Tyler Cowen.

The minimum wage will tend to increase unemployment among low-skill workers, often minorities. To many people that’s an argument against the minimum wage. But to progressives at the opening of the 20th century that was an argument for the minimum wage–progressive’s demanded minimum wages to get women and racial minorities out of the work force.

Something similar may be happening with rent control. Rent control reduces new development. Bug or feature? California Republican Tony Strickland argues that reduced development is a feature. New state laws in California prevent cities from restricting development but if rent control was legal cities could be used it to do the same thing just by making it unprofitable to build.

“The solution to a lot of problems is to just keep shooting.” — Lee Andersen

Bloomberg.

I would hardly call Vance a ‘reactionary’ — although he might be one from the perspective of a professor at Harvard Law.

The Other McCain.

One of the things every liberal must believe is Progress, a quasi-religious faith which G.K. Chesterton mocked as “people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.” The apostles of Progress would have us believe that 1959 — the year I was born — was a nightmare dystopia, despite those snazy new Chevy station wagons, and that if Donald Trump gets elected in November, we are all going back to 1959.

I remember 1959. I prefer it to now.

Well, sonny, lemme tell you, it was plenty rough. Back in those days, people had to pay their own bills, so they worked what were called “full-time jobs,” instead of hustling as DoorDash drivers or peddling naked selfies on OnlyFans. Yes, I remember when gas was less than $3 a gallon and interest on the national debt was less than a trillion dollars a year . . .

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

The drive between Butler, Pennsylvania, and the Ohio village of East Palestine is less than 42 miles long. In between are the villages and boroughs of Lyndora, Connoquenessing, and Evans City on the Pennsylvania side before you cross the state line directly into the village of East Palestine.

It is a stretch of geography that includes bucolic rolling pastures, the gentle slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, traces of what once was powerful Steel Valley between New Castle, Pennsylvania, and Youngstown, Ohio, and a mix of decay of what once was and a rebuilding of what may be.

It is what is often referenced to by coastal elites who have never driven through this very Americana scenery as “flyover country” or “the middle of nowhere.”

Read it.

Maharrey began with personal anecdotes to illustrate the unpredictability of life. He shared stories of a day disrupted by a flat tire and an unexpected plumbing issue during a home renovation, underscoring the theme that “you don’t know what you don’t know.” This unpredictability, he argued, is a fundamental flaw in central economic planning.

Read it.

A new study reveals what common sense could have predicted – giving Americans $1,000 per month disincentivizes them from working, causing them to work less – and earn less, over time.

Why is this a surprise? You get more of what you pay for, and if you pay people not to work, they won’t work. A six-year-old can tell you that.

Brett Cooper.

Let’s all move to Forney.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

At the Toto showroom in downtown Manhattan, a young, well-dressed woman enters and announces with a groan that she’s here to buy a bidet toilet seat. The salesperson proudly displays the five different models of Toto’s Washlet, the advanced electronic toilet seat with a built-in, controllable bidet (along with seat heater, deodorizer, MP3 player, and other available features). “I don’t really care which one,” the woman tells the salesperson. “I’m not going to use it. If it were up to me I wouldn’t get this thing, but it’s something my husband wants. Our deal is he gets this, and I get my say with the rest of the house. It’ll be hidden in our master bathroom. … I don’t want my guests to see this.”

I stand a few feet away, shaking my head in disbelief. Here we are in the world’s most sophisticated city, surrounded by the marvels of 21st century technological progress, and this clearly wealthy woman cannot wrap her head around a toilet seat that will wash her husband’s ass. What’s wrong with North American society? Why do people so fear the one perfect device that can guarantee their bum’s cleanliness? Despite its obvious and well-proven benefits, from personal hygiene to environmental, the integrated bidet toilet seat—which sprays a controlled stream of water from underneath the toilet seat at the push of a button—remains stubbornly off-putting to North Americans. Laugh all you want, but this has an impact on all of us.

Toto toilets are Japenese — and very expensive. (Look ’em up on Amazon.)

I don’t know about you, but my ass is as clean as it needs to be. Just sayin’.

Read it.

The concept Universal Basic Income is a pet notion of the Left. They never explain where they’re going to get all of the necessary money. Studies like these focus on what the recipients do with the money; they never focus on where the money comes from.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

The term “conspiracy theory” has been a popular and effective slur against anyone skeptical of official narratives for a long time. The main reason it has been effective is it was always used against people with implausible theories. While the official narrative may not hold up, the alternatives ranged from unlikely to absurd. We have now reached a point where the poles have reversed. The “conspiracy theories” are often far more plausible and sober minded than official narratives.

