February 2017 Archives

Americans have borrowed over $1 trillion to finance our cars, and the used car market is worth something like $200 billion per year... will all that value evaporate when autonomous cars become available? Aftermarket autonomy kits might help car owners cling to some of that value, but if the future looks like Uber/Lyft fleets rather than personal vehicles then the kits won't help much.

It's not your imagination: many costs really are rising much faster than inflation. The post has a ton of great charts, but let me quote this summation of the evidence:

So, to summarize: in the past fifty years, education costs have doubled, college costs have dectupled, health insurance costs have dectupled, subway costs have at least dectupled, and housing costs have increased by about fifty percent. US health care costs about four times as much as equivalent health care in other First World countries; US subways cost about eight times as much as equivalent subways in other First World countries.

I worry that people don't appreciate how weird this is. I didn't appreciate it for a long time. I guess I just figured that Grandpa used to talk about how back in his day movie tickets only cost a nickel; that was just the way of the world. But all of the numbers above are inflation-adjusted. These things have dectupled in cost even after you adjust for movies costing a nickel in Grandpa's day. They have really, genuinely dectupled in cost, no economic trickery involved.

Read the whole thing -- that summary is only the half-way point.

An "atmospheric river" is headed for the beleaguered Oroville Dam.

Above: Computer forecast models indicate a powerful jet stream will continuously pound California over the next ten days and bring copious amounts of moisture from off of the Pacific Ocean into the state. This 10-day loop of predicted upper-level winds at 250 mb are in 6-hour increments from today until Thursday, February 23rd; maps courtesy tropicaltidbits.com, NOAA/EMC (GFS)

Too bad we have decaying infrastructure and not enough money to maintain it. Bad luck, I guess.

And here's a photo essay about the terrible decisions by California's Democrat government that led to this impending disaster. (HT: Instapundit.)

Poet Sara Holbrook describes how questions about her writing in a standardized test are completely nonsensical. When I was in school, I always suspected that the teachers were making up stuff about the "intent" of the various authors we studied.

Only guess what? The test prep materials neglected to insert the stanza break. I texted him an image of how the poem appeared in the original publication. Problem one solved. But guess what else? I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I'm a performance poet), I pause there. Note: that is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it.

These test questions were just made up, and tragically, incomprehensibly, kids' futures and the evaluations of their teachers will be based on their ability to guess the so-called correct answer to made up questions.

Then I went online and searched Holbrook/MIDNIGHT/Texas and the results were terrifying. Dozens of districts, all dissecting this poem based on poorly formatted test prep materials.

The riots at Berkeley were already humiliating enough for the school and the state of California, but I didn't even see until just now this video of a woman being ambushed with pepper spray while talking to a reporter. It's hard to even find words to describe the viciousness and cowardice of the attack. Reprehensible.

My friend was giving an interview when some coward peppersprayed her #Berkeley pic.twitter.com/CDpEqDsw2A

— janey (@janeygak) February 2, 2017

Ray Comfort asks people on the street: would you use a bulldozer to bury-alive hundreds of people to save your own life?

Over 50 million babies have been legally killed by abortion in America.