Read it.

Adam Leitman Bailey, a Manhattan attorney who runs a real estate firm, says he looks to hire law school graduates who have grit, ambition and a resolve to succeed in the legal profession.

Considering some of the dreck they teach in the Ivy League these days, that’s probably a good idea.

Lileks.

That’s the part that brings you up short: all you can do is go on record, which in the end has the same impact as having your name on the passenger manifest of the Titanic. There is no point arguing with people whose worldview is based on their own dismay at having been dropped, against their will, in the society that’s seven-to-eleven years away from the imminent Utopia; the only problem they seem to have are things that aren’t problems, and even then their braying and snarking is just conspicuous signaling of Virtuous Positions. Every conversation is the equivalent of slamming down those 4+ Uno cards over and over and over.

Read it.

To this day, my biggest movie beef can be distilled to one inelegant, juvenile question:

“Why don’t they just kill That Guy?”

“That Guy.” His names are legion: Kasper Gutman. Darth Vader. The Sheriff of Nottingham. Mr. Potter (although Uncle Billy needed killing even more). Whoever the head guy is in all the Hunger Games flicks I’ve never seen because I’d be yelling, “You have BOWS AND ARROWS, ferchrissakes!” from the back of the theater.

Did you grow up when I did, when in every other movie, That Guy was the Evil Southern Sheriff Who Ran the Whole Town? There was no escape from his suffocating power and influence, his ominous chortle, and his giant belly (which took up a third of the drive-in screen). He decided who voted, who won, who went to jail, and who got off scot-free. And, of course, he was a Klansman or something like it.

If any genre was guaranteed to trigger my party-pooping protestations, it was this one. Think about it: Almost every character in these hicksploitation flicks is already heavily armed and surely knows of some holler where That Guy’s admittedly corpulent corpse could still be stashed undiscovered.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, has the same diskile for the misuse of this term that i do.

The etymology of the word “privilege” is obvious if you think about it: “privi” – private; “lege” – legislation.  Private legislation.  (“Special privileges” is, therefore, a pleonasm.)  A person who is truly privileged, therefore, is a person who benefits from a special use of government force wielded in his or her favor.  This use of force is not generalizable beyond the individual (or small, closed group) for whom the privilege is created.  A genuine privilege is a benefit that government bestows on only an individual or on a small select group with the intention of benefiting that individual or members of that small group even if such benefits come at the greater expense of the general public.

 

Lileks.

When the grizzly at the Minnesota Zoo picked up a rock and smashed the glass that stood between him and having kid-kabob for lunch, maybe he was telling us something.

Reference: Minnesota Zoo bear slams rock into glass pane, shattering it ‘like a windshield’

Read it.

Claire Cain Miller is a representative promoter/consumer of the conventional wisdom (e.g., she pushed Ellen Pao). So, it’s worth noting how she begins her piece by assuming that human frailty and evil must be behind the disparate outcomes of algorithms. Progressives assume they are on the side of Science and Rationality, which have proven that all people are identical, so when robots discover differences, it must be due to Wreckers.

Progressives are at heart conspiracy theorists. They believe in data that agrees with their preconceived notions; when it doesn’t, it’s because of the machinations of Emmanuel Goldstein evil people, especially right-wing evil people (than which no people are, or can be, more evil).

Read it.

The Anti-Discrimination Center, a Manhattan-based non-profit, filed a lawsuit in federal court this week, claiming that New York City’s affordable housing program perpetuates “entrenched segregation.”

The lawsuit takes issue with a common policy in which affordable housing developers set aside 50 percent of the apartments in a new development for prospective tenants already living in the community district. This means access is “effectively prioritized for white residents” who already reside in neighborhoods with the best schools and amenities and “limited for African-American and Latino New Yorkers who do not,” according to the lawsuit.

One of the chief complaints against ‘gentrification’ is that it pushes out existing residents. This has sparked violent confrontations in, for example, San Francisco.

Read it.

