Megan McArdle has a low Bullshit Threshhold.

GM’s main problems are

1)  A terrible, bloated cost structure
2)  A terrible, bloated bureaucracy
3)  A bunch of meh car lines

Which of these is the government going to solve?  That terrible, bloated cost structure supports a bloated union whose jobs are the entire rationale for the government intervention.  Leaning on the parts suppliers just risks UAW jobs further down the supply chain.  Maybe we can take it out of the budget for copy paper and pencils.

Forgive me if I am skeptical that the government is going to show GM how to streamline its bureaucracy.

Rick Brookhiser knows whereof he speaks.

Read it.

That depends on Dad; if he were a liberal….

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Read it.

No surprise, when you’ve been paying attention. “Necessity is the mother of invention” is essentially the same conceptual framework as the Keynesian “demand-pull” approach to economics, and (as we’ve seen from history) that doesn’t accurately describe how the real world works.

Read it.

First, learn how to spell it.

Second, learn the etymology – from “cheiros”, Greek for “hand”, and “praxis”, Greek for “doings”. So basically somebody is doing you with their hands.

No wonder insurance doesn’t cover it….

Read it.

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

Anyone who has read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance will feel immediately at home. (And anyone that hasn’t is to be pitied.)

Read it.

Quite frankly, the concept “Anglican Dominican nun” does not compute.

Read it.

Nine, if you count my younger brother’s handwriting.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

David Friedman does an interesting historical comparison.

We can learn a little more by looking at a different Great Depression—the one that didn’t happen. From 1920 to 1921, the consumer price index fell by 10.8%, more than in any year of the Great Depression; it fell another 2.3% in the next year. Unemployment rose to about its 1931 level. Looking just at that data, it’s obviously the start of a depression.

Harding did what Hoover is supposed to have done, reducing taxes and government expenditure. By 1923 the recession was over. It was the Great Depression that didn’t happen.

Jeff Jarvis is just full of interesting ideas. Unfortunately his thinking on the subject of change seems to be curiously incomplete.

There are three responses to change: (1) Resist it, which is futile. (2) Complain about it, which is unproductive. (3) Find the opportunity in it.

Actually, I can think of two more just off the top of my head: (4) suppress it, and (5) control it. These don’t appear to have occurred to him, and absent dealing with them his discussion is fatally flawed.

One might argue that (4) is merely a species of (1), but it isn’t, really; “resist” is passive, whilst “suppress” is active. Anyone can resist, but only those with power can suppress, and that takes it in an entirely different direction. It is of the essence of the conservative personality type to resist change, and when conservative people hold the reins of power, that resistance is often expressed as attempted suppression. (And that has no connection with popular ideas of political ideology — what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 was a conservative attempt at suppressing change, and was rightly so characterized by the dinosaur media, outraged howls from American “conservatives” notwithstanding.)

That suppression of change never works has embedded itself into popular myth, but it remains a myth nevertheless; the Chinese Emperors successfully suppressed change for centuries, until their society was broken by European technical superiority. That same technical superiority gives any modern state adopting it (North Korea, anybody?) the means to suppress change so long as outside forces refrain from rocking the boat.

Similarly, (5) might arguable be considered a species of (3), but I suggest not. Finding opportunity in change appears to be a “Find the silver lining in every cloud” approach — what the Army calls “embrace the suck”. I see this as qualitatively different from an attempt to control change. Both perspectives view change as inevitable, leaving the only question our response to it; but jumping on the boat is not quite the same thing as attempting to seize the tiller. Jarvis is one of the former, and looks at change in terms of economic opportunity. AlGore and his ilk number among the latter, and their response to change has both economic and political dimensions.

I look forward to Jarvis’s next book, chiefly because I want to see whether this incomplete approach leads him into a defective approach, which I suspect that it might.

David Brooks demonstrates why, even though he’s a wussy RINO, he’s often worth reading.

Schama was born in Britain and makes documentaries for the BBC, but he has spent more time in the United States than most Brilliant authors, having taught at Harvard and now Columbia. But this is very much an outsider’s book, and if Schama doesn’t come from a strictly European perspective, let’s just say he comes from the realm of enlightened High Thinking that exists where The New York Review of Books reaches out and air-­kisses The London Review of Books.

His book is called “The American Future: A History” (which is a puerile paradox before you even open the cover), and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the American future.

Read it.

It’s amazing any of us survived childhood.

Read it.

AlGore isn’t the only guy getting rich off of climate-change hysteria.

Read it.

All of your Star Wars illusions destroyed.

The core point is that the Jedi are not to be trusted:

Read it.

Much has been written about how suburbs have taken people away from the city and that now suburbanites need to return back to where they came. But in reality most suburbs of large cities have grown not from the migration of local city-dwellers but from migration from small towns and the countryside.

Most suburban growth is not the result of declining core city populations, but is rather a consequence of people moving from rural areas and small towns to the major metropolitan areas. It is the appeal of large metropolitan places that drives suburban growth.

Read it.

Read it.

I wouldn’t be surprised.

Read it.

Like zoning laws? I don’t — one of the more pernicious legacies of Herbert Hoover, they make sure that our cities aren’t going to be interesting ever again. Are we stuck with them? Maybe not….

