Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Runaway NLRB

2 Comments

I agree with this:

The NLRB has five seats (and four members serving; there’s a vacancy at the moment). The fact that such a tiny group of unaccountable political appointees can just wake up one fine morning, have some Pop-Tarts, and then decide to rewrite the nation’s union-election rules is terrifying. Such changes ought to require an act of Congress.

My own preference would be to dissolve the NLRB, repeal the Wagner Act and the Railways Labor Act, and stop forcing businesses to accept contracts that they do not wish to accept. (In what other field of life is a contract considered valid if one side does not wish to be a party to it?) Our labor “relations” are an exercise in extortion, and they probably cost American workers more in the form of forgone opportunities and lost investment than they win for them. The problem is that the fruits of that extortion are highly concentrated: among government workers and the 7 percent or so of private-sector workers in unions. Repealing the Wagner Act sounds radical, and it would not be easy, but it would be a very good thing for the country.

I guess that makes me an “extremist.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

NLRB rulemaking at the speed of light.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Metaphysics Of Theft

15 Comments

Thoughts on societal entropy:

Where does this all end — these open borders, unsustainable entitlements and public union benefits and salaries, these revolving door prisons and Al Gore-like energy fantasies?

We are left with a paradox. The taxpayer cannot indefinitely fund the emergency room treatment for the shooter and his victim on Saturday night if society cannot put a tool down for five minutes without a likely theft, or a farmer cannot turn on a 50-year old pump without expecting its electrical connections to have been ripped out. Civilization simply cannot function that way for either the productive citizen or the parasite, who still needs a live host.

I will make a wild leap and suggest that a vast majority of Americans are reaching the point where they accept that the blue statist paradigm is reaching its logical end and simply cannot go on any more, given that it is antithetical to human nature itself. There is not always a Germany for every Greece.

That which cannot continue, will not.

Business, Technology and Society

Spam

…hits the Kindle. It seems to me that this is the key:

Daffron of Logical Expressions said Amazon should charge for uploads to the Kindle publishing system because that would remove a lot of the financial incentive for spammers.

“This is why email spam has become such a problem — it costs nothing,” she said. “If people can put out 12 versions of a single book under different titles and authors, and at different prices, even if they sell just one or two books, they can make money. They win and the loser is Amazon.”

It would require a redesign of the Internet to eliminate free email, but it seems like Amazon could control this. Maybe they will soon.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Former Astronaut Bernard Harris

12 Comments

An interesting interview. He’s being a little too politically correct here, though:

…in the 21st century we need teachers who teach math and science to have expertise in math and science. So there needs to be an upgrade there, and refocus on how much we value those teachers. As you know, in this country, we don’t pay our teachers all that well. We need to rethink that.

The problem isn’t that we don’t pay teachers well, at least on average. The problem is that we don’t pay the valuable ones enough, and we pay the worthless ones far too much, thanks to the unions. We need to be able to adequately compensate the teachers who have actual useful knowledge to impart, and get rid of the ones who don’t. This would all start by eliminating the worthless, or to be more accurate, negative-value, “education” major.