Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.~Dwight Eisenhower
T-rump's current tariff changes will mean higher prices for US steel and aluminum consumers. That's cars, a steel-framed building, or beer from aluminum cans.
It could also be a huge problem for Canada, if the president includes our northern neighbor in any tariffs and quotas. Canadian steel is highly integrated into US manufacturing.
"Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.
The fact that the “bourgeois culture” these norms embodied has broken down since the 1960s, we argued, largely explains today’s social pathologies—and re-embracing that culture would go a long way toward addressing those pathologies."
This is Wax testifying against herself as she argued that certain behaviors were better than others. That, of course, is heresy. In the world of the modern freedom warrior no way of thinking has any advantage over another; that would result in judgment, a modern cardinal sin. Not only did she mistakenly believe that thoughtfulness and honesty would be rewarded in this article she also admitted that bourgeois values might be good, an admission one should make only under torture. "Bourgeois" has not been good on campus for over one hundred and fifty years.
“A seemingly more peaceful form of redistribution and regulation of global wealth inequality is immigration. Rather than move capital, which poses all sorts of difficulties, it is sometimes simpler to allow labor to move to places where wages are higher.” This is Piketty, in praise of immigration as a redistribution tool. He writes of it as if the immigrant is a foreign made product. So.....maybe immigration has a bit of a downside.
Prosecutors in Los Angeles have formally declined to charge fugitive director Roman Polanski in connection with an allegation he molested a woman when she was a minor in 1975, saying the statute of limitations has expired. "Guilt outruns Time:" Film at 11.
Who is...Anthony de Jasay?
The Daily Mail, reports five half-an-hour workouts a week is the 'sweet spot' for reducing middle-aged cough potatoes' heart attack risk, new research reveals.
Being active four-to-five times every seven days significantly improves middle-aged people's heart muscle flexibility, a study found today. Stiff, hardened muscles have previously been linked to heart attacks.
This is a classic study in modern times: The study assessed 53 people for 2 years and only 34 completed the study. Small numbers, big conclusions.
In a recent issue, The Economist observes that business is becoming more political in America. Politicized businesses do not only feel obliged to take a stand on political issues, but they often want their preferences to be, in some way, forced upon members of society who don't share them. The chairman of Starbucks, reports the magazine, "champions the idea that firms should serve both their shareholders and a broader set of interests, including staff and civil society." And, "... many bosses feel that they have little choice but to respond to their staff, who are increasingly vocal on political and on cultural issues. ... 44% of millennial American employees say they would be more loyal to their company if their boss took a public position on a societal issue."
Fascinating. Will companies begin to feign sympathy with popular causes, not hire employees who do not agree with them politically, be vulnerable to those companies who choose the cheaper and more efficient non-political track?
Switzerland’s central bank said it expects to make a record profit of $55.2 billion in 2017, citing higher global equity and bond prices as well as a weaker Swiss franc. That's more than Apple made.
Anthony de Jasay is an economist. He has an article entitled "There are no Natural Rights." His point is, as rights are man-made, they are imperfect. He writes, "The rights that depend not on voluntariness, but on authority, which in turn depends on legitimacy is of a peculiar character, because its enforcement is provided not by the rights holders (who are directly interested in its maintenance), but by the high authority, such as the king or the republic, who alone is able to enforce the laws. I would consider that these rights alone deserve the name of rights." And, "There is not a high authority that does not depend on an even higher authority by which it became legitimate. Legitimacy ascends by an infinite regress. It is obvious that such an infinite regress is both logically and in actual practice useless."
We all must deal with the arbitrary in life, it is only the intellectual who tries to legislate it.
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2014/05/darpa-and-siga.html
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steeleydock.blogspot.com
Several leaders of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) were in town today for some meetings. I was unable to go but would l...
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The emergence of Oprah as a serious political candidate raises the question that most think tanks grapple with: If you're going to have a national politician/celebrity, shouldn't we pick a really great looking one. I know everyone thinks that I am about to make an Angie pitch here but this kind of question is too important to be restricted. The Globes gave me pause; a consensus would be needed. If not Angie, who? Emma Stone? Jennifer Lawrence? Lindsey Vonn? I don't think Hyack or Cruz can run. Remember, we're talking about replacing Melania here.
The last thing we need in the White House is a shift from diplomacy to serial weight loss.
CNN reports that in a study, 31 male patients received either 600 milligrams of ibuprofen two times per day or a placebo. Among the participants given “ibuprofen, within 14 days, their luteinizing hormones – which are secreted by the pituitary gland and stimulate the testicles to produce testosterone – became coordinated with the level of ibuprofen circulating in their blood.” Meanwhile, “the ratio of testosterone to luteinizing hormones decreased, a sign of dysfunctional testicles.” According to CNN, “This hormonal imbalance produced compensated hypogonadism, a condition” linked to “impaired fertility, depression and increased risk for cardiovascular events, including heart failure and stroke.” The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
31 patients published in a good journal and distributed worldwide.
Prosecutors in Myanmar formally charged two Reuters reporters under archaic, colonial-era secrecy laws as criticism grew over the restriction of press freedoms and civil rights in the country under the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi. The WSJ wrote they "were charged with journalism."
Think about this for a minute: Wilfred M. McClay of the University of Oklahoma decries higher education's "dysfunctional devotion to meritocracy," which he says is subverting the ideal that one's life prospects should not be substantially predictable from facts about one's family. Meritocracy, "while highly democratic in its intentions, has turned out to be colossally undemocratic in its results" because of "the steep decline of opportunity for those Americans who must live outside the magic circle of meritocratic validation." Or this, written about recently by Will: In "A Theory of Justice," the 20th century's most influential American treatise on political philosophy, John Rawls argued that "inequalities of birth and natural endowment are undeserved."
