Amber is the color of illegal revenue.

Via Megan McArdle. From Here.

Six U.S. cities have been found guilty of shortening the amber cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners. The local governments in question have ignored the safety benefit of increasing the yellow light time and decided to install red-light cameras, shorten the yellow light duration, and collect the profits instead.

I hate the idea of police-by-camera. I think that police stations issue too many speeding tickets as it is, they aren’t trying to promote public safety, but instead they are just trying to raise revenue. I’m two for two on getting tickets while driving through middle-of-nowhere Texas (91 in an 80). The car was under control, there was no one else on the road (except for, of course, all of the cops driving 2008 V8 Mustangs), so how is it in the public interest to give me a ticket?

Radar camera’s are just ways for the city to raise absurd amounts of revenue by essentially creating a “driving-tax” which no one votes on. I feel considerably less-safe driving through intersections equipped with the radar cameras because cars abruptly slow-down when they get in range, causing traffic to back up and, I’m sure, extra accidents.

Iraq Paradox

Matt Yglesias makes an interesting observation:

Then beating the insurgents became the goal. Our troops had to stay in Iraq and risk their lives in order to kill the people who were trying to kill them to force them out of Iraq — we couldn’t leave until all the people who wanted us to leave were dead.

So this means that we won’t even try to leave Iraq until all of the insurgents are dead. When we are ready to leave, no one in Iraq will want us to leave. We’ll be “abandoning” all of the people who wanted us there in the first place since we’ve killed those who thought otherwise.