Part of it is that most of the companies I want to boycott over recent transgressions, I shopped shopping at years ago over previous ones.
Example: I stopped patronizing Pepsi, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut back in the ’90s, when they were donating big bank to gun control groups. Dick’s Sporting Goods became traef to me when they pulled “modern sporting rifles” from their shelves.
Richard Fernandez at The Belmont Club asks whether the Lesko Brandon administration is strolling into our next quagmire.
We canceled pipelines and oil leases at home, to signal our virtue on climate change. The price of gas at the pump, and natural gas for home heating, is going up. We’ve called on Saudi Arabia to pump more oil for us but we’ve also removed sanctions on Iran, which is funding Houthis in Yemen, who are attacking Saudi oilfields. The US could back the Saudis with arms sales or troops so they could keep pumping the oil we want, except Progressives insist the Saudis are repressing the Yemenis so we must not help them. Can “no blood for oil” be far behind?
We’ve caused a world-wide oil shortage and are about to stumble into another war in the Middle East with conflicting policy goals and no clear mission. But all the Left wants to talk about is Kyle.
Joe Doakes
If it weren’t for gullible, low information voters, the Democrats will be pulling somewhere below the libertarians.
Richard Fernandez at The Belmont Club asks whether the Lesko Brandon administration is strolling into our next quagmire.
We canceled pipelines and oil leases at home, to signal our virtue on climate change. The price of gas at the pump, and natural gas for home heating, is going up. We’ve called on Saudi Arabia to pump more oil for us but we’ve also removed sanctions on Iran, which is funding Houthis in Yemen, who are attacking Saudi oilfields. The US could back the Saudis with arms sales or troops so they could keep pumping the oil we want, except Progressives insist the Saudis are repressing the Yemenis so we must not help them. Can “no blood for oil” be far behind?
We’ve caused a world-wide oil shortage and are about to stumble into another war in the Middle East with conflicting policy goals and no clear mission. But all the Left wants to talk about is Kyle.
Speaking as a person of honk, I wish them all well in their oddly segregationist but utterly legal effort.
Indeed, there are notes of free-marketeering to be found in between the lines in the story.
Which brings me to my actual response..
“Go with God, Freedom, Georgia. Hold that free-market thought, and you have every chance of doing very well. But if you wind up going with the soft-socialism that much of the Black Democrat political mainstream pushes, you might – will – have problems. Try to avoid that”.
Which is better advice than NPR or most of its listeners are going to give.
Several council members are surprisingly against it. Of course, no surprise that CM Jalali is in favor of it. She tweets about how much she has supported development, and how even that development has not been enough to help tenets who continue to face high rent increases.
If she were really honest, she has mostly supported the tear down of single family houses in order for one developer to build apartments on Marshall Avenue. That particular developer was identified in The Villager as someone who donates to Jalali’s campaigns. She has opposed developments of decades long vacant lots elsewhere.
As for the rent control measure on the ballot, I don’t see how it turns out any differently than the garbage collection- small, local landlords bought out by bigger, corporate landlords. They would be the only ones able to afford the rent control. And Jalali probably won’t stop until all the privately owned homes are bought out by corporate landlords so we all become renters, so we can all feel like one, you know. (So we can all be indebted to the whims of our overlords).
Like most everything in Saint Paul politics, this is a group of upper-middle-class progressives in Crocus Hill and Merriam Park playing “let’s build a utopia” with a real city – more or less – as their lab. Just like the indoor smoking ban, or the Tony Soprano Trash Collection “system” [1], or Minneapolis’s “Public Safety” charter referendum, there is no thought to unintended consequences, and plenty of reason to believe it’ll just be another money transfer to the city’s political class.
Given that the inevitable result of “rent control” is rent becoming inexorably less affordable, the developer class – which is finaincially joined at the. hip with the political class. – stands to benefit handsomely.
This article claims the reason for container ship backlog is not a labor shortage, it’s a second-order effect of a California environmental regulation. Seems California will only allow certain low-emission vehicles in the dock area to cut back on air pollution, and there aren’t enough qualifying vehicles to meet the demand to unload the ships.
I have no idea if it’s true. But it sounds plausible, right in line with proposals to ban lawnmowers and cow farts, to derive the energy to charge electric vehicles from wind and sun without a single thought of what happens to civilization when that plan doesn’t work. SITD readers understand second-order effects; California officials, not so much.
