A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
First Amendment as interpreted by the local public school system… (cut and pasted from Facebook Messenger)
Amazon is bailing out of New York City (thus, thousands of potential fat-target defendants have now escaped New York’s winner-take-all family law system!). From a Facebook friend:
Bezos is like every Manhattanite, says he’s going to a great house party but then finds out it’s in Queens and doesn’t show up….
What will the wise central planners in the NYC government do now? From their site:
Every New Yorker deserves a safe and affordable place to live, in a neighborhood that provides opportunities to get ahead. The market alone is not always able to meet that need, and, accordingly, governments at all levels must work together to help. Mayor Bill de Blasio has made affordable housing a top priority of his administration and has committed the City to “build or preserve nearly 200,000 affordable units, and help both tenants and small landlords preserve the quality and affordability of their homes.”
New York City’s shortage of affordable housing has reached a crisis point. The crisis has many causes, starting with the erosion of New Yorkers’ purchasing power in the housing marketplace. Wages for the City’s renters have stagnated over the last 20 years, increasing by less than 15 percent, after adjusting for inflation. During the same period, the average monthly rent for an apartment in New York City increased by almost 40 percent.
A massive increase in the population results in stagnant wages as humans are no longer scarce? While simultaneously generating increased demand for housing that drives up prices? Textbook Econ 101 in action? Not exactly, according to the government technocrats:
Another cause of the affordable housing crisis is the mismatch between demand for, and the supply of, housing.
Econ 101 wouldn’t call this situation a “mismatch.” It would just turn out that the market-clearing price is higher than people want to pay and folks would have to start sharing 2BR apartments with 7 roommates, moving to eastern Pennsylvania and riding buses, etc. Maybe the technocrats are illustrating the general principle of “When the market gives you an answer that you don’t like, declare market failure”.
Regardless of whether this shows the failure or success of Econ 101, the politicians have promised more apartments and the city has plenty of money, since the finance industry has been booming for years. With Amazon out, there is a big empty space. The neighborhood already contains a big government-run apartment complex (see “Amazon’s New Neighbor: The Nation’s Largest Housing Project” (nytimes)).
If the politicians in New York are true to their word and housing those who are unable or unwilling to work is truly a “top priority,” should we expect to see government-run housing built on the proposed Amazon site? If not, what else could happen with this part of the city?
[My own Facebook comment on the collapse of the Amazon deal with New York’s Office of Crony Capitalism: “It is a dark day when small retailers in NYC are denied the opportunity to pay the expenses of their largest competitor.”]
Related:
Recent conversation in the D.C. area:
Related:
Here’s the public Instagram feed of the teacher at a suburban Boston-area school (one of her thankless tasks is molding the 12-year-old mind of a friend’s daughter who previously caused mayhem with a feigned nut allergy). The feed is primarily for communicating with her students and their parents and many of the items are titled “Homework” and contain instructions such as “Just answer the Part 1 Questions! Please DO NOT do the figurative language on the back!”. Some non-homework material has made its way into the feed lately though…
This public servant, whose union has ensured her a total comp of well over $100,000 per year (salary, benefits, and pension), has apparently attended a “Teaching Social Activism Conference”. But with median hourly wage in Massachusetts down around $23 (was $22.81 in May 2017), or $46,000 per year on an annualized basis, can she credibly teach Social Activism? She and her union are directly acting to increase inequality by taking money from people who earn median wages to put it into the pockets of folks who earn above-median wages.
[The other parts of this feed are also interesting. The teacher exhorts her charges to “do something great for your community in honor of Dr. King”. Yet she teaches in a nearly all-white suburb thanks to the miracle of two-acre zoning minimums. African Americans are welcome as long as they can afford $1 million for a vacant lot and $30,000/year in property tax on a completed house.
There is an LGBTQ+ meeting on “Pink Days” in a 7th grade classroom sponsored by the Sexuality and Gender Alliance. Where does that leave 12-year-olds who want to gather around the topics of sexuality and gender but don’t identify as “LGBTQ+”? (maybe the “+” includes cisgender heterosexuals?)
Finally, the Instagram feed reveals that “Google Classroom” is heavily used. Americans will be Google users from cradle to grave? Will Google automatically flag K-12 heresy as a service to the young? An AI on a Google server will read one of the assigned essays on refugees and mark any passages in red that are not appropriately sympathetic and welcoming?]
