dpflsh05 - Dirty Pair

5 Spooky Facts about Power and Inequality You Probably Didn’t Know

What better way to get in the Halloween spirit than a spine-chilling binge of the viral Two Sentence Horror Stories on Netflix? If you still don’t get your fill, you can head over to Reddit for more “bite-sized scares.”

Two of the most outspoken critics of economic inequality look like they’ve been working up their own scary #TwoSentenceHorrorStories leading up to Halloween:



Power, money, influence—inequality is a frightening concern for many people. The way it is debated these days is even scarier than Demi Lovato’s infamous zombie outfit. Our former president called inequality "the defining challenge of our time,” while partisan politicians paint one side as a bunch of heartless monsters and the other side as brainless as the living dead.

To help us all have a more informed (and civilized) conversation about this important issue, here are five facts about inequality you might not know.

1. Historically, the Wealthy Got Rich by Exploiting the Poor, but ...

For most of human history, there was a single story of how the rich got rich. The ruling political class extracted great sums of wealth from everyone else. Kings and emperors topping the list of the 10 richest men of all time reported by the BBC earlier this year include Mansa Musa I, Genghis Khan, Emperor Akbar I, and William the Conqueror.

Only recently, through the expansion of market economies in the late 19th and 20th centuries, have entrepreneurs and business tycoons cracked the list of the world’s wealthiest.

There is something quite different about the fortunes amassed by plunder and those generated by providing the world with Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook.

Entrepreneurs can generate enormous wealth by making people in society better off. There’s nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, like the old days, we also see the politically connected working with government agencies to rig profits.

When thinking about economic inequality in our modern world, we should be careful to differentiate between the economic means and the political means of obtaining wealth.

This differentiation also helps illuminate the real worries people have about inequality, which brings us to my next observation.

2. Concerns about Economic Inequality Are Usually Concerns about Power

I’ve been reading everything from Teen Vogue to the Economic Policy Institute to understand what people are saying about economic inequality. The challenges are nuanced, but the primary concerns young people have are crystal clear—it’s all about power.

Those attacking inequality emphasize the fear that wealth means the power to control. It’s as if the rich are a species of vampire who prey on the weak and feed on the blood of their victims. Once charmed, the victim will obey the vampire master's command for eternity.

There is truth to the age-old story of plunder by the ruling class, and everyone agrees that power corrupts. So, even if we differentiate between the economic means and the political means of acquiring wealth, shouldn’t we be worried that the wealthy possess too much power?

In their study of markets and corruption, Georgetown University’s Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski concluded:

[P]olitics corrupts markets. The more politicized an economy becomes, the more private actors try to rig regulations and the law to cheat consumers and competitors. Instead of trying to keep the nasty market away from pristine politics, we should be trying to keep nasty politics away from the market.

Reaching a similar conclusion, the 2018 Economic Freedom of the World report suggests an

...intrinsic link between economic freedom and other measures of human well-being—such as infant mortality, equality, happiness, and extreme poverty rates.

Additional studies of the 50 states discovered that limiting the size of government, the level of taxation, and the level of labor market regulation decreases inequality and increases incomes of the poorest 20 percent at the state level.

Your concern that some people have too much power is justified, but this is a problem with politics, not wealth. High levels of government control over the economy tend to breed corruption and structural inequality. Open markets of dynamic cooperation tend to decrease inequality and increase wealth for the most disadvantaged.

3. People Debating Inequality Are Biased, Too

Any good politician knows perception matters more than reality. Facts don’t win emotional arguments. You can actually drive a person further away by offering corrective information that challenges a wrong view or seems to dismiss their own personal experience.

When someone contradicts our views in a debate about a sensitive topic like inequality, our bodies respond in much the same was as being physically attacked. Like being chased by a chainsaw-wielding monster in a haunted house, our natural response is fight or flight.

In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt offers insights from moral psychology we can use to navigate ideologically charged conversations and help build bridges of understanding.

Haidt’s lesson is one of humility. We are all much less rational than we think. Our emotional intuitions come first, and then we engage in “motivated reasoning” to justify what we want to believe.

