Read it.

Fly over a major city and what do you see? Not well defined centers and sub-centers. More likely, an amazing complexity. We argue that what is actually down there, but hard to actually see, is a large number of superimposed and spatially realized supply chains.

Read it.

Rather than inch upward from $10 per hour to $10.25 per hour in January 2016, as the rest of the state was doing, San Diego jumped its minimum wage to $11.50 per hour. In the year and three months since then, the number of food service jobs in San Diego has dropped sharply, with perhaps as many as 4,000 jobs lost, or never created in the first place.

Isn’t that amazing? If you raise the price of something, people buy less of it. Somebody ought to teach a course on that or something.

Read it.

When it comes to countries, there really isn’t any dispute. No country has ever gotten rich through high taxes, big government and onerous regulation. And yet, these are the very prescriptions that often are promoted by international organizations and left-wing politicians.

Adam Gopnik is not afraid to ask the hard questions. (Well, actually, it’s not that hard.)

Of all the prejudices of pundits, presentism is the strongest. It is the assumption that what is happening now is going to keep on happening, without anything happening to stop it. If the West has broken down the Berlin Wall and McDonald’s opens in St. Petersburg, then history is over and Thomas Friedman is content. If, by a margin so small that in a voice vote you would have no idea who won, Brexit happens; or if, by a trick of an antique electoral system designed to give country people more power than city people, a Donald Trump is elected, then pluralist constitutional democracy is finished. The liberal millennium was upon us as the year 2000 dawned; fifteen years later, the autocratic apocalypse is at hand. Thomas Friedman is concerned.

Read it.

California may never secede, or divide into different states, but it has effectively split into entities that could not be more different. On one side is the much-celebrated, post-industrial, coastal California, beneficiary of both the Tech Boom 2.0 and a relentlessly inflating property market. The other California, located in the state’s interior, is still tied to basic industries like homebuilding, manufacturing, energy and agriculture. It is populated largely by working- and middle-class people who, overall, earn roughly half that of those on the coast.

Over the past decade or two, interior California has lost virtually all influence, as Silicon Valley and Bay Area progressives have come to dominate both state politics and state policy. “We don’t have seats at the table,” laments Richard Chapman, president and CEO of the Kern Economic Development Corporation. “We are a flyover state within a state.”

…

Fresno, Bakersfield, Ontario and San Bernardino are rapidly becoming the Bantustans — the impoverished areas designed for Africans under the racist South African regime — in California’s geographic apartheid. Poverty rates in the Central Valley and Inland Empire reach over a third of the population, well above the share in the Bay Area. By some estimates, rural California counties suffer the highest unemployment rate in the country; six of the 10 metropolitan areas in the country with the highest percentage of jobless are located in the central and eastern parts of the state. The interior counties — from San Bernardino to Merced — also suffer the worst health conditions in the state.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it.

One of the disadvantages (among many) of the statist myth ‘intellectual property’.

Lileks.

For years, the key to weight loss has been obvious and simple: Eat less and move around more. Run 12 miles each day while licking a carrot and the pounds just melt away.

Kidding! Everyone on the internet knows that you can lose weight fast with This One Simple Trick, or This One Weird Trick. It’s either a diet so rich in fiber you might as well eat a plank of particleboard, or it’s a magic pill that makes the pounds fall off. Yes, a team of Actual Doctors (OK, podiatrists, but still doctors) have discovered a special substance called gullibilium. It increases your metabolism so high the food actually disappears on your fork before you eat it.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Welcome to the MBA Program.

Read it.

Those looks might strike you dead, but in the Victorian period, wallpaper could–and did–kill. In one sense, it wasn’t that unusual, writes Haniya Rae for The Atlantic. Arsenic was everywhere in the Victorian period, from food coloring to baby carriages. But the vivid floral wallpapers were at the center of a consumer controversy about what made something safe to have in your home.

