A followup on J.Kb’s True story about Alabama and the North East

Different areas have different cultures, this is very true. While most of the world will poke fun a Texans, I would much rather interact with a full of themselves Texan than somebody from NY.

When I say “interactions” I’m not talking about friends from NYC as such, but those random strangers that you run into and have to deal with.

If I see a car with New York plates I expect a certain type of driving from them and allow for it. Same with a few other states.

Fortunately for all of us, we don’t wear our license plates on our backs. We just have to interact with each other.

Most people have a level of pride in where they live. This doesn’t include the transplant that is always complaining about how it was better wherever it was they came from, this is the people that live where they live because they want to.

This is how you end up with “The Big Apple” and how every person from NYC seems to believe it is the greatest city ever. The people of San Francisco are proud of their city and or state. You can see this in “school pride” where just because you went to a particular university or high school you are proud of that institution.

Say “Go Trojans” and everybody knows. “I’m a Packer Backer” and everybody knows. This is human.

The problem with attitudes is how people deal when they are not in their territory. The Texan that advertises with a $200 to $500 Stetson hat. The NYC person does it with their “big apple” attire.

But it is when people open their mouths that you find the difference.

“Everything is bigger in Texas” or “It is better in Texas” comes across as crass to the person that knows that theirs is better.

The alternative statement is “your _____ is shit”.

That is the big difference. Somebody from the south is likely to say “Ours is better.” while somebody from these entitled liberal bastion are more likely to say that yours is bad. There is such a huge difference in perception of “ours is better” vs. “yours is bad”. People take offense from those sorts of words.

Those elites have a horrible habit of looking down at everybody that isn’t part of their clique. It doesn’t matter if you are in their territory or they are in yours.

Most cops I’ve interacted with have been polite and helpful within the limits of what the interaction is about. My one interaction with a NYC cop was an example of that “You’re not a NYC person so you’re garbage.” I was on my bike, I asked for directions to a restaurant. The restaurant was actually just down the alley from where we were. You could see it. I didn’t.

The cop was not happy to have somebody talk to him. He heard the request and gave me directions. I thanked him and rode off following his directions. And almost ended up taking the Holland Tunnel right off the island.

Came back around and on the fifth attempt finally found the restaurant. That is the attitude I expect of people that think they are elites.

What this means is that people that have this sort of city elite attitude push it when they are in other states. They are often loud, out, and proud. Not talking about just sexual orientation. You see this in bumper stickers and other car stickers. People on the left will often decorate their vehicles with all their stances. Baby murder stickers. Anti-Trump stickers. Gun Free Zone stickers. coexist stickers. They are all out there. They are never really afraid that somebody is going to react in a physical way to these statements, in their own enclaves.

They know exactly how they think of those low life deplorables those knuckles drag when they walk. They know how they would act if one of “those people” were to dare to enter, no invade, their enclave. They expect the same response when they go elsewhere.

If they would be willing to do evil to somebody because of their stance on a political position, they expect others to do the same to them. The project their actions onto others and are fearful.

It reminds me of the Trump yard signs in the town just north of me. They are a very elite leftist town. The people that put out Trump yard signs were reporting them vandalized or stolen constantly. The police didn’t really do anything. The news media played a tiny violin for those yucky tRumptsters. It wasn’t a big deal.

Then people put out some BLM signs. A few, a very few, were knocked over. The police immediately released a press statement about how hate doesn’t belong int eh community and that they would find the horrible evil people that were vandalizing signs.

The funny thing was one person that reported that they had had more Trump signs vandalized or stolen himself than all the reported vandalism of BLM signs combined.

This is the problem. They know that they would do it. Thus they expect others to do it to them.

I never fear travel in urban and rural areas. I’m going to be polite and most of the time the people around me are polite right back. I worry about moving through cities. There seems to be much more violence in those areas. It is very hard to find confirmed reports of people being attacked because they were “leftists” or “progressives” or such.

This person would have no problems traveling in the southlands if she kept her opinions to herself. The problem she has is that she doesn’t have the self control to keep her mouth shut. So she will say offensive things to strangers and then confirm her biases when they don’t just roll over and take it.

Free market competition has a history of creating jobs, creating new products, new opportunities and wealth. Government control of the market fails.

Thomas Sowell points out in Basic Economics IIRC, that you can’t compare the official government prices in places where the government controls prices. Instead you have to look at the blackmarket price for goods. Since the blackmarket is almost always a free market, it is much more likely to be properly indicating the correct signals.

