Read it.

Avik Roy is a pretty prominent conservative health care policy expert, and he has the reputation of knowing what he’s talking about. We report, you decide.

Megan McArdle reads this crap so that you don’t have to.

Well, you know, if you tilt your head to one side and squint a little, you can sort of see … Obamacare. I called the House health care bill “Obamacare Lite,” but compared to the Senate bill, the House was offering a radical new taste sensation. The Senate bill touches very little of the underlying architecture of Obamacare; all it does is eliminate the insurance mandates, cut spending and give states somewhat more autonomy in how those dollars are spent. Repeal Obamacare, you say? They’re barely even worrying it.

Read it.

An official in the Nebraska state Democratic party has been removed from his position after an audio recording surfaced of him saying that he wished Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise had been killed last week when he was shot by a Democratic gunman during a congressional baseball practice.

Party chairwoman Jane Kleeb removed Phil Montag as chairman of the technology committee after an audio recording surfaced earlier this week of him saying that he was “glad” that Scalise was shot and that he wished “he was fucking dead.”

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Yeah, I can see toilets in India as being a significant part of Trump’s legacy. (After all, when draining the swamp, you’ve got to put all of the crap someplace….)

Read it.

Yeah, environmentalists all look pretty white to me. Sierra Club especially, they’re all a bunch of SWPL granola-crunchers.

Presumably non-white people have better things to do than hug trees.

‘Other countries have threatening neighbors; America has Mexicans and Canadians, whose greatest threats consist of cheap labor and porous borders.’

— Michael Ledeen, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership

Steve Sailer finds a real head-scratcher.

This is our challenge. We have to build a world where everyone has a sense of purpose and community. That’s how we’ll bring the world closer together. We have to build a world where we care about a person in India or China or Nigeria or Mexico as much as a person here.

Uh … how is demanding Americans care more about strangers on the opposite side of the world as much as they care about their neighbors in their own communities going to rebuild community in America?

The thing to keep in mind about Mark Zuckerberg is that whatever he says that he believes in, he really believes in. But not because it makes sense, but because he has a genius for increasing his wealth. Whatever ideas he pushes on you are ideas that will make him richer if you believe in them too. (Whether Zuck’s ideas will make you and your loved ones better off, though, is hardly his concern.)

Read it.

A member of the elite Special Forces unit, Joint Task Force 2, who has not been named, killed an Isis insurgent from 3,450 metres (2.1 miles) away.

The shot broke the previous record, held by Craig Harrison, a member of the British armed forces, by almost 1000 metres.

…

“The shot in question actually disrupted a Daesh [Isis] attack on Iraqi security forces,” a military source told the Globe and Mail.

“Instead of dropping a bomb that could potentially kill civilians in the area, it is a very precise application of force and because it was so far way, the bad guys didn’t have a clue what was happening,” the source added.

 

Read it.

Johannes Gutenberg’s converted wine press, which turned inked letters into books, remained the same in principle for 500 years. But by the mid-1980s cheaper, faster, and more efficient ways of transferring words and images onto paper doomed the old practice of arranging clunky blocks of type in a massive metal machine to obsolescence.

Yet today letterpress is in the throes of a full-blown revival. In 2000, a flatbed proof press, often used in teaching and for posters, cost Boxcar Press founder Harold Kyle about $100. By 2005, the price rose to a few thousand. Today, if you could persuade someone to part with it, you might pay $15,000.

…

Beneath the old-timey patina of letterpress goods is a full-scale digital reinvention that drags Gutenberg’s great creation into the full embrace of modern technology.

Read it.

Speaking truth to glower.

Jim Treacher points and laughs.

Jon Ossoff raised millions of dollars from people who couldn’t vote for him. He couldn’t even vote for himself. In retrospect, maybe that was a problem.

Congratulations to our newest member of Congress, Karen Handel. But if you think feminists and other Democrats are happy about a woman winning an election, if you think they’re celebrating this victory over rape culture and toxic masculinity and whatnot, you haven’t taken into account that the woman in question is a Republican.

Apparently Republicans aren’t real women. Somebody needs to e-mail Lindsey Graham immediately.

Zman nails it yet again.

It probably says something about us that we accept the dystopian future of Orwell as being to some degree inevitable, despite the fact he has proven to be wrong about most things. He was not wrong about everything. He got communism right in Animal Farm. His critique of writing is timeless and is probably more applicable today than in his era. On the other hand, the future is not “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Not even close. The future is a bot making sure you never get your feelings hurt or have a bad day.

Read it.

