Today on the radio I heard an ad for a DC-area supermarket chain that boasts that it now has on sale – as in, selling for a reduced price – “sustainably farmed fish.”
I really dislike the word “sustainable” (and all of its variations) as used today to signal holier-than-thou environmental ‘awareness.’ As Robert Solow said about this concept,
It is very hard to be against sustainability. In fact, the less you know about it, the better it sounds.
But advertising “sustainably farmed fish” – implying, as it does (rather bizarrely), that unsustainably farmed fish are common – is especially annoying. While the absence of property rights in oceans and other large bodies of water, and in uncaught fish, might well lead to overfishing (that is, to a genuinely unsustainable manner of acquiring fish for human consumption), the very essence of a fish farm implies property rights in the fish stocks. And where there are property rights there is sustainability. A fish farmer is no more likely to allow his stock of fish to be depleted than is the owner of Triple Crown winner American Pharaoh to allow his horse to be slaughtered for sport, or than are you to allow the cost of motor oil to prevent you from ever changing the oil in your car.
[…]
It’s depressing that those people who today are most likely to worry about resources being “unsustainable” – people who are most likely to prattle publicly about “sustainability” – are those people who also are most likely to disparage private property rights and to argue for government policies that weaken and attenuate such rights. Such people are those who are most likely to wish to further collectivize the provision not only of environmental amenities such as park space and animal conservation, but also of health care, of education, of housing, and of a host of other private goods and services. Such people also are those who are most likely to protest prices made higher by market forces, and to applaud rent-control and other government-imposed price ceilings on a variety of consumer goods and services.
In short, the people who today howl most frequently and loudly for “sustainability” are those who most frequently and loudly oppose the legal and economic institutions – private property and market-determined prices – that alone reliably promote genuine sustainability.
Don Boudreaux, “‘Sustainability’ is Fishy”, Café Hayek, 2016-07-26.
March 22, 2018
QotD: “Sustainability”
March 21, 2018
Millennials and economics
In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall views-with-alarm the economic illiteracy of many Millennials:
A most amusing piece over in Salon about how American millennials are certain that capitalism just ain’t gonna be around in the future therefore they see no point in saving for their retirements. Boy, ain’t they gonna get a surprise! One of the larger ones being that an absence of capitalism is going to, as it was before the emergence of the system, make having some savings for old age rather more important than it is now.
But there’s more there, of course there is, this is Salon we’re talking about:
The idea that we millennials’ only hope for retirement is the end of capitalism or the end of the world is actually quite common sentiment among the millennial left. Jokes about being unable to retire or anticipating utter social change by retirement age were ricocheting around the internet long before CNN’s article was published.
Well, that’s a generation shopping in the cat food aisle for their meat requirements in retirement then. But more:
Many millennials expressed to me their interest in creating self-sustaining communities as their only hope for survival in old age;
Certainly, that’s one way to do it. Move back to that pre-capitalist idea of the self-sustaining community which takes care of its oldsters. Be useful to have a name for those sorts of things but fortunately we’ve got one that already fits – families. Go and have those 6 to 8 kids and hope like hell that one stays home to change diapers. You did it for them after all.
I’m pretty sure that’s not how they’d see it if you presented it to them that way…
Dear Lord, has anyone even taught them some Marxism? For what’s being described there is the True Communism that will arrive once we’ve abolished economic scarcity. The thing which will come through the productive powers of bourgeois capitalism. You know, as Karl The Beard insisted? As, arguably, we have by any reasonable historical standard. A recent potter around Primark – yes, I know, not high up the list of fashionable outlets – showed that you could, or can, purchase an historically adequate set of clothing for a person for £100. Two day’s minimum wage labour. One set of clothes for everyday, one for Sunday Best. Including a warm coat and more changes of underwear than was usual back then.
No, seriously, there’s not been a period of human history when clothing – to give but one example – was as cheap as it is now. Not in relation to the effort needed to acquire it at least.
There’s actually a serious argument to be made that true communism has already arrived. Certainly Karl and Friedrich would be astonished at a society rich enough to be able to afford diversity advisers – if societal productive surplus is great enough to support that idea then surely communism has indeed arrived?
Boy, aren’t these millennials going to have a surprise when they grow up? That the Good Old Days are now?
The History of Science Fiction – Pseudo-Science – Extra Sci Fi – #3
Extra Credits
Published on 20 Mar 2018The turn of the 20th century brought a lot of new ideas and inventions to the world. Suddenly, nature’s laws were not quite what they seemed. Thus, many folks drifted into explorations of the occult, which directly influenced 19th and 20th century science fiction.
