Lies of Government

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Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast—ADS-B Out—is an aviation safety aircraft transponder system that broadcasts, via satellite, an airplane’s location, altitude, speed, and identification number so that the FAA’s air traffic controllers can more readily track the airplane and its physical relationship with other aircraft in the vicinity. It’s an expensive addition to aircraft that was inflicted on sold to general aviation pilots on the government’s promise that the system would be used only for aviation safety and for no other government purpose.

The lie:

ADS-B gave them [government taxmen] an instant high-tech snoop tool, including the ability to claim owners are registering planes in one place but parking them elsewhere. Jeff Prang, the assessor for Los Angeles County, recently bragged to Politico that the county is using ADS-B to take the tax hammer to owners of 1,000 planes it claims have been “avoiding” “$35 million in local property taxes.”

Now we get ADS-B In, proposed in House and Senate bills, which allows pilots to see for themselves the aircraft around them.

House Republicans…used the revival of the [ADS-B] issue to remedy the original tax sin, forbidding any government agency from using ADS-B “for the purpose of obtaining revenue.”

And we get the response from the Left:

[S]afety means little to the tax officials wailing that they will lose this new “efficient” way to tax—as if Americans are obligated to make their jobs easy. It also means little to Democrats, who see a new front in the class war

It’s more than just petty taxman convenience, though. According to them, the money an employer pays an employee isn’t that employee’s money. It belongs to the government; the employee is merely a middleman on that road. Or, as that LA tax assessor implied, a highwayman needing handling.

Notice that it’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who are defending ADS-B Out’s use as a tax collection facility and who are demanding to use ADS-B In for the same purpose.

Trade-Through Elimination

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The SEC’s trade rule, in effect for a bit over 20 years, requires trading platforms operating in the US to execute investors’ trades at the best price available across the market, even if that means one platform must go to another platform to execute the trade. The SEC wants to rescind that rule as no longer necessary. The SEC says,

Currently, the US equity markets are highly automated and interconnected and the Commission’s concerns expressed at the time of [the rule’s] adoption in 2005 regarding the lack of mechanisms to connect markets is no longer an issue[.]

The SEC now argues that (as paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal)

stockbrokers already have a strict legal duty to execute trades with the most favorable terms for their clients, making the trade-through rule superfluous.

The exchanges’ “legal duty” is all well and good, but then there are the enforcement costs for violations of that rule. These costs are incurred by the government (i.e., us taxpayers) from enforcing compliance with a case’s outcome, incurred by individual (and institutional) investors from raising a ruckus in the first place, and incurred as opportunity costs during the time between detection of a violation and final adjudication.

Then there’s the difficulty of detecting a violation in the first place, especially for retail investors.

The SEC also argues that rule rescission would save the platforms the cost of buy[ing] expensive market data feeds linked to a bevy of exchanges.

Yet, in order to satisfy that legal duty, the platforms still would need access to some version of those data feeds, or at least to the data in them, in order, in real time (which is microseconds in today’s interconnectivity), to identify that best price available.

This is a rule that should remain in effect. The cost to the platforms is trivial: $54.2 million to $77 million annually, compared with nearly $30 billion in aggregated US platform income. Violations of the trade-through rule, importantly, are far more easily detected, including by retail investors.

“Dude-Bro”

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We’ve got some dude-bro politicians on the hustings, that being the new In Thing for politicians and politician wannabes. Most of them have no particular substance, though, trading on their dude-i-ness for the most part. The news writer defined dude-bro as this (though I question the first criterion as truly bro-ish or dude-ish, let alone in combination):

  • accusation of sexual misconduct or marital infidelity
  • voluntary or involuntary association with any of the following:
    • Tucker Carlson, Hasan Piker, or Joe Rogan
    • use of a racial slur in a public appearance or online post
    • publicly brawling or picking a fight

Here some of those dude-bro politicians, though they’re mostly just wannabes:

  • Graham Platner, of PTSD-sourced (he claims) misogyny, abuse, and bigotry infamy
  • Spencer Pratt, a Palisades Fire phoenix who burned down anew in his class war and Never Bass campaign
  • Brandon Herrera, who makes his own guns and refers to a particular German gun as “the original ghetto blaster”

Their platforms? Read the above again. Those are their platforms. They have nothing (had nothing in Pratts case, he’s already lost his election) substantial, only those sort-of tough guy images.

Here’s another dude-bro; he has substance, though, if highly dangerous. He even satisfies the Tucker Carlson criterion, and he’s put into action his bigotry regarding all things Ukrainian. And his fight-picking….

At least he’s wearing pants instead of a towel.

The Death of the Alarm Clock

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Maybe a loss as a minor cultural item, but the loss of the alarm clock has no practical consequence, even though one of the editors of The Wall Street Journal thinks so. The opinion writer opened her piece with this:

A friend who recently joined the Medicare rolls encountered a new test at his last physical. To confirm he still has his marbles, he was asked to draw a clock face displaying the time 10 minutes after 11. He passed, but would a fourth-grader? Not necessarily, I suspect, due to the near-extinction of the alarm clock.

I suspect otherwise.

————-
| 11:10 |
————-

Easy enough for the 4th grader to do, even with AACII art. Maybe, with ASCII art, especially so for him.

The Problem with Platner

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Graham Platner has won the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Maine primary election and has become Party’s nominee to be one of Maine’s Senators in the fall general election. That’s bad enough, but that’s not all.

Party senior leadership and middle tier politicians are enthusiastically endorsing this…person.

  • California Congressmen Adam Schiff and Ro Khanna
  • Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal
  • New York Senator and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
  • Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz
  • Minnesota Senator Tina Smith
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren
  • Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (socialist and Independent, but he caucuses with Party)
  • Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego

All of these support Platner and are touting him to be the next Senator from Maine, replacing the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins.

This is Graham Platner:

Platner has a Nazi symbol for a tattoo on his chest that he has only lately tried to cover over with another tattoo—a move he made only when the public began objecting to his tattoo, not because it took him nearly 20 years to figure out that it was a Nazi symbol.

Platner has a long history of abusing women, including physically, and he has been caught sexting women in the last couple of years—after he was married.

Platner holds women at least partially responsible for their own rapes.

Platner openly disparages American voters, here, Maine voters, saying in plain words that rural Mainers are racist and stupid.

Platner disdains our police, saying that all of them are bastards.

Platner, himself a military veteran, has only contempt for our military men and women. He demonstrates this with his slur of a wounded, and Purple Heart recipient, soldier, insisting that the man was dumb for having gotten shot and deserved to die.

The problem for our nation isn’t a single Senator with such obnoxious and anti-American (not just unamerican) positions.

The problem is bigger than that: those positions of Platner’s–bigotry, misogyny, hatred of police and our military personnel–are, by Party endorsement, Party’s ideology and election platform.