Gus Van Horn blog

Regulars here know that I take issue with the way touchscreens are deployed in many (if not most) newer cars. Granted, they provide a viewer for a back-up cam, cut costs for controls, and allow for greater dashboard functionality through software. But because much of this software is written poorly and controls are indiscriminately moved to the touchscreen, the result is often a frustrating mess of poorly laid-out controls and nested menus that is a real safety hazard because many simple things drivers used to be able to do by touch, like adjust fan controls, now require them to take their eyes off the road. In today's nanny state, the first impulse most people will have will be to scream Force manufacturers to have buttons and knobs again! Not only is this an abuse of government, such abuses are at least partially responsible for the current predicament: American manufacturers are required by law to include backup cams. Since I have long opposed the government regulating every facet of our economy and frequently argue that whatever legitimate functions it wrongly arrogates into regulatory agencies could be done better by watchdog groups and the like, I am pleased to have an example of exactly this, and doubly so because this problem annoys me so much![T]he automotive safety organization European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) ... says the controls ought to change in 2026. "The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes," said Matthew Avery, Euro NCAP's director of strategic development.And, much later:Crash Hall of the IIHS, a non-government safety organization. (Image by Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)... Euro NCAP is not insisting on everything being its own button or switch. But the organization wants to see physical controls for turn signals, hazard lights, windshield wipers, the horn, and any SOS features, like the European Union's eCall feature. ... Euro NCAP is not a government regulator, so it has no power to mandate carmakers use physical controls for those functions. But a five-star safety score from Euro NCAP is a strong selling point, similar to the (American) Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's coveted Top Safety Pick program here in the US, and it's likely this pressure will be effective. Perhaps someone should start bugging IIHS [the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety --ed] to do the same.Yes. Although some automakers have been dialing back a little on this insanity, non-government watchdogs like the NCAP and the IIHS could help marshal market forces to improve automotive safety more quickly, not to mention help customers who want better options than touchscreens for everything. -- CAVLink to Original

Editor's Note: Ars Technica substantially revised its coverage of this story, as can be seen in the screenshots of an archived version (left, below) and a later edition (right), which also changed the headline, but not the URL.*** Wendy's will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025: Surge pricing test next year means your cheeseburger may get more expensive at 6 pm. As soon as I saw this headline at Ars Technica, I immediately thought that might be one of the shortest experiments in retail history.Screenshots of an archived copy of the original story (left) and the revised version (as of today, right) of the news as presented by Ars Technica. (The author believes these screen captures of a publicly-available web page are protected as Fair Use under U.S. Copyright law.)American fast food chain Wendy's is planning to test dynamic pricing and AI menu features in 2025, reports Nation's Restaurant News and Food & Wine. This means that prices for food items will automatically change throughout the day depending on demand, similar to "surge pricing" in rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft. The initiative was disclosed by Kirk Tanner, the CEO and president of Wendy's, in a recent discussion with analysts.The piece led that way when it came out, prompting me to think, This will cause anyone on a budget or with a small amount of cash on hand to go somewhere else. There's nothing inherently wrong with dynamic pricing, and I'm not a businessman, but it seems obvious that it's a bad strategy in this particular market: There is nonzero value to certain customers of having some idea of what they might need to pay before they get in a line to buy something. Glad to know what might be up, I made a mental note that, come 2025, I might wait out the experiment by going elsewhere. Liz Warren's reaction?...Wendys [sic] is planning to try out "surge pricing" -- that means you could pay more for your lunch, even if the cost to Wendy's stays exactly the same. It's price gouging plain and simple, and American families have had enough...It should be plain from my initial reaction that the first sentence would be poppycock even if the news stories were accurate, which they apparently weren't. As for the second sentence, I'll leave a discussion of "price gouging" to others. But do note that usually, when rabble-rousers like Warren drop the phrase, they at least have the good grace to use it for something essential like fuel or food staples during times of emergency or general distress -- rather than minor luxuries like fast food lunches in a highly competitive market. As it turns out, even my modest annoyance was unfounded. (I blame our culture -- which does produce companies known for screwing their customers -- rather than capitalism.) In this case, though, Wendy's just wanted to be able to adjust prices company-wide in less than the six weeks its current technology requires, and sometimes to be able to offer surprise discounts. That makes sense to me, both as a customer and as someone imagining what someone wanting to make a profit might actually want to do. It's too bad so many on the left (and increasingly on the "right") limit their imaginations by assuming that businessmen are grasping and think only short-range -- neither of which is in their actual self-interest. -- CAVLink to Original

An attorney, annoyed at the cacophony of clueless babbling about the court deliberations over Donald Trump's dubious immunity claim, explains (original thread) the "slow" timetable and identifies who is really to blame for the proximity of these proceedings to the election....Judge Chutkan deserves no criticism for this. Two months from filing to decision on a motion to dismiss in federal court is VERY FAST. Usually you are looking at six months or more. This case was expedited. Donald Trump had a right, under law, to appeal this ruling to the Court of Appeals and to stay the trial court proceedings while he did it. You may not like this rule, but it applies to ANYONE raising an immunity defense, not just Donald Trump. President Trump took his appeal and the court concluded briefing in JUST ONE MONTH, and then held oral argument on January 9 and decided the case February 6. This is LIGHTNING FAST. Most CoA cases take about a year to a year and half between commencement and conclusion. Further, the DC Circuit itself broke a norm to speed up the case further, and NOBODY criticized it for breaking this norm. It's a technical issue, but the "mandate" is the date on which a court of appeals judgment goes into effect.Dilan Esper's commentary on these "delays" that actually aren't goes on in some detail, and make for educational reading. (And it was good to see that I wasn't imagining things when I recalled the glacial pace of other court proceedings and thought this seemed fast by comparison.) What I really appreciate, though, is Esper, whom I take to lean left, lays the blame for the real delay exactly where it belongs:f you want to argue that a 5/24 decision is still too late, well, SCOTUS only controls the last 3 months of that delay. The rest of it? Blame the liberal Judge Chutkan and DC Circuit and ESPECIALLY the DOJ, who DIDN'T BRING THIS CASE FOR 2 1/2 YEARS!Or, as I put it the other day:If your're serious, pull it now. If you're not, leave it alone. (Image by jstark7, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)In my uninformed opinion, I think if the Democrats were serious about their constitutional obligations, they would have been much quicker to establish that Trump was an insurrectionist (or not) on legal grounds, and found a way to hasten legal proceedings in that matter and the election tampering in Georgia. As it stands, they appear to be trying to time things to spoil Trump's election attempt. They are playing into his hands. [bold added]There is plenty of commentary from both political tribes in America to the effect that Trump and Biden need each other to run in order to have a chance to win. It bad enough that the Democrats, forgetting that Trump knows how to play the victim, decided it would help their figurehead win an election by saddling Trump with lawsuits during the campaign. It's much worse that they would play around with such serious charges in the process. If they believe the charges, they should have prosecuted earlier. If not, they shouldn't have leveled them at all. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge Probably not as hot as it looks... (Image by Thembi Johnson, via Unsplash, license.)1. Some time ago, I tried a new recipe that called for jalapeño peppers and was surprised that the ones I bought weren't that spicy. Memory jogged, I also remembered having nachos with cheese and sliced jalapeños at a sporting event some months before and thinking that either the peppers weren't hot or I was just inured to spiciness. I bumped into the answer recently within "Here's Why Jalapeño Peppers Are Less Spicy Than Ever" at D Magazine:The salsa industry, Walker said, starts with a mild crop of peppers, then simply adds the heat extract necessary to reach medium and hot levels. She would know; she started her career working for a processed-food conglomerate.The need for standardization in the salsa industry has led to the engineered, run-of-the-mill variety of the peppers being milder. Chefs wanting spicy peppers take note: You'll need to use other kinds of pepper or hotter breeds of the jalapeño, such as the Mitla or the Early. 2. Voyager I, renowned for its great longevity as a useful space probe, may be done for. In "Death, Lonely Death," Doug Muir explains that a software problem has caused the spacecraft to "go mad," and that it may be impossible to fix:In December 2023, Voyager started sending back gibberish instead of data. A software glitch, though perhaps caused by an underlying hardware problem; a cosmic ray strike, or a side effect of the low temperatures, or just aging equipment randomly causing some bits to flip. The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software -- something like an operating system. And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth. ... [T]hey're trying to fix the problem. But right now, it doesn't look good. You can't just download a new OS from 15 billion kilometers away. They would have to figure out the problem, figure out if a workaround is possible, and then apply it ... all with a round-trip time of 45 hours for every communication with a probe that is flying away from us at a million miles a day. They're trying, but nobody likes their odds.This is sad news, but occurs within the context of a fascinating and awe-inspiring history of the probe. 3. Thinking about how I would approach answering a question like, How many states contain counties larger than Rhode Island?, I learned that, there are counties larger than other states -- including Montana, if you count an unorganized borough of Alaska. I can't resist mentioning another item that popped up in that search: "Rhode Island as a Unit of Measure." It gets used a lot, and the next time I casually checked the news, I saw an article in the British press comparing the area of the wildfire in Texas to that of the state. My favorite bit of trivia? Hawaii is the smallest state containing a county larger than Rhode Island. 4. If you've ever wondered what's wrong with the assertion that you could spell fish g-h-o-t-i, here's your answer. -- CAVLink to Original

