Convenience has a massive effect on your behavior. You rarely shop in your favorite store, eat in your favorite restaurant, or visit your favorite place. Why not? Because doing so is typically inconvenient. They’re too far away, or not open at the right hours, so you settle for second-best or third-best or tenth-best. You usually don’t switch your cell phone company, your streaming service, or your credit card just because a better option comes along. Why not? Because switching is not convenient. Students even pass up financial aid because they don’t feel like filling out the paperwork. Why not? You guessed it: Because paperwork is inconvenient.
Tag: contract
Welfare for the Wealthier? What Else is New?
The main function of the state is to redistribute wealth from the productive class to the political class. That’s inherently an upward redistribution, and the “middle class” is half-fish, half-fowl: Partly productive class, partly a hodgepodge of political constituencies well-positioned to grab a share of the grift as bribes for their continuing support.
Private Charity Beats One-Size-Fits-All Government
Charities are free to help people who truly need help.
Diet Pills and Persistent Error in Health and Science
Earlier this year, I was doing a deep dive into virology. Coincidentally, this was before Covid, in effort to solve my own health-related problems and mysteries. I had the same experience I’ve had when I went deeper into any field. A realization that nobody in the field knows what the hell is going on.
Fried Chicken in a Hardware Store
Or, horror fiction on a libertarian website, if you prefer (see my bio below). Most of us have heard this expression, but for the uninitiated, it means attempting to market a product, service, or idea to the wrong or inappropriate audience or demographic. Thing is, I recall a hardware store in New Hampshire about 20 years ago that did sell fried chicken – and it was delicious.
Bureaucracy vs Innovation
Imagine the progress SpaceX could make if freed from government millstones entirely. Just imagine how much progress could be made in every area if government were shoved aside like the worthless parasite it is.
Trump vs. Biden: Keeping Up With Toddlers and Tiaras
If Daddy hadn’t made and left him a fortune on sweetheart government housing contracts, Donald Trump would probably be bragging about how cold the AC runs on the old Ford Escort he’s trying to get off his lot (“BUY HERE! PAY HERE! BAD CREDIT? NO PROBLEM!”) and hoping you don’t notice the transmission slipping when you take it out for a test drive. If Joe Biden had stuck with law, he’d probably be chasing ambulances to emergency rooms, loud plaid sport coat and chartreuse tie thrown across the passenger seat, visions of easy whiplash settlements dancing in his head.
Insulting My Mind
One semi-common insult that is a little fun which I have flung at me is “pseudo-intellectual”. I’ve been insulted this way nearly ever since I got out of school. I’m guessing it has something to do with my thinking/writing style, and that I say things people don’t want to hear but that they may not know how to refute.
COVID-19 Panic is the New State Religion
The TL;DR on COVID-19: Panic, not science, continues to drive the public policy discussion.
Implicit and Structural Witchery
What are you supposed to do if you want to continue the good fight against social ills you’ve already practically driven to extinction? Move the goalposts all the way to Mars. These days, the world’s best detectives would struggle to find outright racists and sexists. Yet implicit racism, structural racism, implicit sexism, and structural sexism will always be in plain sight, because the definition expands as the phenomenon contracts.