The rising price of corn has become a campaign issue in Mexico. In 2016, about 8.3% of all spending on food in Mexico went toward tortilla purchases, and Mexicans consumed about 125 pounds of corn tortillas per person, according to the Mexican statistics agency INEGI. Mexico’s corn production is enough to satisfy only two-thirds of domestic demand, so the country relies on corn imports—almost exclusively (97%) from the United States—to fill the gap. And the gap is widening: Mexico’s corn consumption increased by 3.75%, from 37.3 million to 38.7 million tons, in the 2016-17 season. Gasoline is another issue. Mexico imports 80% of its gasoline and 73% of its diesel. Recent estimates by the Energy Ministry indicate Mexico will increase its refining capacity over the next 14 years but will remain dependent on imports until 2026. The US is by far the largest supplier of fuel to Mexico. Over half of all gasoline and diesel consumed in Mexico comes from the US, and imports continue their steady rise.
Uh oh. An anonymous, crowdsourced spreadsheet, created as part of a survey on ‘Sexual Harassment in the Academy,’ quickly grew to include about 2,000 allegations of sexual harassment at universities in the U.S., Europe and beyond. (wsj)
The joy of low interest rates:
Low interest rates have enabled the Federal government to increase their total debt by 113% since 2008, yet interest payments have risen by only 5%.
If the Fed shrinks their balance sheet--as they say they will--liquidity will decrease and rates should rise. And with them so will the cost of borrowing.
Those particularly annoyed with the abstract and vague hopes of modern liberalism as embodied by our former president Obama might be buoyed by the insight of our current president as he continues to talk like a coal miner into his eighth beer: At a meeting with senators pitching a bipartisan deal on immigration, President Donald Trump asked why the U.S. would admit immigrants from what he described as “shithole” countries. (wsj)
Let me see if I have this straight: The entertainment industry is on the forefront of respect for women?
No blog nominees for President. My suggestions may not have been taken seriously as they are all too young. Wait. How old is Angie?
"Mercantilism" has a definition, it is not a synonym for "businessman." It refers to the economic business practice of amassing wealth through the accumulation of money through trade. But there are other definitions of wealth; some think material wealth also exists in the receiving of goods and services. So in the latter case, money and goods are, reasonably, interchangeable and viewed similarly. The mercantilist thus thinks that selling goods for money is a positive, receiving goods for money a negative. This implies a winner and a loser in trade and such a person would oppose a negative trade balance because goods were being accumulated and cash lost. Someone with a view that saw inherent value in goods and services would not think such a trade as negative but as an equal exchange, wealth for wealth. The Library of Economics and Liberty defines it this way:
"Mercantilism is economic nationalism for the purpose of building a wealthy and powerful state. Adam Smith coined the term “mercantile system” to describe the system of political economy that sought to enrich the country by restraining imports and encouraging exports. This system dominated Western European economic thought and policies from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. The goal of these policies was, supposedly, to achieve a “favorable” balance of trade that would bring gold and silver into the country and also to maintain domestic employment. In contrast to the agricultural system of the physiocrats or the laissez-faire of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mercantile system served the interests of merchants and producers such as the British East India Company, whose activities were protected or encouraged by the state."
A side question: If the accumulation of physical wealth is of inherent value, what happened to the Spanish in the 16th and 17th Centuries where they amassed huge wealth in gold and silver from stealing it from the Americas but, none the less, succumbed to their competitors?
Since 2015, the number of annual homicides in Mexico has been rising—along with armed robberies, extortion, disappeared persons and kidnappings, and sexual assaults. 2017 has been confirmed as the deadliest year in Mexico since the government started tracking homicides in 1997. (The record-high number (23,101) of murder investigations opened last year will likely grow by about another 2,000 once December figures are included.) Mexico does not track deaths specifically related to organized crime, but such crime (which includes drug trafficking) is still believed to be the main contributor to the rise in the number of homicides. Gun-related deaths are generally tied to organized crime, and such deaths made up 66% of homicides in Mexico in 2017. In addition, the states with the most homicides per month are those with the strongest presence of drug trafficking. Finally, there’s been an increase in killings of journalists and politicians.
George Gilder writes the economy is driven not by “centralized” institutions wielding rewards and punishments, but by an ever-growing pool of knowledge. The economy is merely a conduit of this knowledge. And since knowledge is innovative and new, analasis of the past does not help much. Neither do economic laws.
George Gilder writes the economy is driven not by “centralized” institutions wielding rewards and punishments, but by an ever-growing pool of knowledge. The economy is merely a conduit of this knowledge. And since knowledge is innovative and new, analasis of the past does not help much. Neither do economic laws.
The Iraq-Iran War in 1984 killed more than 1 million people and it was the only modern day war which chemical and biological weapons used against troops.
About 510 million flip phones were shipped worldwide in 2016, down from 543 million the year before. Smartphone shipments were triple that number, at about 1.47 billion in 2016, up from 1.44 billion in 2015. But a lot of people are still buying flip-phones.
If the unemployment rate is so low and there is a need for skilled workers, why aren't wages rising?
Because most newly employed people weren’t on the books as “unemployed” right before starting their jobs. They went straight from “out of the labor force” to “employed,” because they were in school or military service, or otherwise neither employed nor seeking a job.
AAAAaaaaaannnnnddddddddd......a graph:
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