Someone I take to be a recent-ish graduate puts forth thoughts about paper note-taking, prompted by the project of scanning in old notes and other materials from college. The post opens in part with the following disclaimer:I realize there are entire online cultures of journaling and notetaking and notebook-buying, and I'm not here to compete with them. This is just what I do.The advice is very different from much of what I have encountered, but I found it well-considered and superior in certain ways to those cultures. I think the bullet points on preferring loose-leaf paper to notebooks are exemplary, because you get reasons along with the advice, which often contrasts with such standard fare as Use a Moleskine:You can hand a single sheet to someone. Graph paper, good. Bound notebook, bad... (Image by Glenn Carstens-Peters, via Unsplash, license.)You can rewrite a sheet later and put it back in the same order, instead of keeping or tearing out the bad copy. Easier to cross reference a previous day without flipping back and forth. [This is because each page is dated at the top. --ed] Easier to integrate with other material: pages you receive, homework you submit and get back. Easier to purchase the same or equivalent paper over the course of years, rather than developing an eclectic assortment of different notebooks or, worse, a brand dependency. Easier to scan. Coupled with the advice to use a standard size of paper and using a printer to create lines or a custom grid, it's easy to see how this can make keeping a notebook on paper and making an electronic archive much easier -- and less annoying to those of us who hate ending up with different paper sizes and other inconsistencies. The post is much more interesting than I expected it to be, and is replete with examples from the scanned-in notes. The next time I need to take paper notes I am likely to want to archive, I will be trying much of this advice. -- CAVLink to Original

At the Daily Beast, Matt Lewis argues in a vein similar to others that Trump's primary victories are weak showings for someone who is effectively an incumbent, and claims that they portend problems in the general election:It's even worse for Trump than that. A Fox News voter analysis showed that 59 percent of Haley voters in South Carolina "say they would not support Trump in the general election if he were the nominee." And if you think this is unique to South Carolina, consider the fact that nearly half of Nikki's Iowa backers also said they wouldn't support Trump come November. [links omitted]Won't support doesn't have to mean will vote for Biden. The margins in the election are thin enough that sufficient numbers of a candidate's potential voters staying home in a few swing states can affect the outcome. When two fifths of a party's voters reject its incumbent and half of those won't support him in the general election, that's a problem, whether that party admits it or not. Lewis has a point, but it is worth considering what such dynamics might mean beyond the election. A thought experiment might help. Sure. It's easy for anyone not under Trump's spell to see Republicans and conservative-leaning independents staying home, but what if Haley were winning? What if she wrapped up the nomination? Consider the kind of invective Trump and his stooges have been hurling at members of their own party who dare have an opinion about anything that doesn't match Trump's: "Crybaby RINO NeverTrumper," "NeoCon," "the left's favorite Republican." Although there's a good case to be made that it is, in fact Trump who might as well be a Democrat, what do you think voters who equate anyone who isn't Trump (or blessed off by Trump) with a Democrat would do in a Haley-Biden contest? They'll stay home, and arguably be more likely to do so than Haley voters would -- whether or not they bought the inevitable claim that the election was "rigged." I don't recall where I first heard this, but I agree that American political parties are best understood as coalitions. Trump appreciates part of this and doesn't care much about another part. The part he gets is that it is possible to achieve a majority within a party and run away with its nomination. Since Republicans are about a third of the electorate, he needs fanatical support from only about a fifth of the total electorate to become the party's nominee and pretty much run things. To Modernize: Replace An Available Candidate with Trump Likes Me, then hire an artist to caricature a charletan, a has-been, or a crackpot. (Anti-Whig Cartoon from 1848, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)The part he doesn't care about -- assuming he is (as he seems) motivated more by a desire to put his feet on the desk in the Oval Office and screw with his opponents than by any positive, coherent agenda -- is that for a coalition to last, it pays not to alienate members of that coalition. Indeed, if members of that coalition get nothing from being in that coalition, they will eventually disappear or go elsewhere. This seems a great way to run the GOP with an iron first ... and into the ground. See also: the last few election cycles, and, perhaps, the Whigs. -- CAVLink to Original

An article about social media laws being scrutinized by the Supreme Court summarizes the stakes as follows:The owner of this auditorium does not "censor" when he decides who can or can't lecture there. (Image by Dom Fou, via Unsplash, license.)The justices will have to decide between radically different conceptions of what social media is. Are these platforms more like old-time phone companies: basically, open to everyone without filtering? Or, are they more like bookstores and newspapers, places that edit and curate information, that get the highest level of First Amendment protection?Or, as conservatives of the ilk who once whined about "fairness" in search results, are social media companies "public utilities" and, as such, subject to longstanding (but illegitimate) regulations? It is a shame that we have this longstanding abuse of government power on the books, because it muddies what should be a clear-cut case of the states of Florida and Texas violating the property rights of Facebook et al. by attempting to overrule their moderation policies. (That this was done possibly in reaction to federal government jawboning does not justify the states doing it or exempt the federal government from being barred from dictating content moderation policies.) The fact that a company grows large enough that it is commonplace for people to rely on it does not make its owners rightless or duty-bound at any point. It is a travesty to see government regulation of "public utilities" go unquestioned while the right to free speech is under trial -- by people at least some of whom understand what that is even less than they do property rights -- as witness the assertions that social media companies are "censoring" content. Censorship is an abuse possible only to governments. -- CAVLink to Original