In evolutionary terms, reasoning was designed to help us win arguments, not pursue the truth.

Moreover, we should be aware that all human beings suffer from cognitive bias. That’s a fancy way of saying our brains deviate from rational judgment in identifiable patterns. When it comes to the facts of inequality in their society, it is not just that people are wrong; people hold systematically biased beliefs.

So, instead of treating important issues as political battles, let’s turn a contentious debate into a conversation where well-meaning (and oftentimes mistaken) people who disagree about fundamental issues can learn from one another. To start a productive, honest conversation about economic inequality, here are four questions we should be asking.

But what if the inequality gap really is proof in support of our feelings of injustice?

4. Inequality Can Be a Sign of Injustice

Hear me out on this one. I know inequality is an emotion-filled topic closely related to issues of racism, discrimination, and generational oppression. There are definitely some shady things going on that need to be fixed. I just want to make sure we’re going after the real problem.

People worried about economic inequality typically focus on gaps in wealth, income, and opportunity. They attack unequal distribution as being the real crime, with added emphasis on the “extreme and growing” divide between the haves and the have-nots. The heart of the concern seems to be that some have more. Isn’t the gap itself unjust?

Let’s imagine I bring home more trick-or-treat candy than my little brother because I’m able to cover twice the number of houses. It might be admirable for me to share my bounty, but there is nothing inherently unfair about our candy gap.

Now imagine the neighborhood bully has more candy because he stole from my little brother and his friends. That would be unjust. The injustice is the candy theft, not the candy gap.

In the real world, injustice does create economic disparities. Political power has too often been used to unfairly restrict economic opportunities for targeted racial groups. Among the many examples of laws with racist origins, we find marijuana prohibition and the drug war, minimum wage laws, zoning laws, and government protection for labor unions. Even Jim Crow laws were a political attempt to reverse the economic trends that were abolishing segregation in the marketplace at the time.

Predatory institutions, such as slavery, are clearly unjust. So is a political system that facilitates billions of dollars in wealth transfers to the rich in the form of corporate subsidies, bailouts, and bloated government contracts. Forced transfers to those with power are on par with the neighborhood candy thief.

In his book Race & Economics, Walter Williams details how the natural incentives of an unhampered market promote tolerance, punish discrimination, and benefit the most disadvantaged members of society. Williams explains how political intervention in the labor market reduced opportunities and arrested progress for many black Americans.

Anywhere you see rigid inequality over time, the odds are good that there are laws and regulations in place giving some people unfair political advantages or shielding others from bearing the costs of discrimination. That is the real source of injustice.

5. Populist Policies Tend to Make Inequality Worse

The world has made enormous progress in our struggle to escape from under the oppressive thumb of power. We’ve seen vast reductions in hereditary privilege, state religion, and authoritarian monarchy. The radical idea of individual dignity and human rights even led to the abolition of the ancient, barbaric institution of slavery.

This is all relatively new to human history. Just because global poverty and inequality are falling doesn’t mean the trend will continue or that progress is happening quickly enough.

There is one concerning trend that should give us reason to pause. Those most fiercely attacking economic inequality are also proposing policies to consolidate the kind of power that is historically responsible for creating vast inequality in the first place.

Prominent intellectuals such as Joseph E. Stiglitz (Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001) are worried about the powerful influence the wealthy have on our political system. He believes our economy should be democratically accountable to “the people.” In “The American Economy Is Rigged,” Stiglitz’s agenda for fighting inequality includes:

• Empowering the government to set the salaries private companies pay executives
• Increasing government control of the financial industry
• Ensuring affordable housing for all
• Providing government-guaranteed access to health care
• Increasing government funding for public education, including access to college for all
• Increasing government power for setting the rules of “modern competition” in the marketplace
• Granting stronger power for unions
• Increasing government control over individual retirement programs
• Reducing inheritance to prevent intergenerational advantages
• Raising taxes

Like many people, Stiglitz is worried that the wealth of the super-rich gives them unfair access to control the distribution of social, economic, and political power.