As we know from countless historical novels, movies and costume dramas, the steps toward a duel are highly codified, starting with a real or imagined insult to a lady or one’s personal honor. After the insufferable affront comes the challenge, often accompanied by the “soufflet” or slap, the icy presentation of one’s card, and a demand for satisfaction, soon followed by the choice of weapons and the naming of seconds. Come the evening before the actual “rencontre,” at least one of the duelists, either racked with fearful misgivings or maintaining a languid sang-froid, will have settled his affairs so that he can spend what may be his last hours composing a letter to a beloved wife or mistress.

Read it.

How about — “Socialism: It’s Not Just For Old Rich White Guys Any More”.

Read it.

As you might expect, your money goes farther in Red States.

Richard Fernandez is on a roll today.

It appears that the world is having an outbreak of stupidity. In the imebecile olympics, America may well emerge best off by ironically being the least competent at being incompetent.  For example it is distracted right now by the problem of hauling down a 150 year old flag from a defeated government from several state capitols.  Someone said on Twitter that when he boarded an airplane in Paris everyone was preoccupied with the Greek exit, but when he alighted in Atlanta everyone was talking about Donald Trump. This lack of focus may allow the others to pull ahead in the race to the bottom.

…

Reverting to paper may actually improve security.  Consider why this might be so.

The great benefit of paper clearance forms (and one might add, paper ballots) is that it limits the ability of bureaucrats to play games with data.  The lower tech medium puts the kibosh on all the plans, mandates and improvements they are just dying to implement. All that gender stuff is hard to implement when you’re faced with a stack of paper reaching to the ceiling, besides making the information harder to leak, misuse or steal.  It disempowers the bureaucrats.

The fact that reverting to lower tech may actually improve security suggests that lack of money isn’t the problem, nor are the shortcomings of computer hardware. The biggest shortage plaguing the elites today is a deficit of intelligence. They are a menace to themselves and to the public; and are not even smart enough to know how dumb they are.

Read it.

And will it work on Wall Street?

Steve Sailer thinks deep thoughts so that you don’t have to.

The concept of America being divided into sprawling red Republican regions and dense blue Democrat districts first became a cliché In November–December 2000. Over the past decade and a half I’ve probably thought as much about the underlying reasons as anybody, and in this column I’d like to speculate on an even more fundamental cause behind the red-blue divide.

…

That the partisan divide is related to density is clear. My contribution in 2004–05 was to point out that the red-blue map is related to affordability of family formation, a topic first explicated by Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s but largely ignored in recent decades.

…

But perhaps there are even more fundamental reasons for the density divide. The central red vs. blue identity gap falls between the Core vs. the Fringe of American life: The Obama coalition is a crazy quilt of identity groups who can be held together only by stoking fear and loathing of Core Americans.

In my terminology, the Filling vs the Crust.

Read it.

Just in case you doubted Jonah Goldberg.

Frederick Douglass explains it all to you.

Read it.

The postulate that nature abhors a vacuum seems to apply in politics as elsewhere. There is a vacuum in the Democratic field of candidates for president. Like Gene McCarthy in 1968, Bernie Sanders is in the process of demonstrating the existence of the vacuum. Again, like McCarthy in 1968, there his utility ends. Sanders would not be a viable Democratic candidate for president.

If that is so, then the Republican Presidential race must suck real bad (e.g. Trump).

Hm. Come to think of it….

The vacuum is the space for a plausible alternative to Madam Hillary. Such a candidate would have to be liberal and able to recite the regnant shibboleths with conviction, of course, but he would also have to be likable and honest in his own way in order to distinguish himself from Madam Hillary. This candidate would instantly slow and have a good chance of interrupting the Clinton death march to the Democratic nomination, which seems to be enacting a variant of what Leo Strauss called the joyless quest for joy. In this case it is the joyless quest for power.

Considering how much Democrites lust for power even on their slowest days, the present dearth of candidates would seem to undermine the premise.

Will Joe Biden fill the space created by Hillary’s candidacy?