Seems plausible – I’d be looking for some corroboration, but then so is Joe – but I suspect it’s a perfect storm of side effects from poorly conceived regulations.
Another one that I’ve heard blamed: California ports don’t allow trucks run by independent owner operators; they have to be unionized haulers. Who are a small minority of the nations trucking industry.
So let’s take stock of where were at in the Biden administration so far:
Our shelves are getting kinda bare. “But Merg – you couldn’t find toilet paper during the last year of Drumpf’s regime”. Yep – for free market reasons that actually made sense. Try again.
The borders are in effect open.
We have a de facto hostage crisis
The Taliban in back in control in Afghanistan
Fuel costs aren’t just rising, they’re skyrocketing.
Public education is getting even worse.
The social divides that erupted in violence during the Obama regime have escalated.
Indeed, inflation is back for the first time since my freshman year of college.
The executive branch, which as been too poiwerful for a long time, is starting to act on that fact.
After a year of government acting like a scolding “Karen” of a neighbor and “two weeks to flatten the curve”, not only has Covid gone nowhere, but the economic effects of lockdowns are getting worse.
The workforce – one of the four key pillars of the economy, along with land, capital and management – has been “unintentionally” distorted far out of whack, with dire consequences.
On the one hand, this article, by a Joe Morgan, explains why he is rejecting the “Learn to Code” meme, especially as applied to his kids under the chanting point “coding is the new litracy”:
I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You.
Now, in my opinion the presented reason is a little specious:
Coding is not the new literacy. While most parents are literate and know to read to their kids, most are not programmers and have no idea what kind of skills a programmer needs. Coding books for kids present coding as a set of problems with “correct” solutions. And if your children can just master the syntax, they’ll be able to make things quickly and easily. But that is not the way programming works. Programming is messy. Programming is a mix of creativity and determination. Being a developer is about more than syntax, and certain skills can only be taught to the very young.
Sure.
And by the exact same logic, one shouldn’t teach your kids to read, write or speak your family’s native language, or any others, since you can say exactly the same thing about verbal and written expression; it’s more than just stringing words together, as anyone who’s had to listen anyone trying to do a foreign language out of a phrase book can tell you.
Of course, Morgan is right about what’s really behind “coding”:
That feeling of quality is the hardest thing for many developers to master. Well-designed code feels good to work with, and ugly code will make developers involuntarily cringe. The best developers learn to fuse abstract logic with the sensitivity of an artist. Learning to trust that aesthetic feeling is as much a part of development as any algorithm or coding pattern.
That’s true – just as it is for written and spoken language. Or anything involving having to think critically, to reason and to work one’s way through a complex system, whether language or software engineering, politics, sales, or human relationships for that matter.
But the reason I, as a non-coder who works in a roomful of software engineers, cringe when I year people whose jobs don’t involve “coding” telling people who’ve just lost jobs to “learn to code?”
Because if you hitch your wagon to “code’, your job is as secure as the next country full of low-priced developers allows it to be. We spent the 2000s shipping software engineering jobs to Russia and India; in the 2010s, Romania and the Philippines and Slovenia and even Bolivia started taking development jobs.
It’s entirely possible coding will be to the 2020s what assembly line work was to the 1970s.
Cheap bastards. I agree with William F. Buckley: if raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, why stop at $15 or even $26? Let’s make it $100 and we’ll all be rich.
Yesterdays sardonic quip is today’s proposal and tomorrow’s law.
Two years ago, no one could work from home. Everyone had to come to the office so managers could supervise employees to ensure quality customer service and high productivity.
Last year no one could come to the office. Everyone had to work from home to protect employees from the deadliest virus ever known. Without management supervising us, productivity actually went up.
Starting in November, everyone must work from home, and everyone must come to the office, half and half. It’s a “hybrid” which sounds smart and trendy but actually combines the worst of both worlds. We’re doing it because . . . well, nobody really knows why, exactly. It just is. And since everyone is coming to the office but the deadly virus pandemic is still in effect, everyone must be vaccinated, even those who don’t want to work in the office, who are more productive working at home and who would prefer to continue working from home. Nope, must come to the office, must be vaccinated. And wear a mask plus move your desks six feet apart. But if we’re vaccinated and the vaccine protects us, why wear masks/social distance? If the vaccine doesn’t protect us (and masks/social distance weren’t safe enough to protect us last year), why are we back in the office instead of working from home?