What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: But I don't think of him... -- Ayn Rand *** Recalling the "Shy Trump hypothesis" -- a 2016 attempt to explain how Donald Trump was elected against the run of polling predictions, Slate considers polling data about the question of whether Donald Trump would lose votes in the event he is convicted at one of his trials. The article notes that while this hypothesis didn't hold up, it nevertheless raises the implicit question Will the voters who say they'd desert Trump if he were convicted really do so? The piece follows on by nitpicking in many words: how Clinton's impeachment affected whether people thought he should resign, whether voters are paying any attention to Trump's legal problems, and whether they might have forgotten what they dislike about him. I don't think much of or support either candidate, and this all looked like so much hand-wringing on the part of a partisan hack who'd have to find something else to write about if the Democrats had only chosen someone less ancient and unpopular to run against such an ancient and unpopular opponent. I'm guessing the author isn't a big-picture guy. (Image by Alan Diaz, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)For about 1300 words, this piece myopically speculates from polling data and yet misses three huge factors with much greater and direct bearing on the question of whether Trump's legal troubles will affect the election. First, since both parties have set things up to eliminate any deliberation in the process of choosing a candidate, there is already a binary choice between two terrible options. Is the left's partisan media so blinded by hatred for Trump that they don't see how awful Biden is, and can't conceive of others being equally blinded by hatred for Biden? Second, while Biden's foibles don't excuse Trump's, there is zero mention of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal or Biden's classified document incident. Many people are aware of both, and might understandably conclude that they have a "choice" between two felons/national security risks. Third, while I think Trump should stand trial for election tampering in Georgia and his role in the events of January 6, I think the civil trial in New York is a gross abuse of government on top of being politically motivated. I doubt I am alone in this, and I am concerned that if this perception doesn't already mar public confidence in the propriety of trying the two serious matters I just named, Trump will find a way to make sure it does. (In my uninformed opinion, I think if the Democrats were serious about their constitutional obligations, they would have been much quicker to establish that Trump was an insurrectionist (or not) on legal grounds, and found a way to hasten legal proceedings in that matter and the election tampering in Georgia. As it stands, they appear to be trying to time things to spoil Trump's election attempt. They are playing into his hands.) The article disclaims many circumstances of the election are unprecedented on its way to throwing the bone of hope to Democrats and others opposed to Trump. That is wishful thinking at best, and I see too many circumstances that are ripe to make Trump's unfitness for office look irrelevant to many voters. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. "Why Can't Professional Philosophers Get Rand Right?," by Mike Mazza (New Ideal):What's going on here? To many twentieth-century philosophers, the gold standard for assessing philosophical merit was a concise deduction with informally defended premises. Especially in ethics, these informal defenses attempt to get the reader to accept that a premise is "intuitive" (or the implication of a deeper, intuitively true assumption). So, it's understandable that philosophers educated in this tradition would attempt to interpret someone outside of it as making gold-standard arguments; it's what they're comfortable with and trained to look for. Notice that Rachels and Rachels's first premise states a fact and then attempts to draw from it a common-sense or intuitively plausible implication: the individual is "of supreme importance." But Rand does not argue like this at any point in her case for egoism.Mazza indicates that parochialism, of which the above is only a type, is a problem even for those few non-Objectivist academics who have been sympathetic to Rand, and is right to call out professional philosophers, of all people, for falling into it. 2. "Selfish Randsday to All," by Harry Binswanger (Value for Value):Randsday [the anniversary of Ayn Rand's birthday --ed] is for reminding ourselves that pleasure is an actual need, a psychological requirement for a human consciousness. For man, motivation, energy, enthusiasm are not givens. Psychological depression is not only possible but rampant in our duty-preaching, self-denigrating culture. The alternative is not short-range, superficial "fun," but real, self-rewarding pleasure. On Randsday, if you do something that you ordinarily would think of as "fun," you do it on a different premise and with a deeper meaning: that you need pleasure, you are entitled to it, and that the purpose and justification of your existence is: getting what you want -- what you really want, with full consciousness and dedication.I especially recommend visiting this post for the excerpt from Rand's The Fountainhead, which powerfully demolishes the trite, but deadly and wrong sentiment that it's easy to be selfish. 3. "Portraying CEOs as Cartoon Villains," by Jaana Woiceshyn (How to Be Profitable and Moral):Image by J.J., via Wikimedia Commons, license.When we see the news headlines about online sexual exploitation of children, experience daily the stubbornly high food prices, and witness job cuts, it is easy to take the governments' accusations at face value. No wonder the public distrust of corporations is high. But are the accusations based on evidence? Are corporate CEOs real villains, or are politicians just portraying them as cartoon villains, like the cold-hearted Scrooge McDuck or the conniving Mr. Burns in The Simpsons who stop at nothing to maximize profits? I argue the latter. Politicians are scapegoating corporate CEOs for the problems that ultimately the governments created.This dishonest practice has always been a hallmark of the left, but the right has moved from failing to even pretend to stand up for business to joining in. Indeed, such phrases as corporate media -- once a shibboleth of the left -- now get bandied about as if we're all communists now. 4. "Has the Right Been Eviscerated by Trump?," by Peter Schwartz (PeterSchwartz.com, 2019):[Trump's] core constituency supports him unquestioningly. He calls them "my followers," and they attend his rallies, vote for the candidates he endorses and give him the adulation he desperately seeks. They have helped him co-opt the right. The better Republicans have been driven out and the worst ones entrenched. The few, isolated defenders of a free market have nowhere to turn for political support. There is no significant faction fighting against Trump's war on trade. Today, the right -- the intellectual leaders and the mass followers -- consists predominantly of nativists, who want to "make America great" by expanding the power of the state and regressing to the tribalism of centuries past.This post is even more relevant now than when I read it in 2019. And if the above isn't disturbing enough, news from the latest CPAC will more than underscore Schwartz's point. -- CAVLink to Original

Suzanne Lucas wrote a piece a while back whose title sounds like a corrective to a certain type of nosy person: "Your Co-Worker is a Slacker. Here's Why She Gets Special Privileges." My hot take is that such a piece will be lost on about three quarters of the people who need to read it. The kind of person who assumes you're a slacker on the basis of any of these alone is probably a little too invested in finding fault with others. The rest will be fine after thinking something like Oh. I never thought about that. For the rest of us, the piece gives lots of interesting examples of things that, while sometimes resulting from improper government regulations, are things one can negotiate upon, say, accepting a job offer. Compensation need not be confined to money. Here's an example of what the unimaginative will take for clay feet and the innovative might consider during the appropriate time with a hiring manager or a boss:"Asses in seats:" a surrogate for productivity for bad managers and a surrogate for virtue for nosy coworkers. (Image by kreatikar, via Pixabay, license.)Some people value flexibility over money. Some people want a 35-hour workweek instead of a 40-hour workweek and are willing to be paid for 35 hours instead of 40 to make that work. Your co-worker may be working fewer hours than you are, but she may be getting paid a heck of a lot less than you are for the privilege.The title is great: I bet lots of people can tell when a coworker wrongly thinks they're getting away with something. (I once got grief for the position I placed my desk in. I did it because I startle easily and had to share space with two other people.) Many readers will come for the catharsis from reading an all-purpose corrective/gentle rebuke, and leave with some possibly useful ideas. -- CAVLink to Original

