Tag: analysis

Disincentives to Work

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece, “Fast Food Premium,” which argued that, as restaurants began offering higher wages and even signing bonuses to employees, those increased wages would get passed along to consumers, and would result in wider inflation (a big “thank you” to jonolan at Reflections from a Murky Pond for expanding upon the premise of my post with his own, excellent piece, “UBI —> UBM“).  My observations might be deemed “prophetic” if they weren’t so blindingly obvious:  higher input costs mean higher prices.  That’s basic economics.

Of course, the ongoing labor shortage is not due to a booming economy, per se, but due to excessively generous federal unemployment benefits, which have effectively increased the minimum wage for restaurant employees:  many such employees are paid more to stay at home, collecting unemployment, than they are to flip burgers, wait tables, etc.  Mogadishu Matt highlights this phenomenon in a reblog of a John Stossel piece:  the issue is not a labor shortage, but a problem of incentives.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: The Wailing (2016)

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Lately I’ve been watching quite a few foreign-language flicks, some good, some disturbing.  The latest, the 2016 Korean film The Wailing, falls somewhere in the middle.

The plot of the film involves a mysterious illness or curse that enters a remote Korean mountain village when a Japanese tourist arrives to town.  The malady causes victims to develop glowing red eyes and dark skin, as well as odd contortions of their bodies.  Ultimately, sufferers kill their entire families.

It is near the beginning of this curse that Officer Gong-joo witnesses a naked, wild-eyed woman banging on the doors of his police substation during a thunderstorm.  Gong-joo and his partner hide behind their desks, debating about who will check on the naked woman, but the woman has fled by the time they muster the courage to investigate.  At a crime scene a short time later, they find the woman, along with her family, dead or raving violently at their burned out home.

It is established early on that Officer Gong-joo is a pitiful loser, but he loves his daughter, Hyo-jin, a predictably adorable little Korean girl.  Gong-joo cheats on his wife, shirks work responsibility, and is the laughingstock of his police precinct.  He is a coward and an utter failure, but he is—in spite of it all—a good father.

When his beloved daughter comes down with the strange curse, he has the opportunity to prove his courage.

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Lazy Sunday CXIV: More Movies IV: Movie Reviews, Part IV

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We’re getting into that hot time of year, which for most people means going outside, doing yard work, and having fun.  For those of us that are of a lazier, doughier disposition, it’s a time to avoid the unpleasantness of Southern humidity with some good flicks and frosty A/C.

In that spirit, I decided to return to a retrospective of past Monday Morning Movie Reviews this Lazy Sunday, featuring a selection of three flicks spanning decades:

  • “Monday Morning Movie Review: Young Frankenstein (1974)” – Another timeless comedy classic, Young Frankenstein is one of my favorite Mel Brooks films.  I re-watched it back in January, during those long, cold winter nights, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
  • “Monday Morning Movie Review: Digging Up the Marrow (2014)” – This flick was one I’d seen on Hulu for years, but had always passed over.  I finally watched it, and really enjoyed its twist on the “found-footage” phenomenon.  The premise is that the “movie-within-a-movie” seeks to prove that monsters are real, with only an obsessed old man as their guide.
  • “Monday Morning Movie Review: Witness (1985)” – A modern classic starring Harrison Ford as a cop on the run in Amish Country, Witness is a powerful story of a man whose principles, while out of place in the modern world, help him fit into the world in which he takes refuge.

That’s it for this weekend.  Happy Viewing!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

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TBT: Big Deal

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The big news in media a year ago was that Joe Rogan had signed an exclusive deal with Spotify, purported to be worth around $100 million.  At the time, it seemed that Rogan and/or Spotify was/were purging from the platform the edgiest of Rogan’s guests, the interesting dissidents like Gavin McInnes.

As I wrote last year, “Imagine, though, what [Rogan] could have done for free speech and liberty if he’d fought against the SJWs and taken the McInnes route [of starting his own platform].”

Well, it seems that Rogan is beginning to realize the price of doing business with the wokesters.  In a recent interview, Rogan bemoaned the death of comedy films, as now any bit of humor can be construed as a form of privilege, or of otherwise marginalizing some allegedly oppressed and, therefore, humorless minority.  Rogan even went so far as to claim that “it will eventually get to straight white men are not allowed to talk.”

Rogan seems to be waking up to reality, albeit belatedly.  Let’s see if he puts his money where his mouth is and pushes back against the social justice tyranny, or continues to rest on his lucrative laurels.

Here is 20 May 2020’s “Big Deal“:

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Improving Christian Fiction

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I stumbled upon the psychotherapist and author Adam Lane Smith when Mogadishu Matt wrote a “Sunny Side Up” book review of Smith’s action-comedy novel Maxwell Cain: Burrito Avenger (readers will forgive me for noting that my own book, The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot was featured in the inaugural “Sunny Side Up” review).  I have yet to purchase any of Smith’s works yet, though I intend to pick up copies of Maxwell Cain and books from his Deus Vult Wastelanders series.

