Quotulatiousness

February 3, 2018

Arizona’s legally protected blow-drying cartel

Filed under: Business, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Eric Boehm reports on the fantastic lengths protected businesses will go to to protect themselves from “unlicensed” competitors, even in such areas as hair drying:

Brandy Wells never anticipated the amount of vitriolic abuse she would receive over — of all things — her public support of a proposal to let people blow-dry hair without a state-issued license.

“I’ve been called a cunt, a bitch, an ass, trashy, a puppet, a pawn, repugnant,” Wells says. “And my favorite: ‘your logic on deregulation of cosmetology is much like your hair, dull and flat.'”

Wells says she’s received several attacks from cosmetologists on social media accusing her of being “uneducated” or “clueless” about cosmetology because she doesn’t work in the industry. It’s true that Wells isn’t a licensed cosmetologist (though she does, in fact, know how to use a blow-dryer, she confirmed to Reason), but that’s actually the precise reason why she’s speaking up.

Wells serves as the lone “public member” of the Arizona State Board of Cosmetology. That means she is the only member of the seven-person board who does not work in some capacity as a cosmetologist or with a connection to a cosmetology school. Last month, she voiced her support for House Bill 2011, which would removing blow-drying from the state’s cosmetology licensing requirements. Under current law, using a blow-dryer on someone else’s hair, for money, requires more than 1,000 hours of training and an expensive state-issued license. Blow-drying hair without a license could — incredibly — land you in jail for up to six months.

In response, Wells says, members of the cosmetology profession have sent messages to her employer, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, suggesting that she should be fired — fired because she thinks people can safely blow-dry hair without 1,000 hours of training!

The cosmetology board is “a group of special interest bullies,” said Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, in his recent State of the State address. The board, Ducey said, “is going after people who simply want to make a living blow-drying hair. No scissors involved.”

This week, the fight over the so-called “blow-dry bill” spilled into the state legislature. The state House Military, Veterans, and Regulatory Affairs Committee held its first hearing on the bill, and licensed cosmetologists packed the room to speak one-by-one about the potential dangers of letting unlicensed professionals blow-dry hair

February 2, 2018

Trump Diminishes the Power of the State in Our Heads: Wired Co-Founder Louis Rossetto

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ReasonTV
Published on 1 Feb 2018

Louis Rossetto, co-founder of Wired magazine, on politics, the dot-com bubble, and his new novel, Change Is Good: A Story of the Heroic Era of the Internet.
—————-
“Trump is a refreshing reminder that the guy that’s in the White House is another human being,” says Louis Rossetto, the co-founder of Wired and author of the new book Change Is Good: A Story of the Heroic Era of the Internet. “The power of the state is way too exalted [and] bringing that power back to human scale is an important part of what needs to be done to correct the insanity that’s been going on in the post-war era.”

In 2013, Rossetto was the co-recipient of Reason‘s very first Lanny Friedlander Prize, an award named after the magazine’s founder that’s handed out annually to an individual or group who has created a publication, medium, or distribution platform that vastly expands human freedom. Rossetto is also a longtime libertarian who knew Friedlander personally.

While still an undergraduate at Columbia University, Rossetto co-authored a 1971 cover story in the New York Times Magazine titled “The New Right Credo — Libertarianism,” writing that “[l]iberalism, conservatism, and leftist radicalism are all bankrupt philosophies,” and “refugees from the Old Right, the Old Left and the New Left, they are organizing independently under the New Right banner of libertarianism.”

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie sat down with Rossetto to talk about his new book (the paper version was lavishly designed and crowdfunded on Kickstarter), the 1990s tech boom, and why Trump “diminishes the power of the state” in our heads.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Ian Keyser. Cameras by Paul Detrick, Justin Monticello, Zach Weissmueller.
Machinery by Kai Engel is used under a Creative Commons license.
Photo Credits: Chris Kleponis/ZUMA Press/Newscom – Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/Newscom – Abaca Press/Douliery Olivier/Abaca/Sipa USA/Newscom

“Europeans like the U.S. to be a great St. Bernard dog that takes the risks and does the work, while they hold the leash and give the orders”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Conrad Black on how the European press in general — and the British press in particular — view the United States:

A week in England has enabled me to see more clearly the absurdity of the depths and length that the political scandal-mongering in the United States has achieved. Most of the British media are anti-American anyway, and, like most of America’s so-called allies, Britain likes weak American presidents who are fluent and courteous, other than when they are themselves in mortal peril, at which point strong American presidents suddenly are appreciated. Generally, the Western European attitude toward the U.S. evolved from fervent and almost worshipful hope for rescue by Roosevelt, to appreciative, even grateful recognition for Truman and Marshall’s military and economic support of non-Communist Europe, while fretting whether America would “stay the course” (Mr. Churchill’s concern), to complacent patronization in the post-Suez Eisenhower-Dulles era. Europe, like most of the world, swooned over John F. Kennedy and genuinely mourned his tragic death, but it has been slim pickings since. Johnson was regarded as a boor and an amateur, and, on the left, a war criminal. Richard Nixon was regarded with suspicion and then the customary orchestrated opprobrium, though with grudging respect for his strategic talents. Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush were regarded as dolts, though Reagan, whose anti-missile defense plan was regarded with shrieks of derision and fear, was seen, long after he left office, as possibly useful. Clinton was likeable but déclassé, and Obama was greatly welcomed but ultimately a disappointment. The Europeans like the U.S. to be a great St. Bernard dog that takes the risks and does the work, while they hold the leash and give the orders.

With Donald Trump, the British and most Western Europeans have the coruscation of their dreams that the United States is a vulgar, completely materialistic, cultureless Darwinian contest of the most tasteless and unsavory elements, elevating people in their public life who excel at the country’s least attractive national characteristics. In the British national media there is almost never a remotely insightful or fair commentary on anything to do with President Trump. At one point last week, Ambassador John Bolton had what amounted to a debate with some academic British supporter of the Paris climate accord, and of feeble responses to all international crises, from Ukraine to Syria to North Korea. Both participants were speaking from remote locations and were on large screens, and the moderator’s questions were posed in such a provoking and tendentious manner to John Bolton that he began his last several responses with the stated assumption that the management of Britain’s national television network presumably approved of framing questions on such serious subjects in a deliberately dishonest way, and then answered effectively. The BBC correspondent in Washington uniformly referred to “Donald Trump” or just “Trump” and never to “President Trump” or to “the president,” as normal professional usage requires. The Economist, a distinguished magazine for many decades, follows the same route, referring to Mr. Trump as a “bad” or “poor” president, as if this were an indisputable and universally agreed fact.

The British, and to a large degree the major continental powers, slavishly repeat the Trumpophobic feed from the American national media and justify “Trump’s” view that most of the media propagate lies as a matter of policy, and that America’s allies are largely freeloaders — passengers of the Pentagon with no loyalty to the country that liberated them from Nazism and protected them from Soviet Communism. Senator McCain’s editorial criticism of the president in the New York Times two weeks ago, that his attacks on the press weakened democracy by demeaning a free press, is bunk. The president was closer, though, as is his wont, was slightly carried away, when he called the primal-scream newscasters and writers “enemies of the people.” They are even worse abroad.

QotD: Infrastructural sclerosis

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I have an op-ed in the Boston Globe today on infrastructure, addressing the issue of quality rather than quantity of investment. Rachel Lipson, a graduate student at Harvard, and I describe the fiasco that has emerged from what should have been a routine maintenance project on the Anderson Memorial Bridge over the Charles River next to my office in Cambridge. Though the bridge took only 11 months to build in 1912, it will take close to five years to repair today at a huge cost in dollars and mass delays.

Investigating the reasons behind the bridge blunders have helped to illuminate an aspect of American sclerosis — a gaggle of regulators and veto players, each with the power to block or to delay, and each with their own parochial concerns. All the actors — the historical commission, the contractor, the environmental agencies, the advocacy groups, the state transportation department — are reasonable in their own terms, but the final result is wildly unreasonable.

At one level this explains why, despite the overwhelming case for infrastructure investment, there is so much resistance from those who think it will be carried out ineptly. The right response is to advocate for reforms in procurement policies, regulatory policies and government procedures to make the investment process more efficient and effective. This is all clear enough.

At another level, though, our story may illustrate phenomena that go way beyond infrastructure. I’m a progressive, but it seems plausible to wonder if government can build a nation abroad, fight social decay, run schools, mandate the design of cars, run health insurance exchanges, or set proper sexual harassment policies on college campuses, if it can’t even fix a 232-foot bridge competently. Waiting in traffic over the Anderson Bridge, I’ve empathized with the two-thirds of Americans who distrust government.