A signal is how much a person is willing to pay for a good or service.

If somebody is staying in the same job, even though they aren’t “getting paid enough”, then the company is being signaled that they price they are paying for labor is correct. If they can’t hold personal and/or they can’t hire new personal then they are being signaled that they are not paying enough. Paying enough includes all the extras a job includes.

Maryland has a fairly high income tax. The income tax is both a state income tax, a county income tax and a city income tax. Originally there was no limit on what the county and city tax rate could be. The different counties had different rates. People made decisions on where they lived based on those rates.

In order to “help” the people from being ripped off by the county and city taxes legislation was introduced that set the maximum rate that could be charged. With fanfare it passed.

Within a very few years every county and city had exactly the same tax rate. That maximum allowed by law.

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During hurricane Sandy large parts of NYC and the surrounding areas were hit. Access into and out of the area became very difficult. As this happened gas stations started to raise the prices on gas.

As the prices went up, the screams of “Price Gouging” started to happen. People were obviously making more money if they were selling gas for a buck more than what it cost before Sandy hit. There were huge lines for gas at the stations that still held gas.

A thriving business opened up for young people, mostly men. They would stand in line with a 5 gal can. They would fill it at the pump, then walk towards the end of the line offering their five gallons for a few dollars more than what they paid for it. People bought that “over priced” gas in the 5 gallon can.

They bought it because the extra cost was worth it to them. It could be that they were just tired of being in line. It could be that they had a fear of the station being out of gas by the time they got there.

In the same way people buy up generators when there is a storm coming in. Then when the storm hits they sell those generators at a profit. The people scream “price gouging!” because they didn’t buy a generator when they were available.

In the case of hurricane Sandy, the government stepped in and set a maximum price per gallon of gas.

And suddenly there was no more gasoline. In an attempt to help people afford gas the government managed to cut off the gas supply to everybody. There were reasons the prices of gas was going up. Some of it was that those stations with gas were having it shipped in from locations much further away than they use to. This raised their costs. They were paying the drivers for extra for the risks they were taking.

The people that were willing to pay that extra amount were signaling that the price was acceptable.

As soon as gas started to flow again the people were no longer willing to pay the increased prices. They found places selling for less. Often the station that had been closed since shortly after the storm because they had no fuel to sell.

Price control for labor also increases the costs of everything and it reduces the ability for employers to compete. Regardless of what some union shill is saying about “The Fight for $15!” he is actually ensuring that more people have the real minimum wage, $0. If a high school student with no employment history and no real skills is to be hired at $15/hour they MUST return at least their costs in value to the employer. With no history and no skills that’s harder to do.

If the employer could offer less then they would be able to afford a lower skilled employee.

The complaint is that nobody can live on minimum wage. This might be true. On the other hand, if you are still making minimum wage after six months you might not be providing value to your employer OR you might need to find a different job. Only this time you will be applying with a job history and hopefully some skills.

The progressives want price controls on so many things. They sell it as “for the people.” They like rent control, fuel price limits, food price limits, drug price limits, labor price limits, airline price limits. All things that are easy to sell to the person being told “You’ll have more in your wallet at the end of the week.”

The problem is that it always fails.

The airline industry use to have heavy price controls. When Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978 the left was very unhappy. “The price of air travel is going to go through the roof! Nobody but the rich will ever be able to afford to travel by plane again!”

They were wrong. As they always are. Within a few years competition between airlines kicked in. New discount airlines came into existence. In a just a couple of years people were being offered $99 flights between almost any two airport. Much less than before deregulation.

For years now the left has been screaming about lack of healthcare in these United States. They intentionally conflated “healthcare” with “health insurance”, or the ability to pay. They talked about how so many other first world countries offered cradle to grave “healthcare”.

This healthcare was paid for by a third party, the government. The government took that money from the people. The people did not have to pay at point of service. They paid with every paycheck instead.

Many of these countries with socialized medicine paid almost nothing for their medications. Medications were priced by the government.

These governments weren’t paying the full costs of those drugs. American’s were and are. Most of the advances in pharmaceuticals comes from US companies investing in research and development of new drugs. Americans pay for the cost.

To put this in perspective, the median cost to bring a new drug to market is $985 Million with an mean cost of $1.3 Billion.

All of that cost has to be recovered. Consider just one drug “Lexapro” which is an antidepressant. The cost for 30 pills is around $105 or around $3.50 per dose. Assuming that the development cost median margin was 13.8% * that means that drug company makes around $0.48 per dose.

