From The Defence Reformation

Nobody is needy in the market economy because of the fact that some people are rich.--von Mises

***

Andrew, the Duke of York, has said he “ceased all contact” with the businessman accused of being a Chinese spy after receiving advice from the government.
Sources close to the government of the United Arab Emirates claim the Duke of York is considering a permanent move to the Gulf, where his royal status would still confer a degree of respect, according to the Sunday Times.

***

From The Defence Reformation

We, as a culture, are inundated with manifestos. Most are by self-indulgent lunatics but the culture is broad and forgiving. And curious.

This notebook has often been a sounding board for ideas of varying merit but this article, by the CTO of Palantir, is arresting, radical, and hopeful. 

It is an analysis of the DoD--and may have implications of our efforts to homogenize decisions in our suicidal war on merit that makes life so much easier for administrators..

These snippets are followed by a link, 4000 words. I think it's worth the read.

"In 1993, after the end of the Cold War, America wanted a Peace Dividend and defense spending was slashed by 67%. The Secretary of Defense held a dinner at the Pentagon — the so-called “Last Supper” — to tell the 51 primes they would not all survive. Today, there are 5.

The most important consequence of the Last Supper wasn’t a reduction in competition in the Defense Industrial Base, but the decoupling of commercial innovation from defense and the rise of the government Monopsony. Consolidation bred conformity and pushed out the crazy Founders and innovative engineers. This was the Great Schism of the American Industrial Base.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, only 6% of defense spending went to defense specialists — so called traditionals. The vast majority of the spend went to companies that had both defense and commercial businesses. Chrysler made cars and missiles. Ford made satellites until 1990. General Mills — the cereal company — made artillery and inertial guidance systems.

But today that 6% has ballooned to 86%. The Monopsony’s fixation on cost-plus contracting, control, and tedious regulation has made working in the national interest bad business, suitable only to risk-averse investors who are addicted to dividends and buybacks — a luxury only affordable at the end of history. That is not what the most dynamic parts of the American economy do — only the dying parts.

Working with the Monopsony as a defense contractor is so unappealing that Ball would rather make beer cans than satellite buses. That is depressing.

The S&P 500 last added a defense company 46 years ago — until Palantir’s addition in September 2024. That resembles Europe’s sclerotic capital markets, not America’s.

But Palantir’s addition will not be the last. Because today the Founders are back — in the hundreds — and they are backed by hundreds of billions of dollars of private capital to build in the national interest. However, their effort and capital alone is not enough to resurrect the American Industrial Base. We need a defense Reformation to upend the Monopsony and transform the way the government does business. Here is my treatise on how to get that done.

Everyone, including the Russians and the Chinese, have given up on communism except for Cuba and the DOD. The only problem is that we are bad commies.

We run a centrally unplanned process that neither has the supposed advantages of a planned economy nor the (far superior) advantages of a free market. Bill Greenwalt explains the sins of our poor attempts at copying the Communists:

'This [ideology and management] approach, now deeply engrained in defense management culture, process, law, and regulation, is based on the concepts of scientific management that were once fashionable in the Soviet Union and at the vanguard of the 1950s U.S. auto industry before it was outcompeted by Japan in the 1970s. Centralized, predictive program budgeting, management, and oversight were then thought to be superior to the trial and error and messiness of time-constrained, decentralized experimentation and the seemingly wastefulness of having multiple sources rapidly prototyping potential solutions.'
 
There is no process that can save us. Reform will be painful. We must be very careful not to conflate pain with error. As world champion cyclist Greg LeMond said, “It doesn’t get easier, you just go faster.” Just as there is no pain-free world class cycling performance, innovation will always be painful, messy, and subject to retrospective bureaucratic critiques from those not in the arena.

Our centralized, predictive program budgeting, management, and oversight process values time spent, not time saved. It values costs and effort, not value and outcomes.

