URLs du Jour

Thanksgiving 2018

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  • Happy Thanksgiving to all, and Kevin D. Williamson of National Review has our sermon du jour: For These Gifts We Are Truly Grateful.

    Here is a truth that almost never is spoken: All of the money that ever has been saved and invested in profit-seeking productive business enterprises has done incalculably more for the poor — more by many orders of magnitude — than has all of the money that ever has been put to charitable uses, formal or informal, mainly by preventing them from ever being poor in the first place. That saving and investment, and the innovation and labor that have gone along with them, are the only thing in the history of this little blue planet that has made its inhabitants less poor. Of course we invite the hungry to our table. A hell of a lot of good it would do if we didn’t have anything to put on their plates other than nice intentions or sanctimonious sentiments.

    The Biblical commands of charity were written in eras where nearly everyone was miserably poor. And, arguably, did little overall to relieve that misery.

    So, this Thanksgiving especially, give thanks for good old free market capitalism. Or as Kevin puts it, … well, I encourage you to Read The Whole Thing. And maybe recite it as a pre-dinner prayer, if you want to risk the Wrath of God.


  • Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have an excerpt from their new book in Reason, devoted to a parental lesson: Your Child Is More Resilient Than You Think.

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    Taken literally, Nietzsche's famous aphorism—"What doesn't kill me makes me stronger"—is not entirely correct. Some things that don't kill you can still leave you permanently damaged and diminished.

    Yet in recent years, far too many parents, teachers, school administrators, and students themselves have become taken with the opposite idea—that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. They have bought into a myth that students and children are inherently fragile. For the most part, this represents an understandable desire to protect children from emotional trauma. But overwhelming evidence suggests that this approach makes kids less psychologically stable. By over-sheltering kids, we end up exposing them to more serious harm.

    Excellent article, and I've moved their book up high on my things-to-read list.


  • Jonah Goldberg's column has a consumer warning: Florida is the Jaguar of vote-counting. And not in a good way.

    Florida is the Jaguar of vote-counting, and I'm not referring to the animal or the Jacksonville NFL franchise. I mean the car. For decades, part of the "charm" of having a Jaguar was how often it broke down. (That's no longer the case.) It was the kind of conspicuous consumption that economist Thorstein Veblen used to write about, with owners bragging about how much they paid for repairs.

    The spectacle of sweaty election officials poring over provisional ballots -- 18 years after the state became infamous for such things -- has now cemented election incompetence into the montage of images we associate with the Sunshine State: beaches, rocket launches, Mickey Mouse and the human menagerie of freaks, weirdos, moperers, villains and perverts that fall under the omnibus internet meme "Florida Man."

    How hard can this possibly be? OK, it's a big job, but when you have the entire apparatus of government backing you,…

    Oh, right. Florida is bad, but it makes the rest of the country look good only in comparison.


  • Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. has a (possibly paywalled) contrarian take at the WSJ on The Scapegoating of Facebook.

    Facebook is an especially inapt scapegoat for the besetting uncertainties of our age. The U.S. electorate is described as “polarized.” Closely divided, with a large number of voters shifting back and forth, would be a better description. But what divides us is harder to put a finger on—or maybe it’s truer to say anything would be apt to divide us given the problems of the post-war Western model: overflowing debt plus insufficient productivity to keep living standards universally rising, to afford promised pensions and health care, to give the next generation a better life.

    Politics is fully capable of making things worse, as we might find out thanks to Donald Trump’s trade warfare or the neo-socialist infatuations of the Democrats. But it’s also to politics that we must turn for solutions. That means changing the subject from the search for scapegoats.

    Holman's column references a new book by a group at Harvard, Network Propaganda, that analyzes the likely effect of the Russkies on the 2016 election outcome, and says eh.

    This is in contrast to a book by a UPenn prof, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Cyber-War which purports to show that the "targeted cyberattacks by hackers and trolls were decisive" in the election outcome.

    Your call, friends. That last link was to Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, so there might be a bit of bias involved there.


  • Jim Swift reviews a new board game from Hasbro in the Weekly Standard, and the executive summary is: Monopoly for Millennials is #Awesome.

    Jail still exists and Community Chest and Chance are still there. Instead of the “Get out of Jail Free” card, there's a card that reads “Your mom posts bail. She’s the best.” And instead of committing a crime, you go to jail if you draw the card that says “You literally can’t even pay your student loan bill. Go to Jail. Go Directly to Jail. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $20.”

    At this point, [Jim's co-worker] Alice asked me if Monopoly is the source of an idiom she had heard about not passing GO. She was not kidding. Her #mind was #blown.

    (The meanest card in the Chance pile says “You took a trip to find yourself. You didn’t. Lose a turn.”)

    It's also a cool sixty bucks at Amazon, so I'd appreciate it if you used the link at the head of this post to buy it.


  • And Slashdot has the story: Amazon is Teaching Alexa To Speak Like a Newscaster.

    The way newscasters speak is unmistakeable, with their exaggerated modulations and drawn-out pauses. And now, Amazon has taught Alexa, its voice assistant, to approximate the authoritative intonation

    Now: my perception of the way newscasters speak is like an old-time carny barker, desperate to rope you into paying money to see the freak show. Overlaid with tones of (a) unctuous concern; (b) barely-concealed panic; or (c) treacly sentiment, as appropriate. We'll have more on that, including ways you can avoid the holiday rush, later on in the broadcast. Just after this word.

    And, oh, I might buy an Amazon Echo if it could emulate Brian Collins, the Boom Goes the Dynamite guy.

    Otherwise, no.


Last Modified 2024-01-24 3:16 PM EDT