As middle income residents have fled, the city itself has become a place of many have-nots and a few haves. Rather than invest to engender pride, safety, and a sense of community in the city’s neighborhoods – the small unstylish work of organizing – the doctrine sought to make downtown attractive, livable and appealing by applying the “edifice complex” or the “Field of Dreams theory”: if you build it they will come. Then the planners and developers get to stand around and wonder why downtown still feels empty.

The middle class watched, grew frustrated, and left for the periphery. Despite some of the most glorious – and reasonably priced – architecture in America, the middle class has left, taking with them much of the urban tax base. This creates a hole out from which few cities emerge.

David Friedman isn’t afraid to push the envelope.

There is no antitrust law in WoW, which makes it a good place to observe collusive behavior by sellers. My wife, who spends more time in the auction house buying ad selling than I do, has observed both an attempt to corner a market and an attempt, at least partly successful, to form a cartel—a cartel she was invited to join. Her refusal was met by a threat to drive her out of the market by underselling her. The organizer of the cartel had apparently not read Aaron Director’s analysis, reflected in McGee’s classic article on the myth of predatory pricing; it had not occurred to him that if he was selling, at an artificially low price, ten times as many gems as the interloper, he was also losing money ten times as fast. It took only a few days for him to discover the flaw in the strategy and abandon it.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

Political power is a property right, however you slice it. It is owned, not deserved. It is not a natural or “human” right. And it has no more to do with freedom than brake fluid with fondue.

So what we’d expect, just from rational first principles, is that if you start with a libertarian democracy, it will eventually become socialist. Socialism, as a theology of vote-buying and worse, is perfectly preadapted for Darwinian success in a democracy. If democracy is like cancer, socialism is like terminal cancer – the natural, entropic endpoint of the process.

Read it.

Pay special attention to the demo. Note that the human component filling orders in this warehouse need not be literate, need not be numerate, need only about an 80 IQ in order to function — the only reason there’s a human involved at all is because equipment of comparable flexibility would cost more than the minimum wage required for an adequate human.

This reminds me of a number of science-fiction dystopias I’ve run across.

Read it.

A woman government official is dragged from a lorry to the execution ground, made to kneel in the snow and then shot in the head, her last moments recorded in a set of photographs that have caused a sensation in China.

“Woman government official”. Hm. I’m thinking Nancy Pelosi, here.

However, rather than eliciting sympathy, the 30-year-old pictures have prompted calls for more executions of corrupt officials in modern China.

I certainly understand the feeling.

Megan McArdle has the goods.

Read it.

But Austin’s growth evinces another pattern. As Austin and its suburbs have grown, families with children have left central Austin for its fringes, ceding central Austin to singles and couples without children.

In the end the key reason people have been moving to the suburbs lies in a mundane reality. Austin families have been moving to the suburbs because the suburbs have bigger, better and cheaper houses.

Families want space, and the central housing stock is either too small or too expensive. This basic reality has transformed Austin into essentially two largely successful cities: a central core left to small households and suburbs that offer either larger housing, or smaller housing at much cheaper prices.

Austin’s McMansion ordinance will ensure that its central Austin neighborhoods remain the domain of small, aging bungalows – and people without children – for the foreseeable future. In this way, it will reflect the demographic realities of many prosperous, “hip” cities from San Francisco and Boston to Seattle and Portland.

Yet there’s an ironic side to this. Alarmed by the decline of families in the city, the same city council that enacted the McMansion ordinance created a new task force a few months later to determine why central Austin has now so few families with children.

Read it.

This is one of the most entertaining movie reviews I’ve ever read.

Kimberley Strassel is, despite her ‘-ley’ name, always worth reading.

Purely from a philosophical standpoint, Mr. Specter’s move means nothing, because he didn’t leave his party on philosophical grounds. As even the good senator acknowledged in his press conference, his top priority is, and always has been, staying in office. Had the GOP last year allowed Mr. Specter to pen the entire party platform to his liking, he’d still have bailed this week. The Pennsylvanian has only ever been purely ideological on one issue: the polls.

In other words, a professional politician who will be more comfortable in the party of professional politicians.

The point here being that Mr. Specter isn’t necessarily a good indicator of how open, or not, the GOP is to “ideological” diversity. As it happens, the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate that Mr. Specter is now so unwilling to be “judged” by didn’t suddenly turn against him because he was pro-choice (he always has been) or pro trial-lawyer (ditto). He got in trouble after he voted for the blowout $787 billion stimulus bill. (More on that later.)

Steve Sailer is not very impressed with David Brooks.

Look, to say that Mozart wasn’t special because he was just like Tiger Woods is the kind of skull-crushingly stupid thing that you can only get away with saying if you’re telling everybody what they want to hear.

Tiger Woods is 33 years old. He’s been celebrated on national television for his golf skills for over 30 years. Here’s a video (starts 0:45 in) of a two and a half year old Tiger being interviewed by Bob Hope and Jimmy Stewart on a nationally syndicated TV talk show.

The truth is, unsurprisingly, that Tiger Woods is special. And so was Mozart.

