The concept and governance of name, image, and likeness has always been highly politicized. But the deals themselves have largely stayed out of politics — until now.
Dresser Winn, a quarterback at the University of Tennessee at Martin, has signed a partnership to support the candidacy of Colin Johnson, who is running for District Attorney General for Tennessee’s 27th Judicial District.
The deal is considered to be the first to support a political candidate. It’s also an example of how athletes who may not have major followings or a Power 5 platform can ink partnerships in their community, as one of Winn’s agents, Dale Hutcherson, pointed out on Twitter.
They have always said that politics is show business for ugly people. It was inevitable that some sort of hustler would connect the dots and count up the zeroes.
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Salvador Ramos’s evil rampage in Uvalde, Texas has had the inevitable consequence: it was politicized within minutes by Democrats calling for more gun control. Michael Moore, at least, was honest. He said the Second Amendment should be repealed. That, one suspects, is what many Democrats want, but most aren’t bold enough to say it. Instead, they beat around the bush, like Joe Biden who blamed the Uvalde murders on the “gun lobby” and fumed: “When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?” What, exactly, is that, Joe? He didn’t say.
The fundamental point to be made about mass school shootings is that they are extraordinarily rare.
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The “solutions” proposed by Democrats are laughable, obviously intended for political gain rather than practical benefit. Banning “assault rifles,” while likely unconstitutional, would do zero good. In close quarters, handguns are better than rifles, even short-barreled rifles like AR-15s. In the worst school shooting rampage so far, at Virginia Tech, the murderer used handguns. And when the ill-fated ban on “assault weapons” expired in 2004, the homicide rate went down, not up.
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The vegan runner who lines up next to me at the start of the weekly Park Run doesn’t even wear running shoes; he runs in bare feet and those feet look like something that would grace one of Tolkien’s hobbits. This got me thinking:
“What do vegans wear on their feet?”
It transpires that they wear quite a lot on their feet and I must admit that some of it looks quite smart. If Google is to be trusted then you can get shoes that, superficially, are almost indistinguishable from leather ones and they can even be polished to a reasonable shine (with the appropriate range of vegan cleaners and polishes, of course). Apparently if you’re a vegan soldier then the army has it covered in the shape of vegan combat boots.
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Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on “I Need to Get the F*ck Out of This Car”: Two Separate Teslas Ignite Last Week, One Trapping Driver, One Burning Child’s Car Seat
We investigate this by using as a natural experiment the effect of the online publication of the names and addresses of holders of handgun carry permits on criminals’ propensity to commit burglaries. In December 2008, a Memphis, TN newspaper published a searchable online database of names, zip codes, and ages of Tennessee handgun carry permit holders. We use detailed crime and handgun carry permit data for the city of Memphis to estimate the impact of publicity about the database on burglaries. We find that burglaries increased in zip codes with fewer gun permits, and decreased in those with more gun permits, after the database was publicized.
Imagine that.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Guns, Privacy, and Crime
A post recently made the rounds on hacker news claiming that you should teach your kids poker, not chess. The comments on that post go through a lot of the reasons why poker is a bad game to teach your children, but I felt that I was well suited to opine on this topic, and explain why duplicate bridge is the best game for practicing the life skills involved in business and programming, compared to all of the alternatives.
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To breastfeed, or not to breastfeed? it is one of those parenting decisions that, at first pass, seems to carry little to no political import. For most people most of the time, it’s the sort of thing that you can safely ignore as someone else’s personal preference, having nothing to do with anything or anyone else—none of your business especially. And for all intents and purposes, that’s right. To challenge a new mom on how she feeds her child would be utterly presumptuous, let alone extremely rude.
But as mothers across the country scramble to find ways to feed their infants in the face of a formula shortage, people have begun to wonder—why don’t more American mothers breastfeed? It’s a good question, even if for some, it carries an air of malice and blame. Unbeknownst to the critic, the economic, political, and social environment makes things infinitely more complicated than “you’re just not trying hard enough.”
