Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, uncovers a problem.
IN our society, cars receive considerable attention and study — whether the subject is buying and selling them, the traffic congestion they cause or the dangerous things we do in them, like texting and talking on cellphones while driving. But we haven’t devoted nearly enough thought to how cars are usually deployed — namely, by sitting in parking spaces.
Is this a serious economic issue? In fact, it’s a classic tale of how subsidies, use restrictions, and price controls can steer an economy in wrong directions. Car owners may not want to hear this, but we have way too much free parking.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Free Parking Comes at a Price
I wish I could say the same. McCain has been skating along on his POW rep for half of my lifetime, and I’m really tired of it. I appreciate his fortitude as much as anybody, but that doesn’t give him a free pass to be a pain-in-the-ass RINO scumbag for three decades.
Imagine explosive charges so precise they can cut apart an incoming warhead milliseconds before it hits your vehicle. That’s the operating principle for Iron Curtain, an Active Protection System whose computer brain makes 50,000 calculations in the time you take to blink.
Installed on a frame around the vehicle that looks like a militarized shower rod, the Iron Curtain’s charges propel tiny projectiles straight down like a guillotine. They slice the warhead so precisely that, in 80 percent of tests, it doesn’t even detonate.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Guillotining Rockets: Iron Curtain Active Protection for Light Vehicles
Karl Marx’s greatest trick was gussying up his bargain-bin, Hegel-lite, junk philosophy as “science.” With the stroke of a pen, grave character defects were transformed into high virtues — envy and hatred were now just a dispassionate analysis of the dialectical materialist Forces of History, and ever since, Leftists have claimed that their every opinion is a scientific fact. They’re not just spouting whatever bullshit will let them get their momentary virtue fix; they’re telling it like it is.
The problem is, of course, science doesn’t work like that… and not even liberals can deny it anymore. So what comes next? They’re not going to give up self-congratulation — that smugly superior smirk is the only thing holding their faces together. They’ll have to find some new way to be comprehensively Better Than Us.
They’ve had this problem before. Prior to WWII, ‘progressives’ were all about eugenics and involuntary sterilization of ‘deplorables’, all because Science was on their side. (Too bad that Nazis ruined it for them.)
One of the characteristics of those who write for tReason magazine is that, just as they don’t really recognize who they are politically, they don’t have a clue as to what other people are, either.
Anyone who would characterize McCain as ‘conservative’ is jacked so far to the Left that it isn’t funny. McCain is an old-line nationalist Democrat, like Bloomberg, and the only reason he pretends to be a Republican is because he can’t stomach being in the same party as Nancy Pelosi and ChuckYou Schumer.
Certainly McCain-style ‘whatever’ will live on, as long as there are people who see value in being ‘mavericks’ (i.e. selling out their own nominal side for personal political gain), but that is hardly a good thing.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on ‘Will McCain-Style Conservatism Live On?’
Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock’s job was to ensure safe navigation of the USS Fitzgerald. On June 17, 2017, she was “derelict in the performance of those duties,” resulting in the deaths of seven sailors, according to the single charge she faced Tuesday.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Fitzgerald Officer of the Deck Pleads Guilty at Court-Martial
The post office duly updated the address, and Henderson-Spruce allegedly began receiving the company’s mail — including checks. It went on for months. Prosecutors say he deposited some $58,000 in checks improperly forwarded to his address.
Gee, he appears to be a Person of Color. What are the odds?
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Man Allegedly Used Change of Address Form to Move UPS Headquarters to His Apartment
Waters, who has been calling for impeachment on a regular basis since Trump won the 2016 election, cited his withdrawal from the deal along with “his gigantic ego and narcissistic behavior” as the reasons he should be impeached — neither of which are impeachable offenses.
I’m quite sure she thinks that being a Rich White Guy is an impeachable offense.
Seattle’s city council is considering a 26-cent tax on every hour of employee work at companies grossing more than $20 million a year. The proposal, which is scheduled for a vote on Monday, prompted one of the city’s largest private employers, Amazon, to pause construction on a new office tower. The move was in character for a corporate giant known to play hardball with municipalities, for good and ill. But according to the union-backed group Working Washington, Amazon’s reaction is not just irritating; it’s felonious.
The construction pause is “the sort of thing you might expect from a subprime mob boss lording it over a company town—and that’s not just a metaphor,” says an open letter from the group to Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson. Working Washington claims “there is abundant evidence” that Amazon has broken a state law criminalizing threats against public officials aimed at affecting their votes or decisions. “We urge you to investigate and prosecute Amazon for this serious crime,” the group says.
This is the problem with all those low-IQ people going to law school. A lot of them don’t listen in class.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Labor Group Demands Felony Charges Against Amazon for Opposing Seattle’s Job Tax
Anyone who works in the $200 billion digital advertising industry should be scared of people like Mark Drobnak, because the ad blocker he uses is way more powerful than yours. The college freshman says it feels as though everyone at Rochester Institute of Technology, from his roommate to his professors, has installed some way to ward off online ads. Drobnak is one of the die-hards who goes further, working with a handful of comrades to build what they call “a black hole for advertisements.” His parents say the one he built them works great.
…
Only a few years ago, even people who hated ads saw ad-blocking software as akin to stealing. But online advertising has grown so predatory that while blocking is estimated to cost publishers billions of lost revenue a year, it’s started to seem less like robbery than self-defense: Ads slow devices, eat up data plans, and sometimes deliver malware. Meanwhile, the industry is building ever-more-detailed dossiers on every user based on web habits.
I don’t mind ads. What I mind are ads that move (distracting you from what you came for), ads that block your view (the very definition of assholery), and ads that try to persuade you that you have some sort of computer virus that you can’t get rid of unless you ‘call the number on your screen’.