I have to say I rather agree with him.

How many kids lives get wrecked by this kind of thinking by their parents? When you read about 23-year-old Anthony Kim, who got a prototypical Korean-American maniacal drilling upbringing at the driving range where I hit balls when I was a kid, it’s a story that appears now to have a happy ending. But just two or three years ago, Kim looked like he was headed for Skid Row, he was drinking so heavily in rebellion against his domineering parents. His parents now tell other Korean parents who ask how they too can mold a pro golfer: Don’t even try.

You only see the stories with a happy ending. The stories you don’t see would be about all the Asian kids whose parents thought they could have a Tiger Woods too, and turned their kids’ childhood into a hell.

Good points all.

Read it.

Pontiac, now sacrificed for General Motors to reorganize, was ironically a car that helped GM survive the Great Depression.

Steve Sailer thinks about these things so that you don’t have to.

As a society, we don’t benefit when people wash out of expensive training programs for predictable reasons.

So, why wouldn’t a trucking firm at least consider a parallel parking test for job applicants?

Well, how about “disparate impact?” What if a legally protected demographic group such as, say, women turned out to pass the parallel parking test at less than four-fifths rate of the highest scoring demographic group?

(And, indeed, I suspect that most of you don’t.)

Lynn Viehl, New York Times bestselling author of stuff I probably wouldn’t want to read, isn’t too proud to wait.

I hate moving to another line. I’m superstitious; I usually have bad luck if I believe the promise of no-waiting. If I try to go to that place, someone faster with a truckload of purchases will dart in front of me, or the register will need a new tape, or some other calamity will happen that will make me wait three times as long as I would have if I’d just stayed put.

One of the most endearing characteristics of professional writers is that they can make anything interesting. Read it and see.

Read it.

I suspect a Jesuit plot.

Read it.

But environmentalists are all about fantasy, not reality.

Read it.

Read it.

Remember when Russians, outside of the Communist Party, were terminally poor?

Read it.

Imagine that.

As schools struggle more than they have in decades to fund their core operations, many are looking to a rich pool of so-called restricted gifts — held in endowments whose donors often provide firm instructions on how their money should be spent.

In other words, the arrogance of academics is exceeded only by their dishonesty. No surprises here.

Read it.

Now there’s a hole with no bottom….

Read it.

During the course of a white person’s education they will go through many phases including but not limited to:  “awkward,”  “classic rock,” and “being really into a foreign country.”  Of these phases, there is only one  that all white people are required to go through before they can obtain their  bachelor’s degree. It is known as “Bob Marley.”

Under no circumstances should you ever bring a white person to a dancehall reggae concert,  it will frighten them.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Also, as my theory of Affordable Family Formation would predict, Santa Monica is famously liberal — e.g., the joke about it being the People’s Republic of Santa Monica. Jane Fonda’s ex-husband Tom Hayden represented the Santa Monica area in the state legislature for 18 years. Republican “family values” campaign themes don’t go over big in Santa Monica. The people who raise kids in Santa Monica can afford to insulate them with private schools, tutors, and all the rest. They don’t need politicians’ help in making it a little easier to raise their kids.

David Friedman, as always, gets right to the core issue.

I think it is a more plausible slogan than the usual version. If you and I disagree because I want an outcome more favorable to me and you want an outcome more favorable to you, there is room for compromise—as we see whenever people bargain over the price of a house. But if we disagree because I see what I want as just and the alternative as unjust and you see it the other way around, compromise looks to both of us like moral treason.

There you have modern American politics. There you have modern American foreign policy. Hell, there you have the fargin Civil War.

Read it.

Here’s something that has gotten lost in the drive to institute universal health insurance: Health insurance doesn’t automatically lead to health care. And with more and more doctors dropping out of one insurance plan or another, especially government plans, there is no guarantee that you will be able to see a physician no matter what coverage you have.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

I remember when I got the memo from Society informing me that my wife and I had been assigned the task of socializing our children. It came as quite a shock, let me tell you.

Each of the 450 or so episodes of The Simpsons is a lot more mentally stimulating than listening to your parents or to your daycare worker talk. (Okay, well, some of the episodes from this decade might not live up to that standard, but there are still a couple of hundred good ones.)

Read it.

I see the hand of God in here, somewhere.

Read it.

Red light camera’s a scam? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

Let me know when they take up smoking again.

Read it.

This creeps me out.

The Hog is in rare form.

Ladies who choose to live with single men (every man who is not married is single), let me tell you what it means when your live-in boyfriend proposes after a period of years. It means he gave up and decided you were the best he could do. If he had thought you were a catch, he would have married you sooner, to keep someone else from getting you. Or it could mean he hates being with you less than he hates dating.

And that’s the truest thing you’ll read today.

Read it.

Incompetence is as perennial as the grass.

Read it.

There are things the rich do that working class and middle class folks don’t. Some of them–living off the return on capital rather than wages or salary–are only available to the rich. Others–seeking a first-rate education for your kids, working for yourself rather than others–are things that ordinary folks do to the extent that they can, but their ability is limited. Even so, it’s worth learning the tactics of the rich and applying them where possible.

Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.