The Great Schism has created a religion in government that is unaware or dismissive of power-law outcomes from power-law talent. In Silicon Valley we call them 10x or 100x engineers, meaning they are 10x to 100x as valuable and productive as normal engineers. We once understood this in defense, too: Rickover, Kelly Johnson, Ed Hall and countless legendary talents fought the bureaucracy and got stuff done. We seem to generally appreciate that Usain Bolt is more than a generational talent — even the gold medalist at Paris 2024 was not faster than him. But this is also true for Tom Mueller, Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, Ryan Tseng, and the Founders at the First Breakfast. Reforming the system means renouncing the communist conformity that’s slowing us down and unleashing the charismatic leaders who can drive outcomes — in the boardroom and on the battlefield."

https://www.18theses.com/

Institutionalized Charity

 

                                                              Institutionalized Charity

What is the relationship between profit and social values? Does the modern world identify profit with usury and sin? Is profit possible in a religious community or is the only trade barter?

If so, can charity make up for these errors? Can a plaintiff lawyer gain credit by starting a charity, however insincere?

Is there a break-even point? Is there a point where a business can be excessive in its charity? Or is charity by its very nature so good that there can be no excess? That even bankruptcy is acceptable in a good cause?

Or is it possible that individuals can be charitable but institutions cannot? That institutions mimicking charity is like a dog in a tutu or a bear dancing--the denigrating and inappropriate application of one entity's characteristics to another? Like blackface.

Human appropriation.

.

China and Influence

                                    China and Influence


When officials at the Texas A&M University System sought to determine how much Chinese government funding its faculty members were receiving, they were astounded at the results—more than 100 were involved with a Chinese talent-recruitment program, even though only five had disclosed their participation.

A plant pathologist at the Texas system, where the median annual salary for such scientists employed by the state is around $130,000, told officials that the researcher had been offered $250,000 in compensation and more than $1 million in seed money to start a lab in China through one of the talent programs. The researcher ultimately rejected the offer, according to the Texas system’s chief research security officer, Kevin Gamache, who led the recent 18-month review that has garnered praise from U.S. officials.

As for Harvard:

Charles Lieber, a pioneer in nanotechnology, allegedly signed a contract with Chinese counterparts under which he would be paid around $50,000 a month, plus another $150,000 a year for personal expenses; he was also promised—and received—more than $1.5 million to establish a research lab at the Wuhan University of Technology, according to prosecutors.

He is specifically charged with deliberately lying to U.S. government investigators when asked if he received Chinese talent-plan funding, rather than simply omitting the information on forms.
(from the WSJ)

Who's Your Big Brother?

Price is what you pay, value is what you get.--Warren Buffett

Mom had her first relaxing day in a while.
I did not. I went to the feared book group on The Plague. I have always thought the modern history of the European states was one of how they adapted to the homicidal mania of the two great wars and the French have adapted the worst. Their modern philosophies seem to me to be a jumble of rationalizations, with the Camus "Existence precedes essence" notion looking to me little more than a sports half-time exhortation. But the book is brilliantly written, really beautiful.

A new bill to prevent “social media addiction” would have the government manage social media website design.

Chinese officials are blaming the United States for the enormous political protests  in Hong Kong in recent weeks.

"…socialist experiments usually go through three stages, in terms of their reception by Western intellectuals. The first is a honeymoon period, during which they are widely held up as a glorious example of “real” socialism in action. The second is a period of angry defensiveness, during which some of the 
system’s failures are acknowledged, but blamed on external constraints. The third stage is the stage of retroactive disowning: intellectuals now claim that the country in question was never socialist, and that it is a cheap strawman to even mention it. The Western reception of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Vietnam and, more recently, Venezuela followed this pattern to a tee. Cuba, in contrast, is a bit of an outlier, in that the country seems to be permanently stuck somewhere between stages two and three. It may no longer attract widespread enthusiasm, but Cuban socialism has never completely gone the way of Soviet, Maoist, Vietnamese or North Korean socialism."--Niemietz

The NFL says its fan base is increasingly made up of women and girls, up to 45% now of the NFL’s overall total. Antonio Brown being the face of the next weekend--and the league--would be a real PR nightmare.
On the other hand, why is his accuser meeting with the league?