That’s one of the findings contained in documents that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is releasing as part of its ongoing probe into the death of Joshua Brown. The motorist from Ohio was killed last year in a Florida highway crash when the Tesla he was driving struck a tractor-trailer (PDF) as the semi was crossing an intersection of a divided highway that did not have a traffic signal. The crash raised eyebrows about the safety of new automated driving features when used during long stretches of driving. It was also the nation’s first crash fatality involving a vehicle in self-driving mode.

If the car tells you to do something, do it. We’ve seen this movie before

Model S driver had hands on steering wheel for 25 seconds during a 37-minute period.

Darwin Award candidate here.

Read it.

Peak Oil is upon us! Yeah, we’re going to be running out of oil soon! Time to switch over to ‘renewable’ fuels!

Read it.

Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes….

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Ben Thompson’s blog Stratechery is one of my go-to places for understanding the tech world.

As you might expect, given a goal as audacious as “taking a cut of all economic activity”, Amazon has several different strategies. The key to the enterprise is AWS: if it is better to build an Internet-enabled business on the public cloud, and if all businesses will soon be Internet-enabled businesses, it follows that AWS is well-placed to take a cut of all business activity.

On the consumer side the key is Prime. While Amazon has long pursued a dominant strategy in retail — superior cost and superior selection — it is difficult to build sustainable differentiation on these factors alone. After all, another retailer is only a click away.

One of Amazon’s key features (that everybody knows implicitly but few realize explicitly) is informational — people go to Amazon not just to buy stuff bot to find out what stuff there is to buy. I catch myself doing it multiple times a day: I have a need, and go to Amazon to find out whether somebody out there makes a product that will fit that need, and roughly what that product might cost.

This is the ‘network effect’ writ large; he bigger the Amazon ‘marketplace’ becomes, the better an approximation of the entire market it is, and the better the informational function that it can serve. I don’t know whether this was a conscious decision on Bezox’ part, but it may have been — when Amazon was Just Books, it dumped a universe of information on its site about books, many of which it didn’t even sell; old geezers of my generation may recall when Amazon was castigated by the Usual Suspects for doing so. But it got us accustomed to going to Amazon to find out what books were out there, even if they couldn’t be bought from Amazon, and eventually we got used to buying them from Amazon when we could, and that habit expanded with the expansion of Amazon’s stock.

This, though, is the brilliance of Prime: thanks to its reliability and convenience (two days shipping, sometimes faster!), plus human fallibility when it comes to considering sunk costs (you’ve already paid $99!), why even bother looking anywhere else? With Prime Amazon has created a powerful moat around consumer goods that does not depend on simply having the lowest price, because Prime customers don’t even bother to check.

Absolutely.

Today, all of the logistics that go into a Whole Foods store are for the purpose of stocking physical shelves: the entire operation is integrated. What I expect Amazon to do over the next few years is transform the Whole Foods supply chain into a service architecture based on primitives: meat, fruit, vegetables, baked goods, non-perishables (Whole Foods’ outsized reliance on store brands is something that I’m sure was very attractive to Amazon). What will make this massive investment worth it, though, is that there will be a guaranteed customer: Whole Foods Markets.

Read it.

This is the best overview I’ve seen.

Lileks.

It’s not quite accurate to say we lost power in last week’s harsh storm. It’s not like I couldn’t find it. “Hey, who had the power last, and where did you put it? Did it roll under the sofa? Wait, never mind — it was in my other pants pocket.”

No, the power was taken away. The transformer was hit by lightning, which seems to be the sort of thing a transformer would like: “Whoa! Awesome. That’s the good stuff. Set me up again, bartender.” But no, the transformer decided to do its best impersonation of a large star going nova while some snapped wires danced on the ground looking for squirrels to murder.

Read it.

Even without any James Bond upgrades.

Read it.

But, if you’re a proglodyte, it probably won’t.

Today while I was out running errands in my 5-year-old Honda Accord, I passed a Tesla. If I were a different kind of guy, seeing Elon Musk’s latest creation whisk past me as I trundled along in my middleclassmobile might have inspired a sense of personal envy, or even some worry about the social implications of inequality in America.

But I’m an economist. And let’s face it: In practical terms, the difference between a $200,000 Tesla and my last car, a beat-up minivan worth $2,000 at trade-in, is not all that large. They’re both safe forms of transportation that get you from point A to point B and, given legal limits and the reality of suburban traffic, most of the time they’re driven at roughly the same speeds.

In that sense, measures of income inequality overstate the differences within a developed country like the United States. The products available to the masses are, in many cases, nearly as good as those available only to the elite. Your garbageman’s old Timex and your podiatrist’s brand new Rolex serve almost precisely the same function.