Larry Summers, “Why Americans don’t trust government”, Washington Post, 2016-05-26.

February 1, 2018

The Government is Going to Shut Down Again (And That’s Bad)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ReasonTV
Published on 31 Jan 2018

System failures are a false path to limited government.

——–

Libertarians want to shrink the government, but a shutdown is little cause for celebration. Hitting a giant “pause” button on federal agencies won’t end the drug war or reform entitlements. A government shutdown doesn’t even save money. Back pay to furloughed federal employees ensures that taxpayers pay just as much as they would have if the government had proceeded as normal. But during a shutdown taxpayers don’t receive the government services they’re paying for, and the economy takes a hit from the disruption.

In the latest “Mostly Weekly,” Andrew Heaton explains why libertarians should be against the next government shutdown.

Mostly Weekly is hosted by Andrew Heaton with headwriter Sarah Rose Siskind. Special appearance by Brian Sack.

Script by Andrew Heaton with writing assistance from Sarah Rose Siskind and Brian Sack
Edited by Austin Bragg and Sarah Rose Siskind.
Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Theme Song: “Frozen” by Surfer Blood.

Penn and Teller on Vaccinations

Filed under: Health, Science, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

UltraMiraculous
Published on 20 Aug 2010

January 31, 2018

How the Vikings plundered Minnesota

Filed under: Economics, Football, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

By all accounts, the Minnesota Vikings’ new stadium in Minneapolis is a wonderful structure and fans have been very happy with the amenities provided. However, as Steven Malanga explains, the non-fan taxpayers in the city and the state have a right to feel plundered by the Vikings:

Fans of the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles will travel to the frigid northern city this week because the NFL granted a Super Bowl to Minnesota as a reward for stepping up with more than half a billion dollars in subsidies for the home-state Vikings’ U.S. Bank Stadium, which opened in 2016. For a city whose mayor recently described it as a “shining beacon of progressive light and accomplishment,” this is some feat, and a reminder that the NFL, whatever its troubles, maintains a firm hold on the taxpayer’s purse in many places.

Vikings owner Zygi Wilf, a New Jersey real estate developer, began pushing for a new stadium soon after purchasing the team in 2005. His supplications became more earnest after the roof of the Vikings’ old home, the Metrodome, collapsed in December 2010. Wilf originally proposed contributing just one quarter of the new stadium’s $1 billion cost, a spectacularly low-ball offer in an era when backlash against stadium subsidies for professional teams increasingly force owners to pony up a bigger share of construction costs. Wilf claimed that he couldn’t afford more, but he wouldn’t release the financial details of his real estate empire. A Minnesota state investigation, undertaken after a New Jersey judge ruled that the Wilf family had defrauded real estate partners in a local project and had to pay them $84.5 million, determined that the family could afford to pay up to $500 million for the stadium.

Even after Wilf upped his offer, the road to the stadium deal was paved with controversy. Minnesota financed a portion of its share of the costs by introducing a state-licensed electronic-gambling game to generate construction revenues, but the game proved a clunker with local residents; to fill the financing hole, Minnesota drew on revenues from its tobacco tax and increased corporate taxes. Then Wilf announced that he’d help finance his part of the deal by charging season ticketholders a seat license fee — prompting a threat from Minnesota governor Mark Dayton to pull government financing. Dayton soon changed his tune, explaining that sports financing has its own ineffable logic. “I’m not one to defend the economics of professional sports,” he said. “Any deal you make in that world doesn’t make sense from the way the rest of us look at it.”

Though it lent its balance sheet to the deal, the city of Minneapolis, according to critics — including one former city councilman — has been “hosed” by the Vikings. The city officially contributed $150 million to stadium construction, but these observers contend that that figure doesn’t include expensive infrastructure improvements that Minneapolis was forced to make. As part of the stadium package, Minneapolis also agreed to send $7.5 million a year in operating subsidies to the authority running the facility, which amounts to $225 million over the course of the deal. City taxpayers also apparently remain on the hook for any shortfalls in the revenues that back the bonds used to build the surrounding infrastructure. Residents understand little of this financing because, as the Minneapolis Star Tribune noted, the stadium deal “was as transparent as the Berlin wall.”

