Lotus-eater

The Feds have a 95% conviction rate. The death penalty will be used as leverage for a plea deal or he decides to go to trial and has a decent chance of going 6 feet under. Whether he rots in a prison cell or in the ground, he and his 15 minutes of infamy will be forgotten in a few years.

My BMI is in the 27-30 range, but most of my "excess" weight is muscle. Can I get Wegovy if I wear baggy clothes to a doctor's appointment?

Life imitates art: “He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. ...He waked up late next day after a broken sleep. But his sleep had not refreshed him; he waked up bilious, irritable, ill-tempered, and looked with hatred at his room." ....All at once he heard the student mention to the officer the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna ...the student began telling his friend various details about Alyona Ivanovna...and began describing how spiteful and uncertain she was, how if you were only a day late with your interest the pledge was lost; how she gave a quarter of the value of an article and took five and even seven percent a month on it and so on... ...He pulled the axe quite out, swung it with both arms, scarcely conscious of himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her head. ...As she was so short, the blow fell on the very top of her skull. She cried out, but very faintly, and suddenly sank all of a heap on the floor, raising her hands to her head. In one hand she still held “the pledge.” Then he dealt her another and another blow with the blunt side and on the same spot. The blood gushed as from an overturned glass, the body fell back. He stepped back, let it fall, and at once bent over her face; she was dead. ..."You were hungry! It was… to help your mother? Yes?” “No, Sonia, no,” he muttered, turning away and hanging his head. “I was not so hungry…. I certainly did want to help my mother, but… that’s not the real thing either…. Don’t torture me, Sonia.” “Then why… why, you said you did it to rob, but you took nothing?” she asked quickly, catching at a straw.“ ...“Sonia, I have a bad heart, take note of that. It may explain a great deal. I have come because I am bad. There are men who wouldn’t have come. But I am a coward and… a mean wretch. But… never mind! That’s not the point. I must speak now, but I don’t know how to begin.” He paused and sank into thought. ...“What if it were really that?” he said, as though reaching a conclusion. “Yes, that’s what it was! I wanted to become a Napoleon, that is why I killed her…. Do you understand now?” ...“It was like this: I asked myself one day this question—what if Napoleon, for instance, had happened to be in my place, and if he had not had Toulon nor Egypt nor the passage of Mont Blanc to begin his career with, but instead of all those picturesque and monumental things, there had simply been some ridiculous old hag, a pawnbroker, who had to be murdered too to get money from her trunk (for his career, you understand). Well, would he have brought himself to that if there had been no other means? Wouldn’t he have felt a pang at its being so far from monumental and… and sinful, too? Well, I must tell you that I worried myself fearfully over that ‘question’ so that I was awfully ashamed when I guessed at last (all of a sudden, somehow) that it would not have given him the least pang, that it would not even have struck him that it was not monumental… that he would not have seen that there was anything in it to pause over, and that, if he had had no other way, he would have strangled her in a minute without thinking about it! Well, I too… left off thinking about it… murdered her, following his example. And that’s exactly how it was! Do you think it funny? Yes, Sonia, the funniest thing of all is that perhaps that’s just how it was.” “I’ve only killed a louse, Sonia, a useless, loathsome, harmful creature.” “A human being—a louse!” “I too know it wasn’t a louse,” he answered, looking strangely at her. “But I am talking nonsense, Sonia,” he added. ...“No, Sonia, that’s not it,” he began again suddenly, raising his head, as though a new and sudden train of thought had struck and as it were roused him—”that’s not it! Better… imagine—yes, it’s certainly better—imagine that I am vain, envious, malicious, base, vindictive and… well, perhaps with a tendency to insanity. (Let’s have it all out at once! They’ve talked of madness already, I noticed.)" (Crime and Punishment)

He just needs one hateful Jacobin type or someone captivated by his looks to deadlock the jury.

The hate directed at UnitedHealthCare has matters exactly backwards (pun intended). If he had a failed back surgery that set him off (he apparently recommended the book “Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery”), then UnitedHealthCare should deny more claims like his to discourage useless back procedures.

Banning Tenga fleshlights and "Japan Real Hole" custom pornstar pocket pussies is fine by me if he's volunteering himself as the replacement.

It was a parliament in which the colonists had no representation. By contrast, Shays' and the Whiskey rebellions were deemed to be beyond the pale because Americans did have representation in their legislatures. Likewise, the laws governing insurance companies and their enforcement are subject to popular control. And if there is a tort, you can engage in one of our favorite pastimes and sue the insurance company.

A political motive makes his action worse. It makes it more akin to terrorism.

Agreed. All health care systems--whether public or private--have to control costs. Government-run systems also ration care by denying or delaying access to procedures and drugs and usually do more of it, which is why their wait times are frequently longer. E.g., in the UK, the average wait time for cancer treatment is much longer than in the U.S. and the elderly have the longest waiting times (only 2% of those aged 85+ receive chemotherapy within NHS's target of 62 days) because the NHS in effect doesn't view treating them as cost-effective.

