Much of the focus on home delivery culture, both positive and negative, is on lots and lots of stuff becoming more and more accessible. That’s true, and relevant, whether you’re a fan of consumer culture or bemoan it. But home delivery culture also incentivizes businesses to do things that are good for all of us. And it does so through market mechanisms rather than through political haggling.
Tag: war
Voltairine de Cleyre III: Inquisitors
“I doubt if any other hope has the power to keep the fire alight as I saw it in 1897, when we met the Spanish exiles released from the fortress of Montjuich. Comparatively few persons in America ever knew the story of that torture, though we distributed fifty thousand copies of the letters smuggled from the prison, and some few newspapers did reprint them.”
Adventure May Never Find You
The psychologist Nathaniel Branden was fond of saying “No one is coming to save you.” I would paraphrase to say that (probably) no one is coming to call you on an adventure, at least not when you’re inside a bubble of security and comfort. So there’s no point in sitting around and waiting. Adventure is outside the bubble. It won’t find you in there, but you may find it out there.
Catherine Semcer: Poaching, Preserves, and African Wildlife (1h4m)
This episode features an interview of PERC Research Fellow Catherine Semcer from 2019 by Russ Roberts, host of EconTalk. The conversation discusses how allowing limited hunting of big game such as elephants and using revenue from hunting licenses to reward local communities for habitat stewardship has improved both habitat and wildlife populations while reducing poaching. Semcer draws on her experience as former Chief Operating Officer of Humanitarian Operations Protecting Elephants and also discusses recent efforts to relocate lions in Mozambique.
Afghanistan: Oh, When Will We Ever Learn?
War is always ugly. Optional and prolonged wars with nebulous objectives are always built on lies — lies stacked sky-high atop one another for no other purpose than to keep the ugliness going for as long as possible. Why?
Congress: The Snail’s Pace Race
On one hand, I often thank the Almighty for gridlock. If Congress isn’t doing anything, Congress isn’t doing anything stupid or evil, right? On the other hand, if Congress isn’t doing anything, why do we continue to pay their salaries, hand them significant portions of our earnings, and listen to them flap their gums 24/7 about how important they are?
Meet Virgil Griffith: America’s Newest Political Prisoner
On November 29, FBI agents arrested hacker and cryptocurrency developer Virgil Griffith. His alleged crime: Talking. Yes, really. The FBI alleges that Griffith “participated in discussions regarding using cryptocurrency technologies to evade sanctions and launder money.”
NATO is a Brain Dead, Obsolete, Rabid Dog; Euthanize It
If there’s any real logic to NATO’s continued existence, that logic probably centers around its $1 trillion annual expenses. That’s a lot of money fed into the maws of various military industrial complexes by an entrenched multi-national bureaucracy who love their own paychecks, pensions, and prerogatives.
Find Out How To Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
It’s a dangerous thing to have too many convictions and too few actions to support those convictions. It’s dangerous for all the obvious reasons: you tend to become a hypocrite, you tend not to actually help, etc. But it’s also dangerous for your ability to form new convictions. I’ve noticed it in myself: a growing feeling of being jaded at the problems I hear about in the news.
Federal Gun Control in America: A Historic Guide to Major Federal Gun Control Laws and Acts
Here is an overview of the history behind major gun control laws in the federal government, capturing how we’ve gone from the Founding Fathers’ America of the New World to the United States of the 21st century.