Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let there be snark.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

T R E 4 5 O N

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

This really is a full service blog.

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Fools and Their “Money”

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mt_gox_nerds
If I were to try to devise a plan for the ultimate nerd circljerk, it would be hard to beat Bitcoin (BTC). It’s essentially a complicated protocol that allows anyone with a computer and some computer smarts to “mine”, i.e. “mint”, a digital currency. As nerds are wont to do, there is a whole bunch of nerdery layered on top of that simple fact, but if you want to understand the nut of stories about the many different follies of Bitcoiners, don’t forget that someone paid for a computer, power and used their smarts, or rented smarts, to make them. Bitcoins are also completely anonymous, and Bitcoin transactions are untaxed.

So, to review: dreamt up by nerds, takes place on the Internet, no taxes, no regulation, subject of huge amounts of speculation yet not of much use in the real world, and subject to giant bubbles. If you could express a Ron Paul Presidential campaign in the form of “money”, it would be Bitcoin.

As with any nerdfest, there are starfucker-profiteers who want to get in on the action, like the Winkelvoss twins, who say they own 1% of all Bitcoin.

“We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error,” Tyler Winklevoss said.

The Winkelvii keep their Bitcoins on flash drives in safe deposit boxes in real physical banks in the real physical world, because of all the Bitcoin theft that has occurred over the years, so if Tyler really believes what he’s saying there, he is even stupider than he appeared to be in the Social Network. (As far as I’m concerned, the only interesting part of that movie was the fact that there are some humans on earth so douchey that you want Mark Zuckerberg to fuck them over. Also, too: “Their first two investments [with their meager Facebook go-away-money settlement] were in Hukkster, a start-up shopping Web site and SumZero, an online community for professional money managers.” What a track record of success: were the names “BendOverrr” and “YouWillBCheated” taken for the shopping site?)

Anyway, now that you can trade in Bitcoin derivatives, I assume the whole thing is going to spin out of control and all that will be left once the dust settles will be the tracks of some Galtian tears. There’s been a crash in Bitcoin value in the last couple of days, and the main exchange halted trading yesterday after the value of BTC fluctuated between $266 to the current value of about $80. BTC was about $20 a couple of months ago. Predictions about the future, as we know, are difficult, but my guess is that BTC holders will see that value again, just as someone jumping from the top of a tall building sees the middle floors: on the way down and in a state of panic.

(Image of the guys running the largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, from the Verge)

Fools and Their “Money”Post + Comments (221)

In Galt’s Gulch, the Streets are Lined with Pizza Parlors

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Oh, no, Obamacare claims another victim:

“I probably could keep Chester Cab Pizza going for a while more. But when I see the mandates that businesses will be required to comply with by 2014, I figure those would be the mandates that would break the camel’s back. So why wait, my work is done. Why delay the inevitable?”

“There’s a perfect storm brewing, involving a number of factors. There are higher fuel and food costs (due to mid-west droughts and corn ethanol mandates), higher labor and health care requirements, and a hostile New York State business environment. With high unemployment and U.S. Labor salaries being stagnant, I did not feel we could push the prices to the customer any higher.”

“It just seems to be the right time to shut it down and say good-bye to my customers and employees and thank them.”

You’d think he was going out of business, but actually he sold the place to one of his managers, probably at a profit.

This guy is a serial Galtian douche – last year he replaced the front page of another restaurant he owned with a long rant about union thuggery. The real story was that he rehabbed a restaurant that was located in a special taxation district where property taxes were greatly reduced as long as you did all your work with “prevailing wage” contractors, which in practice turn out to be union. He didn’t want to pay those wages, so he hired his own contractors, and when the unions turned him in, he cried just like a little girl.

The protagonist in Atlas Shrugged was selling something nobody else had, a special metal that was the product of his ubermensch intellect and sweat of his brow. Papa John and this local douche are selling pizza. Anyone with enough money to rent an storefront, pay minimum wage teenagers and buy the cheapest rubbery cheese available can open a pizza place. Please, you whiny fucks, deprive us of your productivity. Maybe the type II diabetics in your neighborhood will stave off amputation for a few more years without your greasy pies.

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The LA Times has this as “rejecting dogma…”

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Hah! It’s a press release. Let’s see how much exposure it gets. Also, “poverty wages” is new to me. Good phrase!