I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.--Freidman
What about the problem of contagion though? If you value individual decision making to the exclusion of contagion risks, you could argue against vaccines.

Over the past 50 years, Ashkenazi Jews have consistently tested well above the norm in almost every IQ study. Some the findings were startling. Looking at worldwide population groups, Jews appear at the top of the IQ charts, followed by East Asians, Whites, Arabs, other Asians, Indians, Blacks and Australian Aborigines. Studies have set average Ashkenazi IQ at anywhere from 107 to 117, which would rank them as the highest tested population in the world, as much as a full standard deviation above the general European average of about 101.

There are signs that the United Kingdom is at the start of a sterling crisis that could have serious implications for global financial markets and the European economy. 

On this day in 1862, Union soldiers found a copy of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s orders detailing the Confederates’ plan for the Antietam campaign near Frederick, Maryland.

               Who's Your Big Brother?

A recent article in the WashPo claimed  “big business is a greater threat to liberty than big government.”
This is usually met with the equally lame "No business can force anyone to buy its products. Only the government can force me to do anything." But life is more complicated than that.
The government may have been the enabler, but it was the banks that invested in derivatives and in subprime mortgages and and the result was an economic disaster that trapped us all. The publishing companies certainly gives us enough misinformation to impair our decision-making. And how much information gathering and storage is too much?
So the basic question is, on the current large scale, does it matter who is doing the gathering, the misinforming and making the financial errors?

National Institute of Manufacturing

“You Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause.” — Randall Jarrell, “Pictures From an Institution”

Mom got back comfortably.
Good dinner with the McGraws and Chris at Zinho.

As a result of the Great Recession and the squeeze of interest rates by the Fed, Alex J. Pollock estimates that American savers lost $2.4 trillion between 2008 and mid-2017. Something similar happened in Europe. These events were just a repeat of history. The value destroyed in a crash must be lost by somebody, and interventionist governments decide by whom.  It is usually taxpayers or savers, although equity investors (as opposed to lenders and bond holders) typically lose something, too.

Biden did Strom Thurmond's eulogy. In a political party with an elephant's memory, is that forgivable?

The Texas state legislature has passed two bills which would define ‘harassment’ on campus as “unwelcome, sex based” words.Hearing anything that makes you feel even slightly uncomfortable would be considered sexual harassment. The legislation allows university professors to be fired or imprisoned for failing to report any instance of harassment that falls under this loose definition.'

So, the solution to this problem, failing mind reading, is silence.

San Francisco’s Washington High School  has a mural painted in the 1930s depicting George Washington (with Native Americans nee Indians and slaves) that is viewed as so offensive to local sensibilities that they are covering it--at the cost of up to $300K.

When did Obama's Detention Centers become Concentration Camps?

One element of Leftist policy is the belief that we have good understanding and that leads to control. But the primary factor is "control." And if control is to be assumed, we must have an understanding. So, we must make everything explainable, even if those explanations are wrong. So we live in a stripped down world. 

I am not a big fan of polls but this is a worrisome one: Americans have little faith the U.S. political system can address long-term challenges and are skeptical the nation remains committed to foundational tenets such as the free market, majority rule and tolerance, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows.

Swarthmore College offers a course on “Queering God,” most recently taught during the spring 2019 semester, that provides a feminist and queer perspective of the Bible, while also exploring God’s gender identity.

On this day in 1944, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the G.I. Bill, an unprecedented act of legislation designed to compensate returning members of the armed services–known as G.I.s–for their efforts in World War II.

                    National Institute of Manufacturing

Gary Peters, D-Mich., wants to create a new federal agency called the National Institute of Manufacturing. The senator explains, "This will be an executive branch agency that will house our national manufacturing programs under one roof," and effectively coordinate a strategic vision for manufacturing.

 This silliness seems to be aimed at the supposed decline of American manufacturing. In reality, while manufacturing employment has gone down significantly over the last 40 years, U.S. manufacturing output is now near an all-time high.

