Visual Thinking and Occasional Odds and Ends

Last week I lost my cell phone. Yep.   And it’s an IPhone 5.   And it was unlocked. What happened next was a miracle. But first let me set the scene.   My wife and I were returning from Rochester, a town that is a five hour drive from our home in Dover NJ.   And since we started the day in Dover, ours was a long day of driving. We were maybe 3 hours from home when we stopped at a rest stop on Interstate Highway 81, southbound at the NY/PA border.   I don’t usually carry my cell phone.   If I take a long drive, it is with my wife – she does all the driving, and carries her Blackberry.   I rarely carry my cell phone, except when I commute to work, and then my phone lives in my brief case, and is turned off.   But on this day my wife asked me to bring my cell phone.   I don’t know why, but she did.   So I put it in my coat pocket and we embarked.   From time to time over a long day, I would pull my phone out to loo...

There is no free market for labor.   Before you start screaming at me that it is the free market for labor that has destroyed US wages, let me elaborate about just how different the market for labor is from what Adam Smith imagined in the 18 th century.   In the US, our labor market may be mostly free from government influence (other than that of fairly innocuous wages and hours laws) but the sellers and buyers are far from equal.   And it is the relative equality between seller and buyers that governs the exchanges between them.   Unfortunately, with labor, the laborers are selling themselves, and since industrialization, the power of large employers has dwarfed that of workers.   If you are a doctor or lawyer, or engineer or programmer (of the right kind of software) your special skill or monopoly license may give you a bit more power than the average worker, but for regular folks with average skills, you are a virtually a pawn.   And the situat...

Entrepreneurs are not Job Creators. America has needed to create its own myths in order to make itself a people.   While nations like the UK have tales of King Arthur and the Vikings their sagas, tales which predate the modern nation-state, we had to invent our myths in plain view.   Thus, we know that it was the well-meaning Parson Weems who made up the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.   And another myth, that “we” never lost a war – at least up till Vietnam, seems to have just happened.   It was Puritan John Winthrop who said their new colony would be a “city upon a hill,” that would draw the attention of the world.    This eventually became a “shining city upon a hill,” and has been used to describe American exceptionalism by folks as varied as John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Sometimes, the myth is harmless, as it is with George Washington and the cherry tree.   In other cases, the myth is delusional and leads to bad pol...

What is it about women and their libido.  I mean really? Women who need sex and must have it so often that they need to take a pill to prevent pregnancy.   Well I do believe.   And Democrats want us to pay for the pills. …. Ok, that is not what it’s about.   To begin with, lets start with whose libido this is about.   Birth control was never about women’s libido.   Sorry, as a teenager in the 60s, I heard lots of stories about women who had bundles of children in the days before the pill.   Sure there were also rubbers but men hate rubbers and truth to tell, the pill put women in control.   So finally, with birth control, women could accept their partner’s advances and not get pregnant.   And it WAS the partner who pushed the issue.   As a man married now for 37 years, I can tell you that it was my team doing the urging, so our libido. And what is the issue anyway?   The ACA mandates the purchase of insurance, a...