Business owners applauded the introduction today of legislation to raise the federal minimum wage for the first time since 2009. U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (IA) and Rep. George Miller (CA) introduced the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, which wouldgradually raise the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 an hour to $10.10, then provide for annual increases linked to the rising cost of living. The Fair Minimum Wage Act would also gradually raise the minimum wage for tipped workers for the first time in more than 20 years from an abysmal $2.13 an hour at present to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage.
“At Costco, we know that paying employees good wages makes good sense for business,” said Craig Jelinek, Costco’s President and CEO. “We pay a starting hourly wage of $11.50 in all states where we do business, and we are still able to keep our overhead costs low. An important reason for the success of Costco’s business model is the attraction and retention of great employees. Instead of minimizing wages, we know it’s a lot more profitable in the long term to minimize employee turnover and maximize employee productivity, commitment and loyalty. We support efforts to increase the federal minimum wage.”
“The biggest problem for Main Street businesses is lack of customer demand,” said Business for a Fair Minimum Wage Director Holly Sklar. “Minimum wage increases have been so little and so late that workers making the current $7.25 an hour – just $15,080 a year — have less buying power than minimum wage workers in 1956, and far less than they had at the minimum wage’s $10.59 high point in 1968, adjusted for inflation. Corporate profits are at their highest since 1950, as a percentage of national income, while the share going to employees is near its low point. We can’t build a strong economy on a falling wage floor. Let’s raise America by raising the minimum wage.”
“We’ve been in business since 1978 and won many awards, including Maryland Small Business of the Year,” said Brian England, Owner of British American Auto Care in Columbia, Maryland. “Our employees are a big reason why. We pay our employees a fair wage with benefits. But some businesses pay so little their employees can’t make a living. That’s not right. We should be moving working Americans as far away from needing the social safety net as possible. Raising the minimum wage raises everyone up.”
Andy Shallal, owner of a group of restaurants – Busboys and Poets and Eatonville – located in Maryland, DC and Virginia, said, “Busboys and Poets was founded in 2005 and started with 30 employees. Today we have over 500 employees. Fair pay is fundamental to our success. Our minimum wage at Busboys and Poets and Eatonville is $10.25 per hour. I just signed another lease last month for another Busboys and Poets! Don’t believe it when you hear business will suffer if the minimum wage goes up. It will help our economy grow and thrive.”
Lew Prince, Managing Partner of Vintage Vinyl in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Midwest’s largest independent music store, said, “The evidence that trickle-down economics doesn’t work is all around us. People are falling out of the middle class instead of rising into it. Putting money in the hands of people who desperately need it to buy goods and services will give us a trickle-up effect. Raising the minimum wage is a really efficient way to circulate money in the economy from the bottom up where it can have the most impact in alleviating hardship, boosting demand at businesses and decreasing the strain on our public safety net from poverty wages.”
“Wages are a basic cost of business and like energy, transportation and other expenses, costs change over time,” said Amy Chender, Chief Operating Officer of retailer ABC Home. “The minimum wage must increase to reflect the rising cost of living. ABC Home pays well above the current minimum wage and we are ardently committed to supporting a minimum wage raise. No business is an island. A minimum wage increase will improve our economy, and is long overdue.”

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How to sell a contradiction

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At least Mark Sanford still has his convictions (via):

When I asked Sanford how that new empathy had changed his views on public policy—whether it had made him, for instance, more inclined to support public-assistance programs he’s long denounced as unnecessary—he said it had not. “Convictions are convictions,” he explained. His empathy is for other public figures recovering from sex scandals and personal humiliations. “I used to open the paper and think, How did this person do that? Now it’s all, But by the grace of God go I.”

I first started to understand conservatives’ belief that Galts go to heaven, plebes go to hell when I read this Nooner piece on Ken Lay:

Putting aside all judgments and conclusions, all umbrage, outrage and indignation, and all debates on who was most responsible for the Enron scandal–putting all those weighty and legitimate concerns aside–isn’t it obvious that Ken Lay died of a broken heart?

When poor people starve or are imprisoned or are killed, it’s usually their own fault. It would be wrong to extend them any sympathy; we owe it to them to be heartless, for otherwise they’ll never learn the Burkean humility that they need to make it in this world. When rich people get caught fucking around on their wives or embezzling money, we need to stop being so judgmental and put ourselves in their shoes for once.

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But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible, logical

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I agree with mistermix that even the liberal Kevin Drum is wrong about Jindal. Of course, it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. Nate Silver thought Sarah Palin would run for president in 2012 and that she had a good chance of getting the nomination. It’s probably fair to say that gay wizardry only works on polling data near the time of an election…though it sure works well then.

I am constantly stunned by how little my colleagues, most of whom remind me of Kevin Drum to some degree, understand about politics. I try to avoid the topic with them, but I’m often asked questions, which I answer with 100% accuracy. I’m not bragging, the questions are easy — should I put stock in political futures markets (no), who will win the election (Obama), why will Obama win the election (big demographic advantage), will the government default (no), will Sarah Palin be the Republican nominee (no)…simple questions like that. Sometimes I try to explain to them a bit about how politics works, so that they can answer these questions themselves, but it never takes.

The problem is that they are unable to conceive of how irrational voters are. They believe there will be some kind of logical consistency, that loving Jeebus has something to do with caring about the poor, that being a libertarian should make you more likely to be pro-choice, that people might consider their own economic interest when they vote, that voters pay attention to issues at all. Of course, that’s not how any of it works, people sort themselves into teams — roughly Team Liberal and Team Conservative, though there’s lots of little subteams within each, and there’s also Team Narcissist consisting of people whose beautiful minds won’t allow them to be put into a simple box. There’s a little more to it, but, essentially, the rest is commentary.

Sometimes I think that perhaps libertarians are politically inept for the same reasons that academics are. Academics tend to believe people are rational because they themselves are rational (or so they think anyway) and that fucks up their ability to understand politics. Libertarians believe that markets and consumers are rational (I’m not sure why they believe this) and that fucks their ability to understand how our society works, fucks it up so badly that the rest of the population can see immediately that libertarians are mostly cranks and weirdos.

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Found art…

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Found_Art

 

After reading about Doug’s Twitter travails, I flipped on the teevee to explore options for checking out this evening. I saw the above and marveled at the perfection of the image. Sure, it doesn’t capture the essence of Ayn Rand with the same precision as these 56 words, but I thought it was close.

How are you wasting your evening?

Cheers

Found art…Post + Comments (129)