Industrial capacity — the existing ability of American factories and workplaces to produce industrial output — is also higher than at any time in the past,

But all the big nations are doing this, one might cry. In his latest book — "The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?" — Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute for International Economics shows that China's growth since 1978 has actually been the product of market-oriented reforms, not state-owned programs.
Lardy notes that in 2012, about 70% of China's GDP was produced by private firms. He details the toll taken on the Chinese economy by the recent increase in ambitious industrial policies and the growth of the state-owned sector. His conclusion is that unless China reverses course and the growing weight of state-owned enterprises, government debt and bad investments, China's growth will wither away.

Here's yet another politician thinking that somehow, the same government that started a war in Iraq on faulty intelligence, botched the launch of HealthCare.gov, gave us the Solyndra scandal and can keep neither Amtrak nor the Postal Service solvent, can effectively coordinate a strategic vision for American manufacturing. Governments fight wars, and the only reason they are successful is that they are fighting other governments.

As Peters notes, "If you go on the factory floor in Michigan, it's not your father's or grandfather's factory." What is he saying? That we should go back one or two or three generations and recreate the factory of the past?  Restore replaced technologies and ideas?

Lighter regulations, a better tax code, more immigrants and freedom to do what they do best are what entrepreneurs need. Which is to say, get government to the sidelines.

Chick-fil-A

‘‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.’--Carl Schmitt

GoT: All gunned up for it last night. The denouement is never near as much fun as the first three and a half acts. Still, its final episode is next week and I will miss it.

Freddie and Fannie, the gatekeepers of the American mortgage market, are increasingly backing loans to borrowers who have heavy debt loads, highlighting questions about mortgage risk. wsj

The German government has withdrawn proposed legislation that would have banned immigrants in polygamous marriages from obtaining German citizenship. The proposed ban had been included in draft changes to Germany's naturalization law, but was quietly removed from the final text, apparently in the interests of political correctness and multiculturalism.

Although German law clearly prohibits polygamy for German nationals, some have argued that the law is unclear as to whether the law applies to foreign nationals living in Germany. 

This has a big impact on social programs  as the polygamist can marry one wife and the others can claim welfare as single mothers.

The Americans years ago fought this over Mormonism. Is this an impingement of freedom of religion? How can those freedoms be clear if the religion has so many social elements? From what I saw of Jehovah's Witnesses last week, faith-based social structures have a significant appeal in this modern culture.

The popular unrest that dislodged Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir and Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is part of a wave of conflict engulfing northern Africa and posing grave risks to stability in the region and beyond. The discord is likely to produce major new refugee flows and increase the potential for a dramatic expansion of Islamic State and Al Qaeda in northern Africa.

Libya is its own reward.

“Walmart’s U.S. store managers earn an average of $175,000 per year and receive benefits including parental leave, health benefits and 401(k) contributions. That’s higher than the average salary of some of the country’s best paying jobs, including dentists, who make an average $174,110 a year, according to U.S. News & World Report, and lawyers, who make an average of $141,890.” (NBC) According to Walmart, “75% of its Walmart U.S. store operations management team members started as hourly employees.”

Countries that have pushed the laudable doctrines of equality of opportunity most assiduously (that would be the Scandinavian states) have the lowest rates of STEM enrollment among females in the world, as it turns out that freed females, so to speak, given free choice, do not often voluntarily become engineers and mathematicians and physicists. Perhaps they do not know their own minds.

IRAs contain 29 trillion dollars. In savings. In what American workers have put aside for retirement and their children and deprived themselves of in their working years.  And the government wants it. The FESA aka Secure Act will in essence eliminate the stretch IRA. The estimate is that will reduce the wealth of family IRAs by 50% and will be the largest tax increase in the country's history. Remember,this can not be done without the cooperation of the house and the senate, the dems and the republicans. i have not seen a single story about this in the press.

