CapitalistImperialistPig

And every technical problem has a technical solution. We don’t need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over. Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (p. 23). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Trump Treasury boy Steve Mnuchin recently opined that taxing millionaires to provide healthcare to poor is "theft." This is a good example of why I find it easy to refresh my hatred of libertarianism, at least in its current incarnation. A cardinal principle of libertarianism seems to be that individuals, at least rich ones, don't owe anybody anything except themselves. I regard this as inimical to the fundamental principle that allows humans to cooperate in groups, the sense of shared destiny and collective responsibility.

Does some form of senile dementia explain Trump's bizarre behavior? It's a tempting diagnosis, but there are also some contrary indications. He seems to have always been a jerk and a compulsive liar with poor impulse control, and he still can work a crowd. I wonder what those who study such things think? Did he used to be able to speak in complete sentences?

An acquaintance shared this story, which I will put in quotes, though it's surely not a precise reconstruction. I had a small check to deposit, so I went to the drive through - I know that you can make a deposit at the ATM, but I'm old, and I didn't want to try to figure it out. I was in a hurry, so I was wolfing down my sausage McMuffin in the car. I sent over the check with my card, and in a bit the girl came back sounding real friendly like. I was, she said, and old and valued customer - a high value customer, whatever the hell that is, and entitled to a private banker. OK, my social security gets deposited automatically, ditto my pension, and every two or three weeks I go to the ATM to take out some cash for this and that. I'm probably not getting the private bit, but I'm damn sure nobody's going to make a living handling my banking needs. So what the hell is a private banker, anyway? I was curious, so I looked it up. It seems that banks are willin...

We have scotch'd the snake, not kill'd it.(15) She'll close and be herself, whilst our poor malice Remains in danger of her former tooth. (W. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene II) Anybody who thinks McConnell is done with his Trumpcare bill is fooling himself.

I'm a slow learner, so when I work through technical stuff I usually write out and at least try to derive all the equations. My favorite pen for that kind of work is the Pilot Precise V5 . It writes a nice precise 0.5 mm line, dries almost instantly, never skips, lasts a long time, and it's dirt cheap (a dozen for $13.28 from Amazon). I've used a lot of pens, some of them nearly two orders of magnitude more expensive, but I've never found one better suited to my needs (writing equations with lots of symbols, Greek letters, and subscripts.) There is a retractable and refillable version, but I usually use the stick. A true triumph of technology. I got about 200 pages of equations and notes out of one pen.

David Brooks, the least crazy of the NYT conservative columnists, has been bashing the current GOP lately. His latest column accuses them of abandoning conservative principles. Not the critique I would make, but not without merit. But I am not here to praise Brooks. His opening paragraph contains a familiar bit of right-wing BS. There is a structural flaw in modern capitalism. Tremendous income gains are going to those in the top 20 percent, but prospects are diminishing for those in the middle and working classes. This gigantic trend widens inequality, exacerbates social segmentation, fuels distrust and led to Donald Trump. This is the kind of technically true but profoundly misleading stuff that makes otherwise kindly liberals hate Brooks. In fact, nearly all of the income gains have gone to a tiny fraction of the top 20%. It's pretty shocking just how sharp the income needle is. If we look at net worth , the results are even more dramatic. The minimum net worth for...