Big aversion to fish.

1. Contrary evidence: "The rise in markups and market power documented by De Loecker, Eeckhout, and Unger (2020) has recently generated much discussion in economics. We measure the correlation between the change in firm level markups and the change in industry level prices as measured by the Producer Price Index and find little to no relationship both for 1980–2018 and 2018–present." 2. The argument that Walmart, Amazon, etc. force out local firms and eventually raise prices is likewise dubious even if Lina Khan, et al. believe so. 3. Higher markups do not prove price gouging if, for example, firms anticipate higher marginal costs in the future: "We show that markup growth likely contributed more than 50 percent to inflation in 2021, a substantially higher contribution than during the preceding decade. However, the markup itself is determined by a host of unobservable factors, including changes in demand but also changes in firms’ expectations of future marginal costs. The decline in markups during the first half of 2022—even as inflation remained high—is consistent with firms having raised markups during 2021 in anticipation of future cost pressures. Furthermore, the growth in markups was similar across industries with very different relative demand and inflation rates in 2021, which is also consistent with an aggregate increase in expected future marginal costs." Also: "Economist Jan De Loecker and his colleagues looked at company-level data on all publicly traded firms to measure both markups and profitability in the United States from 1955 to the present. They have argued that, beginning in 1980, the average “pure profit” rate (that which is in excess of the normal cost of capital) increased from 1 percent to 8 percent. However, this study has been widely criticized, including for its data on markups. Economist Tyler Cowen has pointed out that if profits are defined as the difference between market prices and the marginal cost of production, businesses with high fixed costs and significant economies of scale can have large profits yet still lose money..." More criticisms of greedflation (specifically Isabella Weber). 4. Fairness is a political concept that is even more disputed, so it is impossible for history to show any such thing. The institutional context in which antitrust bureaucrats operate undermine their supposed virtues. Price controls are even worse as a matter of economic efficiency and deontological liberty. 5. Two different explanations of higher prices in simple form:

Wendy's has about 6,000 stores in the U.S., and claims to be opening more stores to offset the closures.

There is plenty of evidence that there has been no overall increase in market concentration, and where there has been an increase in concentration, it is not necessarily "an indication of the augmented market power of top firms" and is instead mostly technological (more productive firms). "The increasing presence of top firms has decreased local concentration in local markets as the new establishments of top firms gain market share from local incumbents." Further, "we find that total employment rises substantially in industries with rising concentration. This is true even when we look at total employment of the smaller firms in these industries." More local competition and higher employment are the opposite of cartel behavior, which restricts output to increase prices. As for government intervention in the market, it requires knowing what the cause of concentration is and exactly what should be done. I am highly skeptical that the common prescriptions of more antitrust enforcement and price controls by bureaucrats will produce more consumer welfare (even assuming that they should override deontological liberty claims).

Yes, it is widely debated (e.g., here and here), so it's not a settled or revealed truth. Even if there is market power, it's not clear that government is capable of improving matters. The pharmaceutical industry is a good example. It's already a highly regulated industry with significant barriers to entry. The likes of EPI may believe that government fine-tuning in the context of various institutional constraints will produce substantially better outcomes even assuming that there's a consensus about what's fair or equitable (which there's not), but I don't.

Whether it's her own opinion or research supplied to her by interns, they're still clueless. Your hypothetical about the market power of Big Egg is something that one of my graduate economics professors wrote a book about (Egg Marketing Board: A Case Study of Monopoly and Its Social Costs, which analyzes a monopoly created by government regulation). But when it comes to the alleged market power of grocery retailers: Where's the beef?

Large size by itself is not proof of price-setting power. There is no clear correlation between market concentration and higher markups. So color me highly skeptical. And as The Economist pointed out, people are confusing cause and effect. The root cause is not to be found in the morality tale of greedy corporations but rather the government rapidly spending trillions of dollars when there were major supply constraints.

Greedflation is a nonsense idea, particularly in the case of grocery retailers because there is no reason to believe that there is market power when there are so many competitors. The greedflation narrative in fact relies on claims of concentrated markets among producers of food, not retailers. Whoopi is clueless.

The issue is whether retail grocers colluded to raise prices or simply passed along price increases from producers. Standard economic theory says that in a competitive market, retail grocers would be price-takers, not price-makers. Aldi is ranked #13 nationally (1/3rd of grocery shoppers admit to shopping there) and growing rapidly.

Retail grocers have been subject to intense competition from Aldi, Walmart, Amazon, Target, Costco, etc., so it's hard to believe that there was collusion among retailers to raise prices.

I am SHOCKED that someone would exploit an animal rescue nonprofit for personal financial gain.