Tres Plus Dos Equals Cinco de Mayo

The difference between an enemy and adversary is an adversary plays by established and mutually agreed upon rules.--anon


Thomas saved and delayed the GoT for me last night.
It is said there are three GoT spin-offs under consideration at HBO.

The president repeated his mistaken claim that “China has been paying Tariffs to the USA” for 10 months. In fact, American importers pay those import levies. While Chinese exporters on some occasions may lower their prices and absorb part of the tariffs, several recent studies have concluded that almost the entire financial burden has fallen on the U.S. economy.--Lynch

While Trump clearly does not understand anything about tariffs, his critics have been so blindly committed to opposing him--e.g. Weapons of Mass Collusion--that they have virtually neutralized themselves. Again we poor working stiffs are caught between a rock-head and a hard-head.

Went to a Jehovah's Witness wedding yesterday and it was an interesting day. ("Day", as it took the couple two bloody hours after the wedding to get their pictures done.) The wedding was between two members of the local religious community and the guests were almost all from that group, 250 at least. It was an unrestrained religious-social community. I began watching early and could not assign parents to children; there was a free flow of kids among the adults. There was no hint of separateness; this was true ethnically and racially. The ceremony emphasized a literal New and Old Testament view of men and women--not St. Paul, Genesis. So a very rigid and hierarchical system is assumed by all--with its serious responsibility as well. It looked like a group of people who would be very comfortable with old-line political conservatives. Reminded me of the Acts of the Apostles. Impressive group.

I could not read the article yet but a headline announced that conservatives were "weaponizing the Middle Ages." The gist apparently is that scholars who emphasize the Middle Ages are inadvertently (or maybe maliciously) supporting and promoting the dominance in the period by white males. From the syllabus of a recent Chicago conference: "Historians of medieval Europe have recently faced a strong intellectual challenge from our colleagues conversant in critical theory, primarily housed in literature departments. The basic organizing principles and methods of medieval historiography, it has been argued, are programmed to support a predominately cis-gendered, white, male, heterosexual, Christian, patriarchal regime of power-knowledge—regardless of the individual historian’s own intellectual and political commitments. What is needed, therefore, is a movement to reshape the historical study of the premodern past, a movement cognizant of critical race theory, intersectionality, and indigenous studies, among other critical frameworks."
A "strong intellectual challenge."
They have a lot of work to do.

Boeing didn’t share information about a problem with a cockpit safety alert for about a year before the issue drew attention with the October crash of a 737 MAX jet in Indonesia, according to industry and government officials. (wsj)



                            Tres Plus Dos Equals Cinco de Mayo

The painting often identified as commemorating Cinco de Mayo in Mexico actually depicts the Spanish war with Napoleon's France two generations before the French war in Mexico. Nor is the event of Cinco de Mayo of much political significance--other than ironic--although it was a shocking military one.

Goya sought to commemorate Spanish resistance to Napoleon's armies during the occupation of 1808 in the Peninsular War, a savage affair fought by Spanish partisans against hard, regular French troops. This famous painting was The Third of May (along with its companion piece, The Second of May 1808 or The Charge of the Mamelukes.)

Third of May:

A half century later in 1862, Spain's creditors ran out of patience with her debts. France, eager to expand her territory and following long accepted custom of seizing a reluctant debtor's ports and collecting the tax receipts in lieu of their loan, invaded the Mexican port of Veracruz with the intent of collecting customs receipts until the debt was repaid. They also had another aim: They hoped to make their stay permanent with the placement of Maximilian on a Mexican throne. The French marched inland. This was an experienced, tough group and they proceeded virtually unopposed until they were confronted by a good sized Mexican force at the small town of Puebla. There, against all expectation and logic, on 5 May 1862, Mexican troops, led by Ignacio Zaragoza, defeated a larger force of the elite French Foreign Legion. Mexican President Benito Juarez declared 5 May a national holiday -- Cinco de Mayo--although he certainly knew the truth. The French replaced their commander and sent thirty thousand reinforcements. In no time they controlled the cities and created the election that elected Maximilian Emperor of México.

Sunday/Among the Manicheans

A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.--deTocqueville

Amazing Derby. The best horse loses. Bad for the event.
Ned was at a Hackathon this weekend.
Housebound with Marathon.
Renya's daughter's wedding today. AA project.
Sort of an amazing baseball game last night.

I watched the new Predator movie. They actually made one of the scariest ideas, silly.

