Roundup

We find that, sadly, we did not coin the hashtag #SundownJoe .  Somebody else on Twtr coined it about 24 hours before we tried to.  Meanwhile,

if "only Nixon could go to China" then

only Bernie can safely challenge #SundownJoe 's mental acuity https://t.co/QGmhg9h0PL

— Law Firm of SolitaryPoorNastyBrutish&Short (@AubreyLaVentana) March 11, 2020

Commenting at Volokh:

“The court system should seek ways to shrink the cost of ending a failed marriage.”
Let’s not concede this too hastily. The costs of ending a marriage, failed or not, fall mostly on the rest of society, not on the two former spouses . .

A discussion on Instapundit regarding earlier action against rapid spread of a communicable disease, versus its consequences to businesses:

I'm old enough to remember when economics was taught to be a science wherein it is impossible to conduct experiments ('the dismal science'), so we had to test our models through study of real-world events. Well, here we have a few, regarding mobility of labor and/or capital, and nation-states, with varying levels of trust in their institutions, acting in various ways to prevent potential collapse. Let's pay attention and watch, say, Mercatus Center tease out the conclusions.

today's panic buying

 . . . at Big Box Retail Home Improvement Retail Operation is for toilet paper (yes, we carry P&G and store brands), paper towels, and bleach.  Customers disappointed with WalMart and the grocery chains got the tipoff that we too carry them, so they bought ours by the cartload.

One troubled young gent left with one cartload, then returned from the parking lot for an encore, while whispering into his phone about it.  Seems that Grandma was caught short too, so he was sent back in to supply her. 

I noticed that the store brand of TP is adorned with a picture of a playful puppy and his chew toy, a blue ball with spikes on it. 

I noted to my customer, "Hey, this even has a picture of a coronavirus on it.  They knew you were coming." 

My customer chuckled. 

He pulled out his debit card a bit too soon so I had to back out of the order and get him to reinsert it to complete the sale. 

activist investor seeks to buy enough TWTR to oust Dorsey

My alter-ego posted at Instapundit:

reminds me of Neal Knox's bid to get 2A folks to buy shares of CBS, then give their proxies to him, to counter CBS's antigun propaganda. One could buy TWTR to the same end. But buy low and don't treat it as an investment.

 Even a handful of nagging votes in the boardroom would be better than we get right now. 

commenting at Instapundit

on a post about how Hispanic support for DJT is surging in spite because of his interest in honest labor:

I talk to my plumber, and my customers. In Castilian when I can. They pay cash. If only I could get them to hold on to their receipts.
They avoid holding receipts, or using credit, or keeping detailed records on their purchases, *in my opinion* because they have a cultural inclination to avoid anything---records, receipts, banks---that El Gobierno can exploit to find their money, because El Gobierno that they came here to get away from has screwed them over on the basis of such records, and they assume all governments do that. It's distrust of the Sheriff of Nottingham, plain and simple.
They keep inventory instead of cash when they can. A truckload of plumbing parts is harder for the Highway Patrol to seize than a wad of cash. Sharkbite fittings and Google Nests are the current favorites.
Trump could leverage this distrust, damned hard. While he's at it, he can challenge asset forfeiture, for the same reason.

I assume they'd also be more successful in their businesses if they kept better records and knew better where their money is going.  Lack of these records probably leads them to devalue their own labor in pure dollar terms.  They could charge more if they knew what their labor was truly worth, and I'm confident they'd rather charge more.  

More on coronapanic

A fetching woman visited Big Box last night, inquiring about sanding respirators.

The word choice alone was telling. 

I showed her our empty shelves.  They're right next to the Tyvek coveralls, and she loaded her arms with about 10 packages of those.  Then she asked about concrete-mixing troughs. 

"You're assembling a decon."

I wish I were better at reading faces, because hers changed. 

"You could get the same function with lower shipping and storage costs by using sheet plastic to line a cardboard box or a hole dug in the ground.  Next aisle over, 4 and 6 mil thickness." 

Then I showed her the pool chlorine. 

QOTD

Of course, in a situation like this, money can only go so far. As the CDC has demonstrated, containing an outbreak is more about decision-making and hard choices.

ZeroHedge, CDC Reports 6 New US Cases Of COVID-19 As Total Hits 59; Italy Surpasses 400: Live Updates

and this:

Are we the only ones who feel that this sounds like justification for closing the border? 

 Big Box Retail Home Improvement Operation is out of N95 masks.  A caller inquired last night.  

QOTD

AI is famous for imitating the biases of the decisionmakers it learns from – and for then being conveniently incapable of explaining how it arrived at its own decisions. No conservative should have much faith in a machine that learns its content moderation lessons from current practice in Silicon Valley.

