I can safely say all of my Christmas shopping is done, completed yesterday with the purchase of the last gift on my list. I traveled with BeezleBub to look for and decide on which gift to purchase, and we had a good time. We even had a little bit of time to swing by the former Weekend Pundit Newfound Lake property to see what kind of house had been built on it by the folks who purchased the land from me 14 years ago. I can honestly say I was...umm...underwhelmed. Basically it’s a plain white box with dark blue doors, no picture windows that allowed any view of the surrounding mountains or of Newfound Lake , and flat ‘landscaping’, if you can call it that.
Such a waste of a great property, even if I say so myself...and I just did.
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California’s new law that effectively bans the gig economy hasn’t worked the way Gavin Newsom and the state legislators promised it would.
Many of those working in the gig economy are now jobless.
Either they didn’t think this through, or the outcome of their legislation is exactly what they wanted because it gives them even more power over great unwashed middle class. Of course the smart middle class folks have been abandoning California in increasing numbers and taking their businesses (an taxes) with them.
Like that’s helping California’s increasingly fragile economy.
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John Miltimore has a roundup of the 10 worst state laws, proposed or passed, for this year. Some I’d heard of (California’s anti-Gig Economy law mentioned above being one of them). Others were surprising and stupid.
One such ‘stupid’ law passed in two states – California and Oregon:
3. & 2. Oregon and California's Statewide Rent Control Laws (Passed)It’s all about control, not housing. It’s always about control. They really don’t care about affordable housing despite what they might say. As they used to say in Rome, “Dominus iudicat populos iudica illos per actus, non suis verbis.”
Economists disagree on a lot of things, but they pretty much all agree on this: Rent control is really harmful. “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing,” observed Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck. Alas, new laws in Oregon and California, the first of their kind, show how little politicians understand about economics. The caps on rent are sure to further reduce housing supply and quality, and increase housing prices in the long run. California's housing problems are well documented. Unfortunately, they’re about to get a lot worse. (As FEE has observed, the solution to high housing costs is more housing, not price controls.)
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I have to agree with Jeff Minick on this one: What’s so wrong with using plain ol’ English?
It seems these days using gobbledygook employing English words to make it seem that the speaker/writer is more intelligent than they really are is becoming more common. But rather than conveying more precise information, it tends to make things less precise and muddies the meaning of what someone is trying to say. Here’s an example:
A specter haunts our culture--it is that people will eventually be unable to say, 'They fell in love and married,' let alone understand the language of Romeo and Juliet, but will as a matter of course say 'Their libidinal impulses being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives and integrated them within the same frame of reference.'Twenty words were used to try to convey the same information as provided by six words in Plain ‘Ol English. But the twenty words were less precise and tended to muddy the meaning of what was being communicated. Other than making it appear that whoever said/wrote those words are more intelligent
Keep this in mind: It’s the same method used by politicians to make it seem they are promising one thing when they really mean something else, particularly when it comes to spending other people’s money.
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Want more crime? Then this is how you get more crime.
Suburban retailers have blamed the increase on a decision by Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx to take a softer approach to shoplifting cases. Foxx has instructed her attorneys to reject felony-level retail theft charges unless a person is accused of stealing more than $1,000 in merchandise at a single event.What has been the result of Foxx’s decision? The same as seen in some California cities that have done the same thing: a drastic increase in shoplifting from area stores. When shoplifters know they won’t be charged with a felony for shoplifting less that $1000 worth of merchandise, they will steal just under that amount. What will happen going down the road? Even more crimes will be committed, most of them more serious than shoplifting.
What Foxx is doing is ensuring the crime rate in Chicago will skyrocket as more than a few studies have shown that if the ‘small’ crimes are ignored, the number of big crimes will increase. Chicago already has a major crime problem that State’s Attorney Foxx is making much worse, something it can ill afford.
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Any time I think the New York Times can’t sink any lower, they prove me wrong.
Their latest dive into depravity? Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, a hard Leftist, explains that impeachment offsets the tyranny of the Electoral College, giving losers their rightful victory.
So is it going to become a nightmare version of “Heads, we win. Tails, you lose,”? That seems to be what Ms. Goldberg is advocating. She doesn’t seem to care that the very thing she’s advocating is what will lead to tyranny. I guess that’s okay with her as long as she is on the side of the tyrants.
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Seeing as we are seeing the last full week of 2019, I have taken vacation time until after the first of the year. I won’t be lounging around, wasting time surfing the web or excoriating trolls whose entire purpose is to perform drive-by accusations with no links or other proof who then demand that everyone else prove their points for them.
I will be spending time with family, visiting long-time friends I haven’t seen in years (we’ve kept in touch, but haven’t been able to get together), catching up with chores here at The Gulch, and putting in some time writing something other blog posts.
The only company I have at the moment is the feline contingent here at The Gulch as the WP Mom is down at one of my sisters’ place until at least Christmas (if not until New Year’s).
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the lake is freezing over, the scent of smoke from woodstoves is wafting on the air, and where Christmas decorations abound.