Monthly Archives: December 2012
Is a college degree worth the cost? You decide.
Gérard Depardieu says he will give up French passport over tax rises
Gérard Depardieu has said he is handing back his French passport and social security card, lambasting the French government for punishing “success, creation, talent” in his homeland.
A popular and colourful figure in France, the 63-year-old actor is the latest wealthy Frenchman to seek shelter outside his native country by buying a house just over the border in Belgium in response to tax increases by the Socialist president, François Hollande.
The prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, described Depardieu’s behaviour as pathetic and unpatriotic at a time when the French are being asked to pay higher taxes to reduce a bloated national debt.
“Pathetic, you said pathetic? How pathetic is that?” Depardieu said in a letter to the weekly newspaper le Journal du Dimanche.
“I am leaving because you believe that success, creation, talent, anything different must be sanctioned,” he said.
An angry member of parliament has proposed that France adopt a US-inspired law that would force Depardieu or anyone trying to escape full tax dues to forgo their nationality.
(Read more)
TSA detains Santa
Maddow Propaganda: “The fastest deficit reduction in generations”
We learned about a month ago that the U.S. budget deficit for the most recent fiscal year fell to $1.089 trillion, $200 billion smaller than it was last year, and nearly $300 billion smaller than when President Obama took office. (Read more)
Iraq 2002, Iran 2012: Compare and contrast Netanyahu’s speeches
Ten years before his “red line” speech at the United Nations last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared before the United States Congress and called for bringing down Saddam Hussein before he developed nuclear weapons. (Read more)
Rabbis Sign Letter Opposing Settlement Construction
Over 500 U.S. rabbis, cantors, rabbinical students and cantorial students have signed an open letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, warning against his decision to advance settlement construction in the sensitive E1 area of the West Bank and build 3000 new housing units in East Jerusalem. The decision, which was announced the day after the U.N. voted to upgrade Palestine’s status, constitutes “the final blow to a peaceful solution,” the letter states. “If Israel builds in E1, it will cut East Jerusalem off from its West Bank surroundings and effectively bifurcate the West Bank. (Read more)
H.L. Mencken Speaks
Anarcho-Capitalism going mainstream?
Nice to see Friedman catching up to the intellectual work of Hoppe:
Further proof that Anarcho-Capitalism is becoming main-stream is this poorly written, rambling criticism from the Southern Poverty Law Center: www.salon.com/2012/12/18/how_to_spot_an_anarcho_capitalist/
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I imagine some power brokers thinking to themselves — okay, we can’t stop this thing, so let’s try to own it.
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Wow! Just found Rothbard’s critique of David Friedman’s Anarcho-Capitalism.
Socialism!
Merry Christmas & Happy Holiday!
Guy creates open-source, free font for dyslexic readers; gets copyright cease-and-desist threat
The plight of dyslexic individuals served as inspiration to Abelardo Gonzalez, a New Hampshire-based mobile app designer, who devised a clever font to help dyslexics read digital text easier.The font, dubbed “OpenDyslexic“, employs a trick in which the bottoms of characters are weighted. Curiously some dyslexic individuals visual processing cortexes rotate images that look slender, making characters appear backwards or upside down. By making the bottom look “heavier” the font reportedly reduces this kind of visual “bug” in the brains of people with this disability.
Mr. Gonzalez wasn’t the first to use this trick, he explained, but he was the first font designer to make an affordable version.
. . . .
Then he “was contacted by font designer Christian Boer (who sells an alternative font called dyslexie for $69 USD per “single-use” license) to “cease and desist” early during his process.” That’s right. He was threatened with a copyright lawsuit for … making an affordable, open-source font to help dyslexics.
At the time he was charging a nominal fee and did reuse some bitstream-vera-sans characters as the basis for his font. Bitstream-vera-sans’ license explicitly allows derivative fonts to be sold (free of fee to the bitstream font creators), however, Mr. Boer was claiming that the offense occurred due to the fact that Mr. Gonzalez had changed the (free) font in a similar way as he had. By all appearances the real issue was that Mr. Gonzalez was offering it for far cheaper than Mr. Boer.
So Mr. Gonzalez went a step further and simply made the font free.
The False Dichotomy of “1%”
The Great Disconnect
Ben Bernanke began his press conference with a touching tribute to the unemployed. Oh, how he cares! And so deeply! His description of the problem was accurate enough. But then out came the smoke and mirrors.
Bernanke said that to remedy the unemployment problem, he will continue the Fed’s program of asset purchases. Specifically, the Fed will continue to buy and hold mortgage-backed securities . . . .
But here’s the disconnect. What the devil does buying bad debt from zombie banks have to do with getting people jobs? The relationship between assets purchases and policy goals is murky at best.
“I need a job, so I hope the Fed buys more bad mortgage debt” — said no unemployed person ever.
Yes, I know about ancient Keynesian theories. There is tradeoff between unemployment and inflation. But those theories have not really explained much at all for the last 40 years. In fact, they blew up in the 1970s with the emergence of “stagflation.” An affliction where unemployment remains high even as inflation roars ahead. (Read more)
FT’s person of the year is ECB President Mario “whatever it takes to save the Euro Zone” Draghi
ECB President Mario Draghi has been chosen as the FT’s Person of the Year 2012 for his commitment to do “whatever it takes” to save the eurozone. (Read more)
Homeland Security is building a $4 billion 170-acre complex for 17,000 employees
Further proof that the fiscal cliff hysteria is sheer nonsense.
The US Department of Homeland Security, despite budget cuts and construction delays, is planning to add 17,000 employees into its consolidated headquarters in southeast Washington. The department broke ground at their new headquarters in 2009 and was originally scheduled for completion in 2016. The new complex is now scheduled for completion in 2022.
The 4.5 million square-foot “federal mini-city for the Department of Homeland Security” on the site of the former infamous psychiatric St. Elizabeths Hospital and is the largest federal construction job since the pentagon was built in the 1940s. The construction of the project was originally expected to cost $3.4 billion but is now going to cost at least $4 billion and is expected to “create 16,000 direct construction jobs”. (Read more)