The root of the problem was the color green, writes art historian and Victorianist Lucinda Hawksley for The Telegraph. After a Swedish chemist named Carl Sheele used copper arsenite to create a bright green, “Scheele’s Green” became the in color, particularly popular with the Pre-Raphaelite movement of artists and with home decorators catering to everyone from the emerging middle class upwards. Copper arsenite, of course, contains the element arsenic.

But I’ll bet it was gluten-free.

Read it.

Imagine the reaction if a white coach had said that about black players.

UPDATE: Big Media Won’t Go Near ‘R’ Word on Ball’s Racist Remarks

Go here to check it out.

We need to encourage Steve to insult and make fun of unpopular people so he can get rich like all the other liberal comedians.

Steve Sailer (who may or may not be a liberal comedian) reports.

It would appear that the one thing white people and black people agree on is that the way to get a good education is to send your kid to a school with a lot of white kids in it. I’m glad that’s settled.

Of course, that raises a number of questions that we’re not allowed to raise because that would be Noticing.

Read it.

I don’t think I believe that.

Steve Sailer goes where nobody else dares.

Just as the 21st century has witnessed the paradox of the rhetoric of white privilege and the reality of white death, we’ve also seen increasing black privilege, but with the benefits flowing mostly to the whitest of blacks. The ongoing flight from white helps those blacks who are almost but not quite white, such as former national security adviser Susan Rice and her affirmative-action-eligible children.

White elites are happy to promote black privilege because they don’t see many American blacks as being anything other than token competition for their children at getting the really good jobs. For example, in 2016, more than a half century after the political triumph of civil rights and in a year in which the legal profession donated 28 times more money to Hillary than to Trump, only 1.81 percent of law-firm partners were black.

ZMan waxes philosophical.

Ethical theories like utilitarianism, say that an action is right or wrong, depending on the consequences it produces. A deed is judged as good if it has a good result. The intentions of the actor are of little or no consequence, because what matters is the final result. Similarly, the deed has no intrinsic morality because the morality is entirely dependent on the results. The most common expression for this is that the ends justify the means. Most of what we think of as the Left falls into this ethical category.

The obvious alternative to this is what Jeremy Bentham called deontological ethics or deontology. This loosely means the knowledge of what is right and proper. A Catholic, for example, acts in accordance with the teachings of the Church. A lawyer conducts himself in accordance with the demands of Lucifer. The act is good or evil intrinsically, regardless of downstream outcomes. What matters is the fidelity to principle or a moral code. The means justifies the ends is the most common formulation of this.

Read it.

Funny thing about that. The Berlin Wall was there for a reason; it worked.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

The DemLegHump Media will do their best to ignore it and cover it up, of course. Nothing to see here, move along, move along….

Read it.

The Danish reputation got a boost among the American left in last year’s presidential election, when none other than Bernie Sanders himself plugged the country as a model for the United States to emulate. But admirers of the popular democratic socialist politician may be surprised to learn exactly how Denmark was able to become an international leader in ICT delivery. It wasn’t super-charged regulation, top-down “net neutrality” rules, or major government subsidies that did the trick.

So how did Denmark do it? Deregulation. By virtually eliminating their equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Danes now enjoy some of the best ICT service on the planet.

ZMan looks how history has changed.

One difference between the Industrial Revolution and the Technological Revolution is the trail of breadcrumbs each left behind, as it worked its way through society. Today, Americans still drive over roads and bridges built during the peak of the industrial age. Even though our consumer goods are made by foreigners, they still use the same practices the West developed for industry. Even in blighted cities, you can still find old factory buildings that remind us of the past.

The technological age is a different animal. It tends to erase its own footsteps. Lotus Development Corp is a good example. It was not just that it lost the competition for desktop productivity software. Everything about it was consumed and recycled. Walk around Cambridge today and you cannot tell that Lotus even existed. The tech economy is a soylent green economy. Once the utility of its creations are exhausted, everything about it is consumed, erased from existence, as if people are ashamed of it.