Concerns about inequality are, rightfully, concerns about power. As such, we have good reason to be suspicious of calls for greater centralized power as the solution. Using the political means to address the symptom of economic inequality is like thinking that the One Ring forged by Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom can be held “democratically accountable.”

Coming Together

Thinking about issues like the imbalances of power in society can be overwhelming and frightening. Things become less scary if we come together in conversations that start by looking for common ground.

This Halloween, my IRL two-sentence horror story might be:

People in our communities were suffering. Instead of learning what actually makes people better off, we retreated to partisan battles on Facebook.

If horror stories aren’t your thing, check out FEE’s Made in Mékhé for the moving story of one entrepreneur fighting against poverty in her home country of Senegal by bringing the beauty of Africa to the world.

 

 

Jason Riddle

Jason Riddle is the Vice President of Programs and Strategic Operations at FEE. Prior to joining FEE, Jason spent over eight years as a management consultant working with a variety of public and private organizations to enhance their business performance through improved risk management, operational effectiveness, and control around internal and external reporting.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (477-480)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/ Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions. The first photo in this set was taken at Kootenay Lake in British Columbia in 1956. The second photo features Leo Oestreicher himself and is from 1955. The final two are of mountains but are not dated or labeled. They are most likely also from the 1950s. Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

Kootenay Lake - Aug 25, 1956
Leo + Ag on hike to top of hill behind house - July 9, 1955


The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

Electronic Gaming Monthly (January 1997)

Electronic Gaming Monthly (January 1997)

After the original Electronic Games, Electronic Gaming Monthly was probably the most influential and popular video games magazine. The January 1997 issue includes: Departments

• Insert Coin - Our editorial director goes to the Dark Side.
• Press Start - The news that's making headlines in the world of video games.
• Gaming Gossip - THE inside source on the gaming industry from Q-Mann.
• Next Wave Protos - Exclusive first-looks at games on the horizon.
• Review Crew - A no-holds-barred critique of gaming's latest releases.
• Tricks of the Trade - Want a power trip? Check out the hottest cheats here.
• Special Features - An in-depth look at the newest of the new (including Mechwarrior 2).
• Next Wave - Get a sneak peek at upcoming titles for all systems!
• Contests - Don't miss your chance to win BIG!
• Team EGM - Previews and reviews for sports games.
• Interface - An open forum for readers' questions and concerns.

Features

• EGM Delivers The Gaming Goodies From Shoshinkai - While gamers were feasting on turkey and pumpkin pie this Thanksgiving, our editors were busy compiling the information gathered at this year's Shoshinkai Show in Japan. Now gamers can savor each morsel of gaming info provided in this issue.


• Which MKT Version Is Better: The PS Or N64? - Mortal Kombat Trilogy has hit the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. The EGM editors dissect each one, showing the pros and cons of each version (glitches, character differences and the price tag). As well, each Review Crew member picks the version he says is the best to get!


• Final Fantasy VII Update Sheds Some Light... - ...on what gamers can expect from the next Fantasy installment. This much-anticipated title - to be released in the second half of this year - will be on three discs instead of the rumored two in order to live up to gamers' expectations. Final Fantasy buffs won't be disappointed with this one!

Next Wave

• Saturn - Play as a not-too-quick-to-become disposable assassin in SCUD.
• PlayStation - Find out who you truly are in the latest role-playing game for the PS - Persona.
• Neo Geo - Samurai Showdown IV packs all your favorite characters and a whole lot more.

dpflsh04 - Dirty Pair Flash

Compute!’s Gazette (March 1986)

Compute!’s Gazette (March 1986)



Compute!'s Gazette was one of the most popular Commodore 8-bit magazines in the U.S. and the most successful spin-off of Compute! The March 1986 issue includes: Features

• What's New Online for Commodore
• The Commodore SIG
• A Buyer's Guide to Modems

Reviews

• Movie Maker
• Perry Mason: The Case of the Manderin Murder
• Dambusters
• Fighter Command
• Spellbreaker
• Touchdown Football