Business magazines are asking what lessons we learned from Covid. Improvements in efficiency, distance working, employee satisfaction . . . no, none of them. We have learned no lessons and have no intention of learning any. It’s our way or the highway. Further proof that the whole thing was not a medical crisis, it was a political stunt.
Joe Doakes
If Dr. Fauci went on CNN and declared wearing aluminum foil Capri pants reduce the spread, I would expect edicts to follow shortly.
Andy Richter is, by a very liberal definition, a “Hollywood star“, having gotten his start as Conan O’Briens, for lack of a better term, “comic“ foil, I shouldn’t be too uncharitable; comedy is hard, and O’Brien proves it.
But time flies, and Richter has a kid who’s going off to college.
Well, trying to:
In the very, very long Twitter thread that followed, Richter evidenced no sense of connecting his plight with the eviction moratorium that has been strangling the rental industry for the past year and a half.
It’s a pretty domestic (if needlessly snide) representation of Big Populist Left’s entire approach to, well, pretty much everything:
Some people believe today’s high housing prices are due to stimulus payments. All those people getting unemployment checks and $1,400 gifts are using them to bid $50-60,000 over the market for houses. I don’t think so. I think realtors are correct: there’s a shortage of houses for sale, about 40% lower inventory than normal. Low supply, high price, basic economics.
A person who lost his job during the Covid pandemic could sell his house and reap the equity, but then he’d have nowhere to live. During the moratorium on foreclosures, he can live in the house rent-free. And there’s always the hope he may get back on his feet, the government may offer an assistance program, he might win the lottery, something might work out that he can keep the house. Psychologically, people in financial distress hang on too long, they end up staying until they’re evicted because they can’t downsize and shed debt fast enough. Their houses are being artificially withheld from the market because of the moratorium on foreclosures.
Even if they did sell, there are increasingly fewer places to rent because landlords can’t evict tenants during the eviction moratorium (recently extended to next June). Fewer available apartments, higher rent, basic economics.
Ramsey County’s normal foreclosure rate is about 300-400 per year in good times (2000-2003 and again 2017-2019): people died, got divorced, lost their jobs, etc. Foreclosures dropped to single digits in April 2020 when the moratorium took effect. There’s a 15 month backlog of ordinary foreclosures and if the economy stutters when inflation causes interest rates to rise, there could be a great deal more coming. Hundreds of bank-owned properties will flood the market in a short period. Banks dump properties cheap. High supply, low price, basic economics again.
Sale prices will drop. Appraisers see the value of comparable sales dropping – appraised values drop. You won’t be able to sell sell your house for what it was worth in 2021 because the appraisal won’t support the sale price. It’s the 2008 downward spiral all over again.
The government knew that its panic reaction to Covid would throw millions of people out of work, making them unable to afford their mortgages, sending them into foreclosure, and exacerbating the homeless crisis. The Band-Aid approach was a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. But that’s just a Band-Aid, it doesn’t solve the underlying problem of people out of work, unable to repay their loans. There’s a storm coming. It has nothing to do with stimulus payments.
Of course, there is one way housing prices don’t fall:
Shovel pandemic relief money to the politically well-connected who will stash it in safe currencies; continue endless ‘temporary’ moratoria on foreclosures and evictions to keep masses quiet even as landlords go broke; extend/increase unemployment benefits to hide the destruction of the working economy; and allow hyper-inflation to conceal the destruction of middle-class savings/wealth. Your house will be worth a million dollars, which will be just enough to buy a loaf of bread. Zimbabwe, Argentina . . . America?
If I was one of the well-connected people able to stash my wealth to ride out the ensuing global crash, that might actually be considered a feature, not a bug. I wonder who else is thinking that way?
I had one of those moments at something like 2AM, when the cat woke me up and I checked thje news.
I read a news story that I thought was either a weird dream at best, or a not-especially-deft bit of satire by some Babylon Bee knockoff at worst. I went back to bed.
Victoria’s Secret is replacing its supermodel angels with seven high-profile women known for their accomplishments rather than their figures in its evolving brand to help “inspire women.”
The lingerie company announced on Wednesday that its new VS Collective campaign aims to “positively impact the lives of women” with its products, experiences and initiatives.