Full post, including commentsReceived from a teacher by a parent of a local 7th grader:
We will be reading March together as a class for our next unit and additionally students will be working cooperatively in book clubs for books that are about and by People of Color.
I asked “So they can pick any book written by or describing a Virginia Democrat?”
It seems that the answer is “no.” The letter continues with
Today in class the students had the opportunity to preview the book club books and rank their top choices.
So students can’t stray from the approved list and pick the autobiography of Clarence Thomas, for example, or Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell:
Government spending is often said to be beneficial to the economy, as the money disbursed is spent and re-spent, creating jobs, raising incomes, and generating tax revenues in the process. But usually if that same government money had remained in the hands of the taxpayers from whom it came, they too would have spent it, and it would still have been re-spent, creating jobs, raising incomes, and generating tax revenues in the process. This again is usually at best a zero-sum process, in so far as the transfer of money is concerned, and a negative-sum process in so far as high tax rates to finance government spending reduce incentives to do all the things necessary to generate economic activity and the prosperity resulting from it.
Poetry by Kanye West is presumably also excluded, though it might be interesting to hear a class discussion of “Gold Digger”:
Eighteen years, eighteen years
She got one of your kids, got you for eighteen years [23 in Massachusetts]
I know somebody payin’ child support for one of his kids
His baby mama car and crib is bigger than his
You will see him on TV any given Sunday
Win the Super Bowl and drive off in a Hyundai
She was supposed to buy your shorty Tyco with your money
She went to the doctor, got lipo with your money
She walkin’ around lookin’ like Michael with your money
Shoulda got that insured, Geico for your money
If you ain’t no punk
Holla, “We want prenup! We want prenup!” (Yeah!)
It’s somethin’ that you need to have
‘Cause when she leave yo’ ass, she gon’ leave with half [maybe closer to 0% after subtracting litigation costs?]
Eighteen years, eighteen years
And on the 18th birthday he found out it wasn’t his?!
The official list would also keep students from asking whether Chinese Nobelists such as Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan qualify as “of color” (of the wrong color?).
Personally I would love to see a student with the temerity to demand In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World, by Rachel Dolezal.
Readers: Does it help Writers of Color to put them in a February ghetto and tell students they can read books on white subjects by white authors the rest of the year?
Exciting Update: I got hold of the list! (Kanye West is not on it!).
Full post, including commentsThe controversy over Gillette’s recent “toxic masculinity” ad campaign got me curious about the state of the art in razor blades.
Test 1:
Results:
Winner: Draw. Equal smoothness of face on both sides.
[Separately, from Friday:
Costco cashier assistant (looking at roses in cart): “What’d you do?”
Me: “If you’ve seen the Gillette ads, then you know that simply existing as a man is reason enough for apologizing.”
Assistant (in her 60s): “Aw. That’s not true. We need men.”
Cashier (in her 30s): “I’m doing fine without. The only thing that I miss is the dual income.”
]
Readers: How much better could Dorco do in the U.S. if they didn’t market their flagship under the name “Dorco”?
See also: Test 2 (in-shower shaving).
Related:
From the Circle K near our Hampton Inn in Jacksonville Beach:
(Note that “EBT” is a way of accessing SNAP, formerly known as “food stamps”.)
Full post, including commentsA wealthy (through marriage) and virtuous (through Trump-hatred) friend posted while on a $1,000+/day luxury vacation on Grand Cayman:
I mentioned the fundamental lack of sustainability of any economic ecosystem involving cruise ships filled with passengers interested in snorkeling coral reefs and visiting white sandy beaches. How the destruction of mangrove forests for the sake of resort development will only increase the damage done by future hurricanes, and that it was my hope that tourists not want to visit places with gross wealth disparity between themselves and the local population: the simile is an invasive species that devours resources to (the resources’) extinction before moving on.
This is consistent with a lot of what I’ve seen and heard from elite Americans. They say that they’re upset by inequality. They also say that they hate cruises and they mock cruise ship passengers as obese, uneducated, undiscriminating, and uncouth.
My response:
If you dislike wealth disparity you should welcome cruise ships. They are the cheapest form of vacation. A week on a cruise ship that visits St. Bart’s is cheaper than one night of hotel on that island. (Currently on a Royal Caribbean ship where the cost per person per day is less than $100/day including food, entertainment, and transportation to all of the ports visited.)
