Author: Christopher Burg

Large Free Library

Here in the Twin Cities quite a few houses have little free libraries (as opposed to Little Free Libraries, which are specifically sanctioned by some 501 nonprofit organization that thinks it owns that term), which are small boxes filled with books. Anybody can take a book and it’s expected that anybody taking a book should also leave a book.

Little free libraries are a neat concept but some garbage collectors in Turkey decided to go bigger:

Turkish garbage collectors in the country’s capital city of Ankara have opened a public library that is full of books that were originally destined to be put into landfill. The workers began collecting discarded books and opened the new library in the Çankaya district of Ankara. News of the library has spread and now people have begun donating books directly to the library, rather than throwing them away.

[…]

The library now has over 6,000 fiction and non-fiction books and includes a children’s section, an area dedicated to scientific research books, and a number of English and French language books for those who are bilingual.

I would love to see this become a trend here in the United States. Although there are a lot of opportunities here to either donate unwanted books or sell them, I know a lot of books still end up in a landfill. Those books are effectively free inventory for anybody who wants to start a library of any size.

Imaginary Collectives of People

There are few things in the universe as precious as an edgy atheist who makes a snide remark about imaginary sky people only to turn around and discuss societies, cultures, and other imaginary concepts as if they were real.

These individuals usually claim to have given themselves over entirely to reason. If something cannot be proven, they claim to not believe in it. Despite their claims though, most of them believe in plenty of things that can’t be proven. As I’ve noted numerous times before, there is no way to prove societies exist because societies, like all collectives of humanity, are concepts that only exists in our head. Ditto for cultures. In reality there are only individual human beings. Any attempt to treat individual human beings as a cohesive group becomes a fiction.

Thus I’m lead to conclude that most of these self-proclaimed atheists are actually theists but instead of, as they put it, believing in imaginary sky people they believe in imaginary collectives of people.

Postliterate America

A few science fiction novels explore the concept of a postliterate society. In a postliterate society, reading and writing have been predominantly or entirely replaced by multimedia. Could the United States be transitioning into a postliterate society? The question may have been absurd to ask just a few years ago but I think there is reason today to give the question serious consideration:

I’ll make this short: The thing you’re doing now, reading prose on a screen, is going out of fashion.

We’re taking stock of the internet right now, with writers who cover the digital world cataloging some of the most consequential currents shaping it. If you probe those currents and look ahead to the coming year online, one truth becomes clear. The defining narrative of our online moment concerns the decline of text, and the exploding reach and power of audio and video.

Writing has been the predominant method of recording information since, at least, the fourth millennium BC when cuneiform first emerged (but for all we know there could have been an even older writing system that hasn’t been discovered yet). This shouldn’t surprise anybody. Writing systems have many advantages but one of their biggest advantages is versatility. You can scratch written information into a wet piece of clay, chisel it into stone, mark it on a piece of paper with ink, or record it to a hard drive. Whether you have access to no technology, modern technology, or anything in between, you can write information.

The biggest limitation of alternative forms of recording information such as pictures, audio, and video has been the cost of creating and consuming them. Only in the last century have photo cameras, audio recorders, video cameras, and televisions become widely available. And only only in very recent times have computers powerful enough and software advanced enough to enable individuals to easily create and consume media become widely available. Thanks to those advancements we live in a society where postliteracy is a possibility.

For the cost of even a low spec smartphone any individual can create a video and upload it to YouTube. For a little more money any individual can acquire a computer powerful enough for them to do based video editing. As with computing power, video editing software continues to become cheaper. It also continues to become easier to use and more featureful, which is why so many people are able to harness the power of artificial intelligence to make fake porn videos.

This widespread availability of media creation and consumption technology has already had a tremendous impact. You can find instructional videos online for almost anything you could want to do. Do you want to fix a running toilet? A quick YouTube search will show you tons of videos walking you through how to fix one. Do you want to learn proper squatting form? Once again, a quick YouTube search will result in tons of videos of professional and amateur weight lifters explaining and showing how to properly squat. But the explosion of media hasn’t stopped at instructional videos.

Most political discussion online seem to involve memes, images with a bit of text bolted on. At one time creating and viewing even the simplest of memes was no simple feat. Today there are free websites that allow you to upload a picture and enter some text and it will spit out and even host your meme. In a few seconds you can create and then share your meme with the world without investing anything more than your time.