Probably not. To Quote Joey the Hit Man, speaking of Nixon-McGovern: ‘I had a choice between a fool and a crook. Naturally, I voted for the crook.’

Biden, let it be noted, is 72. Because Barack Obama ended the careers of so many younger Democrat officeholders only the geriatric contingent like Biden are plausible alternatives to Madam Hillary. We know Biden is possessed by the ambition to be president. He would be a fool not to challenge Madam Hillary. He’s not the brightest bulb in the room, but he’s no fool.

Well….

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, offers some advice for the perplexed.

Here’s this week’s precept:

Avoid fucked-up people.

Most citizens of a functioning society live in a bourgeois style. They obey the law, keep regular hours, and brush their teeth. They get as much education as they can tolerate, acquire a marketable skill, work, marry, raise kids, and keep their debts under control.

The people I’m advising you to avoid, the fucked-up people—hereinafter FUPs—are the others. You’ve met them, or will: the drunks and moochers, the losers and dropouts, the profligates and unemployables. They will at best waste your time, at worst drag you down (?) into fucked-uppery.

Amen to that.

Read it.

One of the great statistics being bandied about in the great inequality debate is that the Walton family have more wealth between the four siblings than the bottom 40 per cent of Americans do in total. Apparently this is something most shocking – and, of course, something must be done.

I would argue that there’s nothing very unusual in this at all and also that it’s actually a thoroughly good idea. Who knows, by the time I’ve finished explaining why one or two of you might even agree with me.

Read it.

If it doesn’t blow up somewhere along the trip.

No, thank you.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Coulter’s latest best-seller, the impressively researched ¡Adios, America!, of course features numerous witticisms. We’re constantly told that conservatives aren’t funny by people without the native wit to realize what a large percentage of professional comedy writers are on the Right. (It’s not unknown for TV writers to email jokes to Ann that they don’t dare use on their own shows.)

Slate actually publishes something useful.

Usually, when we say “American slavery” or the “American slave trade,” we mean the American colonies or, later, the United States. But as we discussed in Episode 2 of Slate’s History of American Slavery Academy, relative to the entire slave trade, North America was a bit player. From the trade’s beginning in the 16th century to its conclusion in the 19th, slave merchants brought the vast majority of enslaved Africans to two places: the Caribbean and Brazil. Of the more than 10 million enslaved Africans to eventually reach the Western Hemisphere, just 388,747—less than 4 percent of the total—came to North America. This was dwarfed by the 1.3 million brought to Spanish Central America, the 4 million brought to British, French, Dutch, and Danish holdings in the Caribbean, and the 4.8 million brought to Brazil.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

“Evolution” is still highly prized, as it was generations ago, what’s changed is the emphasis within that. From Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, or even before then, up until the 1960’s sometime it was: Listen to the old people, because they are keepers of the ideas that are kept. They bear the fruits of eons of painful trial & error, good ideas that are formed by way of process-of-elimination, ideas that we know are right but cannot be formed any other way. The stuff that had to be learned. If you value what is good about evolution, look to the old people because they’re the ones who have it.

Now we still value what is good about evolution, but it is the young people who have it. The only role the old people can play is to try to act like the young people; that, and show us how this “survival of the fittest” thing works, and that’s during their final exit. Clean out the gene pool by eradicating themselves from it. The young people have something of a perceived monopoly on knowledge, theirs is the only knowledge that is worth anything at all.

We’ve lost trust. It used to be, the old people would trust the young people, to renew & carry along the value system that civilization should endure and remain strong. The young people would trust the old people, to intermix a bit of valuable personal experience with the equally valuable legacy-wisdom, to do something besides just repeat mindlessly what they’d been told back when they were the same age. So there would have been this sense of intergenerational trust, going in both directions, and it’s no longer there. We’ve also lost respect. This would start with the obvious realization of “Hooray, I’m all grown-up now, but I’m not the first human being who ever reached adulthood — lots of other ideas have been tried, some of actually worked, and other people have had problems before I had any, so let’s see what came of all that.” That, too, is gone. The loud-crowd, today, always seems to think history began at nine o’clock this morning, and the only purpose for any previously-existing idea is to be dismantled. So some hot new “Beverly Hills 90210? generation can show how cool it is, and of course they do that by carrying out this dismantling.