Concern has grown in Germany about the influence of foreign funding sources for mosques for the country's estimated five million Muslims, who hail mostly from Turkey and Arab countries. Some 900 mosques in Germany are run by the Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institute for Religion (Ditib), under the authority of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government. Its imams are paid by the Turkish state, and the group has come under scrutiny with some of its members suspected of spying on Turkish dissidents living in Germany. In Germany, church taxes are collected from practicing Catholics and Protestants in order to fund church activities. They are collected by the state and then transferred to religious authorities. So the Germans subsidize religion in the belief it will make them independent of government. They are actually thinking of subsidizing the mosques.

On this day in 1981,Pope John Paul II was shot and seriously wounded while passing through the square in an open car. The assailant, 23-year-old escaped Turkish murderer Mehmet Ali Agca, fired four shots, one of which hit the pontiff in the abdomen, narrowly missing vital organs, and another that hit the pope’s left hand. A third bullet struck 60-year-old American Ann Odre in the chest, seriously wounding her, and the fourth hit 21-year-old Jamaican Rose Hill in the arm.

                                               Chick-fil-A 

The city governments of San Antonio and San Jose both oppose the openings of Chick-fil-A restaurants in the airports of their respective cities. In March, Buffalo Niagara International Airport was also against the restaurant opening its doors there. New York Assemblyman Sean Ryan (D-Buffalo) argued that Chick-fil-A was not an appropriate restaurant at a publicly financed airport.

The corporate policy is to not do business on Sunday. And Christian songs can be heard in the background. And the company mission statement is “To glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us and to have a positive influence on all who come into contact with Chick-fil-A.” But that's about it. It does not selectively hire nor does it selectively serve. As such, it is not truly a Christian business.

So, why the fuss? CEO Dan Cathy has publicly stated that he believes that marriage is a contract reserved for a man and a woman. He opposes same sex marriage. They are opposed to what the CEO of Chick-fil-A thinks and they want to punish him and his company for it.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a thought crime.

Taking a Bullet

Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal.--Sowell

In April, U.S. auto sales were down 6.1 percent.  That was the worst decline in 8 years.
Car sales are down in Germany. Car markets in Europe continue to struggle with new EU emission regulations that began last September. These regulations have been the main scapegoat for an industry in Europe that clearly has been grinding to a halt for months now, with manufacturers claiming that the regulations have caused production and sales bottlenecks. 
The economics of self-inflicted wounds.

Amazing stuff on the internet. This is a take on the current world situation from a pro-Russian website I found: 
"The Empire has suffered painful defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, but one has to admit that these are “tough” countries to crack.  The Empire also appears to have lost control of Libya, but that is another complex country which is very hard to control.  We also saw all the pathetic huffing and puffing with the DPRK.  But, let’s be honest, the USA never stood a chance to bully the DPRK into submission, nevermind invading or regime-changing it.  Syria was much weaker, but here Russia, Iran and Hezbollah did a world class job of repelling all the AngloZionist attacks, political and military.  Besides, I for one will never blame Trump for not listening to Bolton and not triggering WWIII over Syria (yet?)

But Venezuela?!

No Hezbollah or Iran backing Maduro there.  And Venezuela is way too far away from Russia to allow her to do what she did in Syria.  In fact, Venezuela is in the proverbial “backyard” of the USA and is surrounded by hostile puppet regimes.  And yet, tonight, it appears that the US puppet Guaidó has failed in his coup attempt." (emphasis unchanged)

WashPo recently counted 10,000 lies by Trump but an economist, looking only at the first one hundred economic "falsehoods" WashPo listed, found 27 out of 100 Trump comments to be "defensible if not unimpeachably accurate." So WashPo is lying?

Apparently this is the Year of the Cicadas, an every seventeen year event. This, and Trump  too. Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

Trump's discussions with Putin is allowing a vicious dictator to seem to be a sensible, reasonable man compared to us.

An end to the Aids epidemic could be in sight after a landmark study found men whose HIV infection was fully suppressed by antiretroviral drugs had no chance of infecting their partner. The success of the medicine means that if everyone with HIV were fully treated, there would be no further infections.

