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The Walmart subsidies
The argument has since spread all over the place and been used to rationalize all sorts of taxes, minimum wage increases, etc.
There is a rat's nest of nasty deception in this argument which needs to be considered. Even if we ignore that this is based on a sloppy propaganda white paper (extrapolating from a single store to the entire US) by a political faction, we still have some really big flaws with the argument.
The first is simply that the point of subsidies is to encourage behavior we want. Walmart is employing poor people. Usually, that is a desirable goal, particularly for the ideologies that spin this as welfare subsidies, but notice how in this case virtue is transformed rhetorically into vice.
Second, anyone who employs people who receive welfare is by this argument receiving the subsidy. The only way to avoid the alleged subsidy is to employ people who never receive any sort of welfare. Thus, anyone who employs poor people can be accused of this vice.
Thus third, it can't be fixed as long as one pays out welfare benefits of any sort. There is no correction that can ever get rid of the alleged problem because either someone will always employ poor people on welfare and run afoul of the welfare subsidy or no one will, creating a permanent unemployed class of people.
I see this causing problems for universal basic income schemes because since everyone receives the income, every employer can be considered to be "subsidized" and thus subject to whatever crazy scheme or punishment that can be rationalized. It's another failure mode that needs to be considered with UBI systems.
basic income thinkings
My crude idea here is that basic income should be a reward for participating in a healthy, growing economy, not merely taking from the rich. That is an unhealthy attitude. It should be higher, if everyone is doing better, including the wealthiest.
My thinking is along the lines of the trust that runs the Alaskan Pipeline. Most Alaskans get a share and the better run and more profitable the pipeline is, the better the payout, leading to incentive to run things well rather than run things for the short term.
I'm not yet prepared for well developed ideas about how basic income should operate, but I think it should be highly predictable in how it operates and using metrics that are difficult to game. For example, no sudden and unpredictable changes in the level of payouts from machinations by politicians. No feedback from inflation (say by basic income being merely the printing of money combined with automatic inflation adjustment mechanisms, combining to create runaway inflation of the system).
Almost strictly pay-as-you-go or "revenue neutral" seems a good idea since money sitting around becomes a political target.
So here's a couple of ideas to put into the ring (oriented around the US where I live):
Basic income is all surplus federal tax revenue acquired by the US above its expenditures. Would generate incentives to run a balanced budget one way or another and encourage reduction of other expenditures.
and
Basic income is set in combination with a moderately progressive income tax at a level where a set percentage of the populace gains money. For example, it could be set so that the median income breaks even, thus half the population gains and half loses income. Incentives here would be to increase median income relative to everything else since that would be the basis for the payouts.
Keyesians might want to tool things so that basic income drops in good times and increases in bad times.
A Short Eclipse Note
Interesting fact that nobody bothers to mention about solar eclipses. It feels about twenty degrees cooler during totality than it does half an hour before or after. This is a good thing during a Tennessee summer.
Also saw eclipse
Anyway, the park consists of two areas, the Teton range of mountains which goes something like 20-40 miles (30-65km) and has a impressive vertical rise (up to 6000 feet or around 1800 meters) over the second part of the park, a very level valley which runs along the entire east side of the range. There are several lakes in the valley area including the fairly large Jackson Lake of which Colter Bay is a part.
We had scouted the Grand Tetons the day before. The authorities had done a relatively good job of managing the situation. There were five areas where visitors were encouraged to go (which in theory would handle a good portion of the visitors the park was expecting to receive) and everything in the park was scheduled to open at 6am this morning (Mountain Daylight Time). It still sounded like way too many people for too small a space, but I'm not seeing what the park could do better. I guess I'll hear how things went later in news or the local Yellowstone rumor mill.
I and some friends managed to find a vantage point near the marina located there to view both the Tetons with the bay in the foreground and the sky where the Sun would be situated during the eclipse. I'd say about 200-300 other people also found this spot, so it was a bit crowded.
We got lucky, the clouds completely vacated the area around 10am and there were no clouds to interfere with our viewing from start to finish of the full eclipse period (about 3 hours in length).
One interesting aspect was the changing of the sky behind the Tetons. My digital camera didn't do it justice since it automatically adjusted for light levels, but you could see the shadow approaching from the west behind the range and later the lifting of the shadow, providing a sort of weird false dawn near the end of the eclipse.
Prior to this expedition, I had prepared some observation tools. I didn't finish the ambitious scheme I vaguely outlined in this post (ran out of time and energy), but I did come up with a nice, simple projection method (small telescope projecting normal image into a box) by which I could count six sunspots on the Sun and partially melt the plastic frames on two very cheap eyepieces of a very cheap telescope that I acquired for this purpose (when the telescope was off-center, the sunlight going through the scope was brushing the edges of the eyepiece holders). Worth the price, but not a problem that I was aware of from reading up on this sort of telescope design. I didn't bother with it at later stages of the eclipse since I had also brought solar glasses and one could observe the total eclipse itself with the naked eye.
The final interesting aspect of this was the traffic. I have never witnessed heavy traffic so purposeful as today. We must have traveled 50 miles in heavy traffic (on single lane roads) that was at or above the speed limit aside from occasional burps. That is unheard of either in Yellowstone or Grand Tetons National Parks (we started our trip in the former around 4am). Usually some animal ambles onto the road or an RV putters along at 25 MPH, putting a halt to that. Not this time.
Moderator Hall of Fame
So, I know you all have read the moderator guidelines and remember the very important "Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting." bit, yes? Well, I went looking for who the worst offenders were against that out of curiousity. I'm not sure it's really proper to shame them here though. You lot can leave your opinions on that here and us staff types will discuss it later.