…

Whether you call it the technological age or the global age, these are just polite terms for cosmopolitanism, scaled to the supranational. In the city, you don’t build, you hustle. You don’t own, you rent. Nothing is permanent because a stationary target is an easy target. Instead you make what you can and you move onto the next thing. If you can shift the burden onto someone else, all the better. That’s how the game is played because in the city, everyone is a stranger.

Read it.

Last week New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof joined Robert Redford, Mike Huckabee, and Norman Ornstein in conflating the humanities with federal subsidies for the humanities. Kristof assumes that those of us who think we could muddle through without the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) must not understand the importance of books. He therefore sets out to educate us.

The major defect of people who want the government to do everything for us is the overwhelming delusion that if the government doesn’t do something it therefore won’t get done.

Lest you think that Kristof “sounds elitist” when he talks about the importance of Big Bird, he wants you to know that “I’ve seen people die for ideas,” including the Tiananmen Square protesters who in 1989 “sacrifice[d] their lives for democracy.” What that has to do with the merits of federal funding for the CPB is anyone’s guess. Kristof seems to be invoking dead dissidents in the name of keeping Sesame Street available on all of the local channels where it currently can be seen.

Another major defect of people who want the government to do everything for us is rampant infection with the Aggregation Fallacy. Those whose lives consist of roaming the land seeking for some discrimination to smash appear incapable of making elementary intellectual distinctions where such distinctions are important.

Walter Olson rips the mask off of some Fake News.

It made for great copy – irresistibly clickable and compulsively shareable. “Trump’s Budget Would Kill a Program That Feeds 2.4 Million Senior Citizens,” blared Time Magazine’s headline. “Trump Proposed Budget Eliminates Funds for Meals on Wheels,” claimed The Hill, in a piece that got 26,000 shares.

But it was false. And it wouldn’t have taken long for reporters to find and provide some needed context to the relationship between federal block grant programs, specifically Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), and the popular Meals on Wheels program.

Steve Sailer reviews a book.

Goodhart renames the new tribes the “Anywheres” (roughly 20 to 25 per cent of the population) and the “Somewheres” (about half), with the rest in between. And it broadly works. Those who see the world from anywhere are, he points out, the ones who dominate our culture and society, doing well at school and moving to a residential university, and then into a professional career, often in London or abroad. “Such people have portable ‘achieved’ identities,” he says, “based on educational and career success which makes them . . . comfortable and confident with new places and people.”

Looked for the phrase “based out of” in bios. It used to be that only hitmen identified themselves as “based out of” somewhere.

…

One paradox is that Anywheres tend to have extremely strong prejudices against living just about anywhere, instead paying $4000 per month rent to live in San Francisco, say. Just ask an Anywhere why Queens isn’t good enough for him compared to pricier Brooklyn. He’ll tell you why. …

Read it.

Beats a hashtag any day.

Read it.

Considering the sort of people who inhabit the Province of Ontario, I can’t say that I have a problem with that.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Read it.

A note to Dutch innkeepers: If you are going to host a convention of lock pickers, and you promise them free Wi-Fi, it is probably a futile gesture to then require paid access with a password. I learned this one evening a few years ago in the Stay-Okay Hostel in Sneek (pronounced like the serpent), a midsized city in the north of the Netherlands. When I asked a conventioneer if Wi-Fi was complimentary, he said there had been some confusion with the hostel. But not to worry, he said: Someone had clandestinely added an access point. I logged on.

Read it.

R.R. Reno’s essay, “A Dissolving Age” (March 2017), raises legitimate concerns about trends in modern American society, but the author is wrong to fix the blame on America’s growing economic ties to the rest of the world.

Reno’s thesis is that globalization?—?which he fairly defines as “the relatively free flow of capital, goods, and labor through most of the world”?—?is one of the principal forces that is dissolving the traditional attachment of Americans to our culture, community, and nation. The author laments “the utilitarian despotism of global capitalism,” which he blames for supplanting the sovereignty of the United States and our patriotic feelings toward our country.

Rather than a point by point response, let me home in on three of the more debatable aspects of Reno’s indictment.

Read it.

I have a copy of the first edition. It’s probably worth a lot of money by now.

