Category Archives: culture

Misunderstanding

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It’s surprising that so many so-called journalists misunderstand, but it’s a widespread failure, and it includes too many economists, as well. For good or ill, there is a loophole in the 2018 tax law that’s providing windfalls for American companies.

The loophole is a mismatch of critical dates between that law’s Section 245A and Section 78. The former lets US companies bring home their foreign profits without paying US taxes, with an effective date of 1 January 2018; the latter was intended to prevent inappropriate tax breaks in the old international tax system, with an effective date of 31 December 2017. Those 24 hours are a loophole far beyond the size of a single day. Three companies, for instance, are claiming—and one has already won in court—tax refunds:

[Varian Medical Systems won its case for] $150 million in deductions. The electronics manufacturer Kyocera and the food distributor Sysco have similar court cases pending, each involving more than $100 million in deductions.

Others are putting together their own refund filings that, in their aggregate will be worth several tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars more.

The misunderstanding is not about the Congressional gridlock blocking reconciliation of those two dates, as the writer of the Wall Street Journal article went on about, even though she got it right in her lede.

That [loophole] is now allowing big companies to save tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that otherwise would have gone to the government.

The misunderstanding—an understanding which goes to the core of our tax system and its and its constitutionally mandated purpose—is this:

The Varian case highlights how gridlock in Congress can cost the public….

No. Leaving money in the hands of our private economy, or returning money to those hands, is not a cost to the public—we American citizens and our enterprises are that public—but a benefit to the public, to us. Leaving the money or refunding it does reduce the amount of money accruing to Government, but that also could be a benefit to the public by restricting the money available to government to misspend. That latter, though, puts the onus on us in the public to elect politicians who will honor that restriction by not borrowing to spend more than government takes in and by not raising taxes to match excess spending.

Then there’s this:

A recent ruling by the Supreme Court will put more emphasis on the literal text of laws….

Literal text of the laws: the text of a law is what Congress intended the law to say, else Congress would have passed a different law saying something different.

And that’s as it should be, since the American system of governance restricts legislation to Congress and judicial action to the limits of those laws’ text. Judge Emin Toro, writing in his ruling on the Varian case, was quite clear on this:

Congress “spoke clearly” when it selected the mismatched effective dates. “Appeals to policy and Congress’s overarching purpose cannot overcome these choices[.]”

Activist judges—and that’s the only kind that presumes to legislate from the bench, that presumes to Know Better than the rest of us what a law should be—are broadly held as Truth Sayers by the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party. These unelected representatives judges writing law rather than ruling within it are the bane of American liberty.

“Honest Mistake”

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That’s the claim Maryland’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Wes Moore is making about his false claim of have earned a Bronze Star which he put on his application for a White House fellowship 18 years ago. At 27 years old, when he made his claim, Moore was old enough to know better. Somewhat older when he was discharged, he was still old enough to know better.

Moore’s claimed sequence of events:

While serving overseas with the Army, I was encouraged to fill out an application for the White House Fellowship by my deputy brigade commander. In fact, he helped me edit it before I sent it in.
At the time, he had recommended me for the Bronze Star. He told me to include the Bronze Star award on my application after confirming with two other senior-level officers that they had also signed off on the commendation.

So far, no problem. He was acting on his commander’s suggestion based on the award being recommended.

However.

Moore said he was “disappointed to learn” that he hadn’t received the Bronze Star towards the end of his deployment.
“But I was ready to begin the next phase of my life, because the reward for service is never an award—it’s the opportunity to give back to your country. When I returned home, I was focused on helping my fellow veterans, a mission I continue to advance as governor,” he said.
“Still, I sincerely wish I had gone back to correct the note on my application. It was an honest mistake, and I regret not making that correction….”

That last is his lie, and it’s indicative of his stolen valor. He knew by the end of his deployment—his own words—that the recommendation for his being awarded the Bronze Star had been turned down. He knew, further, that medal recommendations often are turned down. His pious-sounding words of serving others being its own reward are given the lie by those words of his immediately following.

That level of military decoration is not something any service member forgets about. He chose to not bother to correct his fellowship application after he knew the recommendation for his Bronze Star had been turned down.