What I absolutely can and will post are the badasses who have most excellent ratios of upmods to downmods. Without further ado, here's everyone with over a thousand upmods to their credit and a downmod percentage of less than 10%.
+--------------+-----------------+
| percent_down | nickname |
+--------------+-----------------+
| 0.0865 | VLM |
| 0.1188 | anubi |
| 0.1209 | AnonTechie |
| 0.2067 | tonyPick |
| 0.4737 | redneckmother |
| 0.5438 | Reziac |
| 0.6222 | CoolHand |
| 0.6494 | Bobs |
| 0.7171 | WillAdams |
| 0.8937 | McGruber |
| 1.1099 | GlennC |
| 1.1341 | fritsd |
| 1.2910 | maxwell demon |
| 1.3060 | pinchy |
| 1.3723 | HiThere |
| 1.4609 | monster |
| 1.8067 | DannyB |
| 1.8447 | J053 |
| 1.8601 | quacking duck |
| 2.2772 | deimtee |
| 2.4750 | mhajicek |
| 2.5053 | Unixnut |
| 2.6012 | dak664 |
| 2.6693 | zocalo |
| 2.8353 | Yog-Yogguth |
| 2.8932 | rts008 |
| 3.1125 | khchung |
| 3.2325 | The Archon V2.0 |
| 3.5069 | GungnirSniper |
| 3.5307 | canopic jug |
| 3.7419 | Freeman |
| 3.7582 | jelizondo |
| 4.3070 | turgid |
| 4.3096 | hubie |
| 4.5095 | bradley13 |
| 4.8469 | Scruffy Beard 2 |
| 4.9924 | Nerdfest |
| 5.1967 | Kymation |
| 6.1929 | Bloopie |
| 6.2708 | linkdude64 |
| 7.2055 | SpockLogic |
| 7.2575 | acid andy |
| 7.3139 | NotSanguine |
| 7.4517 | Ethanol-fueled |
| 8.5932 | KiloByte |
| 9.5238 | Hawkwind |
| 9.6141 | bart9h |
+--------------+-----------------+
Congrats to VLM. He is currently Da Man.
Well, Shit
So, yesterday I moved my car into The Roomie's parking space, moved my boat out of the yard and into mine, and mowed the yard. All was good and celebratory beer was drank.
Enter today. I go outside for a smoke and while enjoying it I think to myself, "Self, TR's going to be back from his customer service road trip today. You should jockey things back around before he gets home." This sounded like a fine and courteous idea, so I got up and proceeded towards said goal.
Unfortunately when I went to lift up the tongue of my boat trailer (Well balanced. Boat and trailer together weigh maybe 500lbs. Load on my arms maybe 50lbs.) that I'd moved easily the day before and wag it back over into the grass beside TR's boat. For some unknown reason, my back takes that specific moment to remind me that I started having birthdays beyond my 40th within the past few years; or, to put it more succinctly, it just shit right out on me.
Damned traitorous body parts. If it weren't for all the skills and wisdom you tend to pick up along the way, I'd say getting older sucked.
This has put me entirely not in the mood to bandy words with my peers and adversaries. My apologies to those who will likely never know how utterly wrong some comment of theirs is. To those in need of mocking, leave a note here and I'll get to you as soon as the pain's lessened enough to think through. See you lot in a week or so, I expect.
My 4th of July Coup
In case anyone's been wondering why a hefty plurality if not an outright majority of the stories pushed over the weekend and the first couple days of the week came from yours truly, it's because I hopped on my cavalry bear, rode all over the country, and beat all the Editors except martyb (who I saved for last and only had to threaten into submission) upside the head with a double-barrel chainsaw.
Or it's because I saw there was pretty much nothing except partisan hack jobs and bloody stupid garbage that I sincerely hope the Eds never publish in the submission queue and quickly subbed everything remotely interesting that I found in my feed reader.
Believe whichever amuses you the most.
Ed Fail
Looks like we let the story queue run completely dry last night for about 3.5 hours. Feel free to give the Eds some good-natured ribbing over it here.
Billy Joel on Trump
The fine pieces of shit over at Rolling Stone recently interviewed Billy Joel:
Critics used to give you a hard time. But it seems like in the past few years you've become cool.
Look, man, Trump is president, so all kinds of weird shit can happen.What do you make of that?
I'm still flabbergasted. I try to stay out of politics. I am a private citizen and I have a right to believe in my own political point of view, but I try not to get up on a soapbox and tell people how to think. I've been to shows where people start haranguing the audience about what's going on politically and I'm thinking, "You know, this isn't why I came here." As a matter of fact, one of the biggest cheers of the night comes when we do "Piano Man" and I sing, "They know that it's me that they're coming to see to forget about life for a while," and the audience lets out this huge "ahhhh" and I say, "OK, yeah, don't forget that." We're more like court jesters than court philosophers.
Normally I wouldn't even pay attention to some celebrity spouting off on politics (Because who gives a damn?) but Joel absolutely nails what a whole lot of folks are thinking on the matter. Tip of the hat to the Piano Man for keeping it classy.
FBI files on Gary Gygax
In the early 1980’s, GYGAX had been generating about $1 million per year in income. [Redacted] advised that GYGAX spent his money frivolously. GYGAX was involved in an unpleasant divorce and [Redacted] further advised that GYGAX was a drug abuser. GYGAX is approximately 55 years of age and is currently [redacted]. He lives on Madison Street in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and may be contacted at (414) xxx-xxxx. GYGAX maintains a mailing address as follows: P. O. Box 388, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. [Redacted] considers GYGAX to be eccentric and frightening. He is known to carry a weapon and was proud of his record of personally answering any letter coming from a prison. GYGAX set up a holding company in Liberia to avoid paying taxes. He is known to be a member of the Libertarian Party.
Oh dear.