At a conservative site, one Tim Graham asks, "Who Will Deprogram the Radicals at National Public Radio?" The very title just about sums up what is wrong with today's Aliskyite conservative movement because it shows just how much the right apes the left these days. The headline could conceivably be fine, rhetorically -- except that the piece never challenges either (1) the propriety of the government running a media outlet, or (2) the government (de)programming the staff of a media outlet when it doesn't toe the party line of whoever currently holds political power. To be fair, the piece considers what is plausibly an example of the kind of story that has become all too common from our leftist (and erstwhile dominant) news media -- in which a leftist bias and objectivity are being conflated:"Morning Edition" co-host A Martinez touted an "Iron Broom" of democracy restoring Poland's public broadcasting, known by the acronym TVP. "Part of the new government's effort to rebuild the country's democracy involves returning a popular national TV broadcaster from a right-wing propaganda tool back to a bona fide news organization." Unless you speak Polish, it's hard to know if this finger-painting is accurate, but we can assume that if NPR proclaims it as "bona fide news," it's soothingly socialist. The villains of this story were the "far-right" Law and Justice Party, which rudely took over the government broadcaster like they were in charge of the government. NPR is praising the socialists for cleaning house, doing exactly the same thing they accuse the conservative party of doing. But when they do it, professionalism is returning. [bold aded]There is no mention of whether either party had privatize the media infrastructure as part of its agenda, but it is a very safe assumption that a party that starts off dictating editorial policy doesn't: Confidence in a free market wiping out an obviously biased "news" organization (or in the rightness of one's own position when stated forthrightly (and elsewhere, if necessary) in competition to an opponent's do not manifest as attempts to control the news media. And there is no suggestion that, as an alternative, that NPR (or its Polish equivalent) should be privatized and allowed to sink or swim on its own merits. There's just whining about the left doing it -- while fantasizing about doing exactly the same thing, rather than thinking about how to do the right thing:The American left and the right today might squabble and they might hate each other, but they are trying to do basically the same anti-freedom things. (Image modified from photo taken by Sue Clark and hosted by Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)Terms like "radical left" only seem to air on NPR in soundbites from Donald Trump, in segments containing headlines like "If Donald Trump becomes president again, how authoritarian would his agenda be?" (Dec. 10), "Trump's Rhetoric, Always Extreme, Is Getting More So" (Dec. 19) and "Trump Embraces Autocratic Language" (Dec. 21). Trump had roughly talked of "rooting out" the "vermin" of the current government. Leftists don't use "autocratic language" like that. Instead, as they root out the opposition, they call it "deprogramming." [bold added]So... The great advantage of the right over the left these days is that, while they both want to do the same thing, the right admits it? I have always thought of Trump as a slightly outdated Democrat in obnoxious packaging. The silver lining of this article is that I now have a fan of his demonstrating my point. Today, both left and right are anti-liberty and are only competing to control the existing machinery of improper government in order to control the populace. Do not expect prosperity -- which requires freedom of speech and freedom of contract -- to ensue when the only question being asked is some form of How do we enslave everyone and feed them our propaganda? -- CAVLink to Original

The "same people" (to apply a tribalistic phrase from the right to that tribe) who for decades complained (sometimes with justification) about left-wing jurists "legislating from the bench" will no doubt turn around and celebrate a ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court to the effect that frozen embryos are children:Alabama's Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos are children under state law and subject to legislation dealing with the wrongful death of a minor, stating that it "applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location." The court issued this majority decision in a lawsuit brought forth by a group of in vitro fertilization (IVF) patients whose frozen embryos were destroyed in December 2020 when a patient removed the embryos from a cryogenic storage unit and dropped them on the ground.Parts of the majority opinion and the lone dissent are illuminating. In today's cultural climate, I find myself compelled to label the above skit SATIRE. The ruling appears to be an application of the state's theocratic "personhood" amendment to an 1872 law:[Justice Jay] Mitchell, however, wrote that the clinic was asking the court "to recognize an unwritten exception for extrauterine children in the wrongful-death context" and that the law "applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation." "It is not the role of this Court to craft a new limitation based on our own view of what is or is not wise public policy," Mitchell wrote. "That is especially true where, as here, the people of this state have adopted a constitutional amendment directly aimed at stopping courts from excluding 'unborn life' from legal protection." Chief Justice Tom Parker, concurring with the opinion, wrote "that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory," which he argued was set in policy when Alabama voters approved the 2018 amendment. [links omitted, bold added]The dissent contests neither the arbitrary, mystical definition of human life, nor the implied purpose of government being to implement religious morality, rather than to protect individual rights. It is nevertheless interesting for its historical points:Justice Greg Cook, who filed the only full dissent, wrote that the Wrongful Death Act does not define the term 'minor child,' and that its meaning has remained unchanged since it was first written in 1872. Cook also noted a 1926 opinion from the Alabama Supreme Court that held that the law "did not permit recovery for injuries during pregnancy that resulted in the death of the fetus." "There is no doubt that the common law did not consider an unborn infant to be a child capable of being killed for the purpose of civil liability or criminal-homicide liability," Cook wrote. "In fact, for 100 years after the passage of the Wrongful Death Act, our case law did not allow a claim for the death of an unborn infant, confirming that the common law in 1872 did not recognize that an unborn infant (much less a frozen embryo) was a 'minor child' who could be killed." [bold added]Please note that even during times when Americans were generally more religious than they are now, fetuses were not treated as if they were fully human under the law. I am not optimistic about the prospects for abortion remaining legal anywhere in the United States if this case makes it to the current Supreme Court, which overruled Roe vs. Wade, or an even more theocratic one if Donald Trump gets elected again. The best imaginable outcome of that would be a patchwork of states with reproductive freedom (which is an unbearable idea to today's right) and those which treat potential human beings as actual ones for the purposes of the law. If the left ever needed to get serious about something, it is making reproductive freedom legal, and that clearly entails enacting a rational, secular definition of human life into law. -- CAVLink to Original

In the headlines is something that might sound vaguely familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to upcoming Supreme Court rulings: union target Amazon has decided to challenge the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board:The Amazon filing, made Thursday, came in response to a case before an administrative law judge overseeing a complaint from agency prosecutors who allege the company unlawfully retaliated against workers at a New York City warehouse who voted to unionize nearly two years ago. In its filing, Amazon denies many of the charges and asks for the complaint to be dismissed. The company's attorneys then go further, arguing that the structure of the agency -- particularly limits on the removal of administrative law judges and five board members appointed by the president -- violates the separation of powers and infringes on executive powers stipulated in the Constitution. [bold added]Setting aside the propriety of the government's wholesale violation of right to contract -- inherent in any law restricting how employers and employees bargain with one another -- the complaint about the NLRB is interesting and familiar-sounding. A piece in the Federalist shows why on both counts:"When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." -- Humpty Dumpty (Image by John Tenniel, ">via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)A successful challenge wouldn't necessarily abolish the Board. Courts could fix the independent-agency-judges problem by striking down the judges' removal protections. That's exactly what the Supreme Court did in a 2020 case involving the CFPB [i.e., the Consumer Financial Protection Board]. Similarly, courts could fix the judicial-power problem by reviewing the Board's decisions more closely. The Board's flaw is that it has no check: it can flip positions at will without worrying that it will be second-guessed in court. But if courts stopped deferring to its supposed expertise, that problem could go away. The Board could continue processing labor disputes at an administrative level, and people could still get their day in court. Fortunately, courts seem to be moving in that direction. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a case about when (or whether) courts should defer to agencies. Most observers think the Court will use the case to tighten the standards for judicial review. If it does, the decision could help rein the Board in. The Board would have to defend its decisions in court with little or no deference. And that fact alone might help moderate its political excesses. [bold added, links removed]So, yes: This case sounds familiar for a reason, because the Court heard a similar case recently and it could be poised to rein in agencies on the grounds that a doctrine called "Chevron deference" usurps the role of the judicial branch to interpret the meaning of the law. Most interesting to me is the chance to fix an institutionalized instance of what Ayn Rand called "non-objective law:"All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why), what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they commit it. [bold added]The "flipping" of board decisions, depending on which party is in power is a great example. According to the Federalist, the NLRB "reversed a group of decisions that had been on the books for more than a collective 4,500 years" once Barack Obama became President. How on earth can anyone run a business with that degree of unpredictability? But if that question sounds a little too abstract, consider that the NLRB under the Biden Administration was (is?) toying with the idea of a regulatory change that would upend the venerable franchise model of running a business. What? Companies have been doing that for decades! you might say. That's exactly the problem with non-objective law, and I hope the Supreme Court rules with Amazon on this one. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge This will be short, sweet, and quick, as I dash out the door for an early appointment... 1. Whether you love or hate cicadas, you might find these brood maps useful. The color-coded cicada brood map comes with a list of years at which the main part of any given 13- or 17- year cicada brood will emerge. The usefulness will be somewhat limited by "stragglers" emerging off-schedule and perhaps also by the existence of multiple broods in your area. 2. Professional bridesmaid Jen Glantz started her business on a lark after being asked to be a bridesmaid again. Her business really took off, and she's still at it a decade later. "I don't like weddings. I still don't," she says. "I love supporting people through difficult times in their lives." The combination of Glantz's entrepreneurial spirit and these "difficult times" make for some fascinating reading. (HT: Paul Hsieh) 3. Anyone who has found himself struggling to remember the difference between Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon -- hilariously parodied in Science Made Stupid (PDF) -- will be delighted to know that there are two Margaret Cavendishes in the historical record to go along with them. I learned this at Hacker News, where the following exchange occurred in reference to the New York Times including the wrong image of one of these Margarets in a piece about the other: Ah - this is a quite common error. They selected the duchess on the right when they should've passed the duchess on the left hand side. Nice reference to the Musical Youth Song of 1982! Cheers. Only waited 40+ years for it.I am familiar with that allusion only indirectly, through the good offices of one Dr. Ring Ding. 4. In case you know someone not already suspicious of food items sold as "raw" -- as if all "processing" by human beings is inherently bad -- pass along this story: "Trendy 'Raw Water' Source Under Bird's Nest Sparks Diarrheal Outbreak." -- CAVLink to Original