Moore knew better, and he knows better. It would have been easy enough to check at the end of his deployment—which he hadn’t needed to do; he already knew: his own words, again. At the very least, his DD214, which every serviceman is issued upon discharge or retirement, lists all the awards and decorations—medals—that the service member received. He chose not to correct his “error” until it became public.

Alongside Minnesota’s Progressive-Democrat Governor and Progressive-Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz’ stolen valor regarding his own lied-about retirement rank, this stolen valor behavior, this insult to our nation’s military personnel, both current and discharged/retired and those who’ve actually been in combat, been wounded or maimed, been killed defending our nation, is what Party does.

Wrong Mindset

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As self-driving cars, misnomerly termed AI-driven cars, become more common, or at least less uncommon, there is growing concern about the ethics of the AIs involved. It’s a valid question, but it aims at the wrong target.

What will the roadway scruples of AI look like?

What to do about avoiding collisions vs the consequences of an avoidance maneuver? Relatedly, dodge the large animal but don’t bother about the small animal? Which property is more legitimate to avoid if any avoidance maneuver means collision with something or damage to the maneuvering car—into the ditch or into the tree to avoid another collision.

There are easier questions, too, whose answers left to the AI are just examples of laziness.

Is taking the fastest route the core metric that should guide autonomous vehicles, or are other factors just as relevant? Focusing on getting to the destination quickly would allow self-driving ride-share vehicles to make more trips and more profit, but might result in more danger. Giving priority to safety alone could slow and snarl traffic. And what about choosing routes that let passengers enjoy the journey?

After all,

The trade-off between safety and speed is “the one thing that really affects 99% of the moral questions around autonomous vehicles,” says Shai Shalev-Shwartz, chief technology officer at Mobileye…. Shifting parameters between these two poles, he says, can result in a range of AI driving, from too reckless to too cautious, to something that seems “natural” and humanlike.
The software can also be calibrated to allow different driving styles, he says. So, for example, an autonomous sports car might drive more aggressively to enhance a sense of performance, an autonomous minivan might put the biggest emphasis on safety and an off-road vehicle might default to taking a scenic route.

There’s no need to leave those factors solely in the software. It’s just not that hard to break them out into separate routines, with the human car driver selecting one when he gets in and boots up his car. Planning a trip is what humans do now, whether a trip across town or to another city or the short trip to the grocery store, even if the latter is planned sub rosa. That needs to be in the hands of the human.

Even if we decide to turn driving over to the AI system running the autonomous vehicle, only the driving itself should be turned over—while maintaining human oversight and real-time overruling capability and responsibility during the driving. It’s hard enough for a human to make the value judgment call regarding a broad variety of collision scenarios, especially regarding those outlined at the start of this post. It’s impossible, at least for the foreseeable future, for humans to write code to wire those judgments into the software running a car.

Autonomous vehicles cannot be only AI operated. The human must be responsible for the decisions he makes in validating the car’s real-time decisions, or overruling them. Or flipping a switch and taking over the task of driving because the software has gotten over its code.

Parenting is Hazardous to One’s Health?

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That’s what the United States Surgeon General says. His solution?

[Surgeon General Vivek] Murthy prescribes a mix of institutional actions such as child income-tax credits and workplace management training on one hand, and individual action such as seeking more mindfulness and self-care on the other.

Sure. The typical progressive mix of throw money at the problem along with feel good self-care claptrap. Nothing about taking care of the children directly. Nothing about local community involvement, and no, I’m not talking about it taking a village nonsense. I’m talking about misdiagnosing the problem because the Progressive-Democrat Surgeon General bureaucrat possessed of a medical degree has missed the underlying problem altogether.

It’s not the powerlessness of parents, nor is it their loneliness; although, the latter does play a part.

Parents have nearly complete power over their children except in some jurisdictions where government asserts itself as the sole possessor of children, whether through public schools locking parents out of their children’s education or emotional problems or directly by locking parents out of the government’s decisions regarding children’s sexual health. “Nearly complete” because parental power does not extend to abusing children. That’s the short and simple of parental power.