And, on the Ebola front: The death toll from an Ebola outbreak in Congo rose above 1,000 on Friday, with attacks on treatment centers continuing to hamper efforts to control the "intense transmission" of the second-worst epidemic of the virus on record. "Attacks on treatment centers."

An interesting discussion recently with a businessman from Canada who has a new Corporation that he has registered in the United States rather than Canada. The reason he did so was the Canadian system demands that all of his papers be duplicated in French and this was so expensive and so annoying and the Americans were so much easier to deal with that he just moved the company here.

Miss USA, Miss Teen USA, and Miss America are all Black women.

Mayor Pugh is out in Baltimore, not because she behaved criminally and unethically but because she was too obviously corrupt; she put all of the others at risk.

Wal-Mart has 440 Satanic items on its online catalog.

There is growing use of “diversity statements” to making hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions.  “Professors and other faculty members are asked to pledge their commitment to 'equity' and 'inclusion' and to demonstrate how they have acted to fulfill this pledge in the past,” Christian Schneider wrote in a New York Post op-ed.  The University of California  demands that all professors applying for tenure-track positions “write a statement on their commitment to diversity, showing, for example, their ‘record of success advising women and minority graduate students,’” reported by something called RealClearInvestigations. At Vassar, tenure-track candidates have to report their “contributions to social justice.” Applicants at the University of Minnesota-Duluth must “demonstrate ability to support the university’s commitment to equity and diversity.” Vanderbilt, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington and the University of Nebraska all instruct their professors on how to write effective diversity statements….Faculty at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences were recently required to submit reports detailing their actions in support of “diversity, inclusion and belonging.” The teachers’ ability to demonstrate "wokeness" will affect the assignment of future bonuses, per the school’s dean.
We don't know if they have to memorize chants or anything.

On this day in 1970, at Kent State in Kent, Ohio, 28 National Guardsmen fired into a group of antiwar demonstrators on the Kent State University campus, killing four students, wounding eight, and permanently paralyzing another.

                              Taking a Bullet

The LA Times had a big article on the California "bullet train." The high-speed rail network would transform California as it connected Los Angeles with San Francisco — ​cleaner air, less congested freeways and airports, and more limited suburban sprawl with a whole new style of housing around rail stops. 

When California shifted its bullet train plan into high gear in 2008, it had just 10 employees to manage and oversee design of the largest public construction project in state history. It would take them only 12 years to bore under mountains, bridge rivers and build 520 miles of rail bed — all at a cost of just $33 billion. But significant portions of this work have been flawed or mismanaged, according to records reviewed by The Times and interviews with dozens of people involved in the project. Ten years after voters approved it, the project is $44 billion over budget and 13 years behind schedule.


$44 billion over budget and 13 years behind schedule.

There seems to be a distinction between the abstract plan and the practical implementation. Plans call for the trains to share commuter tracks, moving at much slower speeds and being subjected to delays. The agency originally estimated it would cost $332 million to buy up properties to build the route. But cutting through orchards, vineyards and dairies with vast and sophisticated irrigation and trellis systems proved profoundly more complicated than was expected. The land acquisition is now budgeted at $1.5 billion and tied up in endless litigation. In 2016, engineers said they had to dig a 13.5-mile tunnel through the Diablo Range because their earlier plans cut too close to the San Luis Reservoir. But boring through the unstable mix of hard sandstone, weak shale and boulders has put the estimated cost of that single stretch between $5.6 billion and $14.4 billion.

Even Morocco, with an economy just 4% the size of California’s, managed to build high-speed rail linking Casablanca, Rabat and Tangier.

Oh, well.

But the incentives for building the line is instructive.

The rail authority’s consultants are politically powerful and made major contributions to support the 2008 political campaign for the bullet train bond. They have staffed their ranks with former high-level bureaucrats, and their former executives have occupied key government posts.

Engineering and construction firms contributed $837,000 to the bond campaign, second only to the $1.6 million spent by various unions, according to a Times review of campaign filings. WSP, a professional services firm, put $107,000 into the campaign. There was no organized opposition to the bond measure. It passed with 52.7% support.


