Quotulatiousness

January 30, 2025

Proposed California legislation to allow “Big Oil” to be sued for “climate change damage … regardless of cause”

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

California is a lovely place. I’ve only ever been there once, back in January 1991 but it was a wonderful (business) trip. California’s political “leaders” on the other hand are clearly in need of immediate re-institutionalization:

First, the madness of the California state legislature is richly displayed in Senator Scott Wiener’s remarkable new bill that would allow people to sue the oil industry because climate change damaged their property, via “natural catastrophe, including a hurricane, tornado, storm, high water, wind-driven water, tidal wave, tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide, mudslide, snowstorm, or drought, or, regardless of cause, a fire, flood, or explosion”.

I hope you caught that “regardless of cause” thing, there at the end. If this bill passes — it won’t, being mostly a theatrical performance, but let’s pretend — Californians will supposedly be able to sue Chevron or ExxonMobil (and so on) because a flood or fire damages their property, which implicates fossil fuel-induced climate change, regardless of the cause of the flood or fire.

  1. I threw matches on your couch
  2. Climate change
  3. Big Oil burned your couch

On the hook: anyone who sold “fossil fuels” in California “since the year 1965”, although a lawsuit has to be brought within three years of the discovery of the damage caused by the fossil fuel’s effect on the climate.

Favorite part, and look at item #2 (click to enlarge):

I’m not a lawyer, but I have doubts about declaring in a law that you can’t question the constitutionality of the law. We had similar legal doctrines on the playground in elementary school, despite which some members of the first-grade community controversially persisted in utilizing the disallowed tag-back.

Wiener’s press release on the bill is … very special. California government knows why the recent fires were so harmful, and none of it involves California government. Sample quote from, please help me, the state senator who represents my district:

    “The Eaton Fire destroyed over 9,000 structures in my District, wiping out almost the entire town of Altadena, leaving thousands of my residents calling for justice and accountability,” said Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena). “Our communities have never seen anything like this in urban Los Angeles. The reality is that climate change is here and will continue impacting communities everywhere. What makes this worse is decades ago, Big Oil knew this would be our future, but prioritized lining their own pockets at the expense of our environment and the health of our communities. The Affordable Insurance and Climate Recovery Act will hold the oil industry responsible for the damage it has inflicted, and provide relief for future communities impacted by climate disasters.”

Decades ago, Big Oil knew Altadena would burn, but they did it anyway. Case closed.

I’m also quite fond of the senator’s use of “my residents”, which sounds like she’s buying up dead souls to expand her vassalage. I pay her in grain, of course.

January 19, 2025

California’s wildfire plight

Theophilus Chilton on the end of California dreamin’:

Southern California has had a REALLY rough week. Wildfires, started by arsonists and driven by the Santa Ana winds, have burned thousands of acres in the city and county of Los Angeles and destroyed over $150 billion worth of property (and counting). As I write this, the fires still burn and largely remain uncontained, even as new blazes break out. It is a disaster of epic proportions, striking one of the richest and most economically and culturally relevant portions of the country.

Never ones to let a crisis go to waste, the Left responded to this disaster by … focusing on climate change. Not empty fire hydrants, not drained reservoirs, not incompetent leadership, but climate change. These fires, we have been breathlessly assured, are the result of ever-worsening climatic conditions in the region, drying it out and making it susceptible to this kind of affliction. Never mind that observers since Spanish times consistently noted the same kind of weather conditions and hazards that we see today, which suggests that maybe things aren’t actually changing all that much. Of course, those who are blaming climate change fail to recognise the fundamentally chaotic, nonlinear nature of the Earth’s biosphere and the interactions of its constituent parts, something governed by complexity (in the chaos/complexity theory sense of the term). As a result, it’s somewhat foolish to try to draw a direct, causal link between two variables (such as atmospheric CO2 content and temperature) which depend upon nonlinear interactions with hundreds of other factors. Thankfully, they don’t seem to be getting much traction with this.

So what did create the conditions that burned down Los Angeles?

First of all, there was the implementation of a number of policies driven by the state’s radical environmentalist lobby. Thanks to the fanatics, common sense policies that would help to mitigate the region’s inherent fire hazard went undone. Regular controlled burns of underbrush are a standard conservation technique in dry areas that help to thin out brush and prevent wildfires from getting out of control. Building a sufficient number of desalination plants is a good way for coastal desert areas to provide themselves with abundant fresh water for things like drinking, watering crops, filling reservoirs, and fighting fires. In fact, filling reservoirs for future needs would make a lot of sense. But all of these things are “unnatural” and might have “negative impacts” on local wildlife and whatnot.

Another contributory issue is the state’s policies towards the chronically homeless and its de facto sanctuary status for illegal aliens. The Reagan-era deinstitutionalisation of the homeless has been a nationwide disaster for years and California’s particular policies have made the situation in their state even worse. For decades, California has regularly seen wildfires caused by untended campfires started by homeless junkies getting out of control, which the state’s liberal approach to its indigent population has only made more prevalent. Likewise, California’s harbouring of illegal aliens has created a situation in which the state is flooded with masses of hostile foreign elements, some of whom have been caught starting fires all around the LA basin and creating the current catastrophe.

