Fitzgerald said that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Here are some things that the help desk for the New York State Emergency Rental Assistance Program (“ERAP”) have told me – sometimes during …
When our second child went through an amphibian phase, we rescued a bullfrog to keep as a pet. Instead of going to the animal shelter and picking out a dog, we went to the Great Wall Supermarket on Northern Boulevard. Near the front door, next to the tanks of fish, the tubs of crabs and …
Click That is the sound that the help line for the New York Emergency Rental Assistance Program (“ERAP”) makes when you ask them a question they don’t know how to answer. Unlike most park owners, I think that government can be a force for good. Bubble-up economics works. Trickle-down economics doesn’t. And even if we …
Here’s what Wikipedia says about the game Fuck, Marry, Kill: Fuck, Marry, Kill, also known as Kiss, Marry, Kill, as Bang, Marry, Kill, or as Bang, Smash, Dash, or with other synonyms or arrangements of the terms, is a social forced choice question and answer game. As one source describes it, “[w]e have heard of …
History is littered with examples of the law of unintended consequences. Here are a few: During the Raj, the British government in India attempted to cull the cobra population by putting a bounty on snakes. Enterprising people started breeding cobras and delivering the bodies of domestically-raised cobras to the collection centers. The result was that …
Unlike most park owners, I am not a small-government guy. I think that public institutions can be a force for good and a useful counterweight to the uglier aspects of the market. If I had lived in the thirties (that’s the nineteen thirties), I would have supported the New Deal. If I had been able …
I will take a break from the usual crap and write a little bit about P.L. 117-7, the 2021 stimulus bill. The official name of the statute is The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, but it is referred to hereinafter as the “Act”. In its final version, it is 242 pages of turgid PDF …
One night last week, a former writing instructor forwarded me a link to this article in the New Yorker. Upon receiving her email, I immediately shot off a reply to the effect of, how’s-the-writing-going-yeah-PE-funds-have-been-bidding-up-this-asset-class-for-years and then slid into an alcohol- and Netflix induced stupor. But then, overnight, the emails kept coming. Some people forwarded the …
We all know about Occam’s Razor. I recently learned that Christopher Hitchens coined his own epistemological rule that has come to be known as “Hitchens’ Razor”. Per Hitchens’ Razor, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. If you say that the moon is made of Gribble without any evidence of the …