A civilization that values its older people will always have to value life. Even if it somehow doesn’t want to do this, it will have no other choice once it makes the decision to honor and respect old people, because we’re all headed in that direction. Conversely, a civilization that reserves all of its respect for the young, will have to place a premium value on death, because that’s the only way anybody is going to stay that way for very long. And of course if nothing is valuable besides whatever is cool, and nothing is cool besides what is new, that makes for an awful lot of wreckage and destruction that’s going to have to be done. And it’s going to have to be done by everyone who wants to matter, and all of the time.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re in the weird situation of having pretty much bet the country on a former McKinsey consultant named David Coleman’s vision of education. First, Coleman sold his Common Core K-12 idea to Bill Gates, who has pretty much bought off most potential prestigious dissidents in the field of education. Then the College Board hired Coleman to rewrite the SAT college admission test.

…

In everything I’ve read about Coleman, I’ve never seen anybody claim he knows much about testing. You don’t have to be a professional psychometrician to have common sense about testing, and Coleman certainly has the raw brainpower to eventually come to grasp the ins and outs. But the education racket has a long history of reformers getting into it on the assumption that everybody who came before them must have been an idiot, then slowly reinventing the wheel before they get depressed and bored.

Putting this much untested power into the hands of one obscure individual with no track record sounds like a bad idea. On the other hand, in an era when honest discussion of the realities of American education is largely forbidden because it’s all about various Gaps, turning control over to a single guy who strikes Bill Gates as smart might be about as good as we can do.

Read it.

“People come here because they say they can hear the electrics,” she replied. “I don’t know if it’s a real condition or not. But the electro- sensitives swear it is, so… to each their own, I say.” She didn’t look convinced. “I don’t really mind not having a cellphone,” she added. “You get used to that. And a lot of us have Wi-Fi in our homes anyway, so that’s OK.”

Hang on, so in The Town Without Wi-Fi, there is in fact quite a lot of Wi-Fi? I worried that this would not make for as catchy a headline as I had hoped. “Not publicly, but at home some of us do. It’s not illegal, but the observatory has a truck that can sense it. They’ll come round and ask you to turn it off.”

Read it.

This is the Oceansphere, a gigantic highly automated fish farm that will grow 1,000 tons of ahi and bluefin tuna from eggs to harvest size at a depth of 1,300 feet a few miles off the coast of Hawaii.

There’s lots to say here about the technology, which includes an automatic feeding system, water quality sensors, and thrusters that keep the sphere stationary, but let’s all just marvel at the fact that the Fish Matrix is real and set to begin installation by the end of the year. Hawaii Oceanic Technology CEO Bill Spencer told West Hawaii Today that this first sphere is mostly about refining the technology, but that after installation and testing the earliest harvest could occur in late 2017.

Considering all of the hand-wringing about low fish stocks and endangered fish species, ‘farming’ fish seems an obvious thing. What is less obvious is why it’s not bigger than it is.

The Oceansphere project has been years in the making — the video above is from 2008 — and HOT has been fighting legal and regulatory battles the entire time to make it reality. According to West Hawaii Today, 1,700 people signed a petition opposing the sphere, and 400 more wrote letters opposing the extension of construction deadlines in 2012. “The bottom line is the benefit does not outweigh the risks, no matter what kind of fish they plan to grow,” Diane Kanealii of theKailapa Community Association in Kawaihae told the paper, while Rob Parsons of Food & Water Watch is quoted calling it a “factory feedlot in our ocean.”

Well, there you go. No good deed goes unpunished. ‘What risks?’, I hear you ask. Unfortunately, I don’t hear an answer.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

— G. K. Chesterton, The Thing

If we executed everybody who has a tattoo, the world would be much improved thereby.

