Month: November 2018

Trust Funders

Chill Regular-ass Post

I do not agree with unleashing CS gas on kids, but what about the working class of this country — you know, the people who already live here?

Trust funders like she almost certainly is (most journalists are, even Lefty ones) don’t have to worry about an influx of labor causing an already-terrible $10 an hour job to be done by someone willing to do it for $6 an hour.

As the opposite of a trust funder (my parents actually stole money from me), a decent job is the only thing that anchored my dad. When he lost it our entire existence went into a tailspin from which the family never recovered financially and emotionally.

But of course trust funders don’t care about that because throwing open the borders and unleashing whatever occurs to the working class doesn’t matter to them at all. Not in the least.

You know, there’s millions of journalists and writers around the world who’d love to come to America if they could to compete with these amoral putzes. Why not let them? These terrible journalists need the competition. And I wish it went without saying that someone earning $10 an hour driving a forklift doesn’t need competition from anyone, despite whatever ninnyhammers like Sarah Leonard thinks about it.

She’s not the one paying the price.

Tesselated

Chill Regular-ass Post

On this, I am more likely to believe Tesla and Musk.

The NYT is a well-known water carrier for big oil and their interests. And Musk has the data. Why would he need to lie? I am quite sure the reviewer set out to make the Tesla vehicle look bad to show “what could happen” and got busted doing so. I know a few people with Teslas. They are more than pleased with them and they simply don’t behave like this. This isn’t how they operate and if they did so, it’d be disastrous.

Musk should release the data, agreed, but I do not trust the NYT for reliable journalism in cases like this so I suspect the review was cooked. I’d bet quite a lot of money on it.

Boom Down

Chill Regular-ass Post

I think one of the reasons for the extreme selfishness and antipathy of the Boomer generation to the future and toward their own children and grandchildren is that they are the first generation ever to be told to live as if they’d never die.

This debilitating doctrine of feigned immortality is now having pernicious psychological effects as many Boomers believe not in the future or the past, but rather the eternal shimmering present effulgent with the gleam of a time and place that never existed at all.

Over the past few years I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to understand why Boomers are so supportive of policies that directly and demonstrably harm their own children and grandchildren while hardly making their own lives better at all. The immortality cognitive maladaptation is a large part of this, I think. They aren’t concerned with a bequest to the future in the form of money or good deeds because in their heart of hearts they believe against all evidence they’ll be present for that future (really the eternal present), and they care not for harming their own children because they see them as the competition not as emblems of a future time they will not in fact experience.

The Boomer generation enjoyed all the benefits of consumerism and “choice” feminism while being told to live as if they’d never die. We’re now paying for allowing that sort of avarice and solipsism to fester for so long.

Single Hilarity

Chill Regular-ass Post

We are about to experience a singularity, but not the way the tech-bros and futurists envisioned.

Climate change on a vast scale lies ahead and no one knows what awaits beyond that stygian gate. Could be extinction. Or even a better world. The equations are unsolvable; no one knows the answers or even the questions. That is what a singularity is, by definition.

We are beyond all reason and understanding, foundering for now on Homer’s wine-dark sea.

I though the future would be cooler.

Taxation

Chill Uncategorized

There is not a single good article in English about the French tax protests and riots occurring all around that nation. This is the journalism we must endure.

It’s not about fuel tax increases, really, as the English-speaking press reports. That’s just the spark. The real animus behind the tumult is regressive, neoliberal-style taxes levied against the French people. Being regressive, they will and are hitting average workers and wage-earners much harder than they are the rich. That is Macron and his ilk’s modus operandi. Why spend your money when you can take it from the workers?

Particularly telling is the “frais bancaires.” That means “bank fees.” Who pays bank fees? Not anyone with money. And electricity tax up 17%? Hugely regressive. “PV stationnement” is a roadworthiness certificate, kind of like inspections some states in the US have.

Go Die Me

Chill Regular-ass Post

We are so inured of evil that this hardly raises an eyebrow — but this shows the extent of the failure of our society. That we have become accustomed to it does not excuse it, but makes it yet more monstrous.