Free speech at risk on campus
Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt on the claims and counter-claims about the threat to freedom of speech in today’s universities:
Over the past two weeks, Jeffrey Sachs (a political scientist at Acadia U; not the economist at Columbia) has made the argument that There Is No Campus Free Speech Crisis, as he put it in a long twitter thread on March 9. Matt Yglesias then expanded on Sachs’ argument in a post titled Everything we think about the political correctness debate is wrong, and Sachs expanded his case in a Washington Post Monkey Cage essay with a similar title: The ‘campus free speech crisis’ is a myth. Here are the facts. Sachs and Yglesias both draw heavily on analyses of the speech questions in the General Social Survey, which were plotted and analyzed well by Justin Murphy on Feb. 16. In this blog post we will show a reliance on older datasets and the failure to formulate the question properly have led Sachs and Yglesias to a premature conclusion. Something is changing on campus, but only in the last few years.
Sachs and Yglesias claim that the current wave of concern about speech on campus that began around 2014 (with media reports about safe spaces and trigger warnings), and that intensified in 2015 (after the Yale Halloween controversy, and the earlier publication of The Coddling of the American Mind, by Lukianoff & Haidt) is a classic moral panic. They believe it is merely a media frenzy in response to a few high profile incidents. In a typical moral panic, people on one side of the political spectrum get riled up because stories about outrageous incidents appeal to their desire to believe the worst about a group on the other side. Sachs and Yglesias claim that conservatives and conservative media have gleefully exploited a handful of campus stories to fuel hatred of left-leaning students, or “social justice warriors,” when in in fact nothing has changed on campus.
Given how frequent moral panics are, especially as political polarization and cross-party hatred increases, and as social media makes it easy to whip up a panic, it is vital to have skeptics. It is important for people with different biases and prior beliefs to dig into survey data that bears on the question. It is also crucial to formulate the question properly. What exactly is it that has changed, or not changed, on campus in recent years?
Here are the three major positions in the current debate, along with our proposal for how each should be operationalized.
H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.
Playing with Pleasure l HISTORY OF SEX TOYS
IT’S HISTORY
Published on 19 Sep 2015Erotic sex toys like dildos are no modern day invention. Thousands of years ago, stone phalli already served their purposes contributing to lust and passion. Throughout history more inventions like the vibrator have been developed to improve catering to our desire. Although love toys have been around for more than 20.000 years, society and religions have been struggling with their acceptance. Almost as long as they have existed.
QotD: “Woke”
In case you were unaware, “woke” is a term used by urban teens to describe a mental state in which one believes they are cognizant of how the world really works but instead wouldn’t have a clue if it slapped them in the face. Saying that someone is “woke” is a hip way of saying that they suffer from Dunning-Kruger effect.
Jim Goad, “The Problem With White Guys These Days”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-02-26.
March 20, 2018
Inside the German A7V WW1 Tank I THE GREAT WAR On The Road
The Great War
Published on 19 Mar 2018The German Tank Museum: http://daspanzermuseum.de/
We visited the German Tank Museum (in Munster, not Münster) and talked to the director Ralf Raths about the German tanks in World War 1. The only one that saw action was the A7V and will find out how it was designed, how up to 23 men fit inside one of these and what the operational history was.
Free speech on the ropes
J.D. Tuccille says the right to freedom of speech isn’t dead, but it might not qualify for a new life insurance policy:
We have an environment in which the president of the United States is dismissive of the free speech rights of his opponents, prominent constitutional scholars sniff at free speech unless it’s used by the “right” people for their favored goals, and the country’s leading civil liberties organization is suffering an internal revolt by staffers who oppose “rigid” support for free speech protections.
Last October, President Trump said “It’s frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write.” That came just hours after he tweeted, “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” And even before Trump took the oath of office, he’d huffed that protesters who burn American flags should face loss of citizenship or jail.
So if you’re an academic with expertise in constitutional law, and you have months to watch a populist politician who commands the power of the presidency fulminate about punishing those who criticize him, what do you do? If you’re Georgetown Law’s Louis Michael Seidman, you suggest that the president might be on to something.
In a forthcoming paper, Seidman’s main complaint is that free speech doesn’t inherently favor progressivism — it allows too much voice to people who disagree. “At its core, free speech law entrenches a social view at war with key progressive objectives,” writes Seidman.
Sure, “the speech right has instrumental utility in isolated cases,” he adds. But “significant upside potential”? Nah.
[…]
In its early days, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) viewed free speech as a tool of social justice, suited to particular purposes under particular conditions,” wrote Weinrib, calling on the modern organization to rededicate itself to progressive political goals over civil libertarian advocacy.
The ACLU may be close to taking her advice. Last fall, about 200 of the organization’s staff members signed a letter objecting to the groups’ “rigid stance” on the First Amendment. The letter was characterized by former ACLU board member Michael Meyers as “a repudiation of free-speech principles.”
Huh. With a president who openly chafes at criticism and suggests media naysayers should be punished with the force of law, now seems like a perfect time for opponents to rally around unfettered debate and the First Amendment. Instead, lefty academics and activists are lining up to agree with Trump that a free press and individual rights to freedom of speech, belief, and association are indeed overrated overall.