I’m a (very) long-term fan of the team, but that doesn’t mean I approve of the taxpayers being robbed blind so local fans of the team get to watch the game in a corporate welfare palace. Reason has posted several videos exposing the crony capitalist roots of stadium financing, including most recently this one. I first heard of “seat licenses” in 2014 and they sounded like a bad idea to me then. Back in 2012, when the public support was announced, I was not happy about it.

January 30, 2018

DicKtionary – A is for Air Force – Curtis LeMay

Filed under: History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost
Published on 17 Jan 2018

A is for Air Force, you know that of course
And we turn to the states to look at the dates
When the man in command, that some couldn’t stand
Is our hero today, General Curtis LeMay.

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Camera and Edit by: Spartacus Olsson

January 29, 2018

A new collection of H.L. Mencken’s “The Free Lance” columns

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Reason, Bill Kauffman reviews S.T. Joshi’s new selection from H.L. Mencken’s Baltimore Evening Sun essays:

The longtime Baltimore Evening Sun columnist, American Mercury editor, and rumbustiously splenetic critic, who graced this orb from 1880 to 1956, would not be published in any major newspaper today. The reasons he foresaw over a century ago, when he decried the “cheap bullying and cheaper moralizing” whose purpose was the extirpation, the annihilation, of anything resembling a robust exchange of ideas. Two beliefs puffed up the righteous censor, according to Mencken: first, “that any man who dissents from the prevailing platitudes is a hireling of the devil,” and second, “that he should be silenced and destroyed forthwith. Down with free speech; up with the uplift!”

Plus ça change and all that.

S.T. Joshi, who has chosen his primary scholarly interests — Mencken, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ambrose Bierce — with a fine eye for readability over reputation, has assembled a selection of Mencken’s Evening Sun “Free Lance” columns of 1911–1915 into a book called A Saturnalia of Bunk and contributed an informative introduction to it.

Henry Louis Mencken churned out six of these 1,200-word meringues every week, a vertiginous pace that makes Joyce Carol Oates look like Harper Lee.

Logorrheic bloggers aside, does anyone really have that much to say about the controversies of the day? Mencken once nicked Bierce for reprinting his early work, which was “filled with epigrams against frauds long dead and forgotten, and echoes of old and puerile newspaper controversies.” Is A Saturnalia of Bunk similarly irrelevant?

Happily, no. Although Mencken’s fusillades against, say, blue laws have grown fusty, his rousing conclusions — “the militant moralist tries to steal liberty and self-respect, and the man who has lost both is a man who has lost everything that separates a civilized freeman from a convict in a chain-gang” — have lost none of their punch.

These columns, composed while their author was on the shy side of middle age, afford, says Joshi, “a nearly complete view of Mencken’s political, religious, social, and cultural philosophy as it had evolved up to this point” — and this philosophy would largely remain constant for the rest of his rooted life. (Mencken, a dyed-in-the-wool third-generation Baltimorean, a sardonic citizen of his place, made his home in the house in which he grew up.)

How the U.S. got shafted out of the FN FAL

Filed under: Europe, History, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Legally Armed America
Published on 31 Dec 2017

The FN FAL is one of the greatest battle rifles ever made. Politics caused the U.S. to pass on it while nearly every other NATO country in the world recognized its superiority. And the 7.62 NATO is one of the greatest battle rounds ever made. But we needed an intermediate round. Here’s the story.

* Be sure to join the web’s ONLY 100% pro-gun social community, Gun District at GunDistrict.com. It’s much like Facebook, but without the discrimination against gun owners.

January 28, 2018

Day 13 Cuban Missile Crisis – The End to End All Things and Almost Everything

Filed under: Americas, History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost
Published on 21 Dec 2017

On Sunday, 28 October, 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis is supposed to end, but there are still two nuclear armed Soviet submarines in the waters around the island hunted by the US Navy. And what about Fidel Castro?

January 27, 2018

Remy: Wedu Nagivafaka

Filed under: Government, Humour, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ReasonTV
Published on 26 Jan 2018

The classic Hawaiian-themed song ‘Mele Kalikimaka’ gets a government makeover.

——–
Parody song written and performed by Remy. Produced by Meredith Bragg.
Music tracks and production by Ben Karlstrom. Steel guitar by Wayne Addleman.

