Should we fear Amazon?

The Financial Times straddles the fence:

So: Amazon competes hard and invests heavily, just the things that make capitalism work as it should. Worries that Amazon is a threat to competition — and many people do worry about this — may therefore seem quixotic. The concern is that when the Amazon steamroller has flattened the industrial landscape, it will be free to raise prices and, more importantly, either crush or buy out any innovative rival to its established franchises.

To waive this away on the grounds that one day a new competitor will unseat Amazon, just as Amazon unseated Walmart, seems naive. Amazon has not only a huge edge in physical infrastructure, as Walmart once did. It also enjoys technological network effects to rival Microsoft’s and a trove of consumer data that would make Mark Zuckerberg blush.

Resurrecting other great ideas from the 1930s

Remember the "switch in time that saved nine"?  Why not trot it out again?  It's the Gandhi gambit:  it works only when you're up against an opponent whose principles can be turned against him.  Not, in other words, against the Second Coming of Hitler.

As a corrective, an example of more grown-up ways to resolve disputes:



My Facebook feed (now consisting largely of residents of my county who are involved with me only because of the recent election) is full of zhizzhing and dripping over who started all the incivility, and whether civility has a place in a world where whatever.  Lot's of talk about how we can't win ("any more") by being nice.  One neighbor even complained that people seem to think snowflakes just sit around singing "kum-bah-yah."  I don't think that's anyone's idea of a snowflake:  it's not their niceness that they're famous for but their thin skin, and there aren't many illusions about what's under the thin skin.  What is ever under thin skin but Old Adam?

Everything is Hitler-Eleventy

Feedback mechanisms: some tactics contain the seeds of their own destruction:

Rage is hard enough to direct, rage against everything is impossible to control.

And here's Trump-as-Hitler-Eleventissimo. Any minute now, he'll start murdering political rivals. He's already got ICE, which is just like a fascist militia, right?

Stuff that just has to be true

A blogger called "The Money Illusion" examines five widely held assumptions about important economic events of the last few years, and concludes that we too seldom re-evaluate our assumptions in the light of what later events should be teaching us:

Let’s consider 5 popular hypotheses:

1. The mortgage interest deduction has a major impact on the housing market.

2. The NASDAQ was obviously wildly overvalued in 2000.

3. Switzerland was forced to revalue its currency in January 2015.

4. The US housing market was obviously wildly overvalued in 2006.

5. Brexit would cause a recession in the UK economy.

Powerline week in pix

Fake news

As Mollie Hemingway says, if a poll shows that 53% of D's, 79% of I's, and 92% of R's believe the press lies to us on purpose, and then the press reports only that 92% of Rs don't trust them, that's an example of fake news right there.

The figure works out to 72% of everyone put together.  The press couldn't even get the support of a majority of Democrats, for Pete's sake.  CNN's ratings have dropped below those of the Food Channel.  Yet somehow commentators don't conclude that Trump gets support from people disgusted with the press, they conclude people are disgusted with the press because Trump undermined their sterling reputation.

Update:  Sheryl Attkisson's 52 times the press misrepresented the news about President Trump.

Be careful whom you sue

Mueller's PR stunt of filing charges against Russian companies unexpectedly pitted him against flesh-eating lawyers for a client with nothing to lose.  The prosecution is horrified by the prospect of having to turn over Brady material to the defendants.

Candlemakers vs. the Sun

Basquiat poked fun at protectionist trade policies by pretending to petition on behalf of French candlemakers for an end to the importation of below-cost sunlight.  The only flaw I can find in his argument is that we can't see any plausible way one of our trade competitors can cut off our sunlight after we come to depend on it.

Lately, if I understand the President properly, he's taken to saying he'd actually prefer zero tariffs, and is imposing tariffs only to show other countries the cost of the ones they impose on us.  Is this really like saying we should shut out the sun because other countries are doing the same to themselves?

Whether this really is a flaw in the President's economic theory or not, however, it does seem as though the strategy can work.  Trading partners do respond to the threat of tariffs, sometimes, by agreeing to moderate their own.

The Flight 93 Campaign

I missed this Michael Anton essay from shortly before the 2016 election:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high—except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon.

The story has a happy ending:

Michael Anton ... was a senior contributing editor of American Greatness from July 2016 until January 2017. He currently serves as deputy assistant to the president for strategic communications on the National Security Council.

Wild Irish Rose

Some of you might be celebrating a bit this weekend. Here's a faithful companion for you... well, a companion, in any case.







There's too many of these songs to include them all. Some are old, and some are very sad, but it's a well-known theme.

Another narrative buster

The man early reports were itching to identify as some kind of alt-right NRA nut shooting up the liberal press turns out to be a shotgun-toting guy with a Hispanic surname, no obvious political connection, basically a disturbed young man with a history of scary obsessions.  Here's the lawsuit that started his vendetta against the Annapolis newspaper in 2011.  He believed the newspaper painted him in an unfair light after his guilty plea on an internet harassment charge.  His terrified harassment target has long since moved out of state and sleeps with a gun by her bed.  It's a shame no one at the newspaper office was similarly armed.

As ithers see us

HotAir looks at a poll on how Rs and Ds misperceive each other:

If you replace "Agnositcs or atheists" with "unaffiliated," the Rs are a little less off:  the portion of Ds would be 26%.

