What’s the restaurant of choice for Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Obama? Watch what happens when Brian tries to order lunch at Nou Nou D’Enfer!
H/T to Nick Gillespie.
June 9, 2012
The future of dining
Comments Off on The future of dining
June 8, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My most recent weekly column at GuildMag is now online. With everyone eagerly awaiting the start of this weekend’s beta event, it may be my least-read column for months.
Comments Off on This week in Guild Wars 2
Toronto City Council’s latest collective brain-fart
Terence Corcoran is too kind in his discussion of Toronto’s new ban on plastic bags:
In star-struck liberal green Los Angeles, it took a full-court press by environmental groups, major propaganda efforts, endorsement by the roll-over editorialists at the Los Angeles Times, and deployment of Hollywood stars, such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Peter Fonda, to work up the political steam needed to prompt L.A.’s city council to vote last month to ban plastic bags.
In starless Toronto, all it took was a bunch of dumb city councillors who suddenly decided — seemingly out of the blue — to stage a surprise vote.
“Ban the bags,” somebody said. “Good idea. Let’s vote!” Passed: 27 to 17.
No study, no research, no public review, no thought, no concept and no brains. What’s the environmental and fiscal impact of the ban? Nobody knows, although many people say the cost to both the city and the environment will be greater than the cost of using plastic bags.
As I think Adrian MacNair mentioned, one of the most likely outcomes is that people will end up buying less. It’s those little impulse buys that will be curtailed the most, as many folks — especially tourists — won’t have realized they need to bring their own carry bags.
Comments Off on Toronto City Council’s latest collective brain-fart
A Gen-X lament: “none of these “experts” … even agree on when we were born”
By any reckoning, I just missed being in Gen-X, as the earliest date anyone seems to use is 1961 (so my sister is a Gen X’er, but I’m a very-very-very-late boomer, apparently). In spite of that, most of my friends seem to identify much more with Gen X than the plutocratic fat cats of the early Baby Boom generation. Kathy Shaidle explains the three biggest myths about Generation X:
… the term “Generation X” was popularized by our contemporary Douglas Coupland’s titular 1991 novel. (And Coupland swiped his title from the name of Billy Idol’s old pop-punk band; my fellow ex-punk Kinsella should know that, too.)
There are lots of things “great minds” got wrong about Generation X since they started writing and worrying about them. (I mean, us.)
After Coupland’s novel — about over-educated, underemployed pop culture addicts who’ve formed an ad hoc “family” of friends – swept the planet, countless “consultants” (including, briefly, Coupland himself) started marketing themselves as experts on my demographic.
These consultants made a whole lot of money, keynote-speaking to job-for-life CEOs about why we Gen-Xer’s were all so broke and unemployed.
And the most irritating (and yeah, ironic) thing is, none of these “experts” (“X-perts”?) even agree on when we were born.
[. . .]
The takeaway for pundits and other “experts” is:
“Generation X” isn’t synonymous with “young people today.”
I’m gonna be 50 soon. Dammit.
[. . .]
Like the Y2K “experts” who came after them, all those demographic gurus and futurists who got rich theorizing about Generation X ended up looking pretty foolish. (But never had to give their money back.)
When we Gen-Xers were trying to get our first jobs out of college or high school, we did indeed contend with an economy burdened by a triple-feature of double digit horrors: inflation, unemployment and interest rates were all way over 10%.
We blamed those damn yuppie Baby Boomers. They’d beaten us to all the good jobs and were never gonna give them up.
(In the same way hippies had used up all the safe-ish drugs and free sex, and left us with crack and AIDS.)
Comments Off on A Gen-X lament: “none of these “experts” … even agree on when we were born”
The only two political classes that matter
James Miller in the National Post:
Nineteenth century political theorist and former U.S. congressman John C. Calhoun once wrote, “…the necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is to divide the community into two great classes… to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.”
Throughout history, this is precisely how the dynamic between government and the people has played out. Politicians make careers out of redistributing wealth. Persistent inflation and the running up of public debt have proven that governments are incapable of spending within their means. Retaining elected office hinges too much upon buying votes.
With the post-war boom years came increasing amounts of tax revenues. This was all too enticing for politicians to pass up. Entitlement programs were created to ensure a steady supply of votes. Mr. Moore is correct in alleging that younger generations were thrown to the wolves for these promised benefits as they had no say in the matter and are now forced to foot the bill.