There are many reasons to hate open offices: They’re loud, prone to thieves, and, most of all, lack any kind of privacy. But a new research paper reveals yet another knock against them: They’re subtly sexist.
Hm. We can’t get rid of ‘open-plan’ offices because they’re stupid (management doesn’t care, they’re Hip and Trendy and oh, by the way, cheaper). So I guess we have to go with CrimeThink. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Subtle Sexism of Your Open Plan Office
The recently announced departure of New York City-based Alliance Bernstein for Nashville, taking more than 1,000 jobs with it, suggests a potential loosening of New York’s iron grip on the financial-services industry. Yet the move reflects a longer evolution that has seen financial firms leave not only New York but also other traditional centers—what one historian calls the “Yankee Empire”—that for two centuries dominated banking, insurance, and investment capital.
This process is driven, in large part, by cost considerations. The cost of living in Nashville is just 58 percent that of New York, an important differential for younger workers looking to buy houses and start families, and one likely to widen with the new federal limits on state and local tax deductions. In addition, pension-driven fiscal realities may force states like New York, Illinois, and California to keep raising revenues.
Other forces are at work, too, notably demographic shifts to Sunbelt states and the growing influence of technology companies on finance. Jobs in industries like information technology and business and professional services are fleeing the old centers outside of New York, which is holding its own better than the rest. But the stagnation, and even decline, of financial-services jobs, at a time of high profits, represents a serious threat to regions losing out on job creation in these other sectors as well.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Finance Flies West, and South
And here I thougth it was because of subsidence on one side. Foolish me.
“Ironically, the very same soil that caused the leaning instability and brought the Tower to the verge of collapse, can be credited for helping it survive these seismic events,” said Professor Mylonakis, a person part of the 16-person study from the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Bristol. The soil allegedly lessened the earthquake vibrations underneath to not wreck the famous tower.
Uh, that’s not what the headline says….
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Engineers Reveal Mysterious Reason Leaning Tower of Pisa Is Slanted
n the case of the now-deceased toddler, Alfie Evans, the British government, through its Royal College of Pediatrics and its courts, had legal authority. Alfie had legal “interests,” which the government defined in his case, but he did not have any “rights.” Alfie’s parents only had a right to be heard; they had no substantive rights or authority over their child.
IngSoc is coming, better look out.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on In England, the Child Is the “Mere Creature of the State”
Peter Suderman demonstrates how writing for tReason magazine kills brain cells.
His major complaint appears to be that there won’t be an ‘infrastructure plan’ this year. Color me devastated. I wasn’t aware that that was a core priority of the Republican party. Ever.
I guess a major tax cut isn’t an ‘idea’.
I guess getting tons of decent judges nominated and confirmed isn’t an ‘idea’.
I guess working for peace with a nuclear-armed totalitarian state isn’t an ‘idea’.
I guess pulling the U.S. out of various bad international agreements isn’t an ‘idea’.
Apparently, according to Suderman, the fact that a lot of Republicans are retiring means that the GOP has ‘abandoned the notion of a policy agenda entirely’. As we lawyers say, I’d like to see him connect that up.
The rest of it is just general OOOO IIIIKKKK TRUMP! that we’ve come to expect at the Cultural Marxists at tReason.
For example, one political leader believes Jews disproportionately control American foreign policy. At least two clerics espouse harsh anti-gay sentiments rooted in their religious beliefs. Another hates the state of Israel so much, it’s a disqualifying trait in any potential friend or ally.
CNN provides almost no context or background on those controversies, one of which directly and unfairly tarred one of the network’s top anchors. The list was generated by interviews with more than 100 Muslim Americans, CNN said.
It offered no information about how those 100 people were selected, or what diversity in opinion or religious devotion they offered. But it’s likely that those people skewed toward religious conservatism.
There’s nothing like preaching jihad to make you an ‘influentual Muslim’.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on The Divisive, Hateful People Among CNN’s Influential American Muslim List
Are college students affected by the preaching of their mostly “progressive” professors? We are often told to stop worrying about that because polling shows that on the whole, student beliefs are not changed much by their college experience. The problem with that approach is that some students who come into college with leftist beliefs are turned into zealots who will bedevil the country for the rest of their lives.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Activism Masquerading as College Education
As the housing market has gone from recovering to roaring over the last five years, home flipping has also increased. Both investors and flippers have gained confidence that home prices will keep climbing long enough for them to execute a flip, which usually involves rehabilitating the house as well—hence the term “fix and flip” loans.
I gotcher affordable housing, right here.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on How Wall Street, Silicon Valley Institutionalized Home Flipping
Yeah, that will make housing more ‘affordable’. Way to go.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on California Regulators Want to Add $10,500 to the Price of a New Home With a Solar Panel Mandate
No, it couldn’t. Any danger to American troops would occur with or without the ‘Iran Deal’, because the Iranians were ignoring it any way. (Remember that boatload of Navy people that they seized and humiliated? That Iran Deal was certainly effective, wasn’t it?)
The problem with tReason magazine is that when they’re not dealing with litmus-test ‘libertarian’ issues (WE ARE ENTITLED TO SMOKE WEED! TAXATION IS THEFT!), they are just the same old Cultural Marxists as everybody else of their age and education. Every now and then they have something useful, but then so does The Nation.
Whatever you may say about Latter Day Saints, they are never confused about the culture. Once the Scouts gave up on the ‘morally straight’ clause in the Scout Oath, it was all over but the paperwork.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Mormon Church and Boy Scouts Ending 105-Year Partnership
