…not only is Inman not someone who is likely to back down, he is about infinitely times more creative than whatever drone is running FunnyJunk.com. He has reposted the letter, annotated it and illustrated it, and included an enormous list of links to pages on FunnyJunk.com where his work was even then being displayed without credit. (They have since taken those pages down, because they’re sneaky like that and also probably don’t know about the Wayback Machine.)
He also declared that rather than pay the drone and/or his lawyer $20,000, he would try to raise that much money through donations, “take a photo of the raised money” and “mail you that photo, along with this drawing of your mom seducing a Kodiak bear” before donating the money to charity.
As of today (Tuesday) at 2 pm Pacific time, he had raised $120,414.
We are less than two grand from the goal for the space-safety Kickstarter project. I have an offer from a potential donor to match the next thousand that comes in, which means that the rest of you only have to contribute a thousand on your own over the next two and a half days to get it home. Please, have at it.
I’ve uploaded the video from the Kickstarter project to Youtube in the hope of giving it more exposure, with only a little over four days to go. Unfortunately. I can’t come up with any way to steer people to the project from there. I don’t seem to be able to edit the description of the video, and comments don’t allow links.
Even the best tax regimes are cannibalistic: Every tax is an incentive for the taxpayer to relocate to a more friendly jurisdiction. But tax rates are not the only incentive: Google is not going to set up shop in Somalia. Healthy governments create conditions that make it worth paying the taxes — which is to say, governments are a lot like participants in any other competitive market (with some obvious and important exceptions). The benefits of being in Detroit used to be worth the costs, but in recent decades millions of people and thousands of enterprises large and small have decided that is no longer the case. It is not as though one cannot profitably manufacture automobiles in the United States — Toyota does — you just can’t do it very well in Detroit. No one with eyes in his head could honestly think that the services provided by the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan are worth the costs.
The third lesson is moral. Detroit’s institutions have long been marked by corruption, venality, and self-serving. Healthy societies have high levels of trust. Who trusts Detroit? This is not angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff. People do not invest in firms, industries, cities, or countries they do not trust. Corruption makes people poor.
And here are some recent graphic images of the results, from (Michigan ex-pat) Amy Alkon. As went Detroit, so will go the country, if the Democrats get their way on a national level, as they did in Detroit.