The Binary Circumstance

Just in time for the holidays, Washington State transportation officials have decided that four ferries that provide car ferry service on Keystone, Port Townsend and San Juan Island routes are unsafe.

From the Seattle Times:

The Steel Electric boats — the Klickitat, the Illahee, the Nisqually and the Quinault — were built in 1927 and serve the Port Townsend-Keystone and the San Juan Islands interisland routes. They are the only car ferries that can operate in Keystone’s narrow, shallow harbor.

The affected ferries were pulled from service after their last sailing Tuesday night. By early Wednesday evening, drivers at the Edmonds dock were facing a 90-minute wait, although that had fallen to 60 minutes by midevening.

For now, the state’s oldest ferries will be tied up at least until the end of January while they are inspected for cracks and leaks in their hulls.

“It’s terrible. It’s like a bridge going down,” said State Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano Island, chairwoman of the Senate Transportation Committee. “The fact they’re facing a two-month outage is terrible.”

This is one of the costs of having only one organization control ferry service. When it goes down, there are no alternatives. In addition, the ferries have been maintained based on the same policies which obviously were not effective in preventing this from happening.

Just wait until they control health care.

FORTUNE Magazine is predicting a large decline in housing prices in most major markets over the next five years. Their calculations are based on the relationship between the cost of buying and renting and the fact that the ratio between the two has gotten so out of whack in recent years.

They predict that Seattle which has been a relatively strong market is slated to see a bigger decline than some other markets. They believe that a house priced in today’s market at $854K will cost $687K in another five years. They have similar predictions for most markets. That’s not going to make potential buyers rush out and buy houses.

An easier to read version of the article was published jointly with CNNMoney.com.

An exact replica of the FORTUNE article can be viewed using Olive Software. You click on the magazine cover and then “flip” to page 76 or find the table of contents and click on the link to the article. I found the interface awkward but it gives a much better representation of the table comparing different markets. (In the CNNMoney.com version you can use the tabs at the top to see the breakdown of the cost to own v. cost to rent ratio, which was visually represented in the Olive Software version of the article.)

It’s a fascinating article that I highly recommend.

If their predictions are correct, we can also expect major repercussions in other areas of the economy, including a lot of unemployment.

From AOL News:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (Nov. 15) - A Saudi court sentenced a woman who had been gang raped to six months in jail and 200 lashes - more than doubling her initial penalty for being in the car of a man who was not a relative, a newspaper reported Thursday.

The decision by the Qatif General Court came in a case that had sparked rare debate about the kingdom’s justice system when it surfaced more than a year ago.

In its decision Wednesday, the court also roughly doubled prison sentences for the seven men convicted of raping the 19-year-old woman, the Arab News reported on its English-language Web site.

According to Arab News, the court said the woman’s punishment was increased because of “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.”

She had initially been sentenced to 90 lashes after being convicting her of violating Saudi’s rigid laws on segregation of the sexes.

Bad girl!

A commentator in the Seattle-PI notes as I did eleven days ago that Hillary Clinton is trying to appeal to female voters by repeatedly telling them how at home in the kitchen she is in spite of her previous comments to the contrary.

Take off that apron, Hillary. Democrats want a winning presidential candidate, not a gourmet cook.

As first lady-to-be, Clinton once said, “I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.” The same woman, now running for president, is telling voters, “I’m very much at home in the kitchen.”

In this case, pandering to female voters is a big mistake. The sisterhood is famously fickle. Besides, in order to win, Clinton must grow her vote.

She already has a gender gap problem. More than half the married men in a new USA Today/Gallup Poll said they definitely wouldn’t vote for her. And the most recent New Hampshire primary poll taken by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion underscores Clinton’s dilemma.

Last month, Clinton led her closest competitor, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, by 21 percentage points. Now, the overall gap between them is down to 11 points — 36 percent for Clinton, compared with 25 percent for Obama. One of the biggest shifts occurred among men age 45 and older. Last month, Clinton led Obama and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina by 20 points among this group. Obama now leads Clinton by 13 points with this constituency.