Taxes

Why Arabs hate taxes
Rudy Ayoub

This guy has made a bunch of videos, mostly about the son trying to deal with his father. They are very, very frustrating / annoying. But pop's attitude is spot on here.

Bureaucracy

Stolen entire from David Warren's Essays in Idleness 

Publishing & perishing

Ludwig von Mises was not, to my mind, strictly an economist. He was a moralist, and a practical philosopher, his chief object being the destruction of bureaucracy. It is not a “necessary evil,” but necessarily an evil, done like the others under cover of good. Mises is understandably hated by all socialists and progressives. In addition to its rhetorical attack, his book Bureaucracy (1944, revised 1962) documented the rise of bureaucratic agencies controlling public life throughout Europe and America. It showed that the “profit motive” paradoxically advances the public interest, in almost every case; that the “non-profit motive” is not only counter-productive, but apparently, politically ineradicable. Over time, bureaucracy stifles not only individual freedom, but the adaptability of society itself, leading to its decline and ruin.

This, and Mises’ chef-d’oeuvre, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, fell into my hands as a teenager, and made me an exponent of the “Austrian School.” Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) was another guide along the road not taken, or rather taken only briefly, by the allies after World War II. Such books helped to make me continuously unpopular, among budding Leftoids, from the age of fifteen. Since, I have done some supplementary reading, to make my attitudes more ghastly to them. My preference for liberty, beauty, goodness, truth, have cost me many popularity contests: for the “progressives” invariably prefer plausibility, subterfuge, and lies.

But there are rewards for resisting them: for instance, the satisfaction one feels that Javier Milei is eradicating the bureaucracy of Argentina (where it had been laid on especially thick), and others in their stations (Nayib Bukele, Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders) dispatching bureaucracies elsewhere. This is encouraging, as is the rightwing sweep in trans-European elections yesterday. Note: the method of “cutting back bureaucracy” consists not of a few minor trims, but of the permanent, outright closure of entire government departments.

Even more I enjoy subtle developments in “science,” where bureaucratic takeover has made most public scientific enterprises dishonest and innately alarmist. The international “global warming” climate fraud continues to be Exhibit A; the Wuhan Batflu event, Exhibit B. Both monstrosities are the product of self-interested government strategy and funding.

More generally, the “non-profit” pursuit of academic science produces crooked, fund-grubbing results in the overwhelming majority of cases. I am delighted to see that the big American publisher, Wiley, has had to shut down nineteen of its scientific journals, and withdraw 11,500 scientific papers, to cut its losses from lawsuits. For it is, sometimes, still possible to expose falsity in the courts.

We look forward to an age that follows “follow the science.”

 Word of the day: chef-d’oeuvre - masterpiece

Curious Car Seats

Resarch paper:

Car Seats as Contraception by Jordan Nickerson and David H. Solomon, July 31, 2020

Abstract

Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.

Via Handwaving Freakoutery

Passports R Us

The Passport Office

Woman I know has a job with a large corporation. Among her responsibilities are facilitating travel arrangements. Some of the company bigwigs are scheduled to fly to Europe to meet with some finance guys about some kind of big deal. Our girl notices that the head lawyer's passport is due to expire in a few months. Their destination country won't accept any passports that are not valid for at least six months, so the lawyer, possibly the most important person in this entourage, needs a new passport, or months of planning is going to get blown up and they'll have to restart the whole scheduling brouhaha.

Our girl makes some calls and learns a couple of things. The Federal Government only has a limited number of expedited passports available. There's one in El Paso and a couple in Hawaii. By the time she talks to the lawyer and gets the okay to arrange a trip to pickup one of these passports, the one in El Paso is gone, so she books him a flight to Honolulu with a return flight later that day and he manages to get a new passport.

I've had my own share of fun and games with passports. Part 1 here, Part 2 here.

DEQ Too

Clackamas DEQ station inspector Doug Hatfield uses a mirror to look under a vehicle. - Boyd/The Oregonian

If you live the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area, your car has to pass an emissions test before you can renew your vehicle registration (license plates). The DEQ (Oregon Department of Environmental Quality) handles the testing. They are not the same as the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles), who handle the registration.

It used to be that you had to drive to a DEQ test facility and they would inspect and test your car. Back in the bad old days (25 years ago?) it was quite an ordeal. They had rollers embedded in the floor of the test station, kind of like a dynamometer. You drive in until the drive wheels are on the rollers. They would look under the hood and look under the car using a mirror, stick a probe up the tail pipe, then you put the car in drive and step on the gas until the big meter hanging on the wall says 1500 and hold it there for a minute. Then, if your car passed, which most modern cars did, they collected your money, stamped your paperwork, handed over the precious stickers and sent you on your way.