A while back, I encountered a post by a software consultant who considers himself a generalist, but who maintains that he has had to market himself as a specialist. It reads in part:It might look like that from the outside, but once you look under the covers you can see I'm secretly still a generalist. First of all, each Rust project I've taken required use of my broad skillset and hacker mindset. I've had to jump into completely new problem domains and codebases, where the only common denominator was that the projects were implemented in Rust.A bit later, he correctly identifies part of the problem his apparent specialization solves:Considering all this, my current theory is that focusing on your experience with a specific technology, and on your involvement in a particular community, makes it easier to establish trust with people who don't know you well. And, as trust grows, there's more and more room for the undercover generalist to come to the light of day! [bold added]Yes. That is true. You have to start somewhere to market yourself to the complete strangers you wish to turn into customers, and the best way is to find an area they and you know lots about. There are plenty of people who claim to be generalists and aren't really, after all. Who wants to learn that the hard way? A speciality is a road to the road to where you want to be. (Image by Paul Fiedler, via Unsplash, license.)At the risk of putting words into someone else's mouth, I don't think ease of marketing is the whole story. I regard myself as a generalist writer, and have thought about this problem. It would be easier to get my foot into doors were I to specialize in a topic, but that alone is not (and should not) be motivation enough to specialize. For one thing, what if your big break comes in an area that puts you to sleep? (Or, more realistically, since big breaks are rare: Do you think you can really write that well about something that puts you to sleep?) It can't be just any topic, and anyone like me will bristle at the whole idea of having to pigeonhole himself simply because the right customer hasn't come along yet. Another factor I have noticed is not so directly tied to the need to find customers, and that's time. In my own writing, I have noticed this: I sometimes come up with good-sounding ideas for columns, start researching the topic, and then discover that it will take too long for me to get to the point I actually know what I'm talking about: The time for that idea will be gone by then. That time may return, but in the meantime, I'm not working on something that might get me somewhere -- which is another way time gets eaten for a generalist. The stealth generalist Rust programmer shows a way out in more ways than one: His existing knowledge of Rust saves him time in the process of solving problems and allows him to get experience doing so, and the experience of thinking about a wide variety of problems (in Rust, at least at first) makes him quicker-enough at doing this later on that doing so in other languages isn't as slow for him as it might be for an inexperienced generalist. Specialization isn't just a way to market. It's part of becoming a generalist, which has to start with one or more specific areas of expertise. -- CAVLink to Original

Happy (belated) Mardi Gras! Although my wife is from New Orleans, this year has been my first time to experience the full blown season -- yes, season -- of Mardi Gras, now that I am a transplanted New Orleanian. With the obvious exception of the numerous parades, the lead-in is a little like that for a Bizarro-World version of Christmas. There's a lighthearted, benevolent feel to it, and people decorate their houses for it, although generally not to the ridiculous excess you sometimes see with Christmas or Halloween. My in-laws gave us a couple of wreaths -- in green, gold, and purple, of course -- for our front door. That was about right. I'd originally thought about posting on this yesterday, but took on an interesting news item instead -- only to have my memory jogged this morning by the following question (Item 3 there.) at Ask a Manager:Image by Ugur Arpaci, via Unsplash, license.Is Mardi Gras OK for work? I'm originally from a region of the U.S. that goes big on the whole Mardi Gras season (fun fact: it's a whole season!) but am now in an environment that has barely realized it's happening. I wore some beads into the office today, greeted a coworker with "Happy Mardi Gras!" and brought a king cake for the staff breakroom. I think this is pretty low-key and ok for our work environment. But I'm also realizing I don't really know how secularized it actually is in much of the U.S. I am personally atheist, and I know plenty of other people celebrate it totally divorced from its religious roots (cough Sydney cough). For me, it's a nice way to share my regional-cultural heritage and celebrate joy in a dreary season. But Mardi Gras is at its core a very, very Catholic celebration, and I would never put out a Christmas tree in the office. Or bring an Easter basket. If colleagues wanted to do an organized "give something up for Lent" challenge I would be HORRIFIED. Should I chill out about the holiday in the office? Or is it closer to a cultural exchange, like a Mexican coworker sharing Día de Muertos traditions? [Alison Green Replies:] A cultural exchange is a fine way to look at it. Obviously you shouldn't insist that people who don't want to celebrate it should embrace it anyway (as people love to do with Christmas), but it's fine to observe it yourself (i.e., the beads) and bring in king cake to share. [bold added, links removed]I agree with the sentiment I bolded above, and welcome this new holiday to my calendar with a caveat. That caveat is this: The holiday, as a respite from the privation Christians are supposed to inflict upon themselves especially during Lent, reminds me of the "holidays" from sales taxes Republicans like to tout instead of, say, repealing them or permanently lowering them, or even reducing the spending that makes them seem necessary. The idea that we need permission from a church to celebrate life is even more ridiculous than the idea that the government is "helping" us with school expenses by taking less of our money from us. The premise is a covert admission that something is fundamentally wrong -- and the holiday distracts the unwary from some thinking about that admission long enough to forget about it and accept a bad status quo. As someone well aware of the issue -- and who will raise it when the right opportunities present themselves -- I'm more than happy to have a new reminder to celibrate being alive, and I hope this holiday long outlives the unhappy circumstances of its birth. -- CAV P.S. I forgot to mention in my analogy to Christmas, the lack of social pressure to stress out with gift-purchasing (along with outdoing the neighbors on decor). That's a great feature, so far, although I am not so sure the members of the Krewes -- the folks who plan all the parades, balls, and social gatherings -- share that luxury.Link to Original