Then there is the fact that California has systematically implemented a set of DEI policies for its governmental workers, including its firefighters. As a result, the state’s leadership in the relevant departments is very good at “promoting inclusion,” but not so good at dealing competently with emergencies when they take place. Indeed, Los Angeles’ mayor Karen Bass and LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley presided over budget cuts for the city’s firefighting capabilities while adding layers of “diversity and inclusion” bureaucracy aimed at systematically de-white-maleing the department and depriving it of the demographic most prone to self-sacrifice and overall technical competence. That reflects trends across the board in which the state and the city have regularly spent more on gay choirs and social justice artwork than they have on necessary functions of government.

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January 16, 2025

For some unknowable reason, high-tax states keep losing population to low-tax states

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

It sure is a mystery:

“U-Haul Rental Truck (44601958941)” by HireAHelper is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

This probably won’t come as a surprise to many readers, but when people move, they tend to prefer migrating to places where, among other considerations, the taxes are lower than in their old digs. Data from the U.S. government as well as from moving companies reveals that — as we’ve seen in the past — high-tax states are losing residents to states that take a smaller bite out of people’s wallets.

“Americans are continuing to leave high-tax, high-cost-of-living states in favor of lower-tax, lower-cost alternatives. Of the 26 states whose overall state and local tax burdens per capita were below the national average in 2022 (the most recent year of data available), 18 experienced net inbound interstate migration in FY 2024,” Katherine Loughead wrote last week for the Tax Foundation. “Meanwhile, of the 25 states and DC with tax burdens per capita at or above the national average, 17 of those jurisdictions experienced net outbound domestic migration.”

Loughead crunched numbers from both the U.S. Census Bureau as well as U-Haul and United Van Lines. The government data tracks population gains and losses across the country while numbers from the private companies is helpful for comparing flows in and out of various states. The results are revelatory, though not unexpected.

“For the second year in a row, South Carolina saw the greatest population growth attributable to net inbound domestic migration” according to Census Bureau figures. The Tax Foundation separately ranks South Carolina at number 9 for tax burden, with 1 being the lowest tax burden among states and 50 the highest. Rounding out the top-10 population-gainers were Idaho (ranked 29), Delaware (42), North Carolina (23), Tennessee (3), Nevada (18), Alabama (20), Montana (27), Arizona (15), and Arkansas (26).

According to census data, Hawaii lost the biggest share of its population to other states; it’s ranked at 48 for the third-highest tax burden in the country. The rest of the top 10 states for population outflow were New York (50), California (46), Alaska (1), Illinois (44), Massachusetts (37), Louisiana (12), New Jersey (45), Maryland (35), and Mississippi (21).

Numbers released this month by U-Haul and United Van Lines showed migration patterns closely, but not precisely, tracking the Census Bureau’s information. Loughead attributes the disparities, at least in part, to the companies’ varying geographic coverage and market share.

QotD: “At promise” youth

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

A new law in California bans the use, in official documents, of the term “at risk” to describe youth identified by social workers, teachers, or the courts as likely to drop out of school, join a gang, or go to jail. Los Angeles assemblyman Reginald B. Jones-Sawyer, who sponsored the legislation, explained that “words matter”. By designating children as “at risk”, he says, “we automatically put them in the school-to-prison pipeline. Many of them, when labeled that, are not able to exceed above that.”

The idea that the term “at risk” assigns outcomes, rather than describes unfortunate possibilities, grants social workers deterministic authority most would be surprised to learn they possess. Contrary to Jones-Sawyer’s characterization of “at risk” as consigning kids to roles as outcasts or losers, the term originated in the 1980s as a less harsh and stigmatizing substitute for “juvenile delinquent”, to describe vulnerable children who seemed to be on the wrong path. The idea of young people at “risk” of social failure buttressed the idea that government services and support could ameliorate or hedge these risks.

Instead of calling vulnerable kids “at risk”, says Jones-Sawyer, “we’re going to call them ‘at-promise’ because they’re the promise of the future”. The replacement term — the only expression now legally permitted in California education and penal codes — has no independent meaning in English. Usually we call people about whom we’re hopeful “promising”. The language of the statute is contradictory and garbled, too. “For purposes of this article, ‘at-promise pupil’ means a pupil enrolled in high school who is at risk of dropping out of school, as indicated by at least three of the following criteria: Past record of irregular attendance … Past record of underachievement … Past record of low motivation or a disinterest in the regular school program.” In other words, “at-promise” kids are underachievers with little interest in school, who are “at risk of dropping out”. Without casting these kids as lost causes, in what sense are they “at promise”, and to what extent does designating them as “at risk” make them so?