Nearly two-thirds of registered voters polled by news site, The Hill, and market research company, Harris-X, said they would support a plan to make public colleges tuition-free and cancel most existing student loans. The tenets of the plan were presented to voters without Warren’s name attached.
So, Socialism fails because the idea doesn't work, Democracy fails because the people won't.

The Labor Department’s closely watched monthly employment report on Friday showed the greater-than-expected 263,000 new jobs created last month were spread across most industry sectors, and the unemployment rate was just 3.6%, the lowest since December 1969.

 Although many factors contributed to its [Great Britain’s] decline as an economic power in the 20th century, surely part of the blame goes to workers and owners who hid their desire for protection behind demands for retaliation. The U.S. should learn from Britain’s experience and reject the seductive calls for a level playing field and fair trade. The gain to American consumers and to the efficiency of the U.S. economy are reasons enough for following an open-trade policy – even when other countries do not. --The Beckers         

 Ilhan Omar, who has previously criticized American intervention in other countries, argued this week that the United States was partly to blame for the devastation in Venezuela, prompting this from Hinderaker:

"Venezuelans were hunting rats to fry for dinner long before President Trump took office. Not because of foreign “imperialism,” but because socialism is an evil system that enriches a few at the top while enslaving, and impoverishing, everyone else. Is Ilhan Omar really too dim to understand this? Yes, I think she may be. She is an immodest person of modest talents. She knows nothing of economics, nothing of history. One might expect that being rescued from a refugee camp in Kenya and brought to the U.S., where she was housed, fed, educated and given unparalleled opportunities, would make her pro-America. But in today’s Democratic Party, anti-Americanism is the ticket to power. And Ilhan Omar is riding that train as far as it will take her."

On this day in 1961, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, became the first American astronaut to travel into space. 

           
                                 Among the Manicheans

The week before His passion, Jesus came to Bethany, the hometown of Lazarus, whom He had raised from the dead, and Christ had dinner there. One can only imagine the excitement, Christ and Lazarus together. Interestingly, the Jews stalking Him were not eyeing only Christ, they were eyeing Lazarus, with plans of killing maybe both of them.

"There they made him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him. Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.  

Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray him, Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor? " (John 12:5)

And, also, should we rebuild the Notre Dame Cathedral at all? Why should any money go to desert and not to the poor? Indeed, who should be allowed anything but the bare essentials? This in philosophical circles is a classic "False Dilemma," a complex problem with arbitrary and unreasonably limited solutions, like "America, love it or leave it." But in the Notre Dame instance, that is not the case. The question is actually that simple to the questioner. Because the question is being asked by a fanatic, someone for whom nuance is immoral. Someone whose moral conscience is binary. It is an intellectual shortcut--in such an instance here, probably a short circuit. It allows someone opposed to illegal immigration to be called, without questioning, nativist. Or racist. The large, rich choices of life are reduced to simple bite-sized morsels.

The author of the passage is sly about Judas; his question is insincere. But Christ actually responds to this proposal in a disturbing way. He sounds world-weary, a little impatient with us and our stupidity:
"This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein. Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always."

The symbolism--or irony--of using Mary's burial ointment is dwarfed by Christ's insistence on focusing upon the spiritual and not circumstance. Even to His death.

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.

Shakespeare Meets AOC

We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past.--Sowell

Bad guys at the levers of power: “We now know that he was being falsely accused,” Barr said of Trump. “We have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon.” 
The New York Times on Thursday that the FBI sent a trained investigator to London in 2016 to pose as a research assistant and probe Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos over possible campaign links to Russia. The FBI working overseas? 
This whole mess, as awful as it is, might get really interesting.

Global food waste generates 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, making it one of the single biggest contributors to planet-harming emissions. 

Mental health counselor Nancy Strapko treated a female guidance counselor who admitted to sexually assaulting a male at the high school where she taught.
Strapko testified as a paid expert witness in favor of leniency at Kristie Torbick’s sentencing, and questioned whether the male student was a “victim,” because he was the “pursuer” in the relationship. Torbick’s resulting sentence was half of what prosecutors wanted.
Plymouth State University said it would not rehire Strapko as an adjunct professor last summer, just a week after saying it wouldn’t punish professors for their “personal opinions.” It specifically called her “pursuer” language “legally wrong and morally reprehensible.”
Now to head off a lawsuit, PSU and the University System of New Hampshire are paying Strapko $350,000.

Tesla is looking to raise as much as $2.3 billion through a stock-and-bond sale amid concerns about the company’s cash on hand.

See no evil. The United States is the only country to reduce significantly its CO2 emissions; we did it by substitution natural gas for coal in power generation. But Britain’s Greens won’t let that country develop its considerable natural gas reserves.