I have, however, signed up for Smith’s e-mail list—the least any potential supporter can do—and have enjoyed his e-mail blasts.  One recent message caught my eye:  a blog post entitled “Time to Fix a Problem.”

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Egged Off

The Portly Politico7 Comments

An unfortunately perennial story that always gets traction here on the Right goes something like this:  precocious youngsters, hoping to engage in some earnest enterprise, start selling lemonade or the like from a roadside stand.  The kids are doing well and making good money (for kids), until an overzealous local health board official sends in the cops to bust up the lemonade stand.  Like Treasury Department revenuers smashing up a yokel’s still, these local officials destroy children’s dreams—and sometimes slap them with a fine.

It’s a story that guarantees outrage, and highlights the clueless, stringent rule-following of bureaucracies.  Yes, yes—technically you’re not supposed to sell lemonade and hot dogs without some kind of license, and the health department is supposed make sure your establishment is clean.  But these are kids, selling stuff on the side of the road.  Why bother?  Let them have fun and make a little money.

The latest such story involves two young ladies selling eggs in their town in Texas.  The Lone Star State has been reeling since the major winter storm hit a month or so back, and food supplies have been disrupted.  Having some backyard eggs for sale surely helped out some locals.

Unbeknownst to the girls—but beknownst to some overweening Karen, no doubt—a local ordinance prohibits the selling of eggs, though it permits the raising of chickens on one’s property.  That’s asinine.  Why can’t people sell eggs in a small town in Texas?

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The King of One’s Castle

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Over the weekend photog posted a nice little post on his blog, Orion’s Cold Fire, with the title “The Western View,” a clever bit of double entendre:  it’s about both the view of the western end of his property, and the Western view of republicanism—independent self-government.

It’s appropriate that photog used his home as the centerpiece—the “hook,” as he put it—for a short essay on the nature of liberty and republicanism.  At the most basic level, one’s home—one’s land, property, and the people that reside there—is one’s guarantee of liberty.  That scrap of land and the house upon it is one’s castle, and every man is the king of his little estate.

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Fast Food Premium

The Portly Politico8 Comments

There’s been a lot of discussion of UBI—Universal Basic Income—over the last few years, especially with the presidential primary run of Andrew Yang.  The concept is seductive in its simplicity:  gut the welfare state and its behemoth apparatus of bureaucratic pencil pushers and middlemen, and just cut every adult citizen a monthly check.

For fiscal conservatives, it’s a particularly toothsome Devil’s Bargain:  streamline an inefficient and wasteful bureaucracy and simply direct deposit a grand every month into Americans’ checking accounts.  Of course, it’s a siren song:  we’d just get the payments and still suffer with an entrenched bureaucracy, claiming $1000 a month isn’t enough to meet the specialized needs of whatever community they pretend to support.

Even if the deal were struck and every redundant welfare program were eliminated, there UBI would still be a bad idea.  Besides the absurdity of merely paying people to exist, it’s inherently inflationary:  if you give everyone $1000 a month, prices are going to go up.  Just as college tuition has soared because universities realized they could jack up the price and federal loans would expand to cover the costs, UBI would cause a similar rise in prices.  Sure, it’d be great at first, but the inflationary effects would kick in quickly.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Concert Postmortem

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

My poor health recovered, I tested negative for The Virus, and the Spring Concert was a smashing success.  I managed to get back to work Wednesday, giving me time to build—for the first time since the 2019 Christmas Concert—my Frankenstein’s Monster sound system, rehearse my students, and wire up a ton of microphones, amps, keyboards, and the like.

After every big concert, I spend part of a class period conducting a “concert postmortem,” my pet term for reviewing the highs and lows of the previous night.  It’s a good opportunity to discuss elements that could be improved for the next concert, but also to allow the students to bask in the glory of their performance a little longer.

Not surprisingly, this process tends to work better with high school students, who have developed politeness filters and know how to phrase suggestions diplomatically.  They’re also veterans, so they understand better the realities of live performance, and don’t have unrealistic expectations.  Middle school students tend to either be over-awed by the experience (one student Thursday evening exclaimed, “That was awesome!”) or very critical of small errors.  That’s why we frame these discussions as “constructive criticism,” which helps the students understand the purpose is to build each other up and point out areas where we can all improve.

Regardless, I’m letting readers in on that process a bit with a general “concert postmortem,” including our finalized set list.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Spring Break Short Story Recommendations 2021, Part I: “Black Tancrède”

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It’s another glorious Spring Break for yours portly, which means it’s time to whip out some classic tales of ghostly spookiness.  This week I’m working my way through Chilling Ghost Stories, edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, published in March 2020.  It’s a collection that was clearly compiled for the bargain section at Barnes & Nobles, with a list price of just $10 for 471 pages of medium-sized print chills (I picked it up for $8 plus tax thanks to my handy Educator’s Discount card).  The stories were written from 1893 to 1929, with today’s selection, Henry S. Whitehead‘s “Black Tancrède,” being the latest.

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