This abuse of language is Orwellian in the truest sense, in that it seeks to alter words in order to bring about change that lies beyond the scope of nomenclature. Jones-Sawyer says that the term “at risk” is what places youth in the “school-to-prison pipeline”, as if deviance from norms and failure to thrive in school are contingent on social-service terminology. The logic is backward and obviously naive: if all it took to reform society were new names for things, then we would all be living in utopia.

Seth Barron, “Orwellian Word Games”, City Journal, 2020-02-19.

January 15, 2025

Is there anything climate change can’t do?

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Seen on social media earlier this week:

Confirming this, Chris Bray talks about current reporting on the wildfires in and around Los Angeles:

In his much-discussed piece on the Los Angeles fires at the Free Press, Leighton Woodhouse looks to Mike Davis for a narrative foundation. In his book Ecology of Fear, Woodhouse notes, Davis “argued that the area between the beach and the Santa Monica Mountains simply never should have been developed. No matter what measures we take to prevent it, those hills are going to burn, and the houses we erect upon them are only so much kindling.” Malibu and the Palisades, the land of hard living. That’s why so many rich and famous people lived there: because it was so inherently miserable and dangerous.

Mike Davis was full of shit for thirty years — he died in 2022 — and I’ve been rolling my eyes at him throughout. He described Los Angeles as an “apocalypse theme park”, a place of ruin and pain, populated by hardened survivors who, “dutifully struggling”, stagger on through the “Job-like ordeal” of clinging to a brutal landscape.

Also, Sierra Madre has bears. The Los Angeles suburbs are a place of horror and agony, because they back into the mountains, where blood-clawed wild animals prowl and stalk and slaughter. Places where life is especially grim and sanguinary, pgs. 240-41: Bradbury, La Crescenta, Glendora, the areas around the hellscape of Santa Barbara. A poodle was eaten by a mountain lion in Bradbury once, as neighbors gaped in open-jawed terror, YET STILL DO FOOLS ENDURE THE HORROR OF LIVING IN SUCH A PLACE.

Current real estate listings in Bradbury, a gated hillside community incorporated as an independent city in the San Gabriel Valley with a population of about 900 people:

How then would ye endure such horror, oh pilgrim, to live thus amid such blood and death? How bearest thou brutal existence upon this land?

Famously, in 1999, the Los Angeles Times, which used to be a newspaper, ran a long story examining Mike Davis and his vision of Southern California. It’s full of sentences like this:

  • Los Angeles’ most provocative social critic has stretched, bent and broken more than a few facts in “Ecology of Fear,” his latest, darkly themed work on the urban area he claims to love.
  • … more than a third of the time there were factual problems with his work.
  • Davis concedes the error.
  • Davis does not say where he got this piece of information.
  • “I honestly don’t know what I’m referring to,” Davis said.
  • Some of Davis’ mistakes involve mergers of fact and fiction, including making up a quote.
  • Davis attributes the false quote to a mix-up.
  • Then he takes readers on a partial flight of fantasy …
  • An examination of the Malibu Times article shows that Davis made up the parts about the jewels, the hair color, the kayakers’ occupations, the evidence of their callous classism and the ethnicity of their maids.
  • Davis is mischievously unrepentant.
  • Davis also merges fact and literary fiction, without acknowledgment, while arguing that Pomona, like other older, outer suburbs, is dying.

And so on.

The Times concluded that Davis could be read as “a polemicist, who makes cogent, incisive arguments on big themes”, but not as “a historian who is expected to be reliable, even on details”.

October 18, 2024

QotD: Californian wine

Filed under: Business, Quotations, Science, USA, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Of course, there is another reason why Californians so eagerly turned to science and machinery when they finally decided to make serious wine: American wineries were in horrific condition. Andrew Barr, in his social history Drink, tells us that even in the late 1930s there were rats swimming happily in the vats of Sauvignon Blanc at Beaulieu and vinegar flies in the other wines. “The wine is so excellent,” the resident wine maker cooed, “that all the flies go to it. It doesn’t do any damage.” Open fermentation tanks let off clouds of carbon dioxide which got birds flying overhead drunk; stunned, they would fall into the vats and stay there.

Lawrence Osborne, The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World, 2004.

October 2, 2024

How Gold Rush Miners Ate in the Wild West

Filed under: Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jun 18, 2024

Biscuits topped with salt pork milk gravy

City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1881

Food prices skyrocketed during the Gold Rush. A single egg could cost $1 (in the mid-1800s!), and a barrel of flour went from $3 to a whopping $400, which equals about $16,000 today. Once you had some flour and a few other staples, including the newly invented canned evaporated milk, you could make these biscuits and gravy.

I love biscuits and gravy, and while the best biscuits and gravy I’ve ever had will always be my grandpa’s, this is pretty good. My biscuits turned out a little flat, but that’s just because I forgot the baking soda.

