Gongol.com Archives: May 2018
May 19, 2018
Seattle's going to charge a few big companies $275 per employee as a special head tax
The money will be used for low-income housing and homelessness-related programs. Unsurprisingly, Amazon and Starbucks aren't pleased. The tax is to be collected annually from 2019 until 2023.
President Trump wants the US Postal Service to punish Amazon
This cannot be viewed apart from an apparent vendetta against Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon and who (separately) owns the Washington Post (which isn't gentle to the President, nor should it be). The President does not deserve credit for reportedly donating his government salary if he is simultaneously using the government to advance his own personal business agenda or to punish others for behavior he doesn't like. It's not consistent.
Air conditioning or allergy medication?
The people speak (in a totally unscientific survey): They want A/C
Royal wedding illustrates some of the crazier aspects of British immigration law
The extraordinary case of an American becoming a member of the House of Windsor shows just how many hoops a person in Britain must jump through in order to marry a foreigner for love
Why don't we have a technological solution to children being left in hot cars?
There has to be a technological solution to this. Maybe a motion sensor tied to a thermometer and a small cell that dials 911? It can't be too hard or too expensive for Silicon Valley to figure out. We need this to prevent tragedies. While it is evident that technological answers to the problem could end up having unintended consequences (like making some parents less careful), that line of reason mainly reinforces the case for making sure that technologists have a firm grasp on the humanity of the issues on which they work -- from the social implications to the human factors involved.
A truck traveling down the highway with a ladder barely clinging to the bed
Chuck Yeager salutes "The Right Stuff" author Tom Wolfe
One of the few movies that can turn any red-blooded American misty-eyed.
Federalist 39: Read it. Learn it. Love it.
The one-paragraph answer to every cheap shot taken at the Electoral College or the nature of the Senate: We have a Federal government, not a national one.
Can we compel ourselves to promote the classical-liberal order without the threat of war?
Conservatives need to reject blind traditionalism, and the left has to resist the urge to recycle demonstrably failed experiments. The vigorous generation of new ideas (not just new policies) is good for everyone.
When Chicago restaurants serve non-Chicago-style pizza
Deep dish needs sauce
As the old IBM posters said: "THINK!"
Logically, shouldn't the exit door from the fire stairs on the ground floor have a panic bar that opens outward? In a fire, nobody's coming in and climbing up (other than firefighters).
The US has ambassadors in a third of the world and special forces in three-fourths
As Dwight Eisenhower said: "Our concern over these affairs illustrates forcibly the old truism that political considerations can never be wholly separated from military ones and that war is a mere continuation of political policy in the field of force."
Even New Orleans isn't 170' below sea level
It's low-lying, but not that low-lying
A cryptocurrency "mining" computer that doubles as a space heater
When the byproduct of something is so much entropy that it could heat a room, then that thing needs to justify itself in a much bigger way than cryptocurrency ever has. Cryptocurrency is a mania, not a paradigm shift.
"Four bearded tenors trying to harmonize while one of them tickles a banjo ironically" is NOT a subgenre of alternative rock. Stop playing that crap on alternative rock stations.
"The turducken of New Urbanism"
A proposal is out to convert a big abandoned office complex in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, into a "metroburb" -- a micro-suburb within a sprawling building
The Republican Party can't afford to chain itself to an ethnic identity
Conservatism's roots in individual dignity should be conservatism's main appeal to people of all backgrounds: A belief in pluralism and the security of individual liberty, as goods in themselves -- regardless of race or faith or color or origin.
