Downside Detected
And in Bay Area news:
Auto glass repair businesses suffer as Oakland break-ins decline.
A decline in car break-ins across Oakland is being welcomed as a public safety win, but it is also contributing to a downturn for some local auto glass repair businesses.
According to Oakland Police Department, car break-ins are down by some 37% from the previous year and significantly lower than the preceding decade, in which reported break-ins, or “bipping,” reached an impressive 30,000 per year, or around 82 break-ins each and every day. With some single blocks reporting 10 such thrilling events occurring daily. And with shattered car glass being dubbed “San Francisco diamonds.”
At Low Price Auto Glass on San Leandro Street in East Oakland, owner Raj Singh said the decrease has directly impacted a once-reliable portion of his business. “There is the door glass repair if there is any break-ins or vandalism — that segment of my business has been down about 30 percent,” Singh said.
Apparently, Bay Area businesses have also been hit by a lamentable reduction in catalytic converter thefts. Happily, however,
Singh said demand for windshield replacements caused by road debris remains steady enough to keep his business operating.
And as someone quips in reply,
Sadly, a fall in gun violence has led to layoffs in the East Bay mortuary business.
Via Kane.
Consider this an open thread.
Can you blame him?
They’re coming up with new ideas all the time. This one could come in handy.
Devon excoriates a woman making idiotic anti-capitalist arguments. Here are the insults he hurls at her:
“you incomplete set of plastic picnic utensils”
“you factory-defective lawn flamingo”
“you British pub food connoisseur”
“you Vogon poetry appreciator”
Ms Mattei deserves all that and more. Her wrongness is so dense, so fundamental, and so fundamentally perverse, you’d have to burn down the whole thing.
And inevitably, she teaches her “heterodox economics,” her Marxoid woo, at the University of Tulsa.
Chris Snowdon preferred the term gurning airhead.
Only in academia, where being ludicrous and unrealistic is no career impediment, and often an advantage, could this claptrap survive. It’s actually quite remarkable to see what you can get away with in those lofty towers of learning.
The grinning, oblivious self-contradiction; the wild, unsupported claims; the invocation of conspiracies; the noble savage crap. The claim that “humanity has no essence for self-interest.” And all this in under three minutes.
Or as someone quipped pithily, “I can definitely imagine this chick working the land.”
I don’t think the cat was looking for somewhere to empty itself. Though to be fair, I’m not actually sure what that would look like. My impression was that the cat was practising its stealth mode.
It was a bit like catching someone playing air guitar.
In the real world.
I rather like this one:
TBF, though, it is often said the average ‘Murcan couldn’t identify Beachy Head, the Matterhorn, or tell Kilimanjaro from Ayers Rock, but then we don’t have journalistic luminaries like the BBC to guide us through our muddle.
[ Monitors lawn for signs of irritated cat. ]
Did the cat look like this?
Happily, no. It was more of a body language thing.
I should add that I’m not the best at ‘reading’ cats. Their minds are a bit of a mystery.
Dogs seem much more straightforward, much easier to read. For the most part, they’re just happy to be on the team.
I like cats, aesthetically, but I’m more of a dog person.
Was it by any chance a now-fully-grown Social Justice Kitten?
Which is how such people should be dealt with, though in a direct engagement would be better if possible. Unfortunately she likely won’t see that nor directly engage herself. They rant and rage regarding stuff about which they clearly ignorant. They have set themselves up as the “smart” ones and they will not be moved by logic and reason. Nor will *most* observers. People go with the strong horse. Ridicule, the sharper and more insulting the better, but also in the context of direct engagement.
Don’t bother lining up, gents, she crushes hearts like dollar store lawn chairs.
(Anyone aroused and David will up the price of drinks and optometrist exams)
[ Quietly ups price of drinks. ]
She sits on them?
Oh, right, day ending in ‘Y’.
It’s almost enough to make me want …… price controls.
They penciled in MOUNTAINS near Houston? To what end?
That’s hilarious, especially given how superior the BBC consider themselves. I do think though that dependence on AI is making its users universally stupid.
I don’t know where or what Beachy Head is, gonna guess some place in England (wasn’t that name in the title of some early 20th century Literature novel?), but I do know where and what the other three are. Of course I’m older, and went to school back when they taught geography and other useful things.
Near Eastbourne, on the south coast. Big white chalk cliffs, a famous lighthouse, and a favoured suicide spot, apparently.
Though they probably don’t put that in the brochure.
Agreed, and it also makes it easier to fake competence.
I do not know how one could be so ignorant as to rail against “capitalism” which is actually just open markets (as opposed to government control). For most of human history there were open markets and people organized as best they could to build and buy/sell. A 5000 yr old clay tablet from the middle east documents an agreement between 5 or so men (12?) to pool their gold and buy goods to then transport and sell. That was capitalism. The difference now is that we have banks and institutions like corporations and legal systems to organize larger enterprises. Barter will not let you build autos or cell phones. Gov control always always leads to shortages and poverty. What the hell alternative to free enterprise (aka capitalism) do they imagine?
Heh. Not unfair.
They have no imagination — jealousy and the autocratic impulse have driven it out.
So . . . universities have competition?
‘Capitalism’ is a Marxist straw man, an attempt to make normal human activity an ideology inimical to the ‘warmth of collectivism’.
The problem with capitalism from a leftist perspective is that some people (like Musk) succeed and others do not. They refuse to see that for the most part you can only succeed by making other people’s lives better. The things like cell phones “just appear” in their world, and not because some genius risked it all to create it. Where people get rich by cheating it is usually because of government favors like special contracts or regs, not because of the market per se.
Greek yoghurt with honey, enhanced with cherries, cranberries and blueberries.
Oh yes.
Diverse.
On which, more tomorrow.
Everyone’s a kulak.
Often mistaken for the White Cliffs of Dover, it is in the final scene of the film version of the Who’s rock opera…so called…Quadrophenia, where Sting rides his Vespa over the cliff for Godknowswhat reason. Stupid ending. Curious if that’s why people kill themselves there or if it started before that.
Sir Robert would not be pleased.
For years, I thought “Beachy Head” was an activity, and that the English were shockingly liberal to allow it. I know better now.
It starts to make more sense when you realise that the term “capitalism” was made up by the Engels and Marx group as a strawman against which to pit their “communism”.
A lot of the problems with education these days could have been resolved by people not accepting the use of the term at all early on.
Lazy nomenclature results in the dishonest hijacking of said nomenclature. Who knew?
The left does that a lot: invent words, or change the meaning of words to suit their malign purposes. E.g., altering the meaning of “racism” so as to claim that blacks cannot be racists (even though racism is far more common among blacks than whites.)