Before the GOP became a nationalist/theocratic cesspit, it was a band of cowards who would soil themselves the moment some leftist brought up poverty while they posed as champions of capitalism. Today, they have found a way to be even more disgraceful: Throw capitalism under the bus, and adapt left-wing arguments to be deployed against ... porn. This is both a trial balloon and a proof-of concept. If this succeeds, just wait to see how else they'll try cram their religious strictures down your throat. The below is buried within a Reason Magazine article, about Mike Lee's (R-Utah) PROTECT Act, which could ban all existing pornography from the internet as it is written today. The rationale will sound familiar to anyone who grew up (as I did) while the South was under the thumb of Southern Baptists and to anyone whose has suffered an RSI to his eye muscles (as mine have) by rolling his eyes every time some mealy-mouthed leftist has used poverty as an excuse for crime (individual theft not sanctioned by the state) or redistributionism (theft performed by the state):What's next? Banning alcohol (again)? (Image by unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)And in all cases, we're left with this broad and vague definition of consent as a guiding principle. The bill states that consent "does not include coerced consent" and defines "coerced consent" to include not just any consent obtained through "fraud, duress, misrepresentation, undue influence, or nondisclosure" or consent from someone who "lacks capacity" (i.e., a minor) but also consent obtained "though exploiting or leveraging the person's immigration status; pregnancy; disability; addiction; juvenile status; or economic circumstances." With such broad parameters of coercion, all you may have to say is "I only did this because I was poor" or "I only did this because I was addicted to drugs" and your consent could be ruled invalid -- entitling you to collect tens of thousands of dollars from anyone who distributed the content or a tech platform that didn't remove it quickly enough. Even if the tech company or porn distributor or individual uploader ultimately prevailed in such lawsuits, that would only come after suffering the time and expense of fending the suits off. [bold added]That's right. After decades of being too frightened to contest the idea that one man's need is another man's moral duty, conservatives haven't bothered to think for themselves for once, or (if they ever did) finally dared to say Nobody owes another anything simply because he needs it. No. They have instead chosen to say, Okay. Men are obligated to arrange their lives around the needs of others, and we declare that others 'need' to be unable to see porn -- or anything else we decide is 'offensive' to the deity we have never proved exists and whose will we claim to know. What's next? Welfare for "porn exploitation survivors"? Don't laugh: Conservatives are now big fans of welfare for women whom they've denied abortions to. I said years ago that the moment a religious conservative saw a conflict between his religion and freedom, he would throw freedom under the bus. As usual, I was right. Today, they're going after the porn industry, an easily demonized target. What will they do tomorrow? Rank-and-file conservatives would do well to stop cheering abuses like this, and salivating over what they hope people like Mike Lee will target next. Rather, they should consider something they like that some nut from a religion not their own somewhere might object to, and think about that getting banned on some equally ridiculous pretext. -- CAVLink to Original

At Politico, Charlie Mahtesian and Steven Shepard game out what it would take for the Democrats to replace Joe Biden, whose age and unpopularity would make him a non-starter in just about any election, except for the fact that he's almost certainly running against Donald Trump in this one. Suffice it to say, it would be very difficult to do this, even if President Biden willingly stepped down, which is what this would take, so long as he remains President. Mahtesian and Shepard also consider how the Democrats would cope with a dead or disabled candidate, assuming they don't replace him:Image by Aubrey Odom, via Unsplash, license.Alternatively, what if Biden pushed through the doubts and was nominated at the convention in late August, but was then unable to compete in the November election? Convention rules say, in the event of the "death, resignation or disability" of the nominee, Jaime Harrison, the party chair, "shall confer with the Democratic leadership of the ... Congress and the Democratic Governors Association and shall report" to the roughly 450 members of the Democratic National Committee, who would choose a new nominee. They'd also pick a new running mate if they elevated Harris to the top of the ticket.Before you think something like At least they have a process in place to deal with that, think again. The logistics would be ... challenging:A late Biden departure from the ticket would pose a logistical nightmare for the states. Overseas military ballots are set to go out in some places just a couple of weeks after the convention ends, and in-person early voting begins as soon as Sept. 20 in Minnesota and South Dakota. Yes, Americans technically vote for electors, not presidential candidates -- but any post-convention effort to replace Biden would likely end up in court if votes have already been cast with the name "Joseph R. Biden Jr." on the ballot.Great. The duo briefly consider the analogous scenario for the Republicans and point out that it would be even harder for them to change candidates:n one way, Trump's grasp on the GOP nomination may be stronger than Biden's on the Democratic side: Delegates to the Republican convention are actually bound, not just pledged, to their candidate on the first ballot. So there'd be no way to deny Trump if he had the majority of delegates going into the Milwaukee convention -- even if he was convicted of one or more crimes before the proceedings begin in July -- as long as he insisted on continuing his campaign. [bold added]I have a low-enough opinion of politicians that I hold out little hope that the authors have missed a codicil somewhere that un-binds delegates in the event of a felony conviction. This makes Nikki Haley's long-shot/"insurance policy" candidacy seem much more the former and much less the latter. That's too bad: Haley is by no means perfect, but she would be far better in office than Trump and has consistently polled better than Trump against Biden. I also suspect that she would also at least be competitive if Biden did step aside and the Democrats picked someone who could pass as sane/moderate to enough independents. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. At Inc., Suzanne Lucas presents a list of Payroll Mistakes she collected from fellow administration professionals. I found the following especially amusing:My dad once got a check when the manufacturing company he worked for audited its books and found it had shorted him a penny at some point. This was mailed to him at home. He was so irritated that the company wasted the time and money to issue him a check for 1¢ he vowed never to cash it so its books would never balance, LOL. I found it in his things after he passed last spring and it just made me laugh because that was so Dad.That guy could have been the soulmate of me as a very young adult. 2. I'm not sure how long it's been around, but fans of Gary Larson's The Far Side comic can can enjoy it daily at the web site The Far Side: The Daily Dose. Sorbitol, which isn't mentioned in the Less Wrong piece, because it is naturally-occuring, is one of the few sugar substitutes whose taste I can tolerate. (Image by BartVL71, via Wikimedia Commons, license.) 3. Over at Less Wrong is an amusing piece regarding the discovery of artificial sweeteners titled "There Is Way Too Much Serendipity." Here's the topic of speculation:[V]irtually all the popular synthetic sweeteners were discovered accidentally by chemists randomly eating their research topic.The author explores two reasonable explanations for how this came about. And here's my favorite humorous bit, about the man who discovered cyclamate:I know what you're thinking. The kind of guy who lights up cigarettes in a chemistry lab and places them in the middle of uncharacterised compounds before taking them to his mouth again, must have died young of an interesting death. I checked -- he proceeded to live to the old age of 87.Enjoy! 4. And now for the rabbit hole, a Reddit thread titled, "Tell Me Your Most Exotic Selfhosted Solution, the Crazier, the Better, No 0815 Solutions!." This one's pretty clever and gives the idea:I live with a couple roommates in an apartment. For convenience we create a simple webpage where we could quickly see who's home. It works by querying the router (running OpenWrt) every few minutes for known phones connected to the Wi-Fi. We pretty soon realized that we could actually see which room someone was in pretty consistently based on the signal strength alone. After that it didn't take long before we exploited it as much as we could, everything from automatically turning on the coffeemaker the first time someone left their room between 7-10am to blasting an alarm if someone left/didn't leave their room at certain times.You will also learn that the 08/15 in the title is German slang for mediocre or run-of-the-mill. -- CAVLink to Original

Writing at Inc., Suzanne Lucas describes what she learned when a shady talent recruitment site fraudulently attempted to use her name to scam job-seekers. Probably the most important thing was establishing a clear identity for herself and making it easy to verify:Image by Sander Sammy, via Unsplash, license.Be clear about who you are. By taking control of your own personal brand, you'll help people recognize when something don't sound like you. Make it possible for people to contact you. We discovered this scam when someone contacted [Katrina] Collier and asked, "Is this you?" Someone later reached out to me with the same question. Because we are both -- as is [Dave] Ulrich -- very clear about who we are and what we do, people recognized this as being off. And because we are easy to contact, we heard about it. [bold in original]In that sense, a strong brand can be part of its own protection. But Lucas also advises setting up something like a Google alert on one's own name since that might help detect such a problem a little quicker. She also offers advice on what to do when something like this happens. Although she eventually lists Hire a lawyer, she was fortunate enough not to have to do this. And from her account, it would appear that following her other advice might well spare one that last, expensive step. -- CAV Link to Original