The key phrase here is "There was no organized opposition to the bond measure." Here a select few campaigned for a project that would benefit only them. And they were generous; they only wanted enough to get rich on. The rest of the project they gave to us.

Confessions of a European Business Insider

Most government transfers are not from the rich to the poor. Instead, government takes from the relatively unorganized (e.g., consumers and general taxpayers) and gives to the relatively organized (groups politically organized around common interests, such as the elderly, sugar farmers, and steel producers). The most important factor in determining the pattern of redistribution appears to be political influence, not poverty.--Lee

Chris got a good checkup yesterday.

Mom really cut her hand badly yesterday.

Another government Bait-and-Switch. In 2007, the U.S. government made a promise to public service workers: Make 10 years of payments on their federal student loans and any remaining debt would be erased. But officials have largely failed to deliver. Signed into law under President George W. Bush, the program is meant to help college graduates who pursue jobs that often pay modest salaries but serve a greater good, such as careers in teaching, the military or with nonprofit groups. But turmoil has been mounting around the program since last year, when the Education Department revealed that 99% of borrowers who applied for loan discharges had been rejected. As of December, just 338 public workers had been granted loan forgiveness out of nearly 54,000 applicants, according to recently released department data.
Somehow the one way to disqualify you from any government program seems to be to have a job. 

Marriott International is starting a new home-rental business, aiming to challenge Airbnb and other home-sharing companies.

The utopian flaw is in expecting the politicians who enact taxes, subsidies, regulations, and reassign property rights to be more inclined to virtue than the business people we need to guard against.

In France,  5.5 million government employees out of a population of 67 million consume around 13% of GDP in wages. 

Born this way:
In an online lecture hosted by TEDx, a speaker made this claim:
"Mirjam Heine [a German medical student] gave a lecture in defense of pedophiles during the 'independently organized' TEDx Talk at the University of Wurtzberg in Germany in May. The title given to Heine's talk was 'Why our perception of pedophilia has to change.'
"Introducing her theme with the 'story' of 'Jonas,' a 19-year-old pedophile who studies law and plays soccer, she asked her listeners to put aside their revulsion for pedophiles.
"'Anyone could be born a pedophile,' she told them.
"According to the medical student, pedophilia is just another 'unchangeable sexual orientation just like, for example, heterosexuality.'"
(LifeSite.com--I don't know the site but it looks like a Catholic website so they may be more outraged than many but ....)

One of the reasons that the costs of medical care services in the US have increased more than twice as much as general consumer prices since 1998 is that a large and increasing share of medical costs are paid by third parties (private health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, Department of Veterans Affairs, etc.) and only a small and shrinking percentage of health care costs are paid out-of-pocket by consumers.

Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant relatively little to the wealthy. The rich in Ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing: running servants replaced running water. Television and radio—the patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading artists as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets—all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life. They would have welcomed the improvements in transportation and in medicine, but for the rest, the great achievements of Western capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.--Freidman

What happened to me is being repeated at colleges and universities throughout the country. Unfortunately, a growing number of university students equate being made uncomfortable in the classroom with being “harmed.” And in this they are encouraged by a growing number of faculty and administrators who view the mission of the university as more about shielding students from such “harm” (for the sake of “inclusivity”) and less about meaningful education. In the “surveillance university,” students are encouraged to report on the transgressions of faculty, and in what has been called an impulse of “vindictive protectiveness,” faculty are judged guilty and harshly punished.--from a letter written by Evan Charney, professor of twenty years, on his being fired from his job at Duke

                   Confessions of a European Business Insider

Sir Jim Ratcliffe is the billionaire businessman who runs the $60bn chemicals and energy group, Ineos. 

Recently he wrote an Open Letter to the European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

 Tuesday, 12 February 2019 

•  INEOS Group

Open letter to President Jean-Claude Juncker
President European Commission
European Commission
Rue de la Loi 200
B-1049 Brussels

                                                                                                                        11th February 2019

Dear President Juncker,

“Are you quite mad?” was the reaction of one well known CEO of a European chemicals company when INEOS publicly announced recently its huge €3 billion petrochemicals expansion in Antwerp in January of this year.   The first of its kind for a generation.