It wasn’t always so. A century ago, a hungry rich person had access to significantly more food and more choices than a poor one. Yet even bluebloods would have been able to get their hands on less variety and quality than one now finds at an average Midwestern all-you-can-eat buffet. When Herbert Hoover promised “a chicken in every pot” in the election of 1928, it was the sort of pledge that no one expected a politician to actually keep. Today, each American consumes an average of 27 chickens a year, and obesity is a bigger problem than hunger.

Read it.

This reminds me of the SF story Gladiator-at-Law, in which one’s home is provided by one’s employer — lose your job, and you lose your home.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a ‘crisis’ if the yuppie hipsters on the Left Coast didn’t cause it with their crazy NIMBY land use laws. Their tax dollars at work.

Read it.

Will the Islamophobia never cease?

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

1. Avoid blimps
2. Avoid golf

Read it.

J.S.G. Boggs, who just died at age 62, was an artist whose career doubled as an extended economic experiment. Starting in the 1980s, he drew money. I don’t mean that he drew scenes with money in them. I mean he drew actual pieces of currency, and then tried, often successfully, to spend them.

Kind of like every Democrat President, except he was honest about it.

Read it.

When Israel waged a defensive military operation against Hamas in Gaza in the summer of 2014, the international community and the Obama administration alike were quick to offer condemnations, with then-State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki calling Israeli attacks on civilian facilities “appalling.” But if you’re still wondering what really went down during Operation Protective Edge, you might want to listen to Ateeq al-Falahi, the secretary general of the United Arab Emirates-based Red Crescent.

Hamas, al-Falahi said in a recent interview, deliberately launched rockets from a UAE-run field hospital in Gaza in the hope of provoking Israel to respond by shelling the facility. This shows (Hamas’s) wicked intentions and how they scarified us,” Al-Falahi said. “They always claim the enemy targets humanitarian envoys, but the betrayal came from them.”

Read it.

Sushi is not food. Sushi is bait.

Read it.

For me, one of the surest signs of a state-enforced monopoly is that most schools, whether public or private, look the same and act the same. About 90 percent of K-12 students go to public schools and while charters, home schooling, and other forms of more personalized and individualized education are gaining steam and changing the status quo, the simple fact is that most kids go to schools that are not all that different than the ones I went to as a kid in the 1970s, or that my parents went to when they were growing up in the goddamned 1930s! School starts in late August or early September and lets out in late May or early June, with requisite vacations that don’t take into account parental schedules or the well-observed loss of learning that takes place every summer. And schools start ridiculously early in the mornings and then let out in the mid-afternoon, for reasons that make no sense at all. Don’t buy into the myth that we’re prisoners of a agricultural-economy schedule, by the way. Even if that were true (and it ain’t), those days have long since passed and even farmers these days don’t work by an ag calendar.

I know there are schools out there that have adjusted their schedules to better edumicate teenagers. It really shouldn’t be so rare, though, and I can’t imagine it would be if school choice were more robust than it is. The Libertarian Moment—increasing comfort with choice and personalization that is abetted through technological and cultural innovation—has remade and improved every aspect of our commercial, professional, and personal lives. We can produce and consume all sorts of cultural expression on schedules of our choosing, we can work from home or an office, we can live with whomever we want and eat an ever-increasing array of food. And yet when it comes to legally mandated school, our kids are still getting up in the dark at a time when they are not just battling darkness but biology. That should change, and yesterday.

Read it.

Gotta love that Global Warming climate change. AlGore must have been along.

UPDATE: Arctic Expedition Cancelled Due to Excess “Climate Change”

Steve Sailer looks at the numbers.

The pattern is much the same as it has been in every election since 2000: In states where younger white people can better afford to buy a home, they are more likely to be married, have more children, and vote more Republican. In states where whites are less able to afford a home, they marry later, have fewer children, and vote more Democratic.

Read it.

Cities (urban areas or settlements) have been around for millennia. Over that time, cities have changed in form and function. But the way that people move around the city has materially changed only twice. Walking was predominant until less than 200 years ago, then came mass transit, the automobile and now autonomous cars and some substitution for driving by online technology.

Read it.

Because it lasts for a thousand years or more.

Also because it’s way cool.

Here’s proof:

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Randy Holcombe:

When a government is small, it can provide very limited benefits to special interest groups, so there is a small incentive for special interest groups to lobby the government. The successes of those that do lobby the government will cause the government to grow. This occurs because the great majority of voters and taxpayers are rationally ignorant about most government activity, making it easy to increase everybody’s taxes a small amount to provide a sizable benefit to a few. Most people do not have an incentive to investigate in detail the allocation of their tax dollars, but the special interest groups with the sizable benefit will repay the representatives with political support. Thus, special interest groups cause government growth.