Marco Rubio, whom I once regarded as potential presidential material, has popped up as the author of an editorial in Compact magazine, whose about page openly claims as a virtue that:Our editorial choices are shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community -- local and national, familial and religious -- against a libertine left and a libertarian right.This outfit admits publishing pieces from authors with whom it disagrees, but even the most cursory look will show that Rubio's piece isn't one of them. His piece, disappointingly -- but not surprisingly given how easily its author crumbled and capitulated under Donald Trump's nickname of Little Marco -- fits right into this theocratic vision. The piece isn't notable for any originality: Theocrats have package-dealt hedonism and liberty (in caricature here as the "libertine left" and the "libertarian right") together for ages. What is notable to me is its timing, ahead of a presidential election all but set to offer Americans the dispiriting "choice" of four more years of one of its last two awful, unpopular Presidents. I have no idea whether Rubio sees his piece as a donation-in-kind to the Trump campaign, as groundwork for a political resurrection in 2028, or both. Whatever the case, it is, in reality, his intellectual obituary. In case his title ("Against Progressive Pseudo-Religion") isn't enough, his closing says it all:Those of us who belong to a historic faith must defend ourselves in legislatures around the country, never conceding that our rights are mere privileges. But we must also live out our faith in our local communities. When we do so, it will be all the more obvious that left-wing pseudo-religion is unequal to the real thing. Common sense, social science, and other objective criteria agree: America needs traditional religion, not the religion of wokeness. Those who are afraid or ashamed to stand by that claim do little justice to themselves, and even less to their nation. God help us if, when the dust settles, all the United States is left with is an "In This House" yard sign and a communal John Lennon-singalong. [bold added]Insinuations of Christian persecution in a nation that guarantees freedom to practice religion, so long as one does not violate the rights of others. Check. A false dichotomy between Christianity and a meaningless life. Check. Running with the obvious resemblance between leftism (which shares its moral base) and Christianity to imply that the former is a mere shadow of truth. Check. Skipping over the whole problem of the nature of faith -- accepting something as true in the absence of proof or any relationship to reality. Check. I completely disagree with Rubio: The last thing America needs is even more religion. To call any religion false is too high a compliment, and to imply that any religion is true is absurd, and would be greeted with gales of laughter in a better, more rational culture. Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff have both made better cases than I ever will for a rational foundation for the values that make America possible and great. Accordingly, I will mention two of their works, for the benefit of anyone sincerely interested in an alternative to Rubio's thin gruel. I shall start with Ayn Rand's response to a question about religion in a 1964 interview:PLAYBOY Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life? RAND Qua religion, no -- in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man's life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very -- how should I say it? -- dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.Whatever good religion, the primitive precursor to philosophy, might sometimes have to offer, it is far outweighed by the threat its method poses to America, as elaborated by Leonard Peikoff in his lecture, "Religion Versus America," which is embedded in this post, and whose transcript can be found here. -- CAVLink to Original

Anyone who, like me, has been left politically homeless by the mindless lurch of the conservative movement to theocratic/nationalist populism, knows that just about the only things conservatives get excited about these days are banning abortion, Trump!, and banning immigration. But what do they dread? In the vein of understanding today's right, it might be useful to take a look. Capitalizing on last week's find of sites that today's barely-recognizable "right" regards as "better than Drudge." I have found a listicle of "12 Absolutely Insane Examples That Show Just How Far the U.S. Has Fallen." The piece doesn't really elaborate on why its author deems each item indicates American decline, but it is nonetheless interesting to take a look at it. The piece provides a news link and a brief excerpt for each item. Below, I'll just list each item and provide my own thoughts: A social media influencer that returned a couch to Costco after using it for more than two years is telling her followers to buy all of their furniture from Costco because "you can return it when you don't like it anymore." -- Maybe: A major retailer with a generous return policy sounds like a sign of prosperity to me. The fact that some people take advantage of others is hardly news. While it might be a sign of cultural decline that this "influencer" isn't a little embarrassed to admit taking advantage of generosity, I don't see how the people who claim giving to "the poor" is a virtue are going to solve this problem. From now on, a high school diploma will no longer be necessary [to join the Navy] ... "assuming they're able to score 50 or above on a qualification test." -- Yes: This is disturbing, but not news: Government schools have been failing students for decades now. Unfortunately, while some conservatives support school choice, there is no principled effort on their part to separate government from education. If America is to have better schools, it should get out of the way of the private sector. Three years ago, the city of Portland decriminalized the possession of all drugs.-- No and Yes: So long as someone isn't violating the rights of others, the state has no business dictating what he can or cannot consume. Decriminalization of drugs is a step forward out of the depths of Prohibition (i.e., "the war on drugs"). What is a sign of decline is lack of law enforcement against real crimes and zero opposition to the welfare state. Places that decriminalize drugs simply must enforce laws against real crimes, and drug users should bear all costs of their habits. Rather than rally behind Prohibition, conservatives should support strong enforcement of legitimate laws and the repeal of the welfare state. While it is not the purpose of government to save drug addicts from themselves, those two things would go very far to cause more people to be a lot more cautious about drug use. D- and F grades ... are being abolished at Western Oregon University -- Maybe and No: Higher education has been declining for decades and this is yet another step in that decline, to the degree that this reflects a trend. But see also grade inflation. I don't see this as particularly newsworthy. In the sense that we are at least still free to choose which college we can go to, this is definitely not a sign of decline. There are plenty of better schools to attend, and any American worth his salt will pick one upon hearing about this. From this point forward, every police officer in El Paso, Texas will be forced to ask for the preferred pronouns of every person that they encounter -- Yes: It is within bounds for a government agency to have a code of conduct for its members. That said, at a time when the government needs to repeal bad laws (prohibition and the welfare state) and enforce legitimate laws, it seems very odd to make what is at best a matter of evolving etiquette into a major priority -- by either law enforcement or the people who started this special pronoun business (i.e., by calling their favorite ghost He/Him.) and are now complaining about it. A group of migrants that was caught on camera physically attacking cops in Times Square was ... released without even having to post bail. -- Yes. Immigration should be completely legal and legitimate laws, e.g., against assault and battery, should be enforced. The left and the right are both wrong on this one. A group of pro-life activists in Tennessee face 11 years in prison for praying and singing outside of [sic] an abortion clinic -- No and Yes -- Directly below the blurb, the excerpt reads, "They were sitting peacefully [sic] in the lobby of the abortion center." They were trespassing. They should have "prayed and sang hymns" somewhere else. The fact that these "peaceful" "protesters" are in legal trouble is not a sign of decline. That the anti-abortion right is making so much progress is a sign of decline and it says something that they'll champion actions that they'd censure -- were they taken by political opponents. The first step in changing a broken political system is to work within that system, and show respect for legitimate laws. The 24-year-old aide to U.S. Senator Ben Cardin that was filmed having gay sex in a Senate hearing room will not be charged with breaking any laws -- No: This is gross, but pornography and consensual sex are not (and should not be) illegal. I assume whoever was in charge of that building deemed it not worth pursing criminal charges for any damage or exposure to pathogens to others caused by that act, if there was any. Violent carjackers are fearlessly roaming the streets of Washington D.C., and anyone that resists one of those young carjackers can end up dead. -- Yes. The fact that this is not particularly newsworthy speaks volumes. As one of our Founders might have put it, The fact that the owner of this land is a citizen of China neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg (Image by Federico Respini, via Unsplash, license.)The Chinese and other foreign buyers are purchasing millions of acres of U.S. farmland, but nobody knows exactly how much farmland they now own and very few of our politicians are interested in stopping this practice. -- No. This xenophobia is an example of the decline of the right, but it is good to know that America still respects the right of individuals to own property. Since these buyers and investors are, as individuals, subject to our laws, and could have their property seized in the event of war, there is no issue with "this practice." So many radical Muslims have moved into Dearborn, Michigan that the Wall Street Journal is referring to it as "America's Jihad Capital" -- No and Yes. If I recall correctly, it's support for Palestinian butchers by residents and some officials there that earned Dearborn that ignominious title. It is not a sign of American decline that some locales become ethnic enclaves. What is a sign of decline is the brazen antisemitism there (homegrown or otherwise) -- and the homegrown variety in our whitebread prestigious colleges. It is ridiculous to blame the free movement of people for blatant antisemitism. It doesn't cause anti-semitism and it distracts from the very real problem of its rise among people who have lived here all their lives. A teacher in Massachusetts that had a spotless record for 23 years was fired after she revealed the truth about what was really going on (e.g., preferred pronouns used without parental knowledge or consent) in her school. -- Yes. See government schools above. Rather than preen and feign persecution about the poor "Christian" teacher, why not get to work privatizing our schools?American decline is a cultural problem and it has been going on for decades. As if this isn't disturbing enough, the right, which once was at least a decent handbrake on the left, blatantly (1) complains about some things -- such as private property and personal freedom -- that we still have going for us as if they are signs of decline and (2) fails to take the initiative on fixing some things -- like education or prohibition ("the war on drugs") -- that have been broken for a very long time. In some respects, I find the list more alarming than the examples. -- CAVLink to Original