Games

• Survivor
• Shifter

Education/Home Applications

• Computing for Families: Storytelling to Read
• Number Construction Kit

Programming

• Hints & Tips: Timesavers
• BASIC Magic: String Variables in READ and DATA Statements
• Machine Language for Beginners: Machine Maps
• Power BASIC: Keyboard to Joystick Converter
• The Coordinator
• Storage and Display: Using Peripherals with the 128
• ASCII Teleconverter
• Cataloger
• VICDump
• 128 Auto Boot
• Clavier 64

Departments

• The Editor's Notes
• Gazette Feedback
• User Group Update
• Simple Answers to Common Questions
• News & Products
• Bug-Swatter: Modifications and Corrections

Program Listings

• MLX: Machine Language Entry Program
• COMPUTE!'s Gazette Author's Guide
• How to Type In COMPUTE!s Gazette Programs

...and more!

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (473-476)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/ Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions. Not a lot in the way of useful labels on this set. The first photo appears to be of a kitchen remodel in progress and was developed in June 1966. The next two are of some wild lettuce and are labeled as such. The final photo was taken in June 1956 and appears to be of some driftwood by a lake or river. Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

Dup Hauser - processed June 1966
Wild Lettuce
Wild Lettuce by Lamp Stove
June 1956
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

Brevard Renaissance Fair 2019 – The Craic Show – Part 19 (Step It Out Mary)

Brevard Renaissance Fair 2019 – The Craic Show – Part 19 (Step It Out Mary)

Why Bernie Sanders’s Universal Job Guarantee Is Fool’s Gold

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders doubled down when asked about his universal jobs guarantee included in last Tuesday night’s Democratic debates. “Damn right, we will” create jobs for every adult in the workforce, he insisted.

But Sanders’s promise of jobs for all, however appealing it may sound, aims at the wrong target.

In what Henry Hazlitt described as “the fetish of full employment” in his 1946 classic Economics in One Lesson, Hazlitt declared that the goal of full employment is fool’s gold.

Prioritize Production to Create Jobs

Instead of focusing on policies to maximize employment, Hazlitt declared, “We can clarify our thinking if we put our chief emphasis where it belongs—on policies that will maximize production.”

Why focus on maximizing production rather than jobs?

Creating jobs is easy. As Hazlitt wrote, “Nothing is easier to achieve than full employment, once it is divorced from the goal of full production and taken as an end in itself.”

Economist Milton Friedman was once traveling overseas and spotted a construction site in which the workers were using shovels instead of more modern equipment like bulldozers. When his host responded that the goal was to increase the number of jobs in the construction industry, Friedman replied, “Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?”

The key to a healthy economy, conversely, is increasing production using less and less labor. Trying to exclusively “create jobs” or provide universal job guarantees can lead to perverse incentives like restricting workers’ access to productivity-enhancing capital goods in order to require more workers than necessary to produce goods and services.

Under a plan like Sanders’s, a project would be considered more successful the more people it employed relative to the value of the product of the work performed. In short, success would be measured by making labor less and less efficient.

How can it benefit society to demand, say, 200 workers build a bridge that could have been built using 100?

As Hazlitt wrote,

The economic goal of any nation, as of any individual, is to get the greatest results with the least effort. The whole economic progress of mankind has consisted in getting more production with the same labor.

The Power of Creating Value

Value creation, not a measure of employment, is the true measure of economic well-being. Imagine if society could enjoy a luxurious standard of living that requires only half of the people to work to provide it.

Hazlitt asked,

The real question is not how many millions of jobs there will be in America ten years from now, but how much we produce, and what, in consequence, will be our standard of living?

Moreover, Hazlitt dismissed concerns that labor-saving capital goods would cause significant unemployment. Indeed, he argued the opposite. “[O]ur real objective is to maximize production. In doing this, full employment—that is, the absence of involuntary idleness – becomes a necessary byproduct,” he wrote.

Prioritizing employment over productivity puts the cart before the horse. He noted,

[P]roduction is the end, employment merely the means. We cannot continuously have the fullest production without full employment. But we can very easily have full employment without full production.

And the labor that is freed up due to productivity gains can be employed in satisfying other needs and wants of consumers, often new or not-yet imagined desires.