ODB-II Connector and Pinout

Later, when automakers had gotten the computer controls sorted out, they dispensed with the visual inspections and physical testing and simply plugged their computer into the diagnostic port in your car. The computers did their little robotic handshake / dance and then you went through the paper and payment process as before.

This year we have a new deal: DEQ Too. Now you don't have to go to the actual DEQ test facility, you can take your car to your local shop, and if they are connected, they can do the DEQ test right there.

My wife's car needed an oil change, so I took it Clays Auto Service and they ran the test for which they charged me $25. Now all I need to do is go online and I can complete the registration, and here's where things went south.

I go to the website and I pay the DEQ fee (what? Didn't I just pay that? No, silly, that was the other DEQ fee.), then I have to go through this annoying identification procedure with the DMV only to find out that I cannot renew the registration because it is not my car. It's my wife's car. WTF. Fine, get my wife and all her magic numbers, and try again, and now my credit card is declined. Double WTF. Double fine, double trouble, double, bubble, toil and trouble, I'll just write a check and mail in the form. Ha, silly boy, not that simple. To do that you need a DEQ certificate. Great, there is no such animal. Only the great DEQ computer in the sky knows that the car has passed the test, and it isn't telling nobody nothin'.

Stay tuned for part two, wherein this situation is resolved or I am hauled off to the loonie bin.

Veteran

Blue Oyster Cult - Veteran Of The Psychic Wars
BlueOysterWizard
Went to the lab this morning to get my blood drawn. The lab is part of the medical industrial complex, so you have to pay a visit to the registration desk first. 'Papers, please' or the equivalent, but not too many questions, no filling out of forms, and only two signatures required. Don't understand why they need my wife's birth date, nor why they need a signature acknowledging their privacy policy. I mean, it's their policy, not mine. They need proof that they have shown it to me? This is double no-good no-think. Whatever. But then she asks me if I am a veteran, and 'veteran of a thousand psychic wars' line pops into my head. I can remember the tune, sort of, but not where it came from, so I looked it up when I got home and here we are.

P.S. Great comment from the previous YouTube page: This is the kind of music that makes you wanna snort a big bag of plutonian nyborg. - karlbertiljohnsson

Update September 2019 replaced missing video.

Update July 2022 replaced missing video.

Google Map Anomaly

Painting of Tonopah Test Range by Sebastian Gladstone

The above painting was made (copied?) from a satellite image. Does it reveal any government secrets? Who knows? But the story behind this image is intriguing, if you are interested in bureaucratic fumblings that go on behind bringing satellite images of the Earth to your desktop.

Passport Rules

Treasure Island in the foreground,
Mainland Cuba in the background.

The kids are going to Cuba to visit Osmany's folks over Christmas. They have been planning this trip for months, looking for airline tickets they can afford that won't have them spending umpteen hours in Atlanta, arranging for accommodations, travel to Treasure Island, deciding what to take and figuring out how to pack it all into bags that won't incur an excess weight penalty. We're looking good with only a week until departure and then dutiful daughter gets red flagged on her passport.
    It seems that if you are going to Cuba, you need to have two, full, blank pages in your passport. Daring daughter has used the stuffing out of her passport and if you combined all the blank spots that are left you might get two pages, but that won't cut it. So she needs a new passport.
    She might be able to get one if she drives up to Seattle and pleads her case. And then we might have to drive back a second time to pick it up. No telling. Plus, you need an appointment. Would she even be able to get an appointment? Once again, no idea.
     There is an outfit that claims to be able to get your passport renewed in one day, but they charge $300, and that is on top of whatever the government wants, which is somewhere north of $100. I hate being put over a barrel like this, but it might be the best solution. I'm wondering how they are able to do this, and then I realized that the appointment might be the gating factor. If they book an appointment every day then they can be sure of getting in. So their business model is basically paying for one person to hang around passport central all the time. Or maybe they split their take with the secretary of passport control and he sees that their clients get taken care of. Who knows? In any case, it's a stink load of money for something we shouldn't have to pay for at all, but like I said, this new rule has got us over a barrel.
    On the other side, if you count the missed time from work and the time and effort to drive to Seattle (possibly twice), the $300 begins to look almost reasonable.

P.S. No glasses in your passport photos anymore. Another new rule. I'm thinking we need a subscription service to tell us whenever they make a new rule, which seems to be every couple of months ever since Homeland Security took over.

Post Office Follies

Younger son is selling off his surplus guitar pedals. He's working, so I get to go to the Post Office. Yesterday I drop off three packages, no problemo. Today there's a different guy at the counter and he wants me to fill out a custom's form. What the fudgcicle? Oh, this package is going to Canada. Seems Canada has gotten al persnickety about this whole mail thing. Not only did I have to fill out a custom's form, I also had to write CANADA in all caps at the bottom of the address label, even though it already said Canada, and I had to write USA at the bottom on the return address. Seems they sent back a bunch of stuff at Christmas for nit-picky reasons like this.