The recovery of that $985 Million investment is 2,039,337,474 doses or 5,587,225 patent years. That is a lot of patent years on a new drug.

Today there are around 26 Million people taking Lexapro so it would take about 3 months to make back that investment. If that was the only place those profits were going for.

Now I’m not a finance sort of person. My goal is to point out that developing new drugs is expensive and time consuming. For every drug that makes it to market there are many that don’t.

So why all this yapping about price controls and drug development costs? The Democrats have introduced the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022”

Prescription drug price reforms. Allows Medicare to negotiate the price of certain prescription drugs; limits Medicare and commercial price growth of certain drugs to inflation; repeals the implementation of a “rebate rule” scheduled to increase drug-related Medicare outlays beginning in 2027; redesigns Medicare Part D benefit formula and caps out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries.
— Inflation Reduction Act: Preliminary Estimates of Budgetary and Macroeconomic Effects

In other words, price control on medications.

The New York Post put it best Inflation Reduction Act? Drug-price controls make Dems’ bill the Lifespan Reduction Act. When prices are controlled, shortages happen. When prices are controlled, research and development suffer. When prices are controlled, medication choices become limited.

There is nothing in this act that is good for us or good for the country.
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California passed legislation that allows people to sue gun manufacturers, distributors, and retailers for others misusing their products.

In 2019 some asshole shot up the California garlic festival. Now that Bruen has dropped the maggots are coming out to feast on the bodies.

The lawsuit seeks damages and injunctive relief from Century Arms LLC for marketing and selling the WASR-10 military-style assault rifle the shooter used to carry out the horrific act that killed three people and injured 17 others. According to Scarlett Law Group and Brady Legal, the company was “negligent and reckless” for manufacturing and selling “a weapon of war” that can too easily be modified to fire automatically.
— Why Is Century Arms LLC Liable?

The addition off Century Arms to the lawsuit was approved by Santa Clara County Superior Court after California passed laws enabling citizens to individually sue corporations and individuals doing commerce in arms.

In addition to the Scarlett Law Group suit there seems to be others that are suing Century Arms.

This is the second prong on the most recent attack on the Second Amendment. The first being to declare so many sensitive places that it is impossible to carry and the other to use lawfare to drive people and corporations engaging in the legal commerce in arms to be driven out of business via the costs of defending themselves.

The same article was published in many places
— Family of California shooting victims sue gun distributor

The elephant in the room is that nobody is buying anything back. They never owned it in the first place and they are using your money to purchase these guns.

Since most of them are “no questions asked” they are often a place where criminals get rid of guns that have been used in murders.

Lastly, they are often complete rip offs. Some widow brings in the M1 Garand that her father carried in WWII and is given a $100 gift card to the local grocery store or Walmart.

Some of the better buy backs that have happened is when a bunch of gun guys showed up and setup outside the buy back. They were making real offers on the guns before the Government could rip the owners off. In the one case I know of, they cops just told the buyers they had to be back 100 ft from the official buyback booth.

But the folks down in Houston, TX went one step further. They told their 3D printer to start printing some sort of frame. By the time they were done they had enough “ghost guns” to get over $3000 in $50 gift cards.

More than enough to pay for their filament and time.

One of many articles about the government figuring out that they have been had.
— 3D-printed ghost guns won’t be accepted at next Houston buyback event, Mayor Sylvester Turner says
Google Search link: news houston gun buyback

Ohio is a freedom state. They have constitutional carry. Of course this means that the streets are running red with blood.

Oh, right, that’s Chicago and DC and other blue cities and states with “strict gun control”. It doesn’t seem to be happening in freedom states.

This year, for the first time in decades, people will be legally able to carry at the Ohio State Fair. Given that this is an unsecured area, carrying seems to be a good idea. Heck, you are awake and dressed, carrying seems like a good idea.

Unfortunately for fairgoers, this might not be actually possible. According to one pundit all the restrooms at the fair are indoors and according to this one report people are not allowed to carry indoors. This means that people that go to the Ohio State Fair and need to use the restroom might find themselves in violation of the law.

None of the claims of this pundit have been verified. They could just be talking out of their ass, still it shows the type of thing that happens when locations can be marked as off limits to people legally carrying their firearm. Another place that only criminals with guns are welcome.

