Category Archives: Business

Business, Culinary, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Calorie-Labeling Mess

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Another ObamaCare disaster:

The calorie label clause, buried deep within the ACA’s 10,000 pages, seems harmless enough at first glance. Each restaurant chain with over 20 locations is required to display the calorie content of each food and drink item it serves on signs and printed menus–with vending machine distributors subjected to the same rules. But the regulation also covers “similar retail food establishments,” a clause vague enough to give FDA regulators sweeping power to determine who does and doesn’t have to comply.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg admitted that she “actually thought [calorie labeling] would be one of the more straightforward tasks…but little did I know how complicated it would be.” Hamburg’s concerns are hardly unfounded, but it’s small business owners and franchisees—not FDA bureaucrats—that will feel the most pain under the new law.

What’s particularly stupid is that even if they could make it work without impacting businesses so much, it won’t even do any good, because calories are not what make people obese. All part of the Democrats’ war on science.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Obama Democrats

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Their troubling view on work:

The subsidies that enable some Americans to decide “if they will work” mean higher taxes from those who must or want to work.

Republicans immediately jumped on the finding as proof that the law is a jobs killer and cited earlier discoveries about its destructive impact. These include Obama’s lie that “you can keep your plan” and the fact that many new insurance plans come with higher premiums and ­deductibles and fewer doctors.

Pay more, get less will be the experience for tens of millions by the time the law is fully implemented. And don’t forget its ­assault on religious freedom.

All true and yet, as Carney’s defense showed, something much, much larger is at play. The impacts are symptoms. The disease is that leading Democrats view fewer workers and more dependency as a good thing. That attitude largely explains slow economic growth, record-low labor rates and the explosion of handouts over the last five years.

This anti-job, pro-dependency tilt is the crux of the nation’s polarization. In essence, it pits those who believe in the sanctity of work against those who believe in penalizing wealth and redistributing its fruits.

Not all Democrats agree with that approach, but the party is now controlled by those who do. It is the party that celebrates subsidies and rewards states for getting more people on food stamps. It opens the door wider for disability payments and fights for unemployment benefits like it once fought for jobs. It does these things not because of an emergency but because of a warped ideology.

It’s called Marxism.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Eighth Avenue High

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Fast time, fast times…

High school is an apt metaphor for the shenanigans inside the Times’ $850 million skyscraper at the corner of Fortieth Street and Eighth Avenue. The Times portrayed in Kurson’s article is not the established, serious, and competent institution of the liberal imagination. It is the Beverly Hills High School in Clueless, a cliquey and catty war of all against all, where the self-importance of the occupants masks deep insecurities. The next time our reporters and producers and anchors and bloggers affect an air of moral or social superiority, the next time they pretend to know the answers to every political and economic and cultural question, remember this: They are basically teenagers.

And yet as I read the story I could not help feeling, despite my better instincts, a twinge of sympathy for Rosenthal and his editorial staff. The “tyranny and pettiness” ascribed to the op-ed editor seems to me to apply equally to the behavior of a gossipy newsroom reeking of self-importance and snarky jibes. Nor are the specific complaints lodged against him any more compelling: Bad bosses are part of the human condition, and as a longtime subscriber I find it less than surprising that it can be difficult to get along with the people who produce the New York Times.

The rest of the case against Rosenthal is unintentionally revealing. “The growing dissatisfaction,” Kurson says, “stems from a commitment to excellence that has lifted the rest of the Times, which is viewed by every staffer The Observer spoke to as rapidly and dramatically improving.” But “commitment to excellence” are not the words I would choose to describe a paper whose coverage is increasingly liberal and silly, devoted to sniffing out racism and sexism and to identifying trends significant only to a select few, a paper that in the last month devoted not one but two articles to the subject of female pubic hair, that loads its news copy with opinion through mealy-mouthed phrases like “some say” and “has long been viewed,” that uses its pages as a Democratic fundraising apparatus, that thinks a $1,700 dollar suit is a sign of mayoral populism, that specializes in publishing articles detrimental to national security, that treats the president as a courtier treats a king, that is so eager to disqualify a potential challenger to Hillary Clinton that it initially misrepresented its latest “scoop.” One source tells Kurson the problem with Rosenthal “really isn’t about politics, because I land more to the left than I do the right.” You don’t say.

No kidding.

Business, Philosophy, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

We’re Number 53,000!

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[Sunday morning update]

We’re up within 35,000 today, and there are three new (all five-star) reviews.

I think this is the highest ranking the book has ever had on Amazon. Sales must have picked up this week (I hawked it quite a bit while in DC, both at the conference and with a couple think tanks — I’ll probably be doing a ReasonTV interview in the next couple weeks).

Also, it’s once again number one in the category “Aviation and Space Law.” Plus, it’s selling for full retail, which I’d assume means that Amazon thinks there’s sufficient demand for it that they don’t have to discount (not that I’ve given them a lot of room to do so, but they have had it down a buck or so in the past).

[Update a while later]

OK, based on numbers at the printer, it looks like I sold 27 books last week. Compare that to 18 for the entire month of January. Hopefully those will continue to build with more publicity, and good reviews at Amazon (six right now, all five star).

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Failing Well

…is the American way. Michael Barone reviews Megan McArdle’s new book, which I think has some similar themes to mine.

[Update a couple minutes later]

This bit is interesting:

Her advice is to avoid enterprises that are in long-term decline, such as General Motors starting in the 1970s. In business and public policy, try to learn from well-conducted experiments — but recognize that successful trials can’t always be replicated on a large scale.

I think that also applies to NASA human spaceflight as practiced for the past fifty years.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Congress Versus Commercial Space

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Bob Zimmerman says that the former “hovers over [the latter] like a vulture.”

While there are no doubt many in Congress with that attitude, I was actually encouraged by Chairman Palazzo’s remarks this morning at the Space Transportation Conference, in which he expressed support for an extension of the “moratorium” because it will “stifle innovation” to overregulate at this point. (Note: At the hearing yesterday, he used the phrase “learning period,” as industry does. It’s possible he used the “m” word because he was reading from notes put together by staffer that hadn’t gotten the memo.)