Given the Greens’ intransigence, how does Britain generate electricity? It simply imports gas that was produced elsewhere, thus increasing CO2 emissions and outsourcing jobs and tax revenues to other countries.

 

According to the WashPo, President Trump has made more than 10,000 false or misleading claims in the last 828 days at a rate of more than 12 per day.

 “We should understand Brexit not as a rejection of Europe, but as a rejection of its political class.” This was said by Canadian activist and public intellectual, Pamela Anderson.






An interesting idea for raising money for infrastructure repair from Leonard S. Schleifer of Regeneron:

For each of the next three years, every American public company would  be required to issue 1 percent of its equity in the form of new stock to a newly formed infrastructure “bank.” Given that American public companies have a collective market capitalization of about $30 trillion, this would raise about $1 trillion in three years.

The corporate stock contributions would be based on the number of shares a company has outstanding, not whether it makes a profit. The $1 trillion in stock would form the capital of an infrastructure bank, which could in turn provide grants or loans to support worthy infrastructure projects. Although detailed mechanisms for issuing the stock and managing the portfolio would need to be defined, this plan should be more straightforward than an income tax.

(Then this unfortunate extra: The money would, as always, come from someone else--someone much less nice than the rest of us.) 

This small equity dilution of companies takes the financial responsibility for infrastructure off the backs of most American taxpayers. Instead, it would put the burden onto wealthy Americans and foreigners. Today, 84 percent of all stock held by Americans belongs to the wealthiest 10 percent of households, and foreign investors account for 35 percent of investment in American stocks.

More than 20,000 man-made objects are currently orbiting earth. 90% of this is debris.

                                     Shakespeare Meets AOC


From The Tempest:

GONZALO

I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;--

SEBASTIAN

Yet he would be king on't.

ANTONIO

The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the
beginning.

GONZALO

All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.

SEBASTIAN

No marrying 'mong his subjects?

ANTONIO

None, man; all idle: whores and knaves.

Measuring the French Economy

The failure of socialism in countries around the world can be traced to one critical defect: it is a system that ignores incentives."--Perry

Dinner with Mom and Chris at the Oaklander. Interesting place but food not great.

I thought the Islanders had a defensive style that would hold them in good stead in these playoffs but, after the Pens, they are on the ropes.


Infrastructure costs will be met by increasing gas taxes, already over $4 a gallon in cap and trade California. But some fret this will fall disproportionately on the poor and middle class. My solution, tax caviar.


Let me see if I have this right, Mueller is complaining about bad press in his investigation of Trump?


If you've been around long enough.....Bernie Sanders has attacked Joe Biden for his vote to approve the Iraq War, taking his 2020 challenger to task for his part in the “worst foreign policy disaster in the modern history of America.”


The Pirates have cut down on base-running gaffs by not getting on base. And, of course, Polanco and Marte have been hurt.

NBC News reports that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand unveiled a plan on Wednesday to give every voter up to $600 in what she's calling "Democracy Dollars" which they can donate to candidates for federal office. Subsidizing politicians. These people are beyond satire.

Wearables are now almost 10% of Apple revenues.

Joe Biden and the Dems are apparently going to run against tax cuts. This is revolutionary. It turns the idea of American government on its head, giving a supervisory power more right to one's wages than the man who earned it. And assuming that power will do a better job with it. They can not possibly do it without the help of the media.

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI)  spent a lot of time slandering Barr yesterday. Really quite something. These people will say and do anything.

New from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

 1. Labor force status of 2018 high school graduates

• For every 100 women enrolled in college, there are 95 men.
• For every 100 women not enrolled in college, there are 117 men.

2. Labor force status of persons 16 to 24 years old

• For every 100 women enrolled in college, there are 85 men.
• For every 100 women not enrolled in school, there are 109 men.

3. Labor force status of 2018 associate degree recipients and college graduates 20 to 29 years old

• For every 100 women 20 to 29 years old who recently earned an associate’s degree, there are 69 men.
• For every 100 women 20 to 29 years old who recently earned a bachelor’s degree, there are 67 men.
• For every 100 women 20 to 29 years old who have a bachelor’s degree, there are 69 men.
• For every 100 women 20 to 29 years old who have an advanced degree (master’s, professional or doctoral), there are 61 men.

Thanks to our environmentalist friends, we do not have the pipeline capacity to take U.S-produced natural gas from the places where it is processed to the places where the people are. This has some pretty serious consequences: Con Ed has just announced that it cannot get enough gas to serve new customers in the New York City suburbs, which has meant in effect a moratorium on much new residential construction, which obviously can’t happen without utility connections. --Williamson in an article criticizing the Jones Act.