Now, the loneliness aspect. The loneliness of parents isn’t from being a parent, it’s from lack of community in the local neighborhood. The folks in too many neighborhoods don’t interact with each other, so they don’t know each other, so they’re in no position to support each other. Yes, yes, both parents work in a double potful of those cases. So what?

I grew up in a household where both my parents worked. At the same time, I grew up in a neighborhood where most households had both parents working. In those days, though, there weren’t backyard fences for individual privacy in the neighborhood. Instead, all those backyards, and front yards, too, functionally ganged together as one large playground for the neighborhood kids to play together, sometimes with ad hoc games, sometimes with less informal games: croquet courts, football (yes, we played tackle), sometimes out into the streets for baseball. The noise of children having fun was loud and common, from toddlers more closely watched by the various parents through high schoolers playing those football and baseball games, and soccer today—and where basketball hoops were set up in driveways, those games, too.

The parents interacted among each other, too. They all knew each other, and they all looked after all the kids, emphasizing their own, to be sure, but all of them. They even had each other’s kids over for snacks or a dinner.

We’ve lost that capacity now, with those ubiquitous fences isolating the back yards, and the children and adults, from each other. We’ve lost that capacity now, too, with today’s adults—parents—more self-centered, me-time demanding, and less community oriented. Today’s neighborhoods are eerily silent of kids playing outdoors.

That sense of community is much harder to achieve in many inner city (and a growing number of outer city) neighborhoods, but that’s not the loss of community among parents and families, it’s the destruction of community through two mechanisms. One is the crime rate. Too many city, county, and State governments reduce, or leave already inadequate, funding for policing the neighborhoods and don’t prosecute criminals that the police do catch. Crime expansion makes the neighborhoods unsafe for parents or children to go outdoors, for adults interact, and for children play with each other.

Community: gangs fill a lot of that—children need their own sense of community, and gangs, however dysfunctionally or crime-oriented fill a lot of that. Those gangs are potentiated, too, by the lack of policing in the neighborhoods.

The other aspect is the lack of effort in or facilities for encouraging newly arrived immigrants to assimilate into American culture. Instead, the newly arrived immigrants hold themselves apart, keeping themselves and their children apart. And they become old immigrants, establishing themselves in their own small (or large) enclaves, into which further newly arrived immigrants of the same culture go to live, and to stay apart.

Lose the loneliness by tearing down those fences; throwing the kids outside to play, without their electronics; talking to the neighbors; get adequate numbers of beat cops in the neighborhoods; prosecute crimes—especially by the gang members. Take concrete, measurable steps to get immigrants assimilated rather than held apart.

American Culture

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Not what it is, but how to protect it. This is at the core of the culture war the Progressive-Democratic Party is so zealously fighting against us average Americans.

On the one hand is the Harris/Walz position of the US as a land of opportunity for all. On the other hand is the Trump/Vance position of protecting American values from outside threats.

The two positions shouldn’t be in opposition to each other. Protecting our values—our culture—from outside threats is what preserves our nation as a land of opportunity for all. If that protection fails, if our culture is materially altered by those threats, that which makes us a land of opportunity for everyone ceases to exist, and that opportunity disappears.

The problem here is in the Progressive-Democratic Party’s demand to define what those opportunities are and how they’re to be achieved. Party wants government—the government Party wishes to control—to determine those opportunities through its taxing programs and its social engineering-oriented expanding spending.

Party wants to dictate via government regulation what transportation we can have opportunity for, what products our businesses will be permitted to produce and sell, what energy sources we will be permitted to buy or sell, who will be permitted to vote, even who will be permitted to run for election.

This is as opposed to what is at the core of our culture: we—us citizens—decide what our values are, we decide what opportunities we wish to pursue, we select our opportunities from lists of our own devise or from none at all, creating opportunity from scratch. Choices may or may not include any of Party’s goals, but none of which are foisted off onto us.

Notice that: what we citizens want to pursue is much less enumerated, and that permits of much expanded opportunity and opportunities.

The choice is clear: Everything within the Party, nothing outside the Party, nothing against the Party vs we’re free to do our own thing, at our own risk, on our own responsibility, and for our own benefit.