP but would question why in the world the federal government needed to convene a hearing on this seemingly internal matter.

It turns out that the basic federal concern is over HP's use of pretexting, whereby "one person masquerades as another to obtain private information such as phone records." The major concern is whether HP used social security numbers to pretext. I keep coming across that there is a real possibility that this probably would have violated a federal statute, although I have yet to find any article that specifically cites the criminal/civil law.

In any event, I don't think it is at all clear that the feds need to be involved in this type of situation. The federal law is likely based on interstate commerce concerns, but one wonders whether state fraud laws would have done the job as well. Whatever your beliefs on the merits of the feds' involvement, check out some of the quotes from this past week's congressional hearing, including:

"Is all of this really the HP way?...I'm not even talking about the legality issues so much as kind of the sleaze factor here. And I'm just wondering if none of this really came through to you over the period." Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, to former HP Chairman Patricia Dunn

Corn Syrup and Electoral Votes

On the chance that people are still checking this blog out occasionally and hoping someone's posted something new I thought I'd post something new.

This is a re-post of something I just posted in another IHS blog, for the the folks at the Liberty, Art, and Culture seminar this past summer. It's my own crazy theory and I'd be interested to see what some of you economist think about it. The state of farming in the U.S. is something I plan on doing a lot of further research on.




I've just spent the last week camping, (post on the national parks system possibly coming eventually), with a group of friends of mine from England. At some point they asked me why so much of our food has corn syrup listed as the first ingredient.

Here's my theory:

Presidential electoral math.

First, of course, I had to explain how the electoral vote system works, with each state getting a group of electoral votes bases on the number of Representatives plus two for each of their senators and whatever candidate wins most of the votes within the state wins all of the state's electoral votes and therefore they only focus on the swing states. (Then I went off on a tangent about how California is a tenth of the population of the US but only gets attention when the candidates want money, this is worthy of it's own post, but I'll hold off until later).

The problem with this is that because of the two senator electoral votes it's the less populated states that matter more. Additionally it's those less populated states that are easier to put into swing from one election to another.

And it just so happens that many of those less populated swing states are ones where farming is one of the major industries, Ohio, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania.

Add farming's historical importance in American history and the theory that's it's better to have too much food than too little and you come up with a situation in which farmers are given so much attention, subsidies and assistance that we end up with more corn than we know what to do with. This drives down the price of corn, making it easily accessible for food manufacturers to throw it in to nearly everything we eat without raising the cost of the food they're making.


This is all of course, all too straight forward to be completely true, but I'm sticking with it for now, despite the fact that I don't have any immediate data accessible to back it up. Eventually I'm planning on doing a bunch of research into the American farming industry, but in the meantime I'd love to hear the IHS collective's views on this theory.


**As a side note I'll just point out that New Mexico and Vermont(?) don't award all their electoral votes to just one candidate. I wish California would follow their lead although I disagree with the way they do decide who gets how many votes. I'll probably post something about this as we get closer to the election and I get more and more frustrated by politicking.