Tony K's Blog

I voted for Obama's re-election. He is not an evil Kenyan, Muslim, socialist. He is not a crazy spendthrift. Nor do I think he is the second coming. I believe he had some solid, very strategic victories in his first term that are and will be good for the country. Really if you look at what Obama actually did, he is pretty much in the same camp as some of those crazy herd-line right wingers like Goldwater, Nixon, Romney, and Reagan. I want to lay out my logic and reasoning for myself on why I think this was the right thing. It will be fun to look back 4 or 10 years from now at this. I also want to thank those whose views are different tlhan mine who have respectfully engaged around issues using facts and logic. The issues we face are not simple and are not solvable by sound bites and cynicism. There is tremendous depth of knowledge, thought, and understanding required. Romney I believe that if you separated Mitt Romney from the party system, he would be s...

Increase Taxes On The Rich - What that means There is a tremendous amount of innumeracy in this country. I don't know why that is. One thing I keep seeing is talk of tax hikes on those making more that $250k. I want to describe what that means. First, technically, it is an increase of tax rate on incremental (marginal) income above $250k. It's not simply raising the rates on everyone making more than $250k. It may have that effect, but the distinction is important. What is the distinction? Consider a person who makes $1.01 less than $250k. He or she will pay let's say $50k in income tax. If he makes $1 more, he will pay about $0.30 more taxes at a 30% income tax rate. Now let's say that the tax laws change so that income above $250k is taxed at 40% (up from 30%). It does not mean that suddenly his entire income is multiplied by 40%, it means that only the amount above $250k will be multiplied by 40%. So let's say our $249,999 earner gets a raise to $...

Ezra Klein recently published a blog post in response to a NY Times piece by David Brooks, the conservative on staff there. It was called "T he sad history of climate policy, according to David Brooks." It's interesting on some levels. It shows that the Republicans used their influence to kill initiatives to reduce carbon footprint, forcing the Democrats, who really wanted to do something about carbon into the corner of funding green startups as the only remaining available option. When some of those startups inevitably failed, the Ds became the bad guys on many levels. It is a sad story of the conversion of a bipartisan consensus going away for political gain. Klein makes the point that it is really quite clear who the bad guys are, the Rs. But there is a big assumption behind all this:  Catastrophic  global warming is happening. All the scientists say so. I sent this response to his column: "First, I completely agree with the premise that if Obama is for it, th...

--> I have mentioned previously that I am a big fan of Andrew Tobias. Recently, he posted on his blog  the claim that climate "deniers" were massively funded by corporate interests.  I sent him the following note. "You said, "The connection between the climate-change deniers and the Republican budget enthusiasts is that both are massively funded by corporate interests , now entirely unleashed by the Republican Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision.  That’s the one that stacks the political system even more heavily in favor of the rich and powerful, and allows their influence to be hidden. " "For the record, I am a big fan and we are on the same side politically. Scientifically we differ, and this thing about climate-change deniers being funded by corporate interests is simply not true as far as I can tell. People point to XOM funding someone for 25 M illion dollars or so. Compare that to the forces of climate change "proponen...

Some of you know that I have a second blog. It's in the links on this page and is called Emotions for Engineers . I have not made my identity in that blog public, but decided to for a variety of reasons. Go take a look. That is all.

We have put our San Ramon home for sale. The kids are out of he house (but still on the payroll). We decided that 2776 square feet of house and 10,000 square feet of yard with a pool is just a bit more than we want to deal with. So we're moving to Oakland. We'll be near Kathleen's work, I'll have a reverse commute, we'll be close to the city, have no yard, and only 1700 square feet to take care of. IT feels good. Here's our house for sale at 51 Sage Circle in San Ramon. Our new place is at Pacific Cannery Lofts . Next stage of life. It's exciting.

Disclaimer: I have worked in the oil industry 30 years. I started with Western Geophysical, moved to Texaco, and now work for Chevron. I have no specific knowledge of BP, the Macondo well, or Ecuador. The views expressed on this blog are my own personal views and do not necessarily represent those of my employer. I am not defending BP. It looks like here were several errors in human judgment leading up to the blowout. These errors were probably caused by people who did not understand their fields well enough to really understand the riskiness of what they were doing, and whose judgment was tainted by pressures to cut costs. BP seems to have had a really defective culture (See Bob Lewis' column on cost cutting and risk) ( see also this article from Fortune magazine ) during the regime of Lord Browne (who racked up record numbers by taking greater and greater risks). Tony Hayward was apparently in the process of turning that around. Sadly, he was not able to turn it around fast en...