    Cream of Tartar Biscuits
    Mrs. Milliken
    One quart of flour, three heaping teaspoonfuls of pure cream of tartar, a piece of butter two-thirds the size of an egg, well worked in flour, one heaping teaspoonful of Babbit’s salaratus, dissolved in sweet milk. Make the dough as soft as can be kneaded conveniently; roll a half inch thick, cut in biscuits, and bake in a quick oven.
    Los Angeles Cookery, 1881

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September 24, 2024

Trust, once lost, is very difficult to re-gain

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Public officials and legacy media often complain about the public’s significant decrease in trust for once highly trusted organizations, yet rarely seem to realize that they’ve done everything they could to destroy the public’s confidence in them and their actions:

Dr. Jay Varma, 21 April, 2021.
Photo by the New York City Health Department via Wikimedia Commons.

I don’t want to be a cynic.

While I don’t think anyone should blindly trust anything or anyone who hasn’t earned it, I don’t want to blindly distrust everything and everyone, either.

However, there are areas where distrust is warranted.

Over the weekend, a number of stories popped up in my various feeds that sort of illustrated the point pretty well from a number of different angles.

Let’s start with partying in the time of COVID.

    New York City’s former COVID czar was caught on a hidden camera boasting about having drug-fueled sex parties mid-pandemic — and admitting New Yorkers would have been “pissed” if they had found out at the time.

    Dr. Jay Varma — who served as senior health adviser to then-Mayor Bill de Blasio and was tasked with running the Big Apple’s pandemic response — made the confession in secretly recorded conversations with a so-called undercover operative from conservative podcaster Steven Crowder’s “Mug Club“.

    “I had to be kind of sneaky about it … because I was running the entire COVID response in the city,” Varma was filmed telling the unidentified woman on Aug. 1 in what appears to be a restaurant.

    The edited clips of the hidden camera footage, which were all recorded between July 27 and Aug. 14 in New York, were released by Crowder on Thursday. The Post has not reviewed the full, unedited recordings.

Now, let’s remember that Varma admits to doing the exact opposite of what he was telling everyone else to do. He was part of the government and part of the effort to shape New York’s response to COVID-19.

And the city is large enough that their response was likely to inform other communities.

Meanwhile, he’s out partying it up while everyone else is sitting at home, trying to figure out how to survive.

Remember how our current problems stem from this time. People like Varma told us we all had to stay inside. Most of us couldn’t go to work, couldn’t go to bars or restaurants, couldn’t go out to the movies or to take part in activities. As a result, people suffered and the economy suffered. Stimulus plans were put in place to flush trillions of dollars into the economy, only to remain there as more and more got pumped in later, creating inflation and making the economy worse in the long run, but that time locked up was essential because we had to stop the virus.

And this twit is out sexing it up while the rest of us were shut inside trying not to go nuts.

He wasn’t alone, either. A number of folks from various institutions were part of the “rules for thee but not for me” crowd, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s trip to dinner at The French Laundry — which is the dumbest name for a restaurant ever — during the lockdowns or Austin’s mayor telling everyone to stay inside while he went to Mexico.

Of course, bad public officials are nothing new. We’ve all seen them over the years.

But our media is also failing us.

July 16, 2024

Real world economic experiment to test Card & Krueger’s minimum wage theory

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall points out that the California state government is — intentionally or not — running an interesting economic validation of the Card & Krueger study in New Jersey that seemed to show raising minimum wages didn’t have a negative impact on overall employment:

“Fast food” by Daniel Barcelona is licensed under CC BY 3.0 .

For think back to that New Jersey minimum wage study, Card and Krueger. That showed that acshully, employment in fast food joints rose when the minimum wage went up. Now, I’ve been saying for a long time now that I think there’s a fallacy of composition there.

“Fast food” isn’t “fast food”. There are — at least — two sectors here. There’re those big national chains, lots of advertising, franchisees, MaccyD’s and the like. Then there’s a vast hinterland of Mom and Pop places. The financial structures are entirely different. The chains are capital intensive. I think I’ve seen that buns for burgers come in pre-cut. Salad definitely arrives in bags, already shredded. There’s no prep – not even prep areas in those kitchens. Mom and Pop run differently. One reason I know is because I’ve owned and run one. There’s an awful lot of labour that goes into turning blocks of stuff into those sandwiches. Stuff is sliced, diced, soups are cooked on site, from identifiable ingredients, bread is sliced and on and on.

No, this isn’t to try and riff off The Bear. But there is a difference in economic structure between those who are large corporates vending fast food and not-large corporates vending fast food.

And I think — think, me, I do — that the problem with the Card and Krueger study was that it didn’t account for this. A change in the general labour rate might push people to the capital intensive end of this market. Certainly could do, it would be possible to model it that way. Which means that using only the data from the fast food chains, as C&K did, would pick up only part, perhaps half, of the reaction. The Mom and Pops shed labour, the capital intensive chains modestly pick it up, the net effect is — well, the net effect could be anywhere actually.

Which is what makes this CA minimum wage change so interesting. Because the $20 an hour applies only to those working for the big national chains — or their franchisees.

Mom and Pop have to pay the normal CA minimum wage, not the $20. So, the labour intensive part of the overall system has just been handed a competitive advantage against the capital intensive end of it. We would expect, could possibly measure, that the overall employment outcome is positive.