As Steve Jobs said to Business Week in 1998: "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

If labor is tied up using spoons in make-work, government-sponsored “job guarantee” jobs, who will produce the next big thing?

Government jobs programs will not only tend to reward less efficient labor but will also tend to tie the labor force to current modes of production, allowing less opportunity for life-changing innovations.

In sum, high levels of employment do not necessarily mean prosperity. As Hazlitt concluded, “Primitive tribes are naked, and wretchedly fed and housed, but they do not suffer from unemployment.”

Bradley Thomas

Bradley Thomas is creator of the website Erasethestate.com and is a libertarian activist and writer with nearly 15 years experience researching and writing on political philosophy and economics.

Follow him on Twitter: ErasetheState @erasestate

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Dpflsh03 - Dirty Pair Flash

Amiga CD32 Gamer (March 1995)

Amiga CD32 Gamer (March 1995)

The Amiga CD32 could have been an incredible console. It was released in Europe, Australia and Canada and a U.S. release was planned. However, a patent dispute combined with Commodore's bankruptcy prevented that from happening. Given the short life-span and limited support due to the bankruptcy, the CD32 was pretty successful. Amiga CD32 Gamer was a U.K. based magazine dedicated to that system and the March 1995 issue includes:

• CD Instructions - The very fact that you're reading this means you're no doubt at home and are at this very moment loading up the cover CD. Why else would you be reading the contents other than to kill time? Well, you can't play the games if you don't know how they work, can you?



• News - What's happening in the wide world of Amiga, video games, and beyond? Not much to be honest. It's that lull period - after Chrimbo and before summer. Hey ho.



• Previews - They haven't happened yet, but they're gonna! An in depth view of some of the delectable goodies coming your way in the next few months.



• Reviews - Despite most of your average, good for nothing, Amiga press almost howling with delight at the thought of the demise of the CD32, we here at CD32 Gamer say nay! Just look at all these great reviews - what more could a CD32 owner want?
• Whizz
• Emerald Mines
• Mitre Soccer Superstars
• Kingpin
• Dragonstone
• Rally Championship
• The Clue
• Akira



• Subs - For a very reasonable down payment you can be assured of 12 months of up to the minute CD32 related news, views and reviews, not to mention the most comprehensive array of game demos available. Don't be a chump - place a regular order and keep us all in a job.



• Playing Tips - Not only do we tell you which games are worth shelling out for, but we also tell you how to beat the buggers. The fruits of another hard month's work for the Guru are here including Benefactor, Theme Park and more Jungle Strike.



• Correspondence - If you think we're great, write in and tell us so. If you've got an opinion on anything related to the CD32, we'd be delighted to hear it. If you want to have a got at us about our apparent deafness when it comes to criticism, please go elsewhere!



• Mail Order - Can't find that Gamer Gold from issue five? Trashed your joypad after getting killed on Tower Assault (again)? Here's the place to be. Everything you could ever need to complement your CD32, and at very reasonable prices too!



• A-Z - Every CD32 release ever in a nutshell. 1,000 word reviews summed up in one sentence. If it's good, it's good. If it's not, we say so in no uncertain terms. A software bible in only four pages.

...and more!

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (469-472)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

Other than the dates they were developed, there is no other labeling on this set of slides. The first is a photo of some ruins somewhere, the second appears to be the interior of someone's home, the third shows someone using an antique jackhammer and the final one shows a fountain in a courtyard. Dates range from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

processed May 1959
processed May 1958
processed September 1967
processed May 1972

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

St. Nick (TI-99 4A)

St. Nick (TI-99/4A)

I had a friend that had a TI-99/4A but I never had one myself. This computer had a very brief windows of success somewhere in late 1982 and 1983. This rare ad for a TI-99/4A game is from the December 1983 issue of Microkids. St. Nick was released sometime in late 1983 and was developed by a company called Funware which had just been bought by Creative before this game was released. The game is a fairly typical 2D single screen action arcade game of the type that was common in the early 1980s. In this game you must help St. Nick fend off witches invading from Halloween and elves that have been placed under their spell in order to save Christmas. I wonder if the inspiration for The Nightmare Before Christmas came from this game? Anyway, the game itself is nothing special but for TI-99/4A aficionados, there are relatively few games to choose from. It isn't an awful game but don't expect anything amazing either. Like most (all?) games for the TI-99/4A, this one comes in cartridge format. Originals are not terribly easy to find but you still may be able to pick one up reasonably cheap if you can find one. If not, there is always emulation. This game has never been re-released and I doubt it ever will be so these are your only two options.