Chalk up another win for the good guys at the Institute for Justice: They just won an award for damages for a man arrested in Louisiana for a satirical post he put up on Facebook at the height of our government's lunatic response to the recent pandemic. Here's how it started:On March 20, 2020, four days after several California counties issued the nation's first "stay-at-home" orders in response to an emerging pandemic, [Waylon] Bailey let off some steam with a Facebook post that alluded to the Brad Pitt movie World War Z. "RAPIDES PARISH SHERIFFS OFFICE HAVE ISSUED THE ORDER," he wrote, that "IF DEPUTIES COME INTO CONTACT WITH 'THE INFECTED,'" they should "SHOOT ON SIGHT." He added: "Lord have mercy on us all. #Covid9teen #weneedyoubradpitt."That night, Bailey was subjected to a SWAT-style raid culminating in his being ordered to stand on his knees and put his hands on his "fucking head." He was arrested for a felony and faced up to 15 years in prison, although the district attorney declined to prosecute for good and what should be obvious reasons. Here's how it ended:Image by Joel & Jasmin Førestbird, via Unsplash, license.Last week's verdict against [Detective Randall] Iles and the sheriff's office validated all of those claims. "It is telling that it took less than two hours for a jury of Mr. Bailey's peers in Western Louisiana to rule in his favor on all issues," said Andrew Bizer, Bailey's trial attorney. "The jury clearly understood that the Facebook post was constitutionally protected speech. The jury's award of significant damages shows that they understood how Mr. Bailey's world was turned upside down when the police wrongly branded him a terrorist." Institute for Justice attorney Ben Field noted that "our First Amendment rights aren't worth anything if courts won't hold the government responsible for violating them." Bailey's case, he said, "now stands as a warning for government officials and as a precedent that others can use to defend their rights."Observing our government so egregiously and stupidly violate our rights throughout the pandemic was shocking and frustrating to say the least. It is truly good news that the Institute for Justice has moved the needle a bit back in the right direction on our most important right, free speech. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge I often come across how-tos that I can't follow up on in the moment. I bookmark them for later. Here are four of them.*** Image by Pop & Zebra, via Unsplash, license.1. Before we decided to move, I was getting in a good hour-long walk most days, and I often read things from the web during those walks. Since many web pages are nightmares of poor formatting and blitz visitors with distracting A/V content, I began to wonder if I could use bookmarklets on my phone to fix this, as I do on my "real" computers. The short answer appears to be that you can, sort of. We decided to move around the time I learned about this, so the daily walks went out the window and I never got around to trying the advice in "Use Bookmarklets on Chrome on Android," as easy as it seems to be, now that I'm looking at it again:I was today years old when I learnt that you can find bookmarks via the Address Bar, and they keep the context of the current page. This means that you can run Bookmarklets. Voila. Now that I know you can use bookmarklets via the address bar, this opens up a lot of options for slightly deeper customisation on Android than what is possible today.If I recall correctly, it is possible to insert a title field within the code for a bookmarklet that can facilitate using this method, by serving as a more memorable/typeable search term. 2. Moving along from Android to Linux, I found the following technique to clear out directories more efficiently in a post titled "Unleashing Daily Productivity with Five Shell One-Liners:"rm !(*.pdf|*.epub) The above will, for example, remove everything that is not a PDF or an epub file from the current directory. 3. Here's another for Linux, and one that I can personally vouch for. A little over a year ago, I bought a new laptop, which was mind-blowingly good, except that its battery life was apparently less than three hours. Linux has a reputation for not having great battery life, but I knew that partly came down to people not knowing how to get more out of their systems. And besides, I have a Chromebook that I installed Linux on that can last over eight hours. So I investigated and very quickly learned that something called "Apport" was chewing up my battery and making my CPU fan wail like a banshee sometimes. A quick search turned up "How to Disable/Enable Automatic Error Reporting in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS." Yes, Apport is the error reporter for the Ubuntu flavor of Linux. Turning this off immediately helped quiet my computer and reduced its power consumption. (This is running 22.04.) I turned it off for that computer permanently and it now has a much more tolerable 4-6 hour battery life. Some may sniff at this, but it's good enough for my current purposes. 4. Even if you don't follow the steps in "I'm Now Using the Right Dictionary" -- which shows how to use the 1913 edition of Webster's dictionary as the dictionary for the Emacs text editor, you might enjoy or even want to use that dictionary on its own. The link takes you to a sparse page featuring a box in which to type the word you wish to look up. -- CAVLink to Original

Writing at Slate, Alison Green informs her readers that "The five little words [We're like a family here] should send you running from any job." Green cites several examples of people writing to her about dysfunctional workplaces whose management described them this way, and why it is a red flag:What they want you to think of is very different from what they actually have in mind. (Image by Jessica Rockowitz, via Unsplash, license.)Almost invariably when workplaces claim to be "like a family," they're using the phrase to mean that they expect employees to show the same sort of patience, commitment, and loyalty (and sometimes guilt!) that we generally associate with families. But they're certainly not offering the benefits people normally expect from their families in return, like love, emotional support, and a financial safety net (nor should they, in most business arrangements). A much better model for employment is that it's a team -- a group of people working together toward a common goal, with the understanding that either party can leave the arrangement if they determine it's no longer in their best interests. Dysfunctional employers don't like that framing, because it underscores that employees are independent agents who can and should prioritize their own needs, but it's a far more accurate one. It's also healthier, since workers should advocate for themselves, expect to be paid fairly, and feel free to move on without guilt.Green is absolutely right about this, and even quotes a letter from someone whose dysfunctional family life helped him catch on quicker to his dysfunctional workplace than he otherwise might have. This reminded me a little bit of a part of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in which a company ran itself into the ground by adopting an explicitly altruist-collectivist work and compensation arrangement, after its management misused the term "family" to describe it ahead of a vote. A former employee describes the hellish conditions that resulted in part:"We're all one big family, they told us, we're all in this together. But you don't all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day -- together, and you don't all get a bellyache -- together. What's whose ability and which of whose needs comes first? When it's all one pot, you can't let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht -- and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it's not right for me to own a car until I've worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth -- why can't he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No? He can't? Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he's replastered his living room? ... Oh well ... Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma'am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars -- rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn't belong to him, it belonged to 'the family,' and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his 'need' -- so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife's head colds, hoping that 'the family' would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it's miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm -- so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother's. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot? (pp. 610-611)This might sound over the top compared to Green's examples -- Well, maybe not the one from the guy who left a job because he developed health problems -- but it has happened politically many times, as countries have adopted socialism or communism because it is allegedly "humane" or more "like a family," the latter based on the all-too-common confusion of altruism with the benevolence or kindness that, say, a parent should show a child. Perhaps family is almost always a red flag in our current culture. -- CAV P.S. The theocratic right is, if anything, even more guilty about misusing the term. Family values is code in that quarter for enforcing Christian morality via government force.Link to Original