How to buy used hand planes- How much should you pay? What to look for…
Stumpy Nubs
Published on 5 Feb 2016
QotD: “Trade-adjustment assistance”
So-called “trade-adjustment assistance” sounds lovely, but this sound is deceptive. Such ‘assistance’ is a policy of socializing losses while keeping gains privatized – which means, therefore, that it is a policy that creates moral-hazard problems. More generally […] the economic and ethical case against trade-adjustment assistance is fraudulent because there is nothing unique about international trade in destroying particular jobs, businesses, and industries. Why should the worker who loses his job in the steel factory to increased imports of steel receive government assistance while the worker who loses her job in the aluminum factory to increased domestic production of carbon-fiber materials be denied such assistance? There is no good reason to treat the two cases differently.
Neither worker is entitled, economically or ethically, to any such ‘assistance.’
Of course, someone might argue that both of these workers should receive government assistance. Apart from such a policy intensifying moral-hazard problems (“Is your firm’s bankruptcy really due to changing patterns of economic activity rather than to your own incompetence as a business owner?”) – and also apart from the need to give such assistance now to the many people who will lose businesses and jobs because of the resulting increase in taxes that must be raised to pay all of this ‘assistance’ (Why should workers and businesses who suffer as a result of changes in government polices be treated differently than those who suffer as a result of changes in private economic activities?) – such a policy of assistance is premised on the false and economically calamitous assumption that the ultimate goal of economic activity is to ensure the well-being of existing producers rather than to satisfy as many consumer desires as possible. The serious pursuit of any such policy would grind the economy to a standstill, and all but the powerful elite into crushing poverty.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-07-14.
March 19, 2018
Prehistoric migrations
In a Science article from last year, Ann Gibbons discusses the ancient migrations that can now be traced using DNA analysis:
After World War II, many scholars recoiled from studying migrations, in reaction to the Nazi misuse of history and archaeology. The Nazis had invoked migrations of “foreign” groups to German territory to justify genocide. “The whole field of migration studies was ideologically tainted,” says archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Some researchers also resisted the idea that migration helped spread key innovations such as farming, partly because that might imply that certain groups were superior.
Nor did researchers have a reliable method to trace prehistoric migrations. “Most of the archaeological evidence for movement is based on artifacts, but artifacts can be stolen or copied, so they are not a real good proxy for actual human movement,” says archaeologist Doug Price of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who tracks ancient migration by analyzing isotopes. “When I started doing this in 1990, I thought people were very sedentary and didn’t move around much.”
Today, however, new methods yield more definitive evidence of migration, sparking an explosion of studies. The isotopes Price and others study are specific to local water and food and thus can reveal where people grew up and whether they later migrated. DNA from ancient skeletons and living people offers the “gold standard” in proving who was related to whom.
The new data confirm that humans have always had wanderlust, plus a yen to mix with all manner of strangers. After the first Homo sapiens arose in Africa, several bands walked out of the continent about 60,000 years ago and into the arms of Neandertals and other archaic humans. Today, almost all humans outside Africa carry traces of archaic DNA.
That was just one of many episodes of migration and mixing. The first Europeans came from Africa via the Middle East and settled there about 43,000 years ago. But some of those pioneers, such as a 40,000-year-old individual from Romania, have little connection to today’s Europeans, Reich says.
His team studied DNA from 51 Europeans and Asians who lived 7000 to 45,000 years ago. They found that most of the DNA in living Europeans originated in three major migrations, starting with hunter-gatherers who came from the Middle East as the glaciers retreated 19,000 to 14,000 years ago. In a second migration about 9000 years ago, farmers from northwestern Anatolia, in what is now Greece and Turkey, moved in.
That massive wave of farmers washed across the continent. Ancient DNA records their arrival in Germany, where they are linked with the Linear Pottery culture, 6900 to 7500 years ago. A 7000-year-old woman from Stuttgart, Germany, for example, has the farmers’ genetic signatures, setting her apart from eight hunter-gatherers who lived just 1000 years earlier in Luxembourg and Sweden. Among people living today, Sardinians retain the most DNA from those early farmers, whose genes suggest that they had brown eyes and dark hair.
H/T to PaleoAnthropology+ for the link.
What SAWS do you NEED?
Matt Estlea – Furniture
Published on 16 Oct 2017Woodworking is not a cheap hobby to get into, especially when starting off. This video will guide you through the options available in regards to saws and hopefully help you make a more suitable and informed choice.
My name is Matt Estlea, I’m a 22 year old Woodworker from Basingstoke in England and my aim is to make your woodworking less s***. I come from 5 years tuition at Rycotewood Furniture Centre and 4 years experience working at Axminster Tools and Machinery where I still currently work on weekends. During the week, I film woodworking projects, tutorials, reviews and a viewer favourite ‘Tool Duel’ where I compare two competitive manufacturers tools against one another to find out which is best. I like to have a laugh and my videos are quite fast paced BUT you will learn a lot, I assure you.
Lets go make a mess.
The Katana
Lindybeige
Published on 4 Jun 2009Revered object of sacred mystery and deadly beauty, or tool for hitting people – you decide. I’ll help.
For examples of pattern forging, see http://www.paul-binns-swords.co.uk/Pattern_welding.htm