At the same time, millennials themselves have been fooled through years of pervasive government and nanny-state decrees into not only expecting entitlements but also misunderstanding the value of prudence. Living standards only rise when the majority of the public produces more than it consumes. This age-old lesson has been slowly forgotten with years of the expansionary welfare state and popular economic theories which favour consumption. When youth are made to believe the most important rule in all economics is “in the long run we are all dead,” is it any surprise when financial discretion takes a back seat to overindulgence?
Comments Off on The only two political classes that matter
Allergy season strikes
I’ve had fall and spring allergy issues since I was a teenager. They’re pretty predictable in symptoms: dry, itchy eyes and full sinuses followed by sneezing and/or coughing (depending on which direction the sinus overflow headed). Over the last several years, the intensity of the allergy attacks has steadily declined, which has been great. This week, however, I got the worst symptoms I’ve had in at least a decade and it came on with little warning.
I tried to tough it out for the first couple of days, but as I really wanted to be awake and de-symptomized for the GW2 Beta Weekend Event kicking off later today, I figured I’d better take some allergy medicine. It turns out the only package of Claritin I had is past its use-by date. The unopened package expired in October.
Of 2009
I guess I really have been doing well in the allergy line recently.
Comments Off on Allergy season strikes
June 7, 2012
Reason.tv: Bath Salts, Naked Zombie Cannibals & Stupid Senators
Comments Off on Reason.tv: Bath Salts, Naked Zombie Cannibals & Stupid Senators
Yet another scare “study” about teens and video gaming
Martin Robbins in the Guardian on another “study” linking teenagers who play video games to negative results:
Not that the ‘research’ cited says anything about violent video games to begin with. BAAM conducted a survey of 204 parents of children aged nine to eighteen, asking about their use of computer games: anything from Tetris to GTA IV via SimCity. This produced the following results:
“Forty-six per cent said their sons or daughters had become ‘less co-operative’ since they started playing video games. Forty-four per cent said they were more ‘rude or intolerant towards others’, 40 per cent said they were more impatient, 36 per cent reported an increase in ‘aggressive behaviour’, 29 per cent cited more mood swings and 26 per cent said their offspring had become more reclusive.”
26% of parents thought their teen offspring had become more reclusive in the years since they started playing video games. No doubt pedantic nay-sayers will whine on about the other SEVENTY-BLOODY-FOUR PER CENT of kids who either didn’t become more reclusive or became less reclusive, or ask how ‘reclusive’ is even defined or measured in the first place; but if that incredible correlation doesn’t persuade you, well then by golly-gosh I don’t know what will.
Even the most ‘persuasive’ of those figures stands at just 46%. That, astonishingly, is the proportion of parents who think their teenaged children are becoming less cooperative with time. This is put down to video games, rather than something silly, like… oh I don’t know, maybe the fact that they’re teenagers?! 46% is a shocking figure only in the sense that I’m shocked it’s only 46%. Perhaps video games actually make kids more cooperative? We have no way of knowing, because there doesn’t seem to have been any effort made to survey kids who don’t play video games as a control group.
Comments Off on Yet another scare “study” about teens and video gaming
“What’s next? Prosecutions before military tribunals in the U.S.?”
Judge Andrew Napolitano on the lack of outrage over the use of military drones within the borders of the United States (and, in all probability, Canada):
When drones take pictures of us on our private property and in our homes, and the government uses the photos as it wishes, what will we do about it? Jefferson understood that when the government assaults our privacy and dignity, it is the moral equivalent of violence against us. The folks who hear about this, who either laugh or groan, cannot find it humorous or boring that their every move will be monitored and photographed by the government.
Don’t believe me that this is coming? The photos that the drones will take may be retained and used or even distributed to others in the government so long as the “recipient is reasonably perceived to have a specific, lawful governmental function” in requiring them. And for the first time since the Civil War, the federal government will deploy military personnel inside the United States and publicly acknowledge that it is deploying them “to collect information about U.S. persons.”
It gets worse. If the military personnel see something of interest from a drone, they may apply to a military judge or “military commander” for permission to conduct a physical search of the private property that intrigues them. And, any “incidentally acquired information” can be retained or turned over to local law enforcement. What’s next? Prosecutions before military tribunals in the U.S.?
The quoted phrases above are extracted from a now-public 30-page memorandum issued by President Obama’s Secretary of the Air Force on April 23, 2012. The purpose of the memorandum is stated as “balancing…obtaining intelligence information…and protecting individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution…” Note the primacy of intelligence gathering over freedom protection, and note the peculiar use of the word “balancing.”
Comments Off on “What’s next? Prosecutions before military tribunals in the U.S.?”
High-ranking conspiracy or blundering incompetence?
