State of the Discussion

Nonsense. When you adjust for inflation, family size and benefits, median incomes are up 40 to 60 percent since 1980. And this ignores the influx of 40 million immigrants pulling down the statistical average (while actually gaining even more by moving here). And if you add lower tax rates for the bottom two quintiles, take home pay is up even more.

The real question is why when things are going so well, do people buy into this absurd rhetoric.

Your comment is fundamentally adopting the zero sum fallacy. Returns are up on entrepreneurial investments and innovation as the market is signaling and incentivizing capital investments and skilled labor over low skilled labor. It would be more appropriate to characterize the situation as one where the improved fortunes of the entrepreneurs are stimulating the improved standards of living of the median.

Empirically, it is easy to show that inflation is historically benign, unemployment rates are historically low, median incomes are higher than any time since this nation was founded.

The truth is, you And the author of this post WANT it to smell like Versailles. If it doesn’t, you will just pretend it does and hope nobody questions your fragile group think.

I'm anxious to get a move on and relocate to Portland.

Single-family home escrows in my area are traditionally set at 45 days.

Beer typically takes six weeks, or 42 days, to complete from brew to bottling.

At long last, I have what looks like not one but three live prospects for house purchase offers in play. One's a counter-offer to a lowball offer that got put in front of me last week, another is a young couple looking to buy my home who would pay my asking price (!) and are right on the edge of qualifying for the financing, and one is a broker looking to buy for himself who wants to do a non-traditional structure that he says effectively meets my asking price (!) and I'm waiting for my own broker to give me advice about that.

Also at long last, I am healthy enough and at home enough to brew the raspberry hefeweizen ingredients I bought several weeks ago. Much has happened in my life between then and now.

The best way I can think of to induce one of those potential buyers to open escrow is to jinx myself by brewing that beer and committing to a 42-day fermentation. So that's what I'm doing today: brewing raspberry hefeweizen.

The issue is wages, not prices. Despite rises in productivity, in some industries dramatic rises in productivity, inflation-adjusted wages, and the purchasing power of regular workers, have been flat for decades.

If our economy is expanding and wages aren't rising, where's all that money going? The answer, as we all know already, is "Wall Street."

When given tax cuts, some companies pay out bonuses and dress up ordinary COLAs as resulting from the cuts, but more of them initiate stock buybacks and layoffs anyway. Executive bonuses are obnoxious but probably negligible on the macro scale. Dividends and buybacks are what matter.

Too much of this for too long, and it's no wonder things start to smell a little bit like Versailles in the mid 1780's. Brioche, anyone?

I didn't like the Cold Six Thousand nor the one that came after (can't remember the title) but the LA Quartet is still one of my favorites, along with My Dark Places.

I read Perfidia (a prequel to the LA quartet) when it came out, and while it was fun to spend time with Dudley Smith again, the prose was all Ellroy tics, like White Jazz turned up to 11. I think I'm done with him.

Id\s this for real? I mean, 3 million rubles and a lifetime supply of hamburgers sounds like the Onion.

(By the way, a ruble is worth about a cent and a half, so that's roughly $45K. The burgers could be the more valuable part.)

Should have taken that content warning seriously. It's been a while since I've read a horror story that's inspired that physical "skin crawling" sensation.

(I'm a big horror fan and it's great to find something genuinely frightening to read.)

I always assumed that college cheerleading started with just this in mind. Line up the prettiest girls in the school along the field/court and see what happens. Odds are you'll get some babies with good athletic potential brought up in families with high levels of school loyalty.

I am imagining a counterfactual timeline.

What if, after the 1991 Gulf War, America had withdrawn all its troops from the Middle East, including the air bases in the Saudi Kingdom, which was the primary grievance of Osama Bin Laden and his causus belli for 9-11?

I want to avoid that strain of thought that places primary agency for all the world's ills on America, but I wonder how the counterfactual world above might have played out.