Stewart Baker, Volokh Conspiracy, What should we do about Section 230?

I'm of two minds on this

A gentleman arrived yesterday at Big Box Home Improvement Retail Operation to pick up his online order of a household appliance.  Because it was paid for, all I needed to see was a valid photo ID. 

The gentleman produced a motor vehicle operator license that expired in 2014.  He could produce no other that was valid.  He went away with no appliance, and with a pocketful of my sincere apologies. 

On the one hand, it is somewhat heartening that an adult can go six years without having to cough up identifying papers to anyone.  Here in the Western redoubt, if one keeps his head down and goes about one's business, one may never contact a cop. 

On the other hand, it's a little disturbing that one can blithely ignore some responsibilities.  Should a person so disconnected from the operations of the State be allowed to, say, vote?  Is he keeping up his auto insurance?  Had he been the subject of a mere traffic stop, I'm not sure what humiliation he would have suffered.  A traffic accident would have had him at fault even if he had done everything right and some tweaker, uninsured, or illegal had negligently rammed him. 

An afterthought

Am I the only guy out here who thinks that DJT's one-line shout-out for the Second Amendment in the 2020 SOTU speech was an afterthought?

I would have appreciated at least a paragraph, and maybe a Presidential award for the man who saved a church full of Texans in White Settlement. 

Maybe next year. 

N95 respirators

I sold 150 of them this weekend. 

Screw it, imma . . .

cut down any 9mm Para cases I have laying about to 18mm, neck-expand them for 9mm Makarov, FL-resize them, and load .365" Hornady XTP in them over some Unique, Unique-ski, or AA#5. 

The Radom P-64 will be fed something.  The single-action trigger pull on my sample is quite crisp at 4 lbs. 

QOTD

" . . what 'natural right' could border controls possibly be a defense of? The obvious one is that they might be justified as a form of collective self-defense. If you’ve got a peaceful, prosperous libertopia going, you’d really prefer not to have a bunch of people who haven’t signed on to your social contract walking in. Because you’re likely to have to kill or expel a lot of them in self-defense, and who wants that aggravation?

 . . . I now understand that the core complaint of the anti-immigration Trump voters isn’t even about illegals low-balling them out of jobs, although that’s certainly a factor. It’s “I want to keep the high level of social trust I grew up with, and I see mass immigration – especially mass illegal immigration – eroding that.” They think the political elites of both parties, and corporations profit-taking in the labor market, are throwing away that intangible asset to plump up a bit more power and profit.

I now think that is a serious – and justified – complaint."

---Eric Raymond, A libertarian rethinks immigration

something else is bugging me about Gene Healy's article

Gene Healy's article . . . about how come we don't impeach Presidents more often.

“Almost alone among industrialized democracies, the U.S. hews to the old-school regime of employment at will, which means most of us can be frogmarched out of the building at any time—for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all.”

What the fuck is he talking about?  There are more than a few people I'd like to have seen fired---some firings that would have benefited me and my career, most that definitely would not---who could be removed from their positions only after painstaking cataloguing of their failures and fair warning that the cataloguing was going on.   Most, of course, were never removed.

In this we will include an ANG Major who, by the end of her six-month rotation to a sinecure in SW Asia, had not one but two members of our Group who demanded a witness to be in the room with them should they ever have to face her in private.  One of whom was her own First Sergeant.  Consequences to her?  She received a decoration that was below the level expected of her rank.  I can even visualize the C-5 pilot, who commanded the Group above her, grinning and saying to himself, "That will show her!"  Had an enlisted man behaved that way, he or she would have been on a rotator  back to the donor unit at about 45 days, and the donor unit would have been on the hook for a replacement. 

The old-school regime of at-will employment is a myth. 

Comments from my alter-ego Aubrey were left to that effect at the article.

While we're at it:  "This is the country that pioneered the idea of firing people as entertainment. For 14 seasons of NBC's reality TV game show The Apprentice, Americans tuned in eagerly to see which contestants would be shown the door with the signature line 'You're fired!'"

Because that's probably the only place where ordinary blokes get to see genuine accountability.  Don't confuse reality TV with reality. 

(updated)  After some reading, it seems that 'employment at-will' is legal shorthand for the opposite of prior English law, which supported seasonal employment, renewable for a year at a time. Even legal descriptions of the current state of at-will employment concede that employers can't fire without cause.  'At-will' is a misnomer.  

splitscreen for today

Contrast Kay Hymowitz's take on the ramifications of sexual liberation . . . 

with Meaghan Daum's,

Reason Feb2020

"On a global scale, inequality is declining.  While it has increased in the United States . . . "

Sounds like a long tail to me, and the sort of thing that a long tail entails. 