Tim Worstall explores the range of possibilities:
Viewing the ghastly mess that politics makes of anything, it can be difficult to decide between cock-up and conspiracy theories. Are politicians simply too dim to perceive the effects of what they do, or are they are plotting to make the world a worse place?
Which brings us to where I believe the real climate change conspiracy is: in what we’re told we must do about it all. I’ve pointed out that if we assume that the basic science is correct (and I certainly don’t have either the hubris or technical knowledge to check it) then the answer is a simple carbon tax. The British Government employed Nick Stern to run through what was the correct economic response, assuming the IPCC was correct, and that was his answer. So the question has to be why hasn’t that same government enacted that very solution? Which is, as I say, where I think the conspiracy comes in.
For instead of this simple and workable solution we end up with the most ghastly amount of wibble and dribble.
Consider the subsidies to renewables. Our system gives higher subsidies to the more expensive technologies: clearly ludicrous. We have some limited amount of money, whatever that limit is, and we thus want to get as much renewable power as we can from that limited money. But we give five times more money per unit of power to the most expensive technology, solar, than we do to the cheapest, hydro. What have the politicians been smoking to deliberately spend our money in the most inefficient manner possible?
Or we could look at the argument for subsidy to solar itself: we’re told that it will be economic, comparable to coal-generated power, within only a couple of years. Thus we must have subsidy now – which is insane. If something is about to be profitable without subsidies then we don’t want anyone installing it yet; install it in a couple of years when it is profitable without subsidies. Why waste good money when we can just wait?
Comments Off on High-ranking conspiracy or blundering incompetence?
June 6, 2012
QotD: Those demon drugs
As “Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber” in an old Saturday Night Live sketch, Steve Martin tells a patient’s father that people once foolishly believed disease was caused by demonic possession, but “nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach.” Likewise, whereas people used to think the devil was the source of evil, today we know that drugs are — even if we’re not sure which drugs, or whether a particular criminal has actually consumed them.
Jacob Sullum, “The Devil in Rudy Eugene: The “Miami Cannibal” story reflects our perennial readiness to believe that drugs make people do evil.”, Reason, 2012-06-06
Comments Off on QotD: Those demon drugs
Europhiles and Euroskeptics have much in common
Under all the noise and confusion, the fans of the EU and the foes of the EU are rather similar says Brendan O’Neill:
Over the past year, as the Euro crisis has intensified, there has been a really interesting revelation — which is that Europhiles and Eurosceptics are not that different from each other. In fact, Europhiles and Eurosceptics are driven by very similar impulses, by similar anti-democratic instincts.
Both of these groups seem keen to absolve national governments of responsibility, to absolve nation states of responsibility for political and economic chaos.
The Europhile does it by kowtowing to Brussels, calling upon EU institutions to do more to save Europe. And the Eurosceptic does it by blaming the EU for almost everything that goes wrong, treating Brussels as a kind of Death Star that has sucked decency from every inch of Europe.
The Europhile tends to have blind faith in the EU, seeing it as the solution to every problem, while the Eurosceptic has a blinkered dislike of the EU, seeing it as the cause of every problem. What they share in common is a belief that responsibility lies with the EU. Both the depiction of the EU as the saviour of Europe and the depiction of it as the destroyer of Europe are underpinned by an instinct to say: ‘National governments are not to blame for what has gone wrong.’
In answer to the question ‘Did the EU kill democracy?’, I would say ‘No, it didn’t’. The EU is better understood as the end product of the death of democracy in Europe, a creation of national governments that had given up on the ideas of sovereignty and democracy. The EU follows the demise of European democracy, rather than instigating it.
The real driving force behind the EU over the past 40 years was the cowardice and opportunism of national governments, not the sinister ambitions of Brussels or Berlin. National political leaders who felt increasingly estranged from their own populations fashioned a post-sovereign institution that they could effectively hide in.
Comments Off on Europhiles and Euroskeptics have much in common
Cassy’s guide to naming spaceships
You have to put a bit more thought into how you name your spaceships, people of the future!
Dear People of the Future,
Congratulations! If you’re reading this, you’ve just received a state-of-the-art spacecraft, and you’re probably about to take it on an extremely dangerous mission. Your journey may even concern the safety and continued survival of the human race.
But don’t worry! I’m betting your new ride is pretty sick. It’s probably got a warp drive and maybe a solar sail and lots of other technology I couldn’t even begin to understand.
At this point, you’re probably wondering: What should I name my spacecraft?
It’s good advice. Really. But I was surprised to find that there had been a USS Custer, a USS General Burnside, and even the USS Benedict Arnold.
H/T to John Turner for the link.
Comments Off on Cassy’s guide to naming spaceships