Would a smaller American footprint have sucked the oxygen out of the argument that we are the Great Satan?
Honestly, I don't know and maybe no one does.

But I am struck by how futile and pointless the current stalemate in Afghanistan/Iraq/Pakistan/Yemen is. 15 years of war and we are no closer to peace than we were on 9-10-2001.

I saw somewhere a news clip about a son being sent to fight the same war his father served in, which makes me wonder how old the grandson might be, and if he will serve alongside them someday.

Four trillion dollars, burned in a massive bonfire. 600,000 Iraqis dead, several nations shattered and traumatized, and an entire region wracked with a seething rage which continues to escalate leading to who knows what horrors ahead of us.

I know there are worse timelines that could be imagined, but I am straining right now to put one together.

The textualism of Thomas and the extreme originality of others threatens the Constitution they claim they want to protect.

If the only correct way to understand the Constitution is through the world and concepts of the late XVIII century, sooner rather than later the Constitution will become obsolete. Judges cannot say “I can’t find cell phones, internet, airplanes, cars, or petroleum in the Constitution or the writings of the Founders and their contemporaries, so I can’t rule about those things. Do you have a case about horses and buggies?”

Yes, lets have a discussion about the tradeoffs.
But in order do that, we would need to be honest about what is happening right now.

Because right now, there are death panels within insurance companies deciding who gets what treatment.

Right now when the insurance money runs out, sick people are dumped onto the street.

Right now people without money are barred from care.

Right people go bankrupt in exchange for care.

All the dystopian horrors invoked by UHC opponents are happening right now. They just don't happen to the people who matter.

I had read that a couple days ago, loved it(!) but even though I wanted to write about it, I could not figure an angle. So, kudos to Jaybird!

I am near the end of a major work project where I am making a series of large changes to my product, so not much time for reading anything serious. But, I picked up a nice copy of Dagon on my last business trip, so combining that with some James Ellroy for comfort food.

Oh, the Beavers are going to the college world series, which is nice.

It really seems that the best thing that can happen to jihadists (and the worst thing that can happen to everybody else) is failed states that allow them to gain a real foothold where they can develop the infrastructure to hold and project power. The overwhelming bulk of this is felt by their neighbors, but eventually they'll start exporting that to the rest of world.

Drone strikes seem... unlikely to help with stability. Of course, neither does anything else we do in the Middle East. Afghanistan, or Pakistan.

I'm wondering if they're gonna require paternity tests, or take the mothers' word for it.

Still, this is a bad idea, but in 2018? This kinda thing doesn't exactly *surprise* me that it's a thing.

I was always a fan of Bleib bei uns, which Douglas Adams cited in Dirk Gently as a perfect piece of music.

Never actually been a big fan of the AAM. I mean, authentic instruments are interesting. But I'm of the opinion that modern instruments have evolved to produce a better sound based on the music that was written. Beethoven in particular sounds less majestic on authentic instruments. And he specifically wrote his piano music for the piano forte, which was very new at the time. There's a particular note -- I think it's in the third symphony -- that's only playable on a modern bass with an open string. It sounds majestic now; corny on authentic instruments.

I think the court have consistently been too lenient with regard to the government and data searches. I fail to see why the government can't get a warrant for any data, GPS, credit card, etc. If they have a target, getting a warrant should be trivial.

It is nice to see you writing and posting again @mike-schilling

I am still not a fan of "classical" music, but heartfelt writing is always nice.

It's an interesting theory though, you could also make the case that Phil only won anything because he lucked into MJ + prime Pippen and then got Shaq/Kobe. Should also be noted that Bulls got to the Conf Finals in 1988-89 without Phil and lost in the same place the following year with Phil. My guess is it was a combination of coach + Pippen/Grant gaining some experience that ultimately put the Bulls over the hump.

As to your second point, I actually agree and I tried to allude to that with LeBron having a higher "floor" in terms of team success. It is pretty remarkable how successful he's been from basically his 3rd year onward with different rosters/coaches.