Discuss.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

Very first test I apply to any presidential candidate is they have to be FOR something.

Bernie Sanders passes the test, Hillary doesn’t, Carly Fiorina does, Jeb Bush doesn’t, Ted Cruz does, Lindsey Graham doesn’t, Sarah Palin would if she was running, Ben Carson probably not, Chris Christie definitely not.

This is just the very first test. It’s asking so little. A candidate’s long-held personal-pet-peeve, would suffice.

It is positively shocking that half the candidates, on both sides, flunk. They’re just outspoken and so wonderful, with name recognition, and it’s their turn! But, they don’t stand for anything.

We just don’t need it.

YES!

Get it.

It’s free, so you have no excuse.

Read it.

When I was an undergrad at Harvard, the English department produced fancy brochures about the opportunities available to its majors: teacher, editor, Rhodes scholar. Personal assistant was not listed. I hadn’t even heard of such positions until senior year, when older friends, artistically inclined friends, started snagging them. It’s the position I think I’ve heard most about now.

…

Welcome to the main artery into creative or elite work—highly pressurized, poorly recompensed, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes menial secretarial assistance. From the confluence of two grand movements in American history—the continued flight of women out of the home and into the workplace, and the growing population of arts and politically oriented college graduates struggling to survive in urban epicenters that are increasingly ceded to bankers and consultants—the personal assistant is born.

This is actually a reversion to the medieval practice, where an important man’s ‘secretary’ was a candidate for important positions later on. We are so used to thinking of secretaries as clerical drudges that we forget the roots of the job. You’ll remember the famous scene in A Man For All Seasons where Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More are speculating on who will wear the Lord Chancellor’s chain after the Cardinal. Wolsey mentions his secretary, Thomas Cromwell, and More doesn’t immediately scoff but rather considers it seriously.

Read it.

Trial by battle was a medieval European form of legal proof in which difficult lawsuits were decided by a single combat between two duellists before a judge.

Nowadays drive-bys serve as a crude substitute.

Read it.

Perhaps the least controversial thing that President Obama ever said was that “in the coming decades, a high school diploma is not going to be enough. Folks need a college degree.” This vision is commonplace, but it implies a bleak future where everyone must work harder just to stay in place, and it’s just not true. Nothing forces us to funnel students into a tournament that bankrupts the losers and turns the winners into conformists. But that’s what will happen until we start questioning whether college is our only option.

…

But what if higher education is really just the final stage of a competitive tournament? From grades and test results through the U.S. News & World Report rankings of the colleges themselves, higher education sorts us all into a hierarchy. Kids at the top enjoy prestige because they’ve defeated everybody else in a competition to reach the schools that proudly exclude the most people. All the hard work at Harvard is done by the admissions officers who anoint an already-proven hypercompetitive elite. If that weren’t true — if superior instruction could explain the value of college — then why not franchise the Ivy League? Why not let more students benefit? It will never happen because the top U.S. colleges draw their mystique from zero-sum competition.

…

Of course, you can’t become successful just by dropping out of college. But you can’t become successful just by going to college, either, or by following any formula. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t famous because of the similar ways in which they left school. We know their names because of what each of them did differently from everybody else.

Read it.

Prediction: Peruvian men will ignore animal rights activists.

Many called on the owner of the crocodile farm to be charged by police.

Prediction: Peruvian police will ignore many.

The RSPCA, which cannot investigate the incident due to it taking place in South America, told The Independent, “We would like to express our shock and disgust at the events in the video.

Which, to such people, is almost as good as actually doing something about it.

I wonder: If the animal in question had been, say, a similarly-sized rat (and they have them that size in Peru), rather than a cute iddle puddy-tat, would the ‘many’ have been so many? Somehow I doubt it.

Read it.

Some good advice for people who, if they were the sort of people who listened to good advice, wouldn’t need it.