---David R. Henderson, in Reason, The Truth About Income Inequality, February 2020 (not yet available online)

If you're bitching about the broad, 'unitary' power of the Executive, blame Congress

Gene Healy (same guy who I used to read in Liberty? yep) in Reason:

"the more fundamental problem is the office, not the man. The presidency has grown far too powerful to entrust to any one fallible human. Will the current impeachment drive do anything about that?"

The unitary executive has grown excessively powerful because Congress has passed legislation that hands that power to the Executive.  Congress should not bitch when that power is abused.  Write legislation that the President can execute.  By the way, do we yet have a Federal budget for FY2020? (Continuing resolutions do not count)

And be prepared to argue that legislation's Constitutionality when the Executive asserts its own power to decide what is Constitutional and what isn't, what is discretionary for the Executive and what isn't.

In the same article, he praises Nixon-era Congressional reforms that would limit future Presidents, including (ahem) "the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act."

Wonder what Mr Healy thinks about FISA abuses, or whether he sees them as, in fact, abuses? 

Marketing study 403: Progressive presses

Dillon introduces a new press with the sole purpose of preparing cases for its other progressive reloading presses.  I didn't read the article yet, but it reminds me of Cabinet Man's recent inquiries about my RL450.

It's a four-station press that has no separate powder-check station, which kinda concerns him.  To be fair, those four stations don't reflect what I'd really want in a progressive press either.  The first station is meant as full-length resize and decap, and priming.  With GI brass, I have to decap separately and then swage the primer pockets, so I prep cases on a Rockchucker anyway.  The Dillon's first station is used only to prime. 

So if somebody wants to cleverly realign reloading functions for volume with GI brass, with resize, pocket swage, shoulder and case length checks on a separate platform, the four stations of an RL450 or 550 need to be rearranged. 

I can't visualize one station that both drops a powder charge, and verifies that the case has received its charge.  I also very much like seat and crimp as separate stations.  So move the powder charge to first station, right after the primer is seated. 

1:  Prime and powder charge.

2:  Powder check.

3:  Seat.

4:  Crimp.

The manual of arms changes from case-bullet-up-down-back-rest-rotate to case-bullet-back-up-down--rest-rotate so the case gets primed before the charge drops.  Some mechanical warning that there's no primer in the seater plug might also be useful. 

If I were doing this for the money, I wouldn't be doing *this*

As my military career came to an end, I was noticing problems with memory.  Forgetting meetings, not having a clear head for them, and tackling low-hanging fruit instead of going after the big, meaningful, change-agent kinds of things. 

Now, it seems my memory is sound.  I remember names, faces, situations, problems, solutions.  There's still plenty of keyboard time, but none of it spend interpreting a regulation or explaining my actions to dim second-guessers. 

My work keeps me on my feet and in front of people.  I didn't realize that's what I needed.  

I may also be losing weight.  Now for putting the garage and the radios back in order . . .

Update: Yaesu back on the air

Citizen Jed helped me find an Elmer willing to do the surface-mount work on my Yaesu. After some email exchanges, he inspired me to go back through the relevant circuits, and that reminded me of some work I had done in the power supply.  It had developed an intermittent between the transformer and the rectifier.

The power supply was not putting out DC.  When I went back in, I found that joint had broken again. 

I cleaned up some soldering on the aftermarket RC battery pack also. 

We're back in business. 

SCOTUS transcript is up

Transcript of SCOTUS hearing on NYS Rifle and Pistol Association versus New Yawk is at Dave Hardy's place.  

One observation of my own:  New York seems OK with the prospect that 'continuous and direct' will be shaped by litigation---premises licensees being prosecuted and spending money defending themselves---rather than clear definitions beforehand that licensees can read, understand, obtain advice of counsel, and train to each other.  How, and where in the court hierarchy, does Petitioner lodge that complaint?  

Is there not a Constitutional principle that people can know what conduct is lawful before engaging in it?  If one accepts that certain conduct requires a license, that license should include that sort of clarity.  Those who argue that firearms should be licensed like automobiles owe it to explain just what time, place, and manner restrictions that license will prohibit. 

Also:  Petitioners' Counsel missed an opportunity to distinguish premises licenses from carry licenses, though I'm not sure it would have helped Petitioners' case.  "We're not talking about the right of Petitioners to carry on person with a round in the chamber (yet), just the right to transport lawfully-owned property from one lawful place to another lawful place."