LYRICS:
Wedu Nagivafaka is the thing we say any bright Hawaiian winter day
You send an island greeting out to everyone saying nukes are on their way
But don’t clean out that desk quite yet and don’t you sob—
You work for the government, you’ll keep your job
Wedu Nagivakfaka is the way we say
There’s nothing that we will do to you

Wedu Nagivafaka if your kids can’t read when their senior year’s adjourned
Or if you make six-figures and you spend your days at your desk just watching porn
See you don’t have a normal job, you’ll be just fine
Come tomorrow morning you’ll be “reassigned”…

Wedu Nagivafaka is the way we say
There’s nothing that we will do to you
What else would I have to do?
There’s nothing that we will do
To you…

Day 12 Cuban Missile Crisis – Black Saturday, nuclear war on autopilot…

Filed under: Americas, History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost
Published on 7 Dec 2017

On October 27, 1962 a deal to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis is ever so close, but then almost everything that can go wrong, goes wrong. Political confusion between the leaders, lost and shot down airplanes, errant nuclear armed submarines and exhaustion takes its toll. For those immediately involved it will go down in memory as the Black Saturday.

Burger King swings and misses in their first attempt at entering political discussions

Filed under: Business, Food, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tho Bishop explains why the second-rate burger business fails to convince:

For one, Burger King does not have a “Whopper neutrality” policy – and for good reason. If a family of five places a large order, while the next customer simply orders an ice cream cone, most Burger King employees will not refuse to serve up the dessert until after they fulfill the first order. The aim is to serve as many customers, as quickly as possible.

Similarly, a Whopper meal comes in various sizes – all with different prices – all so that customers have more flexibility based on having their food desires met. Imagine if a government regulator decided that since Americans have a right to have their thirst quenched – no matter its size – all fast food restaurants had to price all drink sizes the same? The result would be the prices for small drinks going up, while restaurants having to submit to occasional inspections by government agents to make sure no one was violating beverage neutrality laws. (This of course would still manage to not be the worst soda-related policy that’s been proposed.)

Additionally, Burger King certainly has the right to not prioritize delivering their customers food in a timely matter, just as customers have a right to avoid their services as a result. Whether or not the customers in the video were authentic or not, their reaction to the absurd fictional policy is how you’d expect someone to act. The video suggests that none of them would be excited about returning to Burger King if this had become actual franchise operating procedure. Once again, the market has its own ways of punishing bad actors.

Which is precisely why I will be avoiding Whoppers myself for the foreseeable future.

At Reason, Nick Gillespie comments on the video:

The joke in the video is that customers must pay $26 to get a Whopper “hyperfast.” If they go with the standard price, it takes forever. Because you know, Net Neutrality rules that were formalized in 2015 somehow magically altered the way internet service providers (ISPs) delivered data to their customers. Before 2015, the internet was a morass of shakedown artists who forced all of us to pay extra for this or that site. And now that Net Neutrality has been repealed, the ‘net has reverted to a Hobbesian world in which access is nasty, brutish, and metered.

Oh wait, in fact, the average speed and number of internet connections kept growing regardless of the regulatory regime. The FCC’s most recent Internet Access Services Report counted 104 million fixed internet connections, a new high. That number doesn’t count mobile or satellite connections. Eighty percent of census tracts had at three or more ISPs offering connections of 10 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream and another 17 percent had two ISPs doing the same (figure 4). So 97 percent of America can go elsewhere when it comes to basic internet connections that allow the sort of streaming, surfing, and gaming we want. Just as customers do with Burger King, we can say, “Screw it, I’m going to McDonald’s.” In 2016, 56 million residential connections offered at least 25 Mbps upstream speeds. That’s up from about 22 million in 2013 (figure 8). How did that progress happen before the 2015 open internet order?

Watching the responses by customers helps explain why Net Neutrality rules as mandated by the FCC under Tom Wheeler were unnecessary. After all, for all the hysteria kicked up around the need for such rules, proponents went begging for examples of ISPs throttlng traffic or blocking sites in systematic ways. ISPs don’t actually enjoy pure-monopoly conditions, but even if they did, customers would raise holy hell if they were treated as poorly as Burger King acts in this video.

January 26, 2018

Day 11 Cuban Missile Crisis – Will President Kennedy invade Cuba after all?

Filed under: Americas, History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost
Published on 30 Nov 2017

On 26 October 1962, USSR Premier Nikita Khrushchev is preparing to offer the US an olive branch. Meanwhile US President John F Kennedy continue to plan an invasion of Cuba. While the politicians make new plans, their previous military plans take on a life of their own

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