The campaign also includes new partnerships with professional soccer player Megan Rapinoe, actor and producer Priyanka Chopra Jonas, world champion free skier Eileen Gu, model, refugee and mental wellness supporter Adut Akech, body advocate and model Paloma Elsesser, journalist Amanda de Cadenet and LGBTQIA+ activist Valentina Sampaio.
Look – I kind of got Viotoria’s Secret’s 2019 decision to ditch the “Angels” and their annual cheeseca; not being a marketer, I’m not sure what the net pros and cons of “pelting your target demographic with images of women that were mostly fantasy objects for men” versus “selling the idea that you kind of are that fantasy, for that special someone, if you buy our unmentionables”.
I suppose it’d be more or less like having Wilt Chamberlain endorse an Erectils Dysfunction remedy; half of the audience might think “THAT’LL HELP ME BANG 20,000 WOMEN TOO!”, and the other half could get…inteimidated?
I guess I’ll let the marketeers market.
So while I can intellectually understand the idea that Victoria’s Secret might shy away from their harem of supermodel “Angels” (complete with some of the more Hefner-y aspects of that image), and simultaneously the idea of feminists wanting companies to use more examples of female empowerment in marketing…
…I guess I’m struggling to see where or why a business and industry that produces lingerie, a milieu which ostensibly exists to make women feel sexy for their significant others, sees itself as a vehicle for that sort of empowerment.
Especially given the role models they’ve selected. The linked article lists :
…actor and producer Priyanka Chopra Jonas, world champion free skier Eileen Gu, model, refugee and mental wellness supporter Adut Akech, body advocate and model Paloma Elsesser, journalist Amanda de Cadenet and LGBTQIA+ activist Valentina Sampaio
…most of whom fit fairly squarely into the modern current western notion of “beauty”…
…and probably the most “controversial” of the picks…
…Megan Rapinoe, a woman whose entire claim to fame is successfully chasing a ball around a field and stridently proclaiming the dominant social narrative on cue in front of cameras, and who also matches the current western notion of beauty, if you have a secret thing for Reinhard Heydrich.
Beiing neither a lingerie buyer, a second-wave feminist nor a Heydrophile, I am probably not the one to comment.
I’m still trying to figure out if Victoria’s Secret, the brand, is…:
terminally beset by executives under the spell of “woke” culture
trying to “shock” its way out of a market doldrum
Either way, I think I’m gonna buy stock in whatever VS’s more traditional competitors might be. It just seems…market-prudent.
I can see why the likes of Tide Pod Evita and Ilhan Omar prate and gabble on about minimum wage increase. It’ll never cost any of them anything.
But when I hear Gen-Y and younger people yapping about it, I am almost tempted to ask – have any of you actually thought about this…
…and then I remember.- nobody’s taught critical thought in decades. It’s why the Democrats bounced back after the nineties.
Anyway – it turns out the actual economy obeys that most basic Econ101 principle – you can not make someone pay more or less for something than they would naturally pay for it without having consequences.
a 27% increase in the total number of workers scheduled to work each week
a 20.8% decrease in the average number of hours each employee worked per week
a 13.6% decrease in the total wage compensation of an average minimum wage worker
a 23% decrease in the percentage of employees working more than 20 hours per week (making them eligible for retirement benefits)
a 14.9% decrease in the percentage of employees working more than 30 hours per week (making them eligible for health care benefits)
a 33% increase in fluctuations in the number of hours worked per week
a 9.5% increase in fluctuations in the number of hours worked per day
a 9.8% increase in fluctuations of shift start times and
average net losses of at least $1,590 per year per employee, equivalent to 11.6% of workers’ total compensation (assuming that workers were able to use their reduced hours to work a second job — an assumption which may not hold true for many employees).
It might be tempting to say “people who advocate for higher minimum wages are trying to make the poor poorer and more dependent”.
It’s the position of this blog that you can tell everything you need to know about what people and companies really think by observing where their money goes – especially money that is intended to get people to give them more money back.
Least of all television ads, with their high production costs and long lead-times. If you see something in a television ad, especially an “agency” spot (produced by an ad agency, as opposed to something shot at a store or TV station for a local merchant, you may be assured someone thought about the message it was portraying.
A lot.
As we’ve discussed recently, the high numbers of African-Americans in TV commercials challenge the idea that Americans are innately racist. If an add offends someone on some visceral level, it’s just not going to work.
