Cracks are forming in it.
Good.
Category Archives: Business
Venezuela
It wants to spread the suffering:
As with the old lady and the fly, Venezuela’s government may be running out of encores. It can crack down on black-market activity, but that won’t make the shortages go away. It might redistribute the suffering a bit, but that’s not all it will do. The black market is often a sort of release valve for bad policy; shut it down, and you turn the formerly annoying into the totally intolerable.
There is, as Adam Smith once observed, “a lot of ruin in a nation.” President Nicolas Maduro seems determined to find out exactly how much Venezuela has left.
This is always how socialism ends. They’ve run out of other peoples’ money down there.
Those 7M “Sign Ups”
Why yesterday’s champagne-cork popping in the Rose Garden was meaningless propaganda.
[Update a few minutes later]
Want medical insurance? Get in line:
The first thing we thought of when we saw the pictures was the photos we’ve recently seen on Twitter of Venezuelans waiting in bread lines. Waiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes. Closer to home, one doubts even the Transportation Security Administration would be so tone-deaf as to advertise long airport lines as an indication it’s doing a great job.
So what in the world could the White House have been thinking? Here’s a guess: They look at the ObamaCare lines and think not of communist subjects queuing up for bread or toilet paper, or Americans for driver’s licenses, but something more like the lines of consumers eager to be the first to get the new iPhone or the latest Harry Potter book. Affluent people often wait in line for things about which they have a particular enthusiasm–or for special experiences, like an amusement park ride, concert or meal at a favorite restaurant.
One obvious difference is that whereas the iPhone and Harry Potter queuers are eager to get the new thing first, the ObamaCare ones are presumably anxious not to miss the deadline (even if it’s not rigorously enforced). ObamaCare lines might have been impressive if they’d begun to form in the last days of September. At the end of open enrollment, the White House boast is akin to the IRS’s citing a “surge” in filing of tax returns two weeks from now as evidence that the income tax system is popular and well designed.
Command economies under repressive regimes seems to be the goal.
Government Motors
It’s not that GM’s new owners didn’t care. It’s just that they cared more about their political backers: the UAW.
Spacecraft Tech Expo
OK, now that I have my health care squared away (just under the wire), I’m heading down to Long Beach. Not sure how much I’ll be able to blog from there, but I’ll take a laptop.
No, Mr. Tito
SLS/Orion is not only not a “spaceship to everywhere,” it’s really is a spaceship to nowhere.
I really don’t understand what he’s thinking.
The New Space Race
The Modern World
Yes. “The modern world is astonishing. But it has a price: sometimes the expectation of no communication is better than an expectation of communication that goes unfufilled.”
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related: Wifi is about to get faster.
Too bad it’s not about to get more reliable. I still have to reboot the router every time I want to watch Netflix.
Hipster Web Fonts
A righteous rant. As Glenn notes, a lot of web designers are young, with good eyesight, and monitors the size of a drive-in theater screen.
But now I’m thinking I should go look at my own style sheet.
Cosmos
Chad Orzell has some problems with the reboot. So do I and while it’s not his main concern, he puts his finger on it:
The bit where he called out young-Earth creationism for the impoverished scale of its vision was cute, too, though I’m not sure it was all that necessary or useful (in that the people who believe that won’t be watching, and wouldn’t be convinced), but then the show has clearly established a pattern of throwing red meat to the anti-religious from time to time.
Yes, if by “from time to time” he means every episode so far. I’m not traditionally religious, but I find it gratuitous and off putting. The writers and Tyson seem to get some sort of righteous satisfaction from putting a rhetorical thumb in the eyes of believers. It does not advance science, or their own secular religious cause.