The concept of “white privilege” has become a staple of left-wing think, especially on college campuses. But is it a meaningful way to talk about race? Only, I would argue, in a limited sense that those who bandy the term about probably don’t have in mind.

Like Humpty-Dumpty, they’ve decided that a word means what they want it to mean, and to Hell with everybody else.

Whites as a class aren’t “privileged” economically. Nearly all white children had better obtain knowledge and skills, and then be prepared to work hard at least five days a week (and, of course, eschew criminal and other self-destructive behavior), if they want to make a good living. Nearly all black children who follow this path will also make a good living.

Funny how that works.

Morsy and Rothstein propose that the parenting gap be addressed through “quality preschool.” They probably assume that to propose that parents who aren’t doing so start talking, listening, and reading to their kids would make them look foolish.

Yet these practices, not preschool, are the key to spreading “white privilege” around.

As I said, above.

JOHN adds: How about “Asian privilege”? Asian-Americans earn significantly more money than whites, on the average. Is this because they are privileged in some way? Obviously not. On the contrary, the spectacular success of Asian-Americans is due mostly to the same effective parenting that Paul described with respect to whites–only more so. This has everything to do with solid values and hard work, and nothing to do with “privilege.”

Indeed. If the culture is dysfunctional, as black American culture obviously is, then the people who grow up in that culture will turn out to be dysfunctional to, more often than not.

Read it.

Well. There you go.

This triggers very discomforting thoughts about Austrian beer….

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, gets back to basics.

One of the greatest services that economics offers to humankind is the demonstration that prices set on markets are not arbitrary dictates.  Instead, prices (1) reflect underlying realities and, in doing so, (2) inform producers and consumers about how best to coordinate their actions with each other and (3) give incentives to countless producers and consumers to adjust their actions to each other in coordinating ways.  In short, prices reflect, inform, and incentivize.  (I hate the word “incentivize,” but I now give up trying to buck the trend that has made its use widely acceptable.)

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

I think it’s about reminding the Democrites that their baggage is waiting for them on the platform.

Read it.

This thesis examines several organised examples of live role-play: Southron Gaard, a branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism based in Christchurch, New Zealand; larping, as represented by two documentary films, Darkon and Monster Camp, that document the activities of larping organisations in the USA; and ‘Lord of the Rings Tour’, a tourism trip from Christchurch to ‘Edoras’, a fictional location from Middle-earth, the fantasy world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Novels and Peter Jackson’s filmic adaptations thereof. These organised leisure activities provide platforms for the pursuit of active, physical involvement with the images and ideas of medieval fantasy. In them, participants find ways to bring these fantastic images and ideas onto their bodies in reality and, perhaps as a result, closer to their everyday lives in ways that have more significant social implications than may at first be apparent.

Read it.

Counterfactual history is a risky endeavor. But the events that followed America’s entry into World War I strongly suggest that had President Woodrow Wilson permanently “kept us out of war,” as his 1916 presidential campaign slogan boasted, the conditions that produced World War II would not have been sown.

The Great War began in August 1914. America did not enter the war until April 1917. By that time both sides were exhausted from years of grinding warfare. There is ample reason to believe that had nothing new been added to the equation, the belligerents would have agreed to a negotiated settlement. No victors, no vindictiveness.

…

Thus, the first likely consequence of U.S. prolongation of the war was the Bolshevik Revolution (and the Cold War). Communism — its threat of worldwide revolution and its wholesale slaughter — was a key factor in the rise of the European despotism that sparked World War II. (Had the Bolsheviks come to power anyway and Germany had won the war, Germany would have thrown the communists out.)

…

The second likely consequence, then, of U.S. prolongation of the war was the rise of Nazi Germany.

Read it.

Before Betsy Chao, a senior here at Rutgers University, could take midterm exams in her online courses this semester, her instructors sent emails directing students to download Proctortrack, a new anti-cheating technology.

“You have to put your face up to it and you put your knuckles up to it,” Ms. Chao said recently, explaining how the program uses webcams to scan students’ features and verify their identities before the test.

