Society without Police: Insurance Jargon, the BLM Surcharge

Posted: June 11, 2020 by datechguy in culture, News/opinion
Tags: ,

Vicar the Reverend Morrison: It’s about this letter you sent me regarding my insurance claim.

Mr. Devious: Oh, yeah, yeah – well, you see, it’s just that we’re not…as yet…totally satisfied with the grounds of your claim.

Vicar the Reverend Morrison: But it says something about filling my mouth in with cement.

Devious: Oh well, that’s just insurance jargon, you know.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus The Buzz Aldrin Show 1970

The latest in a series of post concerning the removal or the de-funding of police departments and the unintended and/or unconsidered consequences thereof.

One of the hidden costs in every product you buy is the cost of insurance.

Every product you buy online, every time you go to a local store, every time you buy a gallon of gas at the pump or eat at a restaurant (although you likely haven’t done that lately) part of the price you are paying for an item or service include that cost that the shipper, the business owner, the manufacturer paid for insurance.

The insurance business is a lot like the casino business in the sense that it’s all about the odds. In life insurance you look at the numbers concerning life expectancy adjusting for factors such as smoking, flying disease and set your rates accordingly (it’s no coincidence that as life expediency went up near the end of last century ads for life insurance without a medical exam for those 50-80 were everywhere). In collision insurance you calculate the number of fender benders you are likely to have to pay out and base your rates on those odds.

When it comes to business property there are many things to consider. How likely is a robbery, how likely a broken window, how likely a fire, how likely a package will be stolen from a stoop after delivery. All of that is figured into the price a business must pay for doing business.

Now take that batch of risks, and add to that the risk of doing business in a city with either no police or a de-funded police department.

How do you factor that into your price?

Well if you are a small business or retailer you might will find the cost of such an increase prohibitive and not even bother to try. What about the big guys?

Well if you are a business like Wal-Mart you can lean on a mayor to make sure she gives you preferential tax treatment or incentives to stay:

“Mayor Lightfoot said she was on a conference call with Walmart and other major retailers that had stores looted or heavily damaged during the unrest in Chicago. She said she pleaded with them to not abandon Chicago.”

Or you might decide it isn’t worth it at all to reopen and move:

Some may shrug at Wyrobek’s declaration and say that it’s just 50 jobs, but Wyrobek isn’t likely to be alone. He just has the distinction of being the first to go public with his decision to leave, and the reasons for doing so. How many business owners in Minneapolis might decide that the risk of a repeat is just too high, and that the track record of city leadership represents a bad risk?

For that matter, some businesses might not have the ability to reopen in place even if rebuilt. Insurance losses in the riots will go over $500 million, and customers in Minneapolis will have higher rates as a result of the suddenly-exposed risk of doing business in the city. For some businesses, that might be too much of a hurdle for reinvesting in the city.

But move or stay the cost of either that lost tax revenue or extra insurance will be passed on to you. But it goes deeper than that.

Let’s say you don’t go to stores, What happens if you are in Chicago or Minneapolis and decide to go all in on Amazon?

Well we’ve already talked about the return of the shotgun driver carrying a real shotgun but lets go one step further.

If the police are unlikely to respond to a truck or UPS truck getting hit how much less likely are they going to worry about porch pirates?

Now if you don’t get your package you might call amazon and they may say that their responsibility ended when it ended when it was delivered or they might consent to replace it, in fact the cost of such a replacement is likely factored into the, but what happens if you live in a city that has no police and / or defunded police and the cost of such replacements become prohibitive?

Well I suspect you will see and extra charge for such cities call it a black lives matter surcharge, assessed to cover packages lost in those cities because nobody is afraid of getting in trouble for taking them.

But let’s go one step further. Let’s say that BLM decides that such a charge is “racist” and that penalizing residents of such cities over it is also racist. In this politically correct world a business might not want to be tagged so.

In that case if you’re amazon you introduce optional “insurance”. For a small fee if your order is lost or stolen then it will be replaced at no further charge, BUT if you don’t select that option Amazon or any other online retailer might elect to take no responsibility for any package once it’s delivered to that address.