Let me devote New Year’s Day, then, to celebrating the cruise concept, which enables people of many different income levels and nationalities to come together and experience the world. Empress of the Seas is the smallest vessel in the Royal Caribbean fleet, but we still had crew from 59 countries and passengers from 39 countries on board. The cost of visiting Cuba via this ship was less than half of the cheapest land-based “person-to-person” tours that I’d ever seen. Roughly 20 percent of the Americans on board were African Americans. Due to the policy of mixing up passengers at tables for eight, I saw more mixed white/black groups in a week on the ship than in a year of dining out in Boston. Retired government workers (loyal Democrats!) conversed politely with working small business owners.
Here I am with a new friend:
(my Facebook friends posted some similar images, minus the golden halo, after each had found one African American friend to join for Black Panther)
One block of cabins on our ship was occupied by graduates of a Taiwanese engineering college enjoying their 60th reunion(!).
Who else, other than Purell sales reps, will be brave enough to join me in hoping that 2019 sees further growth in what has already been a spectacular growth story and a force for national and global unity?
“Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees” (nytimes) is about an employer that prefers non-pregnant to pregnant employees:
Discrimination against pregnant women and new mothers remains widespread in the American workplace. It is so pervasive that even organizations that define themselves as champions of women are struggling with the problem.
That includes Planned Parenthood, which has been accused of sidelining, ousting or otherwise handicapping pregnant employees, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.
What would happen if the managers at Planned Parenthood admitted their bias and offered free on-site abortions to employees?
Related:
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!
After listening to The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, I’m thankful that we don’t have lynch mobs anymore.
The course covers United States v. Shipp, a criminal contempt case tried by the U.S. Supreme Court that grew out of the almost-surely-wrongful conviction and then lynching of Ed Johnson, a man whom multiple witnesses placed at his place of work when a woman was raped. From the course notes:
The first witness for the defense was Ed Johnson. Johnson spoke in what observers call “a strange voice” and grabbed the arms of his chair with both hands. He denied having attacked Nevada Taylor. Johnson testified that he spent the evening in question working as a poolroom porter at the Last Chance Saloon. He said he had arrived around 4:30 pm and stayed until approximately 10:00 pm, which would have made it impossible for him to rape Nevada Taylor at 6:00 pm. Thirteen witnesses followed Johnson to the stand. Each one swore that he had seen Johnson at the saloon during the time Johnson claimed to be there.
The defense moved on to attack the credibility of Will Hixson. One defense witness testified that two days after the rape, Will Hixson had asked him the name of a black man doing some roofing work at a church. When he told Hixson the roofer’s name was Ed Johnson, Hixson asked him for a physical description—an odd thing to ask about someone Hixson would then identify as the suspect.
The most dramatic event of the Johnson trial occurred on its third and final day. At the request of jurors, Nevada Taylor was recalled to the witness stand. During questioning, a juror rose and asked, “Miss Taylor, can you state positively that this Negro is the one who assaulted you?” Taylor answered, “I will not swear he is the man, but I believe he is the Negro who assaulted me.”
The juror was not satisfied. He asked again: “In God’s name, Miss Taylor, tell us positively—is that the guilty Negro? Can you say it? Can you swear it?” Tears streamed down Taylor’s face. She answered in a quivering voice: “Listen to me. I would not take the life of an innocent man. But before God, I believe this is the guilty Negro.”
The U.S. Supreme Court grants an appeal. The Chattanooga sheriff responds by sending all but one jail guards home for the night, a prearrangement with the mob leaders. The mob then breaks into the jail and drags Johnson out to be lynched off a bridge over the Tennessee River. Johnson died in an almost saintly manner:
Johnson’s last words were: “I am ready to die. But I never done it. I am going to tell the truth. I am not guilty. I have said all the time that I did not do it and it is true. I was not there … God bless you all. I am innocent.” When Johnson was dead, a leader of the mob pinned a note to his body: “To Justice Harlan. Come and get your [n-word] now.”
(Lawyers tend to be more plainspoken than laypeople. The professor actually uses the n-word both in the audio (bleeped out) and in the notes! He did not get the memo about Jonathan Friedland!)
The guys who faciliated the lynching and/or perpetrated it were sentenced to either 60 or 90 days in jail and then returned home to hero’s welcomes (a crowd of 10,000 welcomed Sheriff Joseph Shipp, for example).
So… this year I’m thankful that our society has moved beyond real-world lynch mobs, even if Facebook and Twitter can now facilitate virtual ones.
(The whole lecture series is worth buying, in my opinion just for this one lecture.)
Full post, including comments