I’m not saying the United States is a postliterate society at this point but I believe the foundation necessary for such a transition exists and there is evidence to suggest that such a shift could be taking place. Think back to math class when you asked your teacher why you had to learn multiplication tables when you had a calculator that could multiply for you. Your teacher likely said that you wouldn’t always have a calculator with you. Today anybody with a smartphone in their pocket also has a calculator. Soon the same question that has been so often asked about multiplication tables could be often asked about reading and writing. It’s an interesting thing to ponder.

The Government Giveth and the Government Taketh Away

Anybody who has waited for-fucking-ever in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles so some grumpy goon could take their money and stamp a card has already experienced one of the best arguments against government healthcare. However, inefficiency isn’t the only argument against government healthcare. Another argument against the stupidity that is government healthcare is the fact that governments like to change the rules on a whim:

WASHINGTON — After allowing states to impose work requirements for Medicaid enrollees, the Trump administration is now pondering lifetime limits on adults’ access to coverage.

The government giveth… OK, the government never gives, it only takes. It would be far more accurate for me to say that the government taketh and then taketh some more. My point is the same either way. Government may decide to appear benevolent by providing services like Medicaid but it might then take it away or restrict it in some manner. And if you don’t like it? Tough shit. You’re not allowed to disassociate yourself with the government.

Private enterprises may come and go. They may also disappear. But you can bind them into a contract, which limits their ability to change the rules on you. Moreover, if they do something that you disagree with, you can disassociate with them and find another to do business with.

Jeff Sessions Is a Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain

What should you do if you suffer from chronic pain? According to Jess Sessions, you should just toughen the fuck up:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions this week said that the solution for many people who suffer from chronic pain should be to “take aspirin and tough it out.”

Jeff Sessions reminds me of a villain from an old Saturday morning cartoon. If you remember such shows, the villains are often pure evil. Since they have no redeeming characteristics, the concept of moral grey area can be safely avoided by the show runners.

Jeff Sessions has no redeeming characteristics. He seems to be evil just for the sake of being evil. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wipes his ass with a puppy after taking a dump just because doing so would be evil. On the upside, since he reflects a Saturday morning cartoon villain, there’s a good chance that his evil schemes will be continuously thwarted by a group of mutated turtles with martial arts skills or giant robots that can transform into trucks.

The Government of Maine Must Be Abolished

The government of Maine must be abolished. I know what you’re thinking, I’m an anarchist so I say this about every governmental body. However, the government of Maine is deserving of special scrutiny because it committed a sin so egregious that no justification for its continued existence matters any longer. That sin was the failure to use the Oxford comma:

Drivers with Oakhurst Dairy filed the lawsuit in 2014 seeking more than $10 million. Court documents filed Thursday show that they settled for $5 million.

A federal appeals court decided to keep the drivers’ lawsuit alive last year. The suit concerned an exemption from Maine’s overtime law that says it doesn’t apply to “canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of” foods.

The disagreement stemmed from the fact there’s no Oxford, or serial, comma in the “packing for shipment or distribution” part. The drivers said the words referred to the activity of packing and shipping, but they don’t do any packing.

As I’m prone to say, you either use the Oxford comma or you’re wrong.

Playing with Other People’s Money

Is government deficit spending good? If you ask the party in power, yes. If you ask the party out of power, no. The Republican Party likes to advertise itself as being fiscally conservative, which is a label that implies an opposition to deficit spending. And the Republicans did decry deficit spending… during the reign of Barack Obama. But now their party is in power so deficit spending is a good thing:

On Wednesday, Congressional leadership seemed united behind a budget deal that looks truly awful — at least if you care about the country’s financial future. The bipartisan deal blasts through budget caps and could return the U.S. to trillion-dollar deficits in short order. Right after getting historic tax reform passed, politicians apparently seem content to toss a huge future tax hike onto the next generation. After all, the bills will eventually come due.

And they are serious bills indeed. The proposed deal would include a one-year debt limit suspension, while raising defense spending by $80 billion and non-defense expense by $63 billion. The budget for 2019 would see similar increases, and over the 10-year window, this Chuck Schumer-Mitch McConnell budget could result in $1.5 trillion more added to the national debt.

The poles have flipped. Now the Democratic Party is suddenly concerned about deficit spending.

The United States government is like a teenager who has racked up thousands in credit card debt. It is so far in debt at this point that it cannot hope to pay it off. Hell, it can barely pay the interest on the debt. And if it’s already so far in the hole that it can’t possibly pay off its debt, why should it care if it goes further into debt?