No, really. I’d be willing to defend the idea that it could be, certainly. Note that “could”. So, we’ve two sectors, capital intensive, labour intensive. We’ve just said that the capital using guys now have to pay more — much more — for their labour than the labour intensive guys. The capital intensive guys can only respond by higher prices or worse service (ie, fewer labour hours). The labour intensive sector might end up picking up so much of the traffic that they expand employment — expand employment so much as to actually increase overall fast food sector employment. By shifting from the capital to the labour intensive sectors.

This should be studied, right? Now, my actual economic skills — rather than ruminations — are zero so it’s not going to be me checking this out. But I recommend it as something for someone looking for a PhD subject to think about. Possibly even someone more senior than that looking for a point upon which to make their bones.

Does a higher minimum wage that only — only — applies to the capital intensive portion of an economic sector like fast food actually increase employment? By shifting the sector over to the more labour intensive sector not subject to that higher minimum wage?

Logically, it could, significant empirical work would be necessary to show it though.

July 10, 2024

The four horsemen of cultural collapse

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray provides yet more examples of cultural decay and the collapse of law and order in America’s Trudeaupia, California under the loving care of Justin Trudeau’s spiritual twin, Gavin Newsom:

Today tells you about next year.

In a long history of murder in America, the historian Randolph Roth argued that violence follows other losses of trust and order. The murder rate surges in the face of “four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy”.

Read that list carefully, because it should sound familiar.

Similarly, the originators of the theory of “broken windows policing” argued that peace and order grow from peace and order; neighborhoods are more likely to be calm when they’re “places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls”. Crime follows crime; vandalism, for example, “can occur anywhere once communal barriers — the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility — are lowered by actions that seem to signal that ‘no one cares'”. The police commissioner William Bratton famously reduced all categories of crime in New York City subways by assigning officers to arrest turnstile jumpers who entered the system without paying. He sent a signal at the front gates.

“Broken windows” is a much-criticized theory: “He contended that the very notion of ‘disorder’ is subjective and racially fraught”. But the criticisms tend to reduce the complexity of the theory in order to “debunk” it.

Decay communicates. Disorder is a message.

July 4, 2024

“In other words, God is a deliverable for the R&D team”

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia isn’t impressed with the changes we’ve seen over the years among the Silicon Valley leadership:

Yes, I should have been alarmed when this cult-ish ideology took off in Silicon Valley — where the goal had previously been incremental progress (Moore’s law and all that) and not being evil.

When I first came to Silicon Valley at age 17, the two leading technologists in the region were named William Hewlett and David Packard. They used their extra cash to fund schools, museums, and hospitals — both my children were born at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital — not immortality machines, or rockets to Mars, or a dystopian Internet of brains, or worshipping at the Church of the Singularity.

Tech leaders were built differently back then. When famous historian Arnold Toynbee visited Stanford in 1963, he had a chance encounter with William Hewlett. Afterwards Toynbee marveled over his new acquaintance, declaring: “What an amazing fellow. He has more knowledge of history than many historians.”

In other words, Bill Hewlett had more wisdom than ego. He invested in the community where he lived — not the Red Planet. Instead of promulgating social engineering schemes, Hewlett and Packard built a new engineering school at their alma mater, and named it after their favorite teacher.

They wouldn’t recognize Silicon Valley today. The FM-2030s are now in charge.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invested in engineering, not social engineering

Another warning sign came when Google hired cult-ish tech guru Ray Kurzweil — a man who had once created a reasonable music keyboard that even Stevie Wonder used.

But Kurzweil went on to write starry-eyed books of utopian tech worship which come straight out of the weird religion playbook (The Age of Spiritual Machines, The Singularity is Near, etc.)

What does tech look like when it gets turned into a religion? Kurzweil summed it up when asked if there is a God. His response: “Not yet.”

In other words, God is a deliverable for the R&D team.

I note that, when Forbes revisited Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, they found that almost every one went wrong.

So what does he do?

Kurzweil follows up his book The Singularity is Near with a new book entitled The Singularity is Nearer. Give the man credit for hubris. This is exactly what religious cults do when their predicted Rapture doesn’t occur.

They just change the date on the calendar — Utopia has been delayed for another 12 months.

But, of course, Utopia is always delayed another 12 months. Meanwhile the cult leaders can do a lot of damage while preparing for the Rapture.

And despite the techno-elite’s apparent endless quest for perfection in their own lives, the enshittification of the technology they deliver to us proles continues relentlessly:

Here’s a curious fact. The more they brag about their utopias, the worse their products and services get.

Even the word upgrade is now a joke — whenever a tech company promises it, you can bet it will be a downgrade in your experience. That’s not just my view, but overwhelmingly supported by survey respondents.

For the first time since the dawn of the Renaissance, innovation is now feared by the vast majority of people. And the tech leaders, once admired and emulated, now rank among the least trustworthy people in the world.

It was different when Linus Pauling was peddling his horse pills — he eventually set up shop in Big Sur, far south of the tech industry, in order to find a hospitable home for his wackiest ideas.