dpflsh00 - Dirty Pair Flash

Brevard Renaissance Fair 2019 – The Craic Show – Part 18 (In Taberna)

Brevard Renaissance Fair 2019 – The Craic Show – Part 18 (In Taberna)

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (465-468)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

The first photo in this set is of several people lounging about on towels or blankets on the grass somewhere. The second and third slides, both processed in August 1960 appear to show a fishing trip on a lake or river. The final photos is of a long picnic table filled with people eating. This one was processed in September 1959. Other than the date the slides were developed, there are no other labels.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

processed August 1960
processed August 1960
processed September 1959

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

Super Punch-Out!! (Super Nintendo)

Super Punch-Out!! (Super Nintendo)

California’s Power Problems Are Self-Inflicted

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), an investor-owned utility company serving 16 million customers primarily in Northern California, cut the flow of electricity to 800,000 of those customers last week in what it has deemed “public safety power shutoffs.” According to PG&E, the shutoffs were a necessary precaution to reduce the risk of wildfires in the region as it experienced high sustained winds with gusts of over 70 miles per hour, along with dryer than usual conditions. The shutoffs are an acute reminder for Californians of the fundamental importance of reliable energy, with some analysts estimating that the multi-day episode might have cost the region’s economy over $2 billion.

PG&E’s Recent History

The shutoffs, which came with just hours of warning for most of the affected customers, caused Californians dismay and confusion. But, while undoubtedly frustrating, the shutoffs should come as no surprise.

Last year, according to the official report filed by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention, sparks from a PG&E transmission line in Butte County ignited what became known as the Camp Fire in the early morning hours of November 8. The fire burned over 150,000 acres, destroyed almost 19,000 structures, and killed 85 people. As a result of the catastrophic damages, the company faces more than $30 billion in liability costs and filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy case in January 2019.

The Camp Fire, rather than prompting a wholesale evaluation and upgrade of the California utility landscape, has mired the state in paralysis. PG&E states that comprehensive inspections and tree clearance along its 100,000 miles of transmission lines would require a quadrupling of rates—this while PG&E ratepayers already suffer under some of the highest electricity prices in the country, about 20 cents per kilowatt-hour.

As a result of this logjam, the status quo holds, and Californians are left with the unenviable alternative of high fire risk or high likelihood of imposed blackouts. With last year’s disaster (and numerous other recent fires for which it has been deemed liable) fresh in PG&E’s institutional memory, the application of utmost precaution is understandable. In the words of PG&E CEO Bill Johnson,

we faced a choice here between hardship on everyone and safety, and we chose safety.

Public and Political Reaction

While Californians should not be surprised, they are justifiably outraged by the shutoffs. One of the hallmarks of advanced societies is reliability in basic services such as sanitation, transportation, and electricity; this episode reveals that California may not be as advanced as it thinks. The question everyone wants answered is how such a failure is possible (and indeed likely again) in a region famed for its technological prowess.

As Governor Gavin Newsom tells it, this is a failure of corporate malfeasance. “This can’t be, respectfully, the new normal,” Newsom told reporters as the shutoffs continued Thursday. The culprit, he surmised, was “greed and mismanagement over the course of decades.” What Newsom fails to address, and what millions of Californians simply do not know, is that PG&E, with its state-mandated, state-regulated monopoly on supplying power, operates hand-in-glove with the California government.

This latest California electricity crisis, like its predecessors, is not an instance of market failure but of political failure.