The national debt can’t be repaid and is therefore no longer a financial point of interest. It’s purely a political point of interest that is brought up by the party not in power to criticize the party in power.

Just More Heroes Doing Hero Things

For the life of me I can’t figure out why our heroes in blue have such a dismal reputation:

BALTIMORE — The officers’ job during some of the bloodiest years in Baltimore was to get guns off the streets.

Instead, they plundered money, jewelry, drugs and weapons and gouged the cash-strapped city for overtime and hours they never worked, according to their own admissions and testimony in ongoing criminal cases.

Over the past four years, some members of the Gun Trace Task Force stole more than $300,000, at least three kilos of cocaine, 43 pounds of marijuana, 800 grams of heroin and hundreds of thousands of dollars in watches from suspected drug dealers and civilians, according to officers’ plea agreements and statements in federal court.

They admit to putting illegal trackers on the cars of suspected dealers so they could rob their homes and sell off any drugs and guns they found.

This sounds an awful lot like the Minneapolis Gang Strike Force. In both cases officers were assigned to specific duties and used their newfound positions of authority to rob people left and right. Moreover, it appears as though the Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force followed in the footsteps of the Minneapolis Gang Strike Force in that it committed so many crimes that they could no longer be effectively swept under the rug.

I’m sure Minneapolis and Baltimore aren’t unique. After all, what else could be expected of a group of officers given tremendous powers, in addition to the tremendous powers they already have, and almost no oversight? Such an environment is custom made for corrupt behavior.

Look at All the Economic Stimulus

A lot of statists cheered when it was announced that the Super Bowl would be coming to Minneapolis. Not only would Minneapolis have the honor of hosting the larger religious festival of the year but its piousness would be rewarded with untold riches from a million, err, 125,000 visitors hurling cash at the local establishments!

As it turns out, the fantastic economic stimulus that was promised was just that, fantasy:

Restaurants along Nicollet Mall and at the Mall of America saw plenty of traffic, but many eateries located away from those immediate areas reported quiet weeks as regular customers stayed at home to avoid the expected Super Bowl bedlam. Downtown Minneapolis skyway eateries also saw customer counts dwindle as the week went on as more downtown workers stayed away from the office and worked remotely.

Super Bowl week was “the worst week ever for us,” said Brenda Langton, co-owner of Spoonriver, located by the Guthrie Theater and just blocks away from U.S. Bank Stadium, site of Super Bowl LII. Sales were down by 75 percent.
Langton also voiced frustration that the media repeated claims by the Minnesota Super Bowl Host Committee that the Super Bowl would draw 1 million visitors, a number that turned out to not reflect the actual number of out-of-towners coming to the area. The big-number prediction wound up scaring office workers and suburban diners away from crowds that never existed, she said.

“The media needs to stop putting the fear of God into everybody and understand that other cities have weathered [the Super Bowl] just fine and not to terrify everyone,” Langton said. “I just want to have people come back downtown and get over the Super Bowl. It was very good for a few people and that’s what happens.”

PinKU Japanese Street Food, a quick-service Japanese restaurant in Northeast Minneapolis, had some of its slowest days of business ever during Super Bowl weekend, said Co-founder and Head Chef John Sugimura On Super Bowl Sunday, for example, the restaurant made just $303, only 15 to 20 percent of its typical Sunday revenue.

While the entire article lies behind a paywall, it’s not a very effective one. Just disable JavaScript for the domain and the story will display. You can also find the contents of the article in the page’s source code.

This news is only surprising to the economically ignorant. Stadiums and large events don’t create wealth. The most they do is shift wealth around. Money that individuals would have spent on other forms of entertainment are instead spent on attending stadium events. Moreover, large events can run the usual customer base out of town. If I’m an employee working near a stadium and want to grab a quick lunch, I’m going to likely avoid any restaurants in my area during stadium events because I’m worried that they’ll be too busy for me to get served within the block of time I have.

The security large events like the Super Bowl employ can also scare people away. I, for one, have a policy against attending events that require military hardware to defend. Any event that’s thought to be a big enough target to warrant such security is riskier than I want to bother with. I also have a general distain for militarization in general so even if the risk isn’t high enough to warrant the security, I don’t feel like living the life of a poor bastard in an occupied foreign city even for only a few hours.

So stadiums and large events merely shift wealth around. A few establishments will enjoy a significant windfall but they are the exception that proves the rule. Most establishments will notice, at most, a minor increase and oftentimes they’ll suffer a notable decrease in business.