Anyone bringing a firearm to the Ohio State Fair better have a strong bladder, or someone who will babysit their firearm, if they need to relieve themselves. As I recall, all bathrooms at the fair are indoors. No open-air urinals, and urinating in public is still against the law in Ohio. I have no sympathy for them.
— No guns indoors, including bathrooms

Dark songs tell a history. Songs of war and heroes move us.

Songs of Country, God, and Flag makes the sprit soar.

But sometimes you hear a song that reminds you of a time where men were men and women were women and the reason for being.

Here is Peggy Lee setting it on fire with Fever

You can tell that the recession of 2022 is going to be bad. The media is rolling out the narrative that inflation is caused by anything but the Democrats policies.

A couple of years ago there was a massive wildfire. The west coast of the US was burning. But when you looked at it from space there was a strange thing happening. The fires stopped at the US/Canadian border. Why?

Policies.

While in the US the econazi’s screamed over anything humans did that changed a single bit of nature, the Canadian’s were practicing better (good?) forest management. The environmentalist in the US had initiated a number of policies that caused the forests of west coast to be turned into one great big tender box.

Different policies get different results.

Of course the media was screaming the leftest talking point “Climate change is causing wildfires!”

In the same way Biden’s economic policies are causing inflation. The media claims it is not because of policy but there are things that make you go “Hmmmm…”

Inflation started falling at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, it stabilized with a slow climb through 2020. Then in 2021 there is a sharp upward spike. Just what happened in January of 2021?

The left counters by claiming corporate greed. Corporations are pulling in huge profits in 2022, this proves they are greedy.

The first thing to understand is that companies pulling in profits doesn’t mean that there is suddenly a huge pile of money that the board of directors gets to play in. No, it means that the corporation is going to be paying out more dividends.

As an example they point to Exxon’s profits, year over year. In the 1st quarter of 2021 Exxon had a profit of $11.824B. In the first quarter of 2022 they had a profit of $20.317B. Obviously this means that the corporations are being greedy.

Except that this is a false comparison. From 2010 through 2012 profits were going up, slightly. From 2012 through 2017 it was going down. 2017 through 2019 it goes back up again. And from 2019 through 2021 it is going down. Then suddenly, in the first quarter of 2021 there is a huge spike in profits. Just what happened in January of 2021?

The short answer is there was a policy change.

The problem with judging “greed” by profits is that profits doesn’t tell you anything about the state of a business. If the gross income on a widget is $100 and the net is $0.10 nobody thinks that’s an outrageous profit. Take that same widget and sell 1,000,000 of them per month and you have a net income of $100,000.

Making $1.2Million in “profits” per year sounds a whole lot better than 10 cents per widget.

People have a difficult time conceptualizing large numbers. A Small Problem With Big Numbers is a brief description of the problems with understanding, getting a feel for, large numbers.

I spent time working for a super computer company. We dealt with very very small numbers in measuring time. Times that were so short that the lengths of wires were all carefully measured because the speed of light made a difference in processing signals correctly.

I was also doing photography. I have some very expensive studio lights.

The lights were fired remotely. When the flash on my camera went off it would trigger all of the studio lights. I was very concerned about synchronization issues. I carefully calculated the time it would take for the light to travel to the sensors, looked up the response time of the sensors and everything else. There was some serious lag involved.

I went to my mentor and asked “How can this possibly work? The lag is horrible.” He carefully pointed out that my lag was measured in nanoseconds. The shutter to my camera was open for 17 milliseconds and the flash only existed for a very short period of time. The lag would have to be nearly one million times larger in order for it to have any effect.

I had failed to grok large numbers.

When dealing with profits most corporations run on slim margins. While the over all cost to you of a good or service might be high, no one entity in the chain of creation is running at unreasonable margins.

When you sell your labor you are competing with every other person with your skillset trying to get that job. If you price yourself out of the labor market then you don’t get the job. If you are asking $100k/year and they are asking $80K/year and they can do the same job, they might get the job instead of you. Unless you bring some extra value.

If the price of a bag of oranges is noticeably higher than a different bag of oranges then you are more likely to buy the lower cost bag of oranges, IFF the quality is good enough.

If the corporations could have raised their prices in 2019 as much as they have today and still sold goods, they would have. They didn’t because their competition would have undersold them. If every seller of oranges is raising their price and nobody is undercutting that implies that people are willing to pay that price and that the seller is unable to cut their prices to get more sales.