Read it.

Our counter-offer: You can have California. We’ll even pay you to take it.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

ZMan looks behind the curtain.

One of the remarkable things about the Cloud People is they have a non-linear timeline that has more holes than the fossil record. For most of them. the world started in the 1960’s. That’s because the Cloud is dominated by Boomers, but it is also when the Cloud started to form up as a social force. The result is they have two versions of the past. Their past, the 60’s and 70’s, and the long ago past, when Lincoln defeated Hitler.

This ahistorical world view is why they reflexively compare every foreign leader to Hitler and every problem in world affairs to Munich. It’s even more present tense for domestic matters. They have never stopped fighting the Civil Rights Movement. T.N. Coates makes $50K a speech because his kid brushed up against an old white women on an escalator once and that was just like the cops attacking the blacks at Selma.

…

So-called foodie culture is interesting in that it is not really a culture. It is the result of lack of culture. The people endlessly searching for a new dish or new cuisine do so because they have nothing of their own or at least nothing they wish to hold up as their own. The endless search for some new exotic cuisine is a distraction from facing the fact that their own culture is dead and its artifacts are now just museum pieces.

Read it.

Well, hate makes you ugly, and nobody can hate as well as Leftist politicians.

Read it.

A remarkably incisive analysis.

Of course, those who study history recognize that all radical ideologies get taken over the cliff by their fringe. But they never learn.

Read it.

Prediction: In any contest between a Real Hamburger and a Fake Hamburger, the Real Hamburger will win every time.

Notice how many people are making fake meat out of plants, and how nobody is making fake plants out of meat. Think about that.

Tyler Cowen looks at what the Crust obsesses about these days.

Since the 1960s and ’70s, food has replaced music’s centrality to American culture. These are invariably somewhat subjective impressions, but I’d like to lay out my sense of how the social impact of music has fallen and the social role of food has risen.

…

Most of the top music from the 1990s, such as say Alanis Morissette, would sound current if released today, a sign of cultural stasis in what was once a highly socially charged and rapidly changing sector. In 1967, music from 20 or even 10 years earlier sounded quite different and indeed archaic.

…

Restaurants are increasingly an organizing and revitalizing force in our cities, and eating out has continued to rise as a means of socializing. America’s educated professional class may be out of touch with sports and tired of discussing the weather, and so trading information about new or favorite restaurants, or recipes and ingredients, has become one of the new all-purpose topics of conversation. Food is a relatively gender-neutral topic, and furthermore immigrant newcomers can be immediately proud of what they know and have eaten.

Megan McArdle visits America for Bloomberg News.

There’s no getting around it: For a girl raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Salt Lake City is a very weird place.

I went to Utah precisely because it’s weird. More specifically, because economic data suggest that modest Salt Lake City, population 192,672, does something that the rest of us seem to be struggling with: It helps people move upward from poverty. I went to Utah in search of the American Dream.

Columnists don’t talk as much as they used to about the American Dream. They’re more likely to talk about things like income mobility, income inequality, the Gini coefficient?—?sanitary, clinical terms. These are easier to quantify than a dream, but also less satisfying. We want money, yes, but we hunger even more deeply for something else: for possibility. It matters to Americans that someone born poor can retire rich. That possibility increasingly seems slimmer and slimmer in most of the nation, but in Utah, it’s still achievable.

You will have noticed, if you have been paying attention, that the loudest clamoring about being ‘sanctuary cities’ comes from yuppie hipster enclaves like San Francisco or Malibu or West Palm Beach or Manhattan. The reason for this is that the Upper Crust can’t afford to lose their Underclass dependents, upon whom they rely for domestic servants, nannies and housekeepers and yardboys and such.

Scrape off the icing of virtue-posturing and that’s all it is. Those who scream loudest about ‘living wage’ are the same ones who are ready to die in the last ditch to continue paying their illegal servitors a less-than-market wage for their Upper Crust lifestyle.

So, as with any other area of life, tune out the bleatings and follow the money.