The growth of government, in turn, raises the payoff available to special interest groups. With a higher payoff to special interest groups, this encourages the formation of new special interest groups to share in the payoff. A larger government can support a larger number of special interest groups. Thus, as government grows, more special interest groups form. The formation of special interest groups in turn increases the demand for special interest legislation, cause a further growth in government spending.

Read it.

Surely the Trump administration would be willing to add something to that? It would be a cheap price to pay to get rid of fake scientists.

Read it.

If you were to ask those people who marched for science if they believe in evolution, they would have answered with a resounding “yes”. Ask them if they believe that all branches of the human race evolved identically and you will be met with hostility. The problem, for them, is that an admission of the obvious — differential evolution, resulting in broad racial differences — leads to a fact that they don’t want to admit: there are broad racial differences in intelligence, differences that must have evolutionary origins.

In these degenerate modern times, science is only SCIENCE when it agrees with the Narrative.

http://dailysignal.com/2017/06/09/cartoon-media-still-hungry-comey-hearings/

Glenn Harlan Reynolds points the finger.

One reason why so many people don’t take climate change seriously is that the people who are constantly telling us it’s a crisis never actually act like it’s a crisis. They’re all-in for sacrifices by other people, but never seem to make much in the way of sacrifices themselves.

Funny how that works.

I’ll believe that climate change is a problem when real estate prices in Manhattan and Malibu start dropping.

Read it.

Something that few of us pay attention to, other than perhaps Lileks.

Read it.

No one knows what is going to happen 100 years from now — what problems human beings will face and what advances they’ll make. Are you willing to double your electrical bill — to European rates — to reduce global temperatures by two-tenths of 1 degree 100 years from now?

Not even AlGore, for all his psychic powers.

At the present, we do not know how to cost-effectively reduce many carbon-dioxide emissions, but we do know how to adapt to slowly rising sea levels and slightly warmer temperatures. Sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age, and there is no evidence that this rate of rise has increased during the past half-century — and mankind has adapted just fine. Despite rising sea levels, the island of Manhattan has grown in size over the last four centuries — because it makes economic sense to create landfills.

It is odd that many in the media and “public intellectuals” call people climate deniers who merely want to have a civil discussion about the rate of climate change and how much is caused by man — while, at the same time, being in deep denial about the real costs, particularly to the poor, of many of their proposed solutions.

Perhaps we’re not all going to die after all.

Rich liberals, like John Kerry and Leonardo DiCaprio, predicted dire consequences (more children with breathing problems) while, of course, conveniently ignoring the hypocrisy of the huge carbon footprint from their private jets and multiple large homes. These folks probably have no idea what they pay for electricity because it does not affect their lifestyles — so they can afford to be moralistic.

Plus being Chicken Little is very very profitable these days. Ask AlGore.

Read it.

So, to overcome any doubts on point one, the scientific and ecological community would have to show a scrupulous concern for the scientific method.

Instead, we have the opposite.

Meanwhile, there is, to date, no credible empirical evidence that the global temperatures on average are increasing. There has been no measured increase in twenty years.

Read it.

Hah.

Read it.

The bus versus streetcar debate became personal in Washington DC when a Megabus rammed a platform for the H Street streetcar. The crash put the streetcar out of service for several hours, and that particular platform for many days.

As if in retaliation, a streetcar rear ended a DC bus, injuring ten transit riders. There were only eight passengers on the bus, so the other two must have been on the streetcar and the Antiplanner wouldn’t be surprised if they were the only passengers on board.

Of course, the entire streetcar system was put out of commission while the messes were cleaned from each of the accidents. If only they had a vehicle that could pass one that was stationary because of an accident or breakdown. Maybe someday someone will invent one.

Read it.

Of course. Mother Nature scoffs at your puling climate alarmism.

And don’t get her started on AlGore….

Read it.

Remember.

Read it.

You want science? You can’t handle the science.

Read it.

Ask any Iraq War veteran about Jersey, Alaska, Texas, and Colorado and you will be surprised to get stories not about states, but about concrete barriers. Many soldiers deployed to Iraq became experts in concrete during their combat tours. Concrete is as symbolic to their deployments as the weapons they carried. No other weapon or technology has done more to contribute to achieving strategic goals of providing security, protecting populations, establishing stability, and eliminating terrorist threats. This was most evident in the complex urban terrain of Baghdad, Iraq. Increasing urbanization and its consequent influence on global patterns of conflict mean that the US military is almost certain to be fighting in cities again in our future wars. Military planners would be derelict in their duty if they allowed the hard-won lessons about concrete learned on Baghdad’s streets to be forgotten.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.