The men the Amer­i­can peo­ple admire most extrav­a­gantly are the most dar­ing liars; the men they detest most vio­lently are those who try to tell them the truth.

H.L. Mencken

Comic for July 15, 2012

[Dil­bert Daily Strip]

I’ve found that this sort of thing is extremely com­mon in some soft­ware companies.

The Week­end Inter­view with Joel Kotkin: The Great Cal­i­for­nia Exo­dus. And things will only get worse in the com­ing years as Demo­c­ra­tic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre imple­ment their “smart growth” plans to cram the pro­le­tariat into high-density hous­ing. “What I find rep­re­hen­si­ble beyond belief is that the peo­ple push­ing [high-density hous­ing] them­selves live in single-family homes and often drive very fancy cars, but want every­one else to live like my grand­mother did in Brownsville in Brook­lyn in the 1920s,” Mr. Kotkin declares.

“The new régime”—his name for pro­gres­sive appa­ratchiks who run California’s government—“wants to destroy the essen­tial rea­son why peo­ple move to Cal­i­for­nia in order to pro­tect their own lifestyles.”

Hous­ing is merely one front of what he calls the “pro­gres­sive war on the mid­dle class.” Another is the cap-and-trade law AB32, which will raise the cost of energy and drive out man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs with­out mak­ing even a dent in global car­bon emis­sions. Then there are the renew­able port­fo­lio stan­dards, which man­date that a third of the state’s energy come from renew­able sources like wind and the sun by 2020. California’s elec­tric­ity prices are already 50% higher than the national average.

Oh, and don’t for­get the $100 bil­lion bul­let train. Mr. Kotkin calls the runaway-cost train “clas­sic Cal­i­for­nia.” “Where [Brown] with the state going bank­rupt is even think­ing about an expen­di­ture like this is beyond com­pre­hen­sion. When the schools are falling apart, when the roads are falling apart, the bridges are unsafe, the state econ­omy is in free fall. We’re still doing much worse than the rest of the coun­try, we’ve got this grow­ing per­ma­nent wel­fare class, and high-speed rail is going to solve this?”

[…]

Accord­ing to Mr. Kotkin, these upwardly mobile fam­i­lies are flee­ing in droves. As a result, Cal­i­for­nia is turn­ing into a two-and-a-half-class soci­ety. On top are the “entrenched incum­bents” who inher­ited their wealth or came to Cal­i­for­nia early and made their money. Then there’s a shrunken mid­dle class of pub­lic employ­ees and, miles below, a per­ma­nent wel­fare class. As it stands today, about 40% of Cal­i­for­ni­ans don’t pay any income tax and a quar­ter are on Med­ic­aid. [The Wall Street Jour­nal]

A good arti­cle from a few months ago on the exo­dus of the pro­duc­tive class from Cal­i­for­nia, and why it’s hap­pen­ing. I’m look­ing at leav­ing myself in the not-too-distant future.

Chil­dren are like lit­tle drunks.

Sara Bareilles

The Great­est Trick the Repub­li­cans’ Anti-Government Belief Ever Pulled Off Was Con­vinc­ing Us It Actu­ally Existed. In the styl­ized but phony Kabuki the­ater of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, the Dems and their town cry­ers such as Pur­dum pre­tend to believe that the Repub­li­cans are or will shrink the state, since that belief helps (sup­pos­edly) ener­gize the Dems base to come out against the GOP even as the lie ener­gizes the GOP’s own base. But no mat­ter who wins elec­tions, big gov­ern­ment wins. [Hit and Run]

When the government’s boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right, is of no consequence.

My new Retina screen Mac­Book Pro arrived today. I’d been plan­ning to buy one even before they were announced, on the assump­tion they would come out some­time this year, and my old Mac­Book Pro (an early 2008 model) died just as they were being announced.

Although the improved screen is notice­able, the biggest improve­ment to me is how much lighter it is than the old model it replaces. On the other hand, all was not perfect–for some rea­son, it came with­out a recov­ery par­ti­tion. Since this model doesn’t have a DVD drive and didn’t come with a sys­tem disc, this would be pretty bad for any­one who got it as their only Mac and then had a prob­lem. It also kept me from turn­ing on Fil­e­vault, which requires the pres­ence of a recov­ery par­ti­tion. For­tu­nately, some search­ing turned up instruc­tions on how to cre­ate a recov­ery par­ti­tion on a sys­tem that didn’t have it.