Now I’m sure that our friends on the left might not be pleased about paying this likely new surcharge, but that’s OK, with the higher rates they’ll pay for car insurance, homeowners insurance, renters insurance if they don’t own a home and of course the higher rates on loans as if you live in those cities you’re a bad risk, I’m sure they won’t notice a few more dollars paid for a package from Amazon.

Society Without Police: The Return of Riding Shotgun (for real)

Posted: June 10, 2020 by datechguy in business, News/opinion
Tags: , , , ,

One of the advantages of being a man of my age is that you grew up at a time when westerns were rather popular on TV. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Western was the lack of a police department in all but the biggest cities. That gives those of us who are old enough a reference to a society where you have no police department.

As I suspect a lot of our friends on the left do not have a reference for a society without police as they go all in on the “Defund the Police” business over the next week or so let me illustrate just one of the may consequences that our ignorant at best or idiotic at worst leftists are not considering because they’re well ignorant and/or well IDIOTS.

Likely you have heard the term “Riding Shotgun” which over the last 50 years has meant riding in the front with the driver.

However 150 years ago riding shotgun meant just that.

If you had someone “riding shotgun” that meant that next to the stagecoach driver whose attention had to be on the horses and what passed for roads you would have a 2nd person next to him, armed with a shotgun.

His job was to watch for armed attackers on any stripe. In an age when lawlessness was common and the entire population was acquainted with death as an everyday risk and thanks to a bloody civil war inoculated against horror over the killing of another a shotgun guard would not have too much to worry about if he found it necessary to discharge his weapon at a potential attacker.

Now with the advent of the automobile, quicker travel, communications and of course a regular police force the necessity for additional armed guards for all but the most valuable cargoes (like a brinks truck) became unnecessary. Furthermore as laws have become stricter and death less familiar the risks of discharging a weapon in defense of a cargo have increased and of course the presence of police who can be called in case of trouble makes the risk of going after a lesser cargo not worth the reward.

But the removal or de-funding of police changes that equation.

First of all if you are a thief looking for a quick score , or an addict in need of money for a fix these lesser targets, a UPS truck making deliveries, a Tractor trailer heading for a store, a mail truck delivering packages or even an UBER driver taking a passenger from an event become very inviting. The absence of police, either due to the force being abolished or because limited resources means nobody to respond to a call & even fewer available to follow up on a robbery after the fact.

This means bad news for a delivery driver who will be taking his life into his own hands in such a city. While any individual package might not be worth a lot a UPS Truck with anything near a full load would be worth enough to hit and loot and what isn’t kept for oneself will turn up at a flea market or pawn shop or sold on eBay.

This means a you need a 2nd person in the truck but if there are no police to call or no prospect that any would come a 2nd person would have no function other than to watch the truck get emptied, unless he was armed.

And if you are talking about a tractor trailer making regular delivers which might have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of items in tow the necessity of an armed guard ready to shoot exists every single day.

So while there a lot of downsides to the de-funding or departure of the police force on the plus side this will mean literally thousands of job opportunities for those both with steady nerves and the willingness to take a risk as shotgun riders for trailers, and UPS trucks and other cargo, jobs that have not been available in such quantity in a century and a half.

Alas for our friends on the left burdened with student loans who are triggered by a speaker who disagrees with them or who can’t function if the wrong pronoun is used, it’s unlikely that these new jobs will head their way. Much more likely a maga man, familiar with a gun and who knows how and when to use it (or not) will get that job.

I’m sure the sight of such a armed fellow in the delivery truck as it pulls up to their house or apartment building will be a great comfort to those inside.

Postmodernism and Her Babies

Posted: June 9, 2020 by julietteochieng in Uncategorized
Tags: , ,

by baldilocks

Originally posted with a different title on September 22, 2013 at my old blog.

I notice patterns, more so now than back when I was a young woman–likely because my head was filled with fruitless things with which, all too often, young, single women occupy themselves. It was too crowded in there. Too bad. The ability to recognize patterns could have done me some good back then, both professionally and personally. But, it was what it was. And now, the patterns of life are pretty much all I think about. Allow me to expound on at least one.

Many people subscribe to subjective truth–that each person possesses his/her own truth that may be different from another individual’s truth and I have noticed how normalized this way of thinking has become.