Might Be Fun

An alternative reality fiction called Vikingverse. I don’t know anything about it beyond what’s at that page, but it could be of interest to some.

Am I ever out of it

Real Clear listed 19 female characters that "changed TV or movies forever."  I'm kind of into this sort of thing, but I'd never heard of a surprising number of them:

1.  Princess Leia, Star Wars: OK, I at least noticed her as an early attempt at a female who was more than a prize or a McGuffin.

2.  Jane the Virgin: I may have heard of her, not sure.

3.  Clair Huxtable: I've heard of her but never watched The Cosby Show that I can recall.

4.  Mary Richards: I did watch some Mary Tyler Moore show episodes as a kid.  Did they fill me with the conviction that I could make it on my own?  I can't recall.  I guess it's possible.

5.  Sophia Burset, Orange Is the New Black: Heard of it but never watched it, no idea who she is.

6.  Jessica Huang, Fresh Off the Boat: Never heard of it or her.

7.  Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games: I think I watched it, but it made so little impression I'm unsure.

8.  Annie Hall, Annie Hall: I certainly remember her.  Perhaps she made an impact as a not-entirely-unfair take-down of a bit of a ditz who was afraid of spiders and ended up the kept woman of some soulless Hollywood mogul.

9.  Letty Ortiz, Fast and Furious:  I'm almost sure I watched this movie, but I retain no memory of her.

10.  Coffy, Coffy:  Never heard of it or her.

11.  Elle Woods, Legally Blonde:  I'll give them this one.

12.  Hermione Granger, Harry Potter:  I at least noticed her, without experiencing much impact.

13.  Annalise Keating, How to Get Away with Murder:  Never heard of it or her.

14.  Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman:  I know the character but not the movie.  Not particularly my thing, even as a kid when the comics were popular.

15.  Olivia Pope, Scandal:  Never heard of it or her.

16.  Mulan, Mulan:  I've heard of her, never saw it, can't remember what it's about.

17.  Rebecca Bunch, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend:  Never heard of it or her.

18.  Minda Lahiri, The Mindy Project:  Never heard of it or her.

19.  Ellen Ripley, Alien:  I'll give them this one.  I genuinely identified with her.

No Sarah Connor?  Emma Peel?  The Geena Davis character in The Long Kiss Goodnight?  Not even, maybe, G.I. Jane?  I was quite taken with the Patricia Arquette character in True Romance, as well as Riff Randell from Rock'n'Roll High School, even Rosalind Franklin in The Race for the Double Helix. I am truly a lost demographic.

Goodnight, Anthony Kennedy

The Justice is retiring at the end of July. If the Republicans in the Senate can get their act together, they should have plenty of time to confirm President Trump's chosen replacement.

Soon we will hear the sound of lamentations.



UPDATE:

Lamentations.

Juxtaposition

Where did the union money go again?

HotAir helps us with the hard math:

If you want a better look at how “balanced” things are in terms of union support for Democrats and Republicans, why don’t we just look at the entity being sued in this Supreme Court case? It’s the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). How well do they spread their money around between the two parties? For that answer, we need look no further than Open Secrets to see what proportions of the more than $10M they spent in the 2015/2016 election cycle they spent where. Let’s take a peek at their outside money spent for or against candidates in those years, shall we?

Independent Expenditures: $8,340,618
For Democrats: $2,661,233
Against Democrats: $0
For Republicans: $0
Against Republicans: $7,562,498
Electioneering Communications: $0
Communication Costs: $1,883,204

Let’s see… the total spent for Democrats or against Republicans adds up to $10,223,731. And the amount spent for Republicans or against Democrats adds up to… hang on. Let me get my calculator out here. (carry the two…. six gozinta 14…) There we go. It adds up to zero. Zilch. Nada. In more technical terms found in post-graduate math classes, that’s known as bupkis.

So would you care to explain to me once more how this is an issue which hits both parties? I’m a bit slow and wasn’t really a math major so you may have to use small words.

Maxine Waters, campaign gold

I really thought Maxine Waters was giving Trump a gift earlier this week.  I keep saying, "Louder, and in front of more cameras!"

When socialism works

Tim Worstall argues that socialism can work as long as it's voluntary.  (I've always said it works great under my roof.)

But the two important words there are voluntary and sometimes.

For example, an employee-owned integrated steel company is going to be a rare beast. It’s unlikely that 10,000 workers are going to have a couple of billion in capital to build one, and if they did, they’d be fools not to diversify.

Employee ownership should, in theory, work well when it is human capital that is the vital ingredient in the recipe, but less so when it is physical such which matters.

The voluntary part should be obvious. If people desire to organize themselves into less and more communal forms of production, then good luck to them.

... What we need is a method of sorting through what works best when—and that’s where the market comes in.

The decision about what is the best form for a specific task is not something to be derived from theory in advance—it’s emergent from market competition.

There's that crazy notion again: finding out what works.

Not Winning in Reality

Five years and change in Federal prison for one Reality Winner.

I hate to see a free person reduced to chains and cages. I wish we had a better system for the few laws we really need to enforce, and fewer laws by far that demand to be enforced. Nevertheless, there are some laws that any nation has to enforce if it is to remain free and sovereign. It has to defend its borders, and it has to punish treason. Five years in prison is not a gentle punishment, but once this would have been seen as a capital crime.