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The Stealth Tubeless Tag Holder is a protective three-part silicone and rubber tubeless mount for your AirTag. Its valve bases seal against your bicycle tire’s rim. The accessory’s stem protects both the rim and AirTag from impacts as it can compress and rebound under extreme loads. It can also allow sealant and air to flow so it won’t rattle inside the tire rim.
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The product is a good idea – if someone’s going to steal your bike, it’d be pretty easy to spot an AirTag if it’s hanging by a keychain or something similar. However, this accessory seems like it could be a pain when you need to exchange or remove the AirTag. AirTag batteries only last about a year, so it’s likely you’ll need to exchange the battery multiple times within your bicycle’s lifetime.
I presume that living in a place where people are unlikely to steal your stuff is not an option.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Bicycle Accessory Maker Launches AirTag Tire Holder, But Is That a Good Thing?
The term “New Right” is one of those phrases that has a long life but has never had much meaning in American politics. Bill Buckley was a member of the New Right when he got going in the middle of the last century. Later, various efforts were made to create a New Right as an alternative to the Buckley Right. As conservatism collapsed over the last decade the term has become a popular one with failed alternatives. Members of the alt-right even tried rebranding as the New Right.
The long life of the term in America, without much meaning, says more about the overall state of politics than the various efforts to create an alternative. In Europe, the term New Right has meaning, because it is a real school that has been trying to create a new politics that reflects the current age. In America, the popularity of New Right reflects the fact that there has never been a genuine Right. What passes for the Right is just a foil for the prevailing orthodoxy of the ruling class.
That reality is clearer now that at any time in the history of the empire, but there are those giving the term another shot. There are several groups competition to be the new Right to replace the rubble that is mainstream conservatism. There is a lot of interest in the mainstream in these projects as the prevailing orthodoxy works best when it has a foil to operate as a gatekeeper. Channeling popular frustration into a sterile alternative is the secret to maintaining order.
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If we were to create a framework in which prominent people were held responsible for any violence carried out in the name of an ideology they advocate, then nobody would be safe, given that all ideologies have their misfits, psychopaths, unhinged personality types, and extremists. And thus there was little to no attempt to hold Maddow or Sanders responsible for the violent acts of one of their most loyal adherents.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Demented – and Selective – Game of Instantly Blaming Political Opponents For Mass Shootings
Harry Splugwarp, a deacon at Straight & Narrow Church, began searching the scriptures fervently for Jesus’ teaching about funding Lockheed Martin following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comments that funding a war in a foreign land was tantamount to feeding someone who was hungry.
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Say you have an athletic child in middle school: Specializing in which sport in high school would make it most likely for your son or daughter to earn a college scholarship? The new self-help book from data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life, which attempts to be “Moneyball for your life,” crunches the numbers on this and other intriguing topics.
Gaming the system is the new American Dream.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on This Sporting Life
The UK government will start informing some illegal immigrants this week of its intention to relocate them to Rwanda, the Home Office confirmed on Tuesday.
The recipients will be warned that they may not be admitted to the UK’s asylum system because they had “travelled through safe countries where they could and should have claimed asylum,” the Home Office said.
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The Department of Homeland Security revealed last week that it was creating a Disinformation Governance Board to distribute “best practices” for countering disinformation. The new board joins a growing chorus—which includes President Biden and former President Barack Obama—that views disinformation disseminated on social media as one of the biggest threats facing our democracy.
But there’s a much bigger threat to democracy coming out of Silicon Valley and it’s this: America’s largest financial and tech companies increasingly act as independent countries, routinely exporting jobs, money and technology to our most significant global adversary. These companies, their assets, and increasingly their workers, exist wholly outside of America’s democratic borders and under the auspices of China’s anti-democratic ones. And they are bringing these undemocratic pressures back home with them, subverting our democracy from within.
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The problem with money is it isn’t just one thing. We think it’s one thing because we use it to buy things, but it’s actually a bunch of different things. This is why I often refer to it as “money:” in other words, one of the class of things that are stores of value, transactional grease, debts and various other bits and pieces.