Nowadays, Big Sur thinking has come to the Valley.

And when you set up cults inside the largest corporations in the history of the world, we are all endangered.

Just imagine if Linus Pauling had enjoyed the power to force everybody to take his huge vitamin doses. Just imagine if Bill Shockley had possessed the authority to impose his racist eugenics theories on the populace.

It’s scary to think of. But they couldn’t do it, because they didn’t have billions of dollars, and run trillion-dollar companies with politicians at their beck and call.

But the current cultists include the wealthiest people in the world, and they are absolutely using their immense power to set rules for the rest of us. If you rely on Apple or Google or some other huge web behemoth — and who doesn’t? — you can’t avoid this constant, bullying manipulation.

The cult is in charge. And it’s like we’re all locked into an EST training sessions — nobody gets to leave even for bathroom breaks.

There’s now overwhelming evidence of how destructive the new tech can be. Just look at the metrics. The more people are plugged in, the higher are their rates of depression, suicidal tendencies, self-harm, mental illness, and other alarming indicators.

If this is what the tech cults have already delivered, do we really want to give them another 12 months? Do you really want to wait until they deliver the Rapture?

June 30, 2024

California’s politics are so weird that Justin Trudeau is frantically taking notes

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray pays attention to California politics … and we should all pray for his long term mental health: that place is insane!

What’s happening in California isn’t politics in any conventional sense. No debate is underway, and no policy choices are being hashed out. We’re in the land beyond. In Our Democracy™, declarations are made, and then they are to be received in a spirit of quiet submission. Your failure to submit is disallowed, and the reason it’s been disallowed is that it’s been disallowed. Were it allowed, it would not be disallowed, but it is, in fact, disallowed, so therefore it is not allowed, you see? All “political” discussion is a circle, eating its own tail. I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain this, but the Sacramento Bee just did it for me. (Paywall-evading version here.)

The Bee is explaining — or “explaining” — what happened on the floor of the state Assembly yesterday, when a Republican was not permitted to argue against a bill, and a Democrat stood up to threaten him for trying. I encourage you to read the whole self-refuting thing. What happened, it turns out, is that the Republican was preventing debate by engaging in debate, which meant that he had to be silenced and threatened so debate could continue, which required that no one express opposing views, which is an act of anti-debate aggression. Debate is agreement, and not agreeing is preventing debate.

The “forced outing” debate was a discussion about AB 1955, which proposes to forbid schools to inform parents of discussions between children and school officials about sexual orientation and sexual behavior. It’s important that parents not be told about sexually themed discussions happening between children and the adults in their schools, because not telling mommy and daddy about sexual discussions is being safe and warm. But watch the casual turn of logic in the last paragraph of this screenshot:

  1. Evan Low said the bill is important because it’s good that parents not be told, and the bill makes sure parents aren’t told.
  2. Sabrina Cervantes said she didn’t have this bill when she was young, which would have forbidden telling, so someone told.
  3. Democrats explained that the bill is not meant to keep secrets from parents.

See, AB 1955 isn’t about keeping secrets from parents — it’s about not allowing schools to tell parents. Not being allowed to tell parents is different than keeping secrets from parents. The story doesn’t go on to explain the distinction between keeping secrets and not telling, but under Jacobin cultural rules, the distinction is that shut up. The distinction is presumptive, and so doesn’t require explanation.

Now, here’s the way the Bee characterizes Assemblyman Bill Essayli’s arguments during the debate that he derailed by not agreeing:

    Essayli has exhibited a consistent pattern of publicly disparaging advocacy groups and fellow lawmakers in an attempt to garner attention for conservative causes. On Thursday, he interrupted colleagues’ testimony and expressed frustration over Wood cutting his microphone and shutting down his comments when they veered away from AB 1955 and toward the issue of forced outing, in general.

His comments about the forced outing bill weren’t about the bill — they were about forced outing. What a bastard! Mister Speaker, he’s not debating the highway funding bill, he’s debating highway funding. Again, why does this distinction make sense? Because shut up. It makes sense declaratively: X is true because they said X.

And Essayli has a “consistent pattern” of saying disparaging things, which the Bee knows through mindreading is a maneuver to “garner attention” rather than an attempt to express his views. He disagreed, which is a very cynical and manipulative thing to do during a debate. He has a pattern of it!

And also Essayli is so rude that he interrupted colleagues when they spoke, and then had the nerve to object when his microphone was turned off. It’s rude to stop someone from speaking, and it’s rude to object to being stopped from speaking. You should never interrupt people, and you should always allow other people to interrupt you. They’re playing partisan Calvinball under the dome, and all moves lose.