Backwards

Chill Regular-ass Post

“Social not technical invention was the intellectual mainspring of the Industrial Revolution. The decisive contribution of the natural sciences to engineering was not made until a full century later, when the Industrial Revolution was long over.”

-Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation

Screened Out

Chill Uncategorized

How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart. When people have a hole in their life, they often fill it with angry politics.

I’ve wondered how much of Fox News taking over the older demographic is just simple loneliness. I’ve often seen old people in the grocery store so starved for human contact that they have inappropriate or overly-long conversations with swamped retail workers. People like that will reach out to and react to anything that seems to provide them a hold and even makes an effort to explain their predicament and that alleviates their extreme isolation.

Work is one of the key sources of friendship and community. Think of your own relationships; surely many of your closest friendships — perhaps even your relationship with your spouse — started in the workplace.

This is one of the reasons I have a huge problem with most of left’s bogus “protection from harm” boss-coddling causing workplace relationships (platonic and non-) to become verboten.

There’s a lot to disagree with and a lot this article ignores, being penned by someone from the AEI — but it’s more right than wrong, and loneliness is an enormous problem that is only getting worse as we retreat behind screens and algorithms.

Borders and Orders

Chill Uncategorized

The problem with the “open borders” cant of the Left is that there is no plausible path from that state and concordant with that absurd demand to anything else that the Left or progressives claims to stand for.

And so today talk of “open borders” has entered mainstream liberal discourse, where once it was confined to radical free market think tanks and libertarian anarchist circles.

While no serious political party of the Left is offering concrete proposals for a truly borderless society, by embracing the moral arguments of the open-borders Left and the economic arguments of free market think tanks, the Left has painted itself into a corner. If “no human is illegal!,” as the protest chant goes, the Left is implicitly accepting the moral case for no borders or sovereign nations at all. But what implications will unlimited migration have for projects like universal public health care and education, or a federal jobs guarantee? And how will progressives convincingly explain these goals to the public?

I believe that de facto or de jure open borders are incompatible with any sort of welfare state, for a variety of reasons. The evidence isn’t conclusive but also points this way as well. And I care about what works and what is most likely to be true rather than my (or anyone’s) feelings. And I care about risk and opportunity cost — two things almost everyone else ignores.

In the heightened emotions of America’s public debate on migration, a simple moral and political dichotomy prevails. It is “right-wing” to be “against immigration” and “left-wing” to be “for immigration.” But the economics of migration tell a different story.

The transformation of open borders into a “Left” position is a very new phenomenon and runs counter to the history of the organized Left in fundamental ways. Open borders has long been a rallying cry of the business and free market Right.

That in particular is what is puzzling to me. Rarely have I seen progressives embrace and even extend hard-Right positions — stances that are obviously harmful to them, their priorities, and to all Americans and legal immigrants who wish to become Americans.

To paraphrase a drill sergeant of mine, compassion isn’t a plan. Just letting half the world in and hoping for the best won’t help us and it won’t help (for long) the people we allow to immigrate.

I am strongly against open borders. It’s a failed experiment in the making, and as the article states it’s a “victory for the bosses.” As for birthright citizenship, I am ambivalent on that, but leaning against. The worry I have is that its revocation could lead to a permanent class of stateless people with no protection or recourse — in other words, the same place “open borders” is far more likely to take us toward.

Int

Chill Uncategorized

I think “intuitive eating” has to be one of the stupidest ideas I have ever heard of. Someone was doing some intuitive cracksmoking when they came up with that body-destroyer. Intuitive eating could just as easily be called “How to weigh 500 pounds in a year or less.”

Also, aye:

Stream Power

Chill Regular-ass Post

I am old enough to remember when the conventional wisdom that streaming video over the internet would never be possible, and if so it’d only be used for certain specialty applications at very high cost.

I also remember when talking about solar and wind power made you the looniest of loons — it was like talking about “magic Tinkerbell-based power.” I know that seems wild now, but it really was that way, once, and not so long ago.