…the only reason this conflict arose was a New Deal-era tax loophole that gave birth to our peculiar employer-based health care system. The main lesson of Hobby Lobby is that this system has to go.
Yes. Of course, ObamaCare should never have happened, either, for the same reason.
Seeing three terabytes for a hundred bucks at Newegg.
My problem is, I don’t know what I’d do with that much storage. I don’t need bigger drives; I’d like cheaper ones. But as with restaurants and food, the marginal cost of adding capacity is low, but the basic overhead of manufacturing a drive seems to set a lower limit on the price.
Culture warriors face two additional problems:
They tend to want to boycott places they never shopped at in the first place.
The company’s actual core demographic takes umbrage about the boycott and stages a much more effective counterboycott.I can’t tell you how many times I have had some version of the following conversation:
Angry person on the Internet: Wal-Mart’s treatment of its workers is shameful. I am not going to give that company any of my business!
Me: How much did you spend at Wal-Mart before you realized its treatment of workers was shameful?
The modal answer to this query is sudden disappearance from the conversation. I’m not sure anyone has confessed to spending as much as $1,000 a year at the stores. Of those who claim to shop there, most seem to do so almost entirely on vacation in rural areas.
If this describes you, you are not Wal-Mart’s core demographic, and its executives don’t care whether you boycott the business; the loss in sales is less than they experience from miscalculating what sort of sunscreen to buy. They care very much about what their core demographic thinks, but those people are, by and large, not interested in these boycotts; they’re interested in paying 12 cents a can less for tomatoes.
As she notes, Chick-fil-A is a canonical example.
In our seats, waiting to hear him play banjo with a bluegrass band and Edie Brickell. Then, the fireworks.
[Saturday-morning update]
What a great show. I hadn’t realized how seriously Martin had gotten into his music in the last few years. He’s equally adept at both bluegrass fingerpicking and clawhammer, and he and Brickell did some beautifully spooky songs in the latter style. He also hasn’t lost his comedic touch. “It’s always been my dream to play the Hollywood Bowl on the 4th of July. Call me crazy, but I feel that, as I step on this stage, I’ve taken a big step in that direction.” (Paraphrase).
Only disappointment was that the show wasn’t long enough, and the fireworks (accompanied by a medley of Sousa tunes from the Air Force Band of the Golden West, ending with the classic Stars and Stripes Forever) less spectacular than I’ve gotten used to in recent years, but still well worth the money and effort to attend.
[Update a while later]
One other thing. Paul Simon made a guest appearance, and sat in for a song.
For those wondering, that’s Apollo 11, taking off on July 16th, 1969.
Buzz Aldrin is starting a social media campaign to commemorate it.
I’m working on a piece that I hope gets good placement, on how it’s time to let go of Apollo.
Adrian Moore explains why he can’t take it any more.
John Walker reviews John Mankins’ new book.
Where to begin? It doesn’t matter if Steyn has “no scientific credentials;” he’s perfectly capable of both spotting fraud when he sees it, and calling out a fraudulent huckster if he deems it necessary. And while it’s true that science, idealized, is “a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion,” this has no bearing on whether or not Michael Mann committed fraud. We’re not debating whether or not science is a fact-based enterprise; we’re debating whether or not Mann is a fraudulent scientist. Defining science simply has nothing to do with the debate at hand; it’s a definitional reductio combined with an argumentative non sequitur.
But that doesn’t really matter with these people. If they get backed into a difficult corner, they just repeat, by rote, the textbook definition of science; for some reason, this is supposed to absolve their pet favorite scientists of any wrongdoing, even if the scientists’ professional credibility is seriously in question. It just doesn’t make any sense to use such a rhetorical device in such a way, and it makes people look like idiots when they use it: “Hey, that scientist is correct; after all, science is fact-based.”
As I said, this is mostly a left-liberal phenomenon; progressives just love the empty-headed campaign to endlessly repeat “science” until their adversaries give up.
It is quite annoying, at the very least.