Once her exam started, Ms. Chao said, a red warning band appeared on the computer screen indicating that Proctortrack was monitoring her computer and recording video of her. To constantly remind her that she was being watched, the program also showed a live image of her in miniature on her screen.

Even for an undergraduate raised in a culture of selfies and Skype, Ms. Chao found the system intrusive. “I felt it was sort of excessive,” she said.

Read it.

But the overarching theme is that urban planning and zoning are best viewed as a form of economic warfare by the upper and middle classes against the working and lower classes. While that might not have been the original intent, to judge by the smug attitudes of the beneficiaries of such planning and zoning, they are perfectly happy with the results.

…

Long-time Antiplanner readers will know what I have to say next: those surging housing prices only happen in certain regions, specifically those that use planning and zoning to increase urban densities. This includes most of Europe, Australia, much of New Zealand, most coastal states in the United States, and a few Canadian cities including Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, and Montreal.

Housing is also a factor in many developing nations where most land is still owned by the government, or held in trust by the government on behalf of local villages. This includes most of Africa, much of South America, and part of Asia. In such places, the only people who can enjoy the benefits of “surging housing prices” are the few who own their own land, and since land ownership opportunities are limited due to widespread state control, everyone else stays poor. (In the United States, the closest analogues are Nevada, where 90 percent of the land is owned by the government, and Hawai’i, where more than 90 percent of the land is owned by a handful of corporations and trusts that might be willing to sell it for housing, but the state governent won’t let them.)

Read it.

But as Silicon Valley bursts at its suburban seams, one tech company after another has been buying up properties throughout the region and embarking on ambitious development projects. Apple occupies 60 percent of Cupertino’s commercial space. Google dominates Mountain View, and Facebook is spreading its tentacles throughout Menlo Park.

…

Company towns of this era had a barely-hidden paternalistic agenda. Wealthy businessmen saw their workers as family, sort of, and they wanted to provide their wards with safe, modern housing. But many were strict fathers, dictating the minutiae of their grown employees’ lives, from picking the books in the library to restricting the availability of alcohol. It’s hard to imagine Facebook going that far, though the company does try to subtly influence its employees lives by offering such healthy freebies as on-site gyms, bike repair, and walking desks. It’s a strategy that mimics what happened with some later company towns, which employed paternalism to better the company, not just employees’ lives. “Company welfare was seen as an important strategy to promote company loyalty and peaceful relations,” Borges says.

Read it.

Providence regularly lands on the lists of top hipster cities and top hipster colleges for its cool factor, having earned plaudits from Travel and Leisure to Buzzfeed for live music, coffee shops, and hip culture.

…

“There are not enough “hipsters” to plausibly resurrect the urban economies of America,” said Renn. “If you’re in downtown Providence, in the proximity to its center, you can live an eminently hipster lifestyle, and ask yourself, ‘Where would Providence be without it?’ And it would probably not be as great.”

“Is that the solution to the jobs issue on the south side of Providence?  No.  [The hipster economy] has its positives, but it’s something that’s happening more now everywhere,” said Renn.  “I was just in Indianapolis.  There were plenty of beards, plaid shirts, and locally sourced food there.”

Read it.

Generates incredible amounts of academic study (hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know) and tons of consequent opinion journalism.

No apparent effect on young brains, though.

Others forget — Google, which puts up a special ‘doodle’ for every fly-by-night whim of the Left Coast, is plain today – but we remember.

Read it.

The latest liberal hoax exposed is a happy face mirror image of the U. of Virginia rape fraud: a massively publicized paper in Science, the most prominent American peer-reviewed academic journal, about how to market gay marriage to minority voters that turned out to be a complete swindle, another exercise in catfishing made-up people into electronic existence.

And yet the most interesting point about this ignominious affair is that even if the paper had been utterly legitimate, it still wouldn’t have been “science” in the sense that most people understand the word: as a search for relatively permanent truths. Instead, it would have just been marketing research.