I do not believe that Jambalaya Harris will be the Democrat Presidential nominee. Harris is a terrible candidate, as she demonstrated in front of God and everybody in the primaries. She’s Joe Biden without even the excuse of Alzheimer’s.

My money is on Gavin Newsom. He’s the only other viable candidate. And the most likely candidate for his Vice-Presidential nominee would be Gretchen Whitmer.

But we shall see.

Read it.

Major Democratic donors who joined a conference call starring Vice President Kamala Harris say the event’s sloppy organization and scolding tone left them feeling unimpressed and insulted, NBC News has reported.

“It was a total failure. It was damaging. It was poor planning,” said one. Another called it “ludicrous.” It was also described as “mismanaged and rushed.”

The Friday call with about 300 heavy-hitter donors kicked off with reports from field organizers, who used their time to vent anger over the intra-party battle over whether Biden should be replaced atop the ticket, owing to plunging confidence in his mental health.

One participant described how organizers stalled to buy time while everyone waited for Harris to join the call 20 minutes after it started. During that stretch, the donors were “admonished” against agitating to replace Biden, and were instructed to “lock in and get behind” the faltering and frail 81-year-old.

Steve Graham.

I keep saying evil spirits are loose on the earth, corrupting people’s minds. They fill us with delusions. That’s why people keep saying so many nutty things these days. It explains a lot of the Democratic Party’s platform. It explains the flat Earth insanity. It explains the people who think the pandemic, not just the virus, was created deliberately. It explains the folks who insist men are women.

Today it occurred to me that there may be a person we can use as our barometer/coal mine canary. Keith Olbermann.

Olbermann is, without exaggeration, deranged. He has both feet planted firmly in police welfare-check territory, not far at all from the threshold of involuntary commitment. He says things so kooky they would embarrass Whoopi Goldberg.

Read it.

Freeman’s academic interests were framed by her activist experiences. She was deeply involved in the seventies attempts to get feminist planks onto the Democratic and Republican party platforms. Up to that juncture the Republican Party had far stronger feminist credentials than the Democrats did; had the feminist of 1960 been forced to predict which party would champion her cause thirty years later, she would have guessed the GOP.

This is not what happened. That is the mystery that drives much of Freeman’s late ‘80s work: why did the feminist movement succeed so brilliantly with the Democrats, but fail so miserably with the Republicans? Freeman argues that this had less to do with demographics or deep ideological alignment than with the structures and operational culture of each party. Although both parties have changed in the days since Freeman stalked the convention floors, many of the differences she observed between the two parties still hold true today.

The Other McCain.

I must confess that sometimes, when I hear about a road-rage incident escalating into deadly violence, I think to myself, “Maybe this isn’t really a bad thing.” Let’s admit that the victim of a fatal road-rage incident is perhaps not an entirely innocentvictim. You probably have to be a very bad driver to cause a traffic situation so bad that another driver decides he needs to kill you. So, a bad driver gets killed, and another driver with serious anger-management issues gets sent to prison for murder. Isn’t it possible to see that as a win-win? The bottom line is, you’re subtracting two drivers from the morning-commute traffic jam, and that’s a net benefit to society.

Good point.

Read it.

Pediatric transgender surgeries allegedly have become a fraudulent multibillion-dollar industry. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating whistleblower reports alleging fraudulent Medicaid billing, including at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.

The Other McCain.

Let’s be clear: South Korea is an ally, not an enemy. But acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, while pretending to be “an independent foreign policy expert”? That’s a felony, and Max Boot’s wife has been doing it for 10 years — “allegedly,” I hasten to add.

UPDATE: Leading ‘Trump Russia Hoax’ Propagandist’s Wife Indicted As Foreign Spy

UnHerd.

If you want to know the secret of J.D. Vance’s meteoric rise, at the age of 39, to Donald Trump’s choice for vice president should he win, just glance at some of the more overheated liberal analyses of Vance’s success. This one, published in the New York Times, is a classic: it is like the X-ray of a liberal psyche outraged by the success of people who are on the “other side”.

Titled “How Yale Propelled J.D. Vance’s Career”, it reveals that “many students and professors remember Mr. Vance as warm, personable and even charismatic. But several also said they were perplexed by what they saw as Mr. Vance’s profound ideological shift.” That’s a real head-scratcher: since when does being warm and personable have anything to do with one’s ideology? Mussolini could be warm and personable. As for charisma, well.

The article recounts, with an air of true perplexity, the conundrum of Vance and his wife, who is of Indian descent and the daughter of immigrants, “deliver[ing]- home-baked treats” to a transgender student who had just undergone, as the Times put it in smug jargon, “top surgery” as if it were an everyday procedure, like a tonsillectomy. It then quotes the student, who said they abruptly ended the friendship after Vance, as senator from Ohio, supported legislation in Arkansas that prohibited transgender care for children.

