Category: Meta

What Ezra Said (on Ads)

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Mr Klein, that is.

Is All Publicity Good Publicity?

The viciously RightWing Center For Union Facts is currently advertising on my sidebar. As always, I don’t screen my advertisers for opinion because I don’t endorse any of them. But though I’m happy to take the Center’s cash, it’s worth pointing out that they’re a business front group that exists for no purpose save to smear and attack workers trying to organize for better wages, benefits, and treatment. Pretty loathsome folks. More on them here

His policy is the same as mine.

Then again, he actually has enough readers that advertisers specifically want to be on his site.

That being said, if you see an ad you find objectionable, email me. I won’t pull the ad, but I may ridicule it.

Small F#$%ing World, But I’d Hate to Paint It.

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I was in the lunch line today, waiting to wrap my food, and the guy ahead of me was having problem with cling wrap. (have to wrap the food if you leave the cafeteria)

I made a comment about the stuff being the bane of everyone’s life, and he looks up, and goes “Matthew Saroff!!!“

It was Scott Campanella, who ran member services for ages at Arisia*. He’s also at BD, but he works at a different building in the industrial park.

Small bloody world.

I think that we’ve both picked up a bit of weight (I KNOW I have), and he’s gotten all the hair that I’ve lost (that picture in the profile is 28 years old).

On a note of meta, I’ll be changing the blog address today, to something a bit more mnemonically friendly (i.e. NOT misspelling the word “forty” ). I’ve already figured out how to autoforward from this addy.

I’m working on this, so posting will be light.

*Arisia is a science fiction convention in Boston that I founded in the early 1990s, I ran the first two.

This is How You Apologize if You are Mensch

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Brian Caplan offers an apology.

EconLog, Mea Culpa: How I Succumbed to Anti-Foreign Bias, Bryan Caplan: Library of Economics and Liberty

Mea Culpa: How I Succumbed to Anti-Foreign Bias
Bryan Caplan

A high fraction of immigrants are young, low-skilled, Hispanic males. Given these demographics, I long assumed that immigrants would have relatively high crime rates. While I kept this problem in perspective, I took it for granted that increased crime was a genuine drawback of immigration.

I was wrong.

A fascinating NBER Working Paper (earlier, free version here) by Kristin Butcher and Anne Piehl shows that, despite their demographics, immigrants are drastically less criminal than native-born Americans. In fact, immigrants have one-fifth the incarceration rate of natives. Yes, natives are incarcerated at five times the rate of the foreign-born:

…

Let’s be clear, the error here is minor, as he is pro large scale immigration, he was arguing for this in spite of what he thought were crime issues, which is far more benign than what Lou Dobbs done.

I tend to be closer to Dobbs than I am to Caplan, though for economic issues (I don’t believe that there are jobs Americans won’t do, just jobs they won’t do for pennies.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot??

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It now appears that I’m going have to spend more time thinking about physically posting than I do writing this. (It’s not a whole bunch in either case).

Google is requiring word verification:

Blogger’s spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What’s a spam blog?) Since you’re an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

Just because no human beings read this, does not mean that a human being did not write this.

On Blogging Facts and Opinions

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This hobby, blogging, to support another hobby, my annual printed on paper newsletter is just that a hobby.

My opinions ans analysis are my own, and if I say something bad about a government program, campaign, etc., most likely I will not be contacting that government program, campaign, etc. before posting.

If you think that it’s wrong, post in the comments, or send to my email, and I will consider your points.

If you convince me that I’m wrong, I’ll retract or take other appropriate measures.

Why Are So Many Highly Skilled People Eking Out a Living as Bloggers

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I’m a strictly amateur blogger. I support my family as an engineer. I don’t need your money, but there are a lot of talented and highly educated people who live on the hairy edge of poverty blogging.

Phoenix Woman, who I’ve known since our Table Talk days, gives a good reason as to why:

The reason that there are so many great bloggers is that there are so many highly-educated, highly-talented throwaways. People who for reasons of cost, or health, or because their conscience was better than their management’s have been stripped of their jobs, replaced by foreigners, sent into humiliated exile in their own land. And, again, this is by plan. The H1-B (and other visas) have been used to drive down American wages and working conditions. The oversupply of scientists, engineers, and other highly-skilled people is deliberate, bipartisan, and planned at the highest levels of government.

The conventional wisdom for the past 25 years has been cheap labor economics, and the subsistance level bloggers are just one symptom of people who have done what the conventional wisdom says to do, and have been shafted as a result.

While free trade is a good thing in the abstract, a bad free trade deal is worse than no free trade deal.

No More Dead Bloggers

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I’m not a professional blogger. Heck, I’m not likely ever to even be semi-pro.

In fact, if I pay for my anniversary dinner with my wife, I’ll count myself lucky.

That being said, there are pros out there, and a lot of them are VERY good and one of them, Jim Capozzola of the Rittenhouse Review, just died because he did not have health insurance. Go to Suburban Guerrilla, and read No More Dead Bloggers.

This is a Paris Free Zone

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I am not referring to the city of lights, neither am I referring to the similarly named town in Texas.

Rather, I am referring to the hotel heiress.

Absent some sort of political activity, such as endorsements, running for office (PLEASE GOD NO!!), or her attempting to assassinate someone, she will not be mentioned here.

That is all.