June 27, 2024

California’s Trudeau

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power by Ellie Gardey Holmes, a biography of California’s own Justin Trudeau:

I’ve been appalled by Gavin Newsom for years, but to read Ellie Gardey Holmes’s powerful and unflinching new book Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power is to find one’s contempt for this hideous creature skyrocketing. If he has any redeeming qualities, any special gifts, any attributes that might illuminate an admirable and recognizably human side, there’s no sign of them here. This is a man who, despite having no discernible talent for governance or anything else, was lucky enough to be born into one well-off family – his great-grandfather co-founded the Bank of Italy, which later became the Bank of America – and to be, from earliest childhood, a sort of honorary member of an even richer family, the Gettys, his father being best friends with oil magnate Gordon Getty, who was like a second father to young Gavin.

Both men, his biological father and his second father, used their considerable influence from the beginning to help Gavin rise to power. Indeed, as surely as any Kennedy or Bush, Gavin Newsom was born into a political machine and bred to be a politician. After he and Getty played a big role in helping Willie Brown to get elected mayor of San Francisco, Brown named Newsom to the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission. Soon he was promoted to the Board of Supervisors, a post he held from 1997 to 2004. “Because of his lack of qualifications,” writes Gardey Holmes, “Newsom entered office entirely indebted to Willie Brown”. Observers referred to him, in fact, as “an appendage of Willie Brown”. Quick sidebar in the midst of this tale of political advancement: when his mother was dying, Gavin was pretty much AWOL, although he was present when she underwent assisted suicide – which, at the time, was illegal in California. Others had been prosecuted for their participation in such actions; Gavin was not, a foreshadowing of many other occasions on which he would be treated as exempt from the rules governing the behavior of ordinary mortals.

In 2003 he was elected mayor. One of his first acts was to authorize the issuing of marriage licenses for same-sex couples, even though he had no power to do any such thing. He even performed some of the marriages himself. This cynical move (which even California’s two Democratic Senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, opposed) was a cheap stunt, carried out at the expense of gullible gays, whose marriages were soon enough ruled invalid by the state Supreme Court – but it had the desired effect. It made him a national figure and it won him the esteem of the mainstream media. Bob Simon told him on 60 Minutes that he might well have “set a record for instant fame in this country”.

From the beginning of his life in “public service” – that laughable term – Newsom’s vanity and ambition were flagrantly palpable. Although the New York Times described him during his mayoralty as the subject of “local adoration”, some San Francisco insiders resented his brazen focus “on self-aggrandizement and personal publicity” and his relative indifference to the city’s growing problems on a variety of fronts. Routinely, he stole credit for other people’s initiatives and acted as if he were exempt from the rules. A police officer drove him to his wedding in Montana in his official SUV – a definite no-no.

After two terms as mayor he had his eye, naturally, on the Governor’s Mansion – but polls convinced him to run for Lieutenant Governor instead. He spent two terms in that job, too, but hated it: he had no real power, no real staff, no real budget, and he felt disrespected by his boss, Jerry Brown. The initiatives he did support were destructive “progressive” bilge of the first water: for example, he was the only statewide elected official to support Proposition 47, which converted many felonies to misdemeanors, helping to set off the still ongoing rash of shoplifting that has made San Francisco, particularly, an international joke. For the most part, however, instead of addressing the state’s problems he put his energies into enhancing his national profile. He became a fixture on shows like Real Time with Bill Maher. He also wrote – or at least signed his name to – a book calling for the transformation of government by means of “digital technology”; the book’s argument didn’t make much sense, and even Stephen Colbert, usually a reliable left-wing shill, dismissed it as “bullshit”.

And then, inevitably, in 2019, Newsom became governor, thanks in no small part to massive donations from the Gettys and Pritzkers and his role as “the darling of the upper class”. California was already on the skids, but Newsom accelerated the process. He pulled National Guard troops from the southern border, saying that “[t]he border ’emergency’ is a manufactured crisis and California will not be part of this political theater”. He even had the state sue President Trump over his border emergency declaration, which according to Newsom was nothing but an expression of “division, xenophobia, [and] racism”. Instead of canceling one of the state’s notorious boondoggles – the program to build a staggeringly expensive high-speed rail line from San Francisco to San Diego – he shortened the planned route, so that the trains would run only between Merced and Bakersfield. This made the rail line an even more ridiculous proposition, but Newsom’s priority was not to provide a useful means of public transportation but to keep the state from having to return the federal money appropriated for the project to a government run by Donald Trump, who from the beginning of his governorship Newsom singled out as his personal enemy – an action that profoundly enhanced his popularity among California Democrats. Indeed, instead of seriously dealing with California’s jobs and education crises, Newsom focused relentlessly on attacking Trump. A hundred days into his governorship, he bragged childishly that California was “the most un-Trump state”.

June 23, 2024

California has “a governing class that wants you to give them power, then shut up and go away”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray illustrates some of the many ways that California’s elected politicians are working to ensure that mere voters won’t interrupt their urgent and necessary work:

The Taxpayer Protection Act, a proposed referendum that got enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot, would have required voter approval for all new state and local taxes. State election officials agreed that it met the qualification threshold, and planned to put it before the voters. Democratic officeholders sued, with considerable support from public employee unions and interest groups, and the California Supreme Court ruled this week that the measure may not be placed on the ballot — because it improperly proposes to revise the state constitution, rather than merely amending it. You can watch them try to parse that distinction here, for seventy murky pages. You can change the state constitution through the referendum process, but you can’t change the state constitution through the referendum process. See, totally clear.