Of course, they had every right to take offence. But there is no contradiction between treating trans people with kindness, protectiveness and respect and opposing transgender treatment for children. Except in the mind of the New York Times, whose grim, sanctimonious and lucrative prosecution of MeToo, the 1619 Project, the trans revolution, and its stigmatising of everything from a Confederate statue in the middle of nowhere to gas stoves and gas-powered cars had as much to do with Trump’s resurrection as anything else.

The American Mind.

Your driving habits might be secretly influencing more than just your road safety—they could be impacting your wallet, too. While everyone knows about credit scores, fewer are aware of the existence and potential consequences of a driver score. This score reflects various aspects of your driving behavior, including how often you brake suddenly, exceed speed limits, use your phone while driving, or operate your vehicle late at night. Auto insurance companies have increasingly been leveraging this data to adjust insurance rates, aiming for a more accurate reflection of the risk posed by individual drivers.

In the past, for rather obvious reasons, auto insurers struggled to encourage consumers to participate in usage-based insurance plans, which monitor driving behaviors to adjust rates accordingly. Consequently, the industry has adopted alternative methods to gather driving data, such as collaborating with automakers or utilizing existing smartphone apps already in use by drivers. Despite the widespread collection of such data, many individuals remain unaware of the extent to which their driving behaviors are being monitored by insurance companies.

The implications of such data collection extend far beyond insurance rates, touching upon broader concerns surrounding personal freedom and privacy. Recent legislative efforts, such as the mandate for new cars to be equipped with a “kill switch” feature by 2026, raise significant questions about government control over vehicles and the potential misuse of such technology.

To be fair.

Read it.

Rocket company SpaceX will move its headquarters to Starbase, Texas from California, CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday in a post on X.

Welcome to my world….

“We live in an age where it is unclear who is in charge. The magic of democracy is it tells people that they are in charge, but that is impossible, and people sense it, so without a clear shot caller responsible for what is happening, people naturally look for an explanation that provides that shot caller. Every conspiracy theory assumes that there is someone, or a small group, who has the power to affect the course of history and the foresight to alter those events to their liking.”

— ZMan

Mark Steyn.

Let’s cut to the chase – the US Secret Service: In on it? Or just totally crap?

Well, I’ve thought the Secret Service were rubbish not just since we learned of the Cartagena hookers but for at least another decade before that. And increasingly, when it comes to American officialdom – from Kabul to Uvalde – to modify Henry Ford, you can get it in any colour as long as it’s bloated, lavishly over-funded and entirely dysfunctional.

And yet and yet… it’s hard to believe even these guys (plus their bevy of five-foot-two-eyes-of-blue Keystone chorus girls) could be this crap. Assuming for the purposes of argument that the body on the roof is actually that of the perp, a goofball barely out of high school hatched a plan to have Donald Trump’s head explode in close-up on live TV – and, wittingly or otherwise, the world’s most flush money-no-object security state did their best to help him pull it off.

Read it.

Minnesota Vikings star wide receiver Jordan Addison was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence after being found asleep behind the wheel near Los Angeles International Airport, the Los Angeles Daily News reported Sunday.

Not what I think of when I think Viking.

Read it.

Colleges offer phantom scholarships for the same reason car dealerships offer discounts: to close the sale. But even as this practice has become too obvious not to notice, families still orient to college prices as though they are real. Why is this?

Professional marketers have long known that people are attracted to expensive things?—?and we have a special fascination with things we cannot afford. Teenage boys hang posters of Lamborghinis, not Toyotas, in their bedrooms. Unattainable products also generate free media: Journalists and bloggers write about the new Rolex, not the new Timex.

At the same time, we are highly responsive to the belief that we are getting a deal. In consumer markets, this practice of creating the appearance of a high price paired with a large discount drives purchase behavior so reliably that it works even when everyone knows what’s going on. Retailers, to take one example, routinely pre-print price tags with a struck-through “original” price that buyers never pay and a “marked down” price that was always the real price. Everyone knows what’s happening, but the practice continues because we respond to it anyway.

One of the ways colleges get around prohibitions on having quotas for racial and other Fashionable Minorities is by setting outrageous tuition-room-board fees and then quietly handing compensating ‘scholarships’ to the favored groups.

Read it.

A common way of building a tunnel today is with a tunnel boring machine (TBM), particularly in urban areas where other construction methods such as drill-and-blast or cut-and-cover would be too disruptive. Of the 89 transit projects around the world that required tunneling in a dataset compiled by Britain Remade, 80 of them used TBMs. But tunnel boring machines are a comparatively modern construction technology. The first successful rock tunneling machines weren’t invented until the 1950s, and into the late 1960s most tunneling was done using other construction methods. But as TBMs have improved, they have increasingly been the method of choice for tunneling through a wider variety of ground conditions. And while many construction tasks have resisted automation and mechanization, tunneling machinery has steadily gotten more automated, to the point where a modern TBM is akin to a mobile factory that burrows through the earth and constructs a tunnel behind it.