On this day in 2011, bin Laden was killed. This time it did not toll for thee.




                             Measuring the French Economy

Really interesting article on the French economy by a Frenchman contained these couple of points:

For 2017, the French GDP/capita was $43,600, while the German was $50,200. (The American was $59,500.) Keep in mind the $6,600 difference between the French and the German GDP/capita.

If French workers are almost as productive as the Germans when they work, what can account for the low French GDP/capita? The answer is that the French don’t work much. Begin with the 35/hr. legal work week. (A study published recently in the daily Le Figaro asserts that 1/3 of the 1.1 million public servants work even less than 35 hours per week.) Consider also the universal maximum retirement age of 62 (vs 67 in Germany), a spring quarter pleasantly spiked with three-day weekends for all, a legal annual vacation of at least thirty days applied universally, a common additional (short) winter (snow) vacation. I have read (I can’t confirm the source) that the fully employed members of the French labor force work an average of 600 hours per year, one of the lowest counts in the world.  Also log legal paid maternity leave. Finish with an official unemployment rate hovering around 9 to 10% for more than thirty years. All this, might account for the $6,600 per year that the Germans have and the French don’t.

There is more that is seldom mentioned. The fastest way for a country to raise the official, numerical productivity of its workers is to put out of work many of its low-productive workers. (That’s because the official figure is an arithmetic mean, an average.) This can be achieved entirely through regulations forbidding, for example, food trucks, informal seamstress services, and old-fashioned hair salons in private living rooms, and, in general, by making life less than easy for small businesses based on traditional techniques. This can be achieved entirely – and even inadvertently – from a well-meaning wish to regulate for the collective good. The more of this you do, the higher your productivity per capita appears to be and also, the higher your unemployment, and the less income is available to go around. I think the official high French productivity oddly distorts the image of real French income. I suspect it fools many French people, including public officials: They think they are wealthier than they are.

The French value added tax (VAT) is 20% on nearly all transactions.
The excise taxes are especially high, including the tax on gasoline. In 2018, the mean price of gasoline in France was about 60% higher than the mean price in California, where gas is the most taxed in the Union. All in all, the French central government takes in about 55% of the GDP. This may be the highest percentage in the world; it’s very high by any standard. It dries up much money that would otherwise be available to free enterprise. Less obviously but perhaps more significantly, it curtails severely what people individually, especially, low income citizens, may spend freely, of their own initiative.

Democratic socialism ....... leaves ... no elbow room, space for recreation, in the original meaning of the word: “re-creation.”
[...The French...] have expected to be taken care of all their adult lives. If anything is not satisfactory in their lives, they wait for the government to deal with it, even it takes some street protests. Seldom are other solutions, solutions based on private initiative, even considered. But the fault for their helplessness lies with more than their own passive attitudes. An overwhelming sense of fairness and an exaggerated demand for safety combine with the government’s unceasing quest for revenue to make starting a small business, for example, difficult and expensive. 

The Scarce and the Non-scarce

What makes an industry competitive is the degree to which entry of new rivals into that industry is politically restricted or free.--Lavoie

This is day three of my move away from Dunkin' coffee. What has burned me is the gradual increase in the cost, the arbitrary pricing of refills and a new cup, a thin poorly insulated thing that burns your hand and gets cold fast. Despite my indignation, it is not all their fault. Jurisdictions around the world are banning single-use plastic takeaway containers and cups.  Starbucks Corp. goes through about 6 billion cups a year. Dunkin’  now makes close to 70 percent of its revenue from coffee drinks,  through 1 billion coffee cups a year. The U.S. accounts for about 120 billion paper, plastic and foam coffee cups each year, or about one-fifth of the global total. Almost every last one of them—99.75 percent—ends up as trash, where even paper cups can take more than 20 years to decompose.
So bureaucrats have successfully changed how I drink coffee.

One of two alleged spies, who was also under investigation for a possible link to the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has been found dead inside his jail cell.

15 MLB teams saw a decrease in their worst March-April gate, which can serve as a relatively informed snapshot of a club’s season-ticket base. Twelve teams’ worst gate was 11,000 or less, with four teams – Pittsburgh (8,523), Cincinnati (7,799), Baltimore (6,585) and Miami (5,934) sporting a base of less than 10,000.