At the same time, California Governor Patrick Bateman is telling the organizers of a ballot measure that would increase penalties for drug and theft crimes — after a decade of sharply reduced penalties — that he’ll punish them by blocking criminal justice reform measures in the legislature unless they pull their measure from the ballot. The intended message is a very clear threat: If you insist on your ballot measure and lose at the polls, you’ll be punished with a complete blockade on your agenda through legislative means, for as long as we can manage it.

And a parental rights proposition that aimed for a place on the November ballot — falling short in its efforts to gather enough signatures — ran into a wall when the attorney general’s office assigned it a misleading label that would have described it to voters as a repressive measure that was intended to hurt children.

So a Progressive reform, the great 20th-century transition to direct democracy, is running into a progressive wall of resistance in the 21st century. California Democrats are fighting to limit the likelihood that voters will interfere with their agenda.

People outside California often shrug at the decline of the state, because Californians are just getting what they voted for. But that view misses a bunch of strangeness and ambiguity in a place that has tended to put Democrats in office, then limit their efforts with an ideologically inconsistent hodgepodge of conservative and libertarian ballot measures. The governor and the state legislature just sued to prevent their own voters, the people who sent them to public office, from voting on the new taxes they create. Democrats against direct democracy — a governing class that wants you to give them power, then shut up and go away.

This is not merely a California problem. I wrote a few days ago about the scumbag Robert Kagan and his idiotic book warning that America is facing a rebellion. Here’s the back cover of the book, and I’ve used sophisticated media software to circle the important part:

“The problem is and has always been the people and their beliefs.” This is what the American governing class believes, now. See also the pro-democracy warrior Tom Nichols and his recurring theme about the repulsive people of an ignorant country. We need to protect democracy by getting all the trash that makes up the population to somehow go away and stop bothering their wise and benevolent betters.

The great point of cognitive slippage in American governance has been the degree to which Americans have been willing to vote for officeholders whose agendas they then try to block through lawsuits, referendums, and popular resistance. We’ve voted for shit sandwich over and over again, then declined to eat the whole sandwich. The governing class is now announcing that we’re no longer allowed to refuse the complete meal. You may not have a ballot measure on that.

In the near term, and in the medium term, that pivot leads to greater friction and accelerated decline. In the longer term, preventing people from limiting the aggressive failure of the governing class can only make that failure more apparent. Geological faults that have a lot of small movements release tension in a series of minor earthquakes; faults that can’t release tension through small movements eventually have one big one. We’ll eventually recognize the California Supreme Court’s decision this week as a Pyrrhic victory. There will be more of these, in a political system of increasing brittleness.

May 15, 2024

Disintermediation Now! “Even the gatekeepers are sick of dealing with gatekeepers”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia on the trend for even people at the top of the distribution chain trying to find ways to get around the distribution chain they inhabit:

The Emoji Movie premiere at the Fox Theatre, Westwood Village, 23 July 2017.
Photo by Kristofer Gonzalez-DeWhitt via Wikimedia Commons.

A few weeks ago, 35 of the biggest names in Hollywood collaborated on a business venture. Can you guess what it is?

I’ll help by providing a list of the participants. Here they are in alphabetical order, to avoid wounding any of the huge egos involved:

    J.J. Abrams, Judd Apatow, Damien Chazelle, Chris Columbus, Ryan Coogler, Bradley Cooper, Alfonso Cuarón, Jonathan Dayton, Guillermo del Toro, Valerie Faris, Hannah Fidell, Alejandro González Iñárritu, James Gunn, Sian Heder, Rian Johnson, Gil Kenan, Karyn Kusama, Justin Lin, Phil Lord, David Lowery, Christopher McQuarrie, Chris Miller, Christopher Nolan, Alexander Payne, Todd Phillips, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Jason Reitman, Jay Roach, Seth Rogen, Emma Seligman, Brad Silberling, Steven Spielberg, Emma Thomas, Denis Villeneuve, Lulu Wang and Chloé Zhao.

What are these movie titans up to?

Maybe they want to make a film together? Or perhaps they’re thinking bigger — planning to launch their own production company or even a movie studio?

Nope. They weren’t thinking big. They were thinking small — very small.

These heavy hitters got together to buy a 93-year-old building.

They now own the Westwood Village theater at 945 Boxton near the UCLA campus. I went there to see films when I was in high school and it was old even back then. At some point it stopped being old, and became historic and vintage. (Maybe if I live long enough this will happen to me too.)

But these 35 investors aren’t just interested in preserving a quaint old building. They want to own a place where they can show quality movies to a flesh-and-blood audience without anybody getting in their way.

We’ve reached a point where even the people in power at the top of the industry want to bypass the system. Even the gatekeepers are sick of dealing with gatekeepers.

That’s how bad it’s gotten.

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