Pacific Gas & Electric: Regulated Monopoly

PG&E does not function as would a company in a competitive marketplace. As a regulated monopoly, it has been granted status as the sole provider of electricity to a swath of the state stretching more than 500 miles from Eureka, north of the Bay Area, to Bakersfield, in the San Joaquin Valley. The company operates in tandem with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), a panel of regulators appointed by the governor. Unlike in a competitive marketplace, PG&E does not need to compete for customers by offering more value dollar-for-dollar than other companies. Instead, PG&E is guaranteed a rate of return on its investments and establishes with the CPUC the corresponding rates that customers will pay.

The regulated monopoly model leads to some obvious and well-documented problems. The chief problem is the absence of an incentive to innovate and improve service. In a competitive marketplace, upstarts can offer different options, better customer service, or a lower price to prospective customers to entice business away from industry stalwarts. Not so in the regulated monopoly model. If a company in a competitive marketplace fails to adequately account for risk (say, of wildfires) and is then confronted with enormous liabilities that it cannot cover (say, of $30 billion), competitors can learn from the mistakes of others, fill the void, and ensure continued service. Again, not so in the regulated monopoly model.

Another problem is the phenomenon of regulatory capture, in which bodies entrusted by the government to represent the interests of customers come to represent the interests of the regulated monopoly itself.

Given the symbiotic relationship of state and company in the regulated monopoly model, to excoriate PG&E for greed and mismanagement, as did Governor Newsom, is to indict the California government itself.

Meanwhile, the California government exacerbates the challenges for utility companies through policies like the daunting requirement for 100 percent of the state’s power to be generated from zero-emission sources by 2045. Moreover, the state government has itself made fires more dangerous by unintentionally encouraging the build-up of fuels through use bans and by reducing access to forests for emergency personnel through wildlife preservation. The state government has also made damage from fires more likely by barring insurance companies from the nonrenewal of policies in some fire-prone areas.

Californians are right to feel dismayed in this situation. Basic services like electricity should be the norm despite dry weather and upticks in wind speed. Their ire would be best directed not at PG&E but at the regulated monopoly model that Californians themselves have maintained through their state government. Further, Californians should recognize that the policies their elected officials have instituted in recent years, such as the zero-emissions mandate and the insurance nonrenewal prohibition, will make electricity delivery less certain and fire damage more certain in the future.

Jordan McGillis

Jordan McGillis is a policy analyst at the Institute for Energy Research. Follow him on Twitter @jordanmcgilllis.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

CDi Magazine – Issue Number 2

CDi Magazine – Issue Number 2

Philips CD-i was an interactive multimedia CD player that was released in 1991. It tried to be a replacement for computers, video game consoles and even your VCR. It ended up being a dismal failure. The problem was that it had a really long development cycle and by the time it was released, full-blown computers with CD-ROM drives were becoming available at a not much higher price point. In addition, CD-ROM drives for game consoles were starting to arrive at a much lower price. I don't think there was even a dedicated magazine for the CD-i in the U.S. but there was at least one short-lived one in the U.K. The second issue of CDi magazine includes:

• News - Hollywood blockbusters, the new CDi 210, Sony's latest portable and the Touchpad games controller
• 7th Guest - Dominik Diamond reviews Virgin Games' hottest title on CDi and reckons it blows the CD-ROM version out of the water
• CDi Movies - Top Gun, Wayne's World, Naked Gun 2 1/2, Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games - coming soon on CDi
• Previews - The latest Digital Video games, Microcosm and Caesar's World of Boxing, seen first in CDi Magazine
• Games - Our reviewers take a hard look at Kether, Nintendo titles Link and Zelda and other new arrivals
• Tech Talk - Chris Cain rips open the top of a CDi player and explains what's inside
• Adult - Ben Southwell reviews Voyeur, the first interactive film on CDi, and talks to its makers. And learn to improve your sex life with The Joy of Sex on CDi
• Kids' Stuff - We take a look at four of the latest children's games
• Profile - Andy Clough takes a trip to Brighton to meet Epic, the software house responsible for the Joy of Sex on CDi
• Education - The latest education titles based on the Two-Can Make It Work! series: Shipwreck and Soundtrap
• Karaoke - If you fancy yourself as a budding pop star, help is at hand - CDi karaoke. Andy Clough takes to the microphone

...and more!