There's a lot of alcohol abuse ads on Pirate games. Targeted advertising.,

Biden is going to campaign for president on a $15 minimum wage, among other labor economic-defying things.
For restaurants, minimum wage hikes usually mean higher menu prices and fewer employee hours, according to a survey released Wednesday.
It's hard to believe that the center of gravity of the Dems is way left of him and he may have a serious fight within his own party but listening to him was a real voyage back in time. Nonetheless, he gave a pretty good speech in Pittsburgh.

Violence in Venezuela. I hope Sean Penn can help.

Wisconsin is known as “America’s Dairyland,” but the milk makers who gave the state its moniker are vanishing, falling prey to a variety of impediments, including President Trump and his global trade war. Over the past two years, nearly 1,200 of the state’s dairy farms have stopped milking cows and so far this year, another 212 have disappeared, with many shifting production to beef or vegetables. The total number of herds in Wisconsin is now below 8,000 — about half as many as 15 years ago. In 2018, 49 Wisconsin farms filed for bankruptcy — the highest of any state in the country, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation....Mr. Trump’s sweeping tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum, which were intended to help American manufacturers but have set off retaliatory tariffs from Mexico, Canada, Europe and China on American dairy products. Most painful for Wisconsin’s dairy farmers has been a 25% tariff that Mexico placed on American cheese, which is made with a significant volume of the state’s milk production. (nyt)



By the Social Security Trustees estimates, the trust fund was large enough to pay 3.5 years worth of benefits in 2010, but can only pay 3 years worth of benefits today, will only be able to pay 2 years by 2023, and will be exhausted by 2034. Yet, every congressional Social Security proposal introduced this year would do one of two things: add a new parental leave benefit, or significantly increase projected costs through a general benefit increase.
And people actually want to give these characters more budgetary discretion.

On this day in 1963, James Whittaker of Redmond, Washington, became the first American to reach the summit of Mt. Everest.



                     The Scarce and the Non-scarce

Tucker discusses Munger's explanation of the distinctions between capitalism and socialism by emphasizing several important points. The pro-capitalist camp believe in ownership, prices, and production structures for scarce goods. There is no better, more peaceful, more productive way to deal with the problem that there is not enough of everything for everyone. The best solution is to deploy a peaceful method of exchange and production so that, over time, there is more wealth for everyone.

At the same time, capitalists believe in universal sharing of non-scarce goods like knowledge. This distinction between scarce and non-scarce helps explain so much about the world around us. We have to learn to distinguish them so that we can apply tools of production and allocation in the proper way. Scarce goods absolutely require the application of economizing; non-scarce goods can be freely and expansively shared without the need for economizing.

The socialist left makes a mess of this distinction, mixing up the two things. They want socialism for scarce goods and private ownership for non-scarce goods. How so? They want free college for everyone, health care for everyone, food for everyone, and they advocate all this with near-zero appreciation for the reality that these are scarce goods and so there are massive costs associated with these plans and everyone must bear them, not to mention endless force to make people do what they would otherwise not want to do.

At the same time, these same people apply the limitations of scarcity where it need not apply. They say there can be no cultural appropriation even though culture is a non-scarce good that is malleable and universally sharable. They demand identity politics even though identity is something anyone can adopt without taking away anything from anyone else. Identity is a non-scarce good and need not be commodified like a physical good. 

Socialists are mostly intellectuals. Their most valued personal production is within the realm of ideas. They share these ideas constantly with anyone who will listen. Their goal is to seek influence, which can occur without the need for allocating and apportioning their product. They are producing goods that are non-scarce.

They can’t understand why doctors, colleges, food growers, and factories cannot do the same. The problem of scarcity does not present itself in their profession so they remain oblivious as to the reality that scarcity exists for every single good other than ideas.

Why the rising popularity of socialism? Munger hints at the answer: “Much of the new wealth is digital, and takes the form of music, movies, or other entertainment or software, code that once written down can be reproduced at no cost and transmitted worldwide essentially for free.”

The great migration from the physical world to the digital world has vastly expanded the realm and pool of non-scarce wealth. That’s a wonderful thing. But this might tempt intellectuals to believe the same thing can happen in the physical world. And yet no matter how much we digitize, it doesn’t obliterate the essential distinction between scarce and non-scarce.

If a  Twitter post can be universally distributed, why not vegan dinners and brain surgeries? Now you know the answer. This is the difference between scarce and non-scarce. One cannot be shared unto infinity and the other can. That’s a huge difference.

If we can’t get that straight, we can never learn to think with economic rationality. Even worse, failing to understand this, and barreling ahead with a system that mixes the two up, can destroy all prosperity and liberty.

(from a clever article in AIER)