Not long ago, I had a conversation with a man, a friend of a friend, on the definition of earning money. For whatever reason, he thought that any money that a person legally possessed was automatically earned–that legal possession and earning were synonymous. We went back and forth about this until I put forth the following scenario: a man is walking down a street and sees a dollar on the sidewalk. He picks it up and puts it in his pocket. Is it legally his? We agreed that it was. But did he earn it? I’d like to think I won the argument. But I found it alarming that, somehow, the gentleman I was talking to–a reasonably intelligent man–had bound up earning and the legal possession in his mind.

Then there was another conversation with another person about the ethnicity of Jesus the Christ. This lady was adamant that Jesus in the flesh was not a “white European” in the manner in which He is often rendered. I agreed, but in the conversation, the passage in The Revelation describing Jesus’ hair was cited. Here it is:

His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow…

–Revelation 1:14 (KJV, emphasis mine)

The lady contended that this passage was describing the texture of His hair; that it was like wool, and, therefore concluded that Jesus was “black.” When I countered that the passage only described the color of His hair and nothing about the texture, she said that I wasn’t “interpreting” the passage correctly. This particular conversation did not end as hopefully as the previous one. (As for Jesus’ “race,” I am…ahem…agnostic on the subject. Moreover, I don’t think it matters.)

But whatever one thinks about the truth of the Bible or the proper translation from its original languages into English, it’s fascinating to note that even an English description of a thing is open to “interpretation” in the minds of some; that an explicit mention of a color has many meanings outside of its scope.

And, by fascinating, I mean scary.

I don’t think this type of thinking is an anomaly and I certainly don’t think that the widespread inculcation of this type of thinking is accidental.

A few years back, I coined the term Coconut Treatment. It didn’t catch on but it’s still useful for the purpose of recognizing this particular pattern:

Take a coconut, slice it in half, scoop out the meat from both halves and toss the meat—the substance–into the garbage disposal. Then take a pile of dog manure that Fido deposited into your yard, fill both halves of the coconut shells with it and glue the halves back together. What do you have now?

A “coconut.”

This is what has happened to words and concepts in the minds of many and it is the fruit of primary, secondary, and collegiate education also known as the Great Dumbing Down. The fruit has been emptied of its nutrients and then painted over or glued back together and called “fruit.” At some point, individual words and concepts became subjective. That is, they became fluid and not set in stone. My old blog friend, Jeff Goldstein, had a series of posts at his old blog on this phenomenon, and a lot of people didn’t get that he was talking about this very thing.

(I was going to say that the idea of subjective definition is more common among those with bachelor degrees or higher, but, in the past few years, I’ve noticed that many who don’t have much formal education also subscribe to the notion. The difference between the two groups is this: the latter are less likely to believe in subjective meaning and, even those who do will shake off this idea once it is pointed out and explained. The former tend to be too well indoctrinated.)

Being one of those with less formal education, I had long observed this phenomenon, but until I read Jeff’s intentionalism series, I didn’t know how to articulate it. Then, [in a long ago] Sunday Morning Book Thread at Ace’s place, OregonMuse, the book thread master, added to my informal education by posting the following

Postmodernism is a complex of concepts that asserts that all our constructs are just that, constructs; that there are no grand narratives or abiding truths; that all such grand narratives are illegitimate power moves; and that every perspective is necessarily a limited and local one.

and said, jokingly, that

One year of free AoSHQ Premium content goes to the first [person] who spots the giant logical hole in this worldview.

So, being insufficiently indoctrinated with the Coconut Treatment, I was the first one to point out the hole.

According to postmodern logic, postmodernism itself is a construct and, therefore, limited and local.

And, of course, that means that postmodernism, itself, is false, illegitimate and a mere power move, by the postmodern narrative’s own logic.

I started writing this post weeks ago [sic], and, after reading OregonMuse’s post, it occurred to me that postmodernism is the very fecund parent of subjective definition. Oh, I’m know that I’m not the first person to come to this conclusion, but, keep these things in mind: I have only a two-year degree and, what little I do know and think about comes from volitional reading, observation and from thinking ideas through to the end. (I had heard of postmodernism, but whenever I began to read anything written by its adherents, my eyes began to close.)