Check it out.

What makes metric time so cool is that would make all the mental math we have to do when adding and subtracting time so much easier—especially when it comes to different timezones. Working with base-10 numbers is so much easier than trying to think in base-60, base-12, and base-24.

Unfortunately, just being “cool” is not enough to motivate people to change how they live. And, because time is a coordinated cultural practice, everybody has to change at once, and ain’t nobody got time for dat (otherwise Americans would be using metric measures like the rest of the world).

LifeHacker.

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say salt is the most important seasoning of all time. It makes things taste salty, sure, but it also makes things taste like better versions the themselves, and more importantly, salt is a powerful preservative and natural anti-microbial. Long before refrigeration—all the way back to ancient Egypt—salt kept meat from spoiling which, in turn, kept people fed longer. And though salty processed foods don’t have the best reputation, sodium is an essential nutrient, needed to keep your fluids balanced and muscles and nerves working smoothly. Salt is important.

We don’t live in ancient Egypt, and it’s currently quite easy to keep your electrolytes where they need to be for normal brain and bodily functions. So while the modern eater may be a little blasé about salt, flavor is not trivial. Chef-y types have strong opinions about brands and crystal size (and so do I), but the salt you stock your kitchen with should be the salt that fits your culinary needs.

Here’s what you need to know about salt, from the standard iodized table variety to the various Kosher offerings.

The New Yorker.

Every now and then the New Yorker will turn from Wokery and do what it used to do best, some interesting and very well written piece that leaves you better for having read it. This is one such.

In 1966, at a meeting remembered in anthropological lore as the beginning of hunter-gatherer studies, seventy-five experts assembled in Chicago to synthesize our knowledge about foraging peoples. More than ninety-nine per cent of human history was spent without agriculture, the organizers figured, so it was worth documenting that way of life before it disappeared altogether. The symposium—and an associated volume that appeared two years later, both titled “Man the Hunter”—exemplified an obsession with hunting, meat-eating, and maleness. “Man” was meant to cover all humans; “hunter” was shorthand for anyone who subsisted on wild food. The book devoted an entire section to the role of hunting in human evolution. “Hunting is the master behavior pattern of the human species,” a chapter began. “It is the organizing activity which integrated the morphological, physiological, genetic, and intellectual aspects of the individual human organisms and of the population who compose our single species.”

The meeting also revealed problems with the meat-centric story. Dart had asserted that “all prehistoric men and the most primitive of living human beings are hunters, i.e., flesh eaters.” But contributors to “Man the Hunter” showed how one-sided this perspective was. The anthropologist Richard Lee reported that the !Kung, one of the so-called Bushman people of Southern Africa, got two-thirds of their calories from plants. Nor were they an exception. When he compared fifty-eight foraging societies from around the world, Lee found that half got the majority of their calories from plant foods; another eighteen relied mostly on fishing. Only eleven—less than a fifth—relied on hunting as their primary means of subsistence, and all but one were limited to either the highest or the lowest latitudes, far beyond our African homeland.

LifeHacker.

Yes, these smart appliances offer some useful features, but half of the folks who buy smart appliances don’t bother to connect them, either because of privacy concerns (see below) or because they simply don’t see the benefit (do you need your fridge to track your grocery list, or do you just jot it down somewhere like a normal person?). Samsung is apparently plotting to infuse all of its appliances with its digital assistant Bixby (plus an AI boost), despite the fact that Bixby is perhaps the most despised piece of technology this side of speed cameras.

The answer is pretty obvious: No, you probably don’t need smart appliances. In fact, you should probably buy dumb ones—as long as you have the option.

If I could trade my modern Amana and Electrolux refrigerators for a pair of the GE models (circa 1955) my mother used, I would, in a heartbeat.

Tyler Cowen.

Apparently, almost everything.

Read it.

There are 13 divorces among the 10 richest men in the world. Seven of the top ten have been divorced at least once.

Tom Luongo has a very interesting take on the current situation.

It is precisely because Kamala Harris was picked to be Biden’s veep for every other reason than the job description that the Democrats and Davos are in the bind they are in as I write this.

It was never about Harris’ competence, capability, or commitment that landed her in the Naval Observatory. It was the boxes she ticked, the perception of her moral fluidity, and her solidification of the black female vote at a time when black men were drifting into Der Trumpenfuhrer’s orbit that made her the center of their Venn Diagram.

Notice how she was never a person to them… just a series of attributes.