With that in mind, I direct your attention to the latest round of commercials for “Hy Vee”, the national grocery chain, and what HyVee thinks it says about their customers. Both spots are done to the tune of the ’80s song Our House, by the British ska group “Madness”.
Here’s the first one, which came out over the winter:
Note the imagery (amid all the HyVee products):
Mom is the executive rushing off to the high-power job.
Dad is not only getting the kids ready for school. Not only is he kind of a bumbler, like most TV ad dads, but he looks like a buffoon.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with dads taking care of kids. I spent 20 years doing it, 11 of ’em mostly by myself, several more covering the day shift and working nights to save daycare. Fathers pulling their weight is nothing new.
But it’s not an unreasonable assumption that, in the typical family – whether two-parent or not – a woman is still making a lot of the shopping decisions. And HyVee, one of the major retailers, believes that not only is the image of the woman being the high-speed executive bread-winner one that appeals to those consumers, but showing hubby as a hapless buffoon who’d be lost without her appeals as well.
HyVee has a new “Our House” spot out – it’s not out on Youtube just yet, so I can’t post it here just yet. And when I first saw it – with its improbably pretty mom cleaning the house to a fine sheen with her array of HyVee products, and a pronounced “Father Knows Best” vibe, I briefly thought “Ooofda – how did this get greenlit? The feministasi are going to have a cow.”.
Then I mentally caught myself. “There’s going to be a whammy”.
And sure enough – Dad finally came home. And he reminded me of Rip Taylor, if Rip Taylor were playing a Gestapo agent (sans long black trench coat – this agent was dressed like, well, Rip Taylor in a HyVee commercial) – simultaneously petulant and way below Mom’s league.
So apparently HyVee’s marketing department believes that an ad Dad who is a mass of caricatures, coming across as a spoiled, petulant martinet to his improbably gorgeous, clearly put-upon spouse, is not only not going to turn their audience off, but will in fact bring them out to the stores?
What does this say about…
…well, not “society”, per se, but the advertising industry’s view of society?
Liquor Lyles, my old band’s former headquarters and the “Dive Bar” that made “dive bars” safe for a generation of Gen-X and Millennial hipsters, is yet another casualty of Covid.
I haven’t been down Hennepin Avenue – north or south of the freeway – in over a year. I can’t imagine there’s much left.
Essentially this article blames the pandemic as the reason for higher Minneapolis property taxes next year. The reason is because commercial real estate in the city has been jumping so much over the last 10 years before 2020, home owners have not seen as much increase in property taxes. It’s all relative. The city spend money like a drunken sailor and has been able to pass that on to the growing apartment buildings, restaurants, other commercial ventures that have popped up in the last 10 years. That growth has halted and I predict commercial properties and values will decrease which will shift the burden to homeowners. Get ready homeowners.
2020 has changed all that. Part of the change is the pandemic as businesses realize they can keep workers working at home and reduce the amount of office space needed. But it is also true that businesses will not move into a city that has no police force and allows blocks of businesses to be looted and burned. Target is downsizing. There wasn’t even a thought of the Canadian Pacific merger of having the headquarters in downtown Mpls where it is now. Who thinks Minneapolis will see a Final Four or a Superbowl in the next 10 years? The airheads running the city have created a bigger mess than just the pandemic. I am glad to see my favorite establishment, Brit’s Pub, has re-opened but I am not tempted to go there even in daylight due to the dangerous downtown.
Right now I am watching the discussion on the local Nextdoor. People are noticing a big jump in their assessed home values yet their property taxes are stable and some even falling a bit. The respite in tax increase this year is a big head fake. The 2022 property taxes will increase mightily as these higher home values will shift a big piece of the real estate base from business to homeowners. Maybe not if the city’s spending can be cut. Unfortunately those cuts will likely come from the police force which is already being decimated by resignations and retirements. The city can just recognize reality that they cannot retain and recruit enough badges. My heart is sad for my beloved Minneapolis. The local voters have been mislead by the local media and the chickens have come home to roost. They will appeal to the state of MN for help. God give backbones to the state legislature to say “NO.” Just say “no” as Mpls voters caused this problem, they need to fix it.
Let this be a cautionary tale for other cities. You don’t want this.
The same story can be said for all of Hennepin County. This will affect them as well.
Two observations.
First: when the MInnPost is too far to the middle for a Democrat machine…
