The Bear and the Contradictions of Work

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Hulu’s series The Bear, oddly labeled as a comedy, takes viewers inside a hectic, crowded, struggling Chicago sandwich shop that Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen Wright) inherited from his brother, Michael,  read more »

Gavin Newsom's Presidential Prospects

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Conservatives often see prospective presidential contender Gavin Newsom as a tool of the far Left—and, as such, politically doomed by the seemingly endless crises afflicting California.  read more »

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Favors More Energy Costs for All

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America, with 4.1 percent of the world’s population (330 million vs 8 billion) professes to be the leader of everything but tightening the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for particulate matter is ludicrous when China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and Vietnam are sending their existing PM2.5 across the Pacific Ocean to America, particularly California, and building new coal power plants that will emit even more PM2.5.  read more »

Subjects:

The Revenge of the Analog Economy

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The last few decades have seen the emergence of two rival economies: an older analog one built on the actual production of goods, and another that profits from financial transactions, images and customer surveillance.  read more »

The Connection: Housing Affordability and Inequality

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Canada’s housing affordability crisis is a matter of considerable concern especially for young people trying to buy a house. The worst problems are in the Vancouver and Toronto markets with their excessive land use regulation.  read more »

Rent Forever and Love It

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Housing is an industry, but it is also where people live, raise families, and stake their future. Yet increasingly, all around the world, housing has increasingly become just a commodity to be traded  read more »

Our On Again, Off Again, Infrastructure Future

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Over a long summer weekend a group of the usual suspects got together and rented a cabin in the Sierra foothills about three hours east of San Francisco. It was an idyllic landscape of modest homes tucked into the forest around a small lake.  read more »

Inflation Reduction Act Will Hinder EV Growth

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After his mandate to transition to electric vehicles (EVs), President Joe Biden then signed The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that requires EVs to contain a battery pack and other parts built in North America with minerals mined or recycled in America.  read more »

Subjects:

Collapse or Evolution?

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An article in Salon by anti-capitalist Chris Hedges argues that our civilization is on the verge of collapse. As evidence, he points to the 65 percent decline of the population of St. Louis since 1950.  read more »

America Has An Oedipus Complex

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As in Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex, we are witnessing a generational drama in which inheritors kill their proverbial father to marry their mother, in this case Mother Earth. The psychology behind this pattern is above my pay grade, but many of the richest people on the planet, and their heirs, now seem anxious to disparage the economic system that created their fortunes.  read more »