Inflation happens when the value of money goes down. Prices go up when demand out strips supply. We are currently experiencing both. The government is injecting more money into the economy which devalues it. The supply for many goods, petroleum products in particular, is going down. Demand is exceeding the supply. Prices will go up.

As our costs go up, we in turn raise our prices to cover those costs. Which in turn raises the costs to those that purchase our goods or services.

We need new policies before we are all billionaires that can’t afford to buy a loaf of bread.

— Workers are being punished for inflation. The real culprit is corporate greed

For years we had to put up with the Supreme court handing down decisions based on what outcome the left wanted. The court was stacked heavily to the left. The great legal minds of the left on the court were looking for ways to modify the law in order to get the outcome they wanted.

You can see this in the disent on Bruen. The disent spends page after page telling us why guns are bad and how horrible it is that people die from gunshots. When they finally get around to arguing on the basis of the law, the major point is that there wasn’t evidence.

There was evidence, the evidence was given directly to the court during oral arguments.

In addition to the left leaning justices, we had justices that would do their best to do the least. Roberts works unendingly to make sure that decisions on the right are as limited in scope as possible. Read about how he was working to limit the scope of Dobbs if you want an idea of the sort of effort he puts in.

Even when he joins in an opinion he is likely to attempt to limit the scope of the decision.

The best of the left leaning justices was Ruth. While I didn’t like her decisions, she worked hard to find law to support her opinions. Kagan is out there telling the world that the court will be delegitimized if they don’t make the decisions she wants.

Having spent years owning the court, the left is now having a fit over no longer owning the court. People that were perfectly happy when the court was 6-3 left are now screaming that 6-3 right is stacked. Rules For Thee, Not For Me.

In response the left threatened to pack the court. To add so many justices to the court that it would be generations before it could be turned conservative again. There was talk of adding as many as 9 new justices, all to be appointed right now.

Court packing isn’t making any headway. It didn’t happen the last time a Democrat in office tried it. It is dead in the water today.

So of course the Democrats have to change the rules. Just like the killed the filibuster for court appointments when Obama was in office, as soon as they lost the Senate they wanted the filibuster back. When the Republicans killed the filibuster for Supreme court appointments, the left lost their minds.

Today’s latest rule change? Term limits on all justices.

The bill, 2021-2022 H.R. 8500 “Supreme Court Tenure Establishment and Retirement Modernization Act of 2022”

This bill has been introduced but there is no official text at The Library of Congress, it is only available at the congressman’s site: To amend title 28, United States Code, to provide for the duration of active service of justices of the Supreme Court, and for other purposes

The bill would limit the term of each justice to 18 years. In the first and third year of each president’s term, they would appoint one new justice. The longest serving justice would then be “retired”.

This means that a two term president would be able to appoint 4 new justices.

All of this to avoid having the constitution read as written and not some magic 8-ball that always gives the answer a left leaning justice wants.

There are a number of articles out there covering this bill. It is a kitchen sink type of bill. Given everything that is in it, almost any center fire semi-auto firearm could be banned under it.

The one that covers most of the important parts and is a quick read is AWB 2022, the way I read it over at Divemedics blog.

A few of the 2A YouTubers have mentioned and my feeds confirm, that the main stream media is claiming that this bill is dead in the Senate.

No. It is not. The Senate already passed one gun control bill this session, there are just to many Republicans that can not be trusted. Make the calls to your Senators, make sure that they know how you feel. Yes, your Senators are Democratic anti-gun rights people, call anyway. There were four Democrats that voted NO on H.R. 1808.

The thing to realize is that these Senators and Representatives are not listening to arguments because Republicans and Democrats are talking pass each other.

A Republican gets up and says “This will do nothing to stop mass shootings.” In response a Democrat gets up and says “The AWB or 1994 stopped mass shootings!” They talk about what experts predict. We talk about what is happening. They talk about saving the children. We talk about how it is unconstitutional on its face.

This is a fight that is not going to stop.

But here is the kicker, H.R. 1808 isn’t the bad one. It is just the obvious one. This is the one that gets everybody all worked up. This is the one that gets us burning up the phone lines and emailing like mad.

H.R. 2814 is the bad one.

Here it is:

To repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, and provide for the discoverability and admissibility of gun trace information in civil proceedings.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

This bill will allow anybody selling or manufacturing firearms to be sued. It doesn’t mean that the person suing will win, but it costs money to defend against lawsuits. This will extend to people selling or manufacturing parts as well.

So while you are calling your Senators, call your Representative as well and tell them to vote NO on H.R. 2814