Recall that “money” is not a fixed class of things; it is a social construct. People agree to use (or are forced to use) something to transact tax payments, debt payments, stores of value, etc. “Money” only has value in a socio-economic system that is a social construct with social contracts and power relations.
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Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.
Nothing in this section shall interfere with or prevent the exercise by any court of the United States of its power to punish for contempt.
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U2’s Bono, The Edge do surprise concert for Ukrainian troops in Kyiv “They may have won all the battles/But we had all the good songs!” — Tom Lerer, The Folk Song Army
Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long?
Since there didn’t seem any way to answer this question, I stopped wondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answer the question, and the answer is that life actually is short.
Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it’s impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know that?
Research has shown that people in non-industrial societies — the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in — average less than seven hours a night, says evolutionary anthropologist David Samson at the University of Toronto Mississauga. That’s a surprising number when you consider our closest animal relatives. Humans sleep less than any ape, monkey or lemur that scientists have studied. Chimps sleep around 9.5 hours out of every 24. Cotton-top tamarins sleep around 13. Three-striped night monkeys are technically nocturnal, though really, they’re hardly ever awake — they sleep for 17 hours a day.
Samson calls this discrepancy the human sleep paradox. “How is this possible, that we’re sleeping the least out of any primate?” he says. Sleep is known to be important for our memory, immune function and other aspects of health. A predictive model of primate sleep based on factors such as body mass, brain size and diet concluded that humans ought to sleep about 9.5 hours out of every 24, not seven. “Something weird is going on,” Samson says.
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It is the simplicity of Seinfeld that makes it so appropriate for use in economics courses. Using these clips (as well as clips from other television shows or movies) makes economic concepts come alive, making them more real for students. Ultimately, students will start seeing economics everywhere – in other TV shows, in popular music, and most importantly, in their own lives.
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Right now, tech companies who appreciate the effects Blue state policies have on their businesses and employees are oozing their way around such policies by tranferring activities to Red states with better attitudes toward business and taxes — Austin TX is a blatant beneficiary of this process; a Blue pustule on the rosy Red butt of Texas, proglodytes in Travis county try their best to turn Austin into a little bitty corner of California on the prairie, but are constrained by the sanity of the state as a whole so that their Wokeness can’t get out of hand (Texas taxes aren’t going to jump to California levels, and Texas social policies aren’t going to reach California levels of weird). So they can signal their virtue like fidget-spinners without any danger of having to suffer from the results.
But abortion is the keystone of the Woke edifice, and if that goes away, well, they’re between a rock and a hard place. AWFLs are going to shun Texas, and Wokerati already in Austin will probably decamp precipitously of Texas moves to restrict or ban abortion (as I expect it will). The squeeze will be on, and the Austin (and San Antonio, it’s little sister) economy could quite possibly crash into rubble. This next year will be very interesting.
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“A big part of the incentive problem is that future people don’t have the vote. Future residents don’t have the vote, so we prevent building which placates the fears of current homeowners but prevents future residents from moving in. Future patients don’t have the vote, so we regulate drug prices at the expense of future new drug innovations and so forth. This has always been true, of course, but culture can be a solution to otherwise tough-to-solve incentive problems. America’s forward looking, pro-innovation, pro-science culture meant that in the past we were more likely to protect the future.
“We could solve many more of our problem if both sides stowed some of their cultural agendas to focus on areas of agreement. I think, for example, that we could solve the climate change problem with a combination of a revenue neutral carbon tax and American ingenuity. Nuclear, geo-thermal, hydrogen–these aren’t just clean fuels they are better fuels! Unfortunately, instead of focusing on innovation we get a lot of nonsense about paper straws and low-flow showers. I hate paper straws and low-flow showers! There is a wing of the environmental movement that wants to punish consumerism, individualism, and America more than they want to solve environmental problems so they see an innovation agenda as a kind of cheating. Retribution is the goal of their practice.”