Nobody but nobody in my business seriously invests in Europe.   They haven’t for a generation.   Everyone in my business does however invest in the USA, Middle East or China, or indeed, all three.   The USA is in the middle of a $200 billion spending spree on 333 new chemical plants.   China has spent that sum annually for many years, constructing its own chemical building blocks.

Europe, not so long ago the world leader in chemicals, has seen its market share in the last decade alone collapse from 30% world market share to 15%.   This is an industry that employs over 1 million people in high quality jobs in Europe and five times that in indirect jobs. Worldwide, chemicals is an immense industry, considerably bigger than the automotive sector with revenues approaching $4 trillion.

Europe is no longer competitive.   It has the worlds most expensive energy and labour laws that are uninviting for employers.   Worst of all, it has green taxes that, at best, can be described as foolish as they are having the opposite effect to how they were intended.  

Europe going it alone with green taxes prevents renewal as it frightens away investment into the open arms of the USA and China. It also pushes manufacturing to other parts of the world that care less for the environment. To get a sense of the importance of renewal a 70s car will emit 50 times the pollution of a modern day car. Chemical plants are not so different.

The USA is fully in the process of renewal.   Immense building programmes are installing the world’s finest chemical technology which has a fraction of the emissions we saw a generation ago.   Old units are being shut down.   The USA doesn’t have green taxes but it does insist on the very highest environmental standards before it issues permits for new builds.

So let’s step back.   Europe remains with an industry built one or two generations ago with old environmental standards and has frightened away new investment for a generation with heavy green taxes.   America has welcomed new investment but on condition that it has the highest possible environmental standards.   It has created investment, new jobs and improved environmental emissions.   Europe has done the opposite on all fronts.  I know who looks smarter.

I have an intense interest in preserving the environment.   I see wildlife being slaughtered in Africa, forests burning all over the world, fish stocks being decimated and I fully believe that we must arrest global warming.

But Europe ‘going it alone’ with green taxes as its main strategy has got it wrong.

As for the question posed to me at the outset, “Are we mad?”, the answer is no.   INEOS is uniquely able to import huge quantities of cheap energy and feedstocks from the USA and we have no ‘market risk’ as all the product that we will produce will be consumed by our own INEOS businesses in Europe.

But don’t expect others to follow.   They will be welcomed by the USA and China with a warm smile and a good strategy.

Europe, reminds me somewhat of the Charge of the Light Brigade, immortalised in Tennyson’s wonderful poem, full of valour and good intention but the outcome will not be pretty.

Yours Sincerely

Sir Jim Ratcliffe Chairman, INEOS.

Rent-Seeking

I'm not sure I'm ready to have fun yet.--child at tennis camp

Good morning.
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                                           Rent-Seeking

“Rent-seeking,” is the use of favorable government rules and regulations to attract taxpayer-funded subsidies or protection from competition. Amazon's move to NYC was facilitated by rent-seeking. Those government programs may allow producers to charge higher prices, because competition is kept out by regulation. Or the government may take money from taxpayers and simply give it to companies. Either way, no value is created for consumers. In fact, consumers are likely harmed because they are denied choices and have to pay higher prices. The benefits--and risks--of competition are sidestepped. Corporate leaders benefit, monetarily and in the short run, from negotiating favorable legislation and protection from politicians. And politicians benefit from making businesses dependent on taxpayer handouts. Businesses that don’t play along will be singled out for “special” attention, either extra taxes or unwelcome regulation.  And investment in government protection is cheep and efficient.  Could a mature company find as much bang for its buck in some peripheral research project or an obscure market as much as simple influence peddling?
The communists thought the capitalists would sell them the rope to hang themselves with but maybe capitalism will be undermined by its self-defeating, immoral and lazy amalgamation with government. (some from Munger)