Something else that occurred to me about postmodernism, besides its logical fallaciousness, is that its advent has been long predicted. Speaking of the perilous times in the Last Days, Paul in his second letter to his protégé, Timothy, writes this:

But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.

–2 Timothy 3:13 (KJV, emphasis mine)

Lying and being lied to.

Postmodernists like to make their written offerings seemingly complicated, but such are really quite simple, and I mean that in both senses.

It is but one big gigantic lie, negating itself even. Above, I likened postmodernism to a mother with countless children and those who read the Bible know who the father is. Subjective truth and definition? The Lie-baby.

It’s up to each individual to see the lies for what they are, to shake off the indoctrination.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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The creation of media bias

Posted: June 9, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: ,

By Christopher Harper

While taking an online course created by the University of Texas and the Knight Foundation, I hoped to learn more about reporting on the Covid-19 crisis.

Instead, I got an informative look at the creation and propagation of media bias throughout the world.

Had the class involved only a few students, the result would have been a small group of individuals subjected to an anti-Trump bias. Instead, nearly 10,000 people from countries throughout the world received examples of how NOT to report.

The instructor, science reporter Maryn McKenna, barely cloaked her bias throughout the four-week class.

In the first week, the class got the bias of writer Sonia Shah.

“[W]hat really surprised me about the way this pandemic is unfolding is the huge political failure in the United States. I think that really was not expected. You know, I think we’ve all been kind of confused about the U.S. response and, you know, the political moment we’re in where we have all of these right-wing populist leaders around the world,” she opined.

That would run counter to recent studies that found the U.S. lockdown may have saved 60 million Americans from contracting the disease.

In the second week, the class read one of the instructor’s articles in The New Republic, an avowedly leftist publication, entitled “The Plague Years: How the rise of right-wing nationalism is jeopardizing the world’s health.” 

“Nationalism, xenophobia, the new right-wing populism in Europe and the United States, are raising our risk,” said Ronald Klain, who was the White House Ebola response coordinator for President Barack Obama, told her. 

The article is a classic example of confirmation bias, where she sought out sources to confirm her beliefs.

In the third week, the instructor blamed President Trump and Fox News for saying hydroxychloroquine might help people to recover from Covid-19. Her criticism was based on a study that has been subsequently found to have had numerous errors. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/health/coronavirus-hydroxychloroquine.html

McKenna also highlighted an obvious piece of propaganda from a student from China:

“China’s President Xi Jinping…pledged to make any potential vaccine developed by China a ‘global public good’ once it was put into use. This move would be China’s contribution to achieving accessibility and affordability of a vaccine in developing countries as well.”

Moreover, the instructor makes a particular point to forecast that it would take 10 to 15 years to discover a vaccine.

Then the coup de grace in the final week. In rapid succession, the instructor interviewed the head of the CDC under Obama, who criticized the current U.S. policies. But, ahem, she failed to ask him about Obama’s and his failures during the H1N1 pandemic.

Then, you can’t make this stuff up, came fiction writer Annalee Newitz.

“We’re seeing our political institutions become more unstable. We’re seeing environmental problems exacerbated as regulations over environmental waste. We’re seeing more problems around climate change because environmental regulations are being relaxed during these difficult times. … We’re facing starvation in California, even though we have plenty of food, but lots of people are now undernourished and malnourished and aren’t able to eat,” Newitz told the instructor, who didn’t question this nonsense.

Famine?

I repeatedly tried to contact the instructor, who apparently ignored my emails.

One of the organizers, University of Texas professor Rosental Alves, responded to my complaints.  

Alves said: “This is the only complaint I have received from anyone among the nearly 9,000 people registered in this MOOC. It’s also the first time I’ve received a political bias complaint since I started our distance learning program for journalists 17 years ago. I will look into it.” 

I’ve heard nothing more.

I declined my certificate of completion of the class on reporting about Covid-19. Instead, I might ask for a certificate in watching media bias unfold to nearly 10,000 people, who, unlike me, may have limited backgrounds in assessing how the media can suborn the truth and propagate the false. 

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