Brevard Renaissance Fair 2019 – The Craic Show – Part 17 (Batucada de Craic / Barentanz)

Brevard Renaissance Fair 2019 – The Craic Show – Part 17 (Batucada de Craic / Barentanz)

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (461-464)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

None of the slides in this set are dated. The first looks like it could be a photo of part of the Grand Canyon but is unlabeled. The second has a sticker on it with the name and address of the photographer and is labeled "Canadian Autumn". I would guess it is probably from the early 1950s based on the car in the photos. The last two photos are unlabeled but are of a funeral. Again, I would guess these were taken some time in the 1950s based on the cars in the photos.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

Sticker:

LEO M. OESTREICHER
South 918 Walnut Road
Dishman, Washington
Canadian Autumn

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

Commodore World (October/November 1996)

Commodore World (October/November 1996)




I generally consider the last mainstream stand-alone Commodore magazine issue to be published in the U.S. as the final issue of RUN in November/December 1992. However, disk only publications and a subscription only magazine or two lingered on for several more years. One example is Commodore World. The October/November 1996 issue includes: Feature

• CMD's New Time Machine - What advantages might the SuperCPU have for your applications?
• All About SuperGEOS - GEOS and the SuperCPU work well together - and here's why.
• Commodore Demos Part 3 - Our final look at the demo-scene... for now!
• Cleaning Out The GEOS Closet - Sometimes getting better organized really is worthwhile.
• It All Adds Up to geoCalc - Take a look at using GEOS for your spreadsheet applications.
• FileSplitter - A handy type-in program for dealing with oversized files.

Reviews

• Hardware: Morse Coach - Forgotten Worlds, Grand Prix Circuit, and Death Sword.
• Games - Karate Champ/Kung-Fu Master, the Ghost of Genghis Khan, and Zamczysko.

Columns

• Just For Starters - There's more than one way to win at computer games.
• Graphic Interpretation - Looking for more geoWrite goodies?
• Carrier Detect - If you thought online chatting died with Q-Link, better check this out...
• Hard Tips - Keep your mouse one step ahead of the cat!
• GeoProgrammist - Learn the in's and out's of creating and modifying GEOS data files.
• Assembly Line - 6402 vs. 65816: The added benefit of using 16-bit routines.
• Basic Instincts - Once upon a time subroutines...
• Over The Edge - Warning: Computing Can Be Hazardous to Your Health.

Departments

• From the Editor
• BackTalk
• Commodore Trivia
• On The Horizon
• Classified Ads
• Advertiser's Index

...and more!

dpcaug - Dirty Pair

Yes, a Currency Devaluation Is Very Much Like a Tax

Britax is a global corporation with a manufacturing hub in Fort Mill, South Carolina where it employs 300. It is there that the company creates car seats for children. Unknown is how long it will continue to.

While it’s surely risky to draw immediate correlation, James Politi of the Financial Times recently reported that Britax is thinking about relocating. The impetus for relocation is the tariffs the Trump administration has levied on foreign goods.

Tariffs Are Taxes

It seems the car seat business is a low margin affair, and beginning in 2018, Britax suddenly faced a 10 percent tariff on the textiles it imports to cover its seats. The tax moved up to 25 percent after a breakdown of trade talks this past May, and then this month a new, 15 percent tariff on metallic inputs such as harnesses and buckles was imposed. The taxes levied on imported inputs Britax relies on to complete its car seats has put it at a disadvantage vis-à-vis car-seat makers located outside the U.S. According to Politi, foreign producers of the seats enjoy a tariff exemption care of the “U.S. trade representative for some, but not all, safety products.”

It’s all a reminder of the basic truth that tariffs are a tax, plain and simple. Not only do they harm the businesses they’re naively assumed to protect by shielding them from market realities, they’re paid for by other businesses reliant on imported inputs; meaning all businesses.T

Figure that something as prosaic as the pencil is a consequence of global cooperation, so imagine by extension just how much a car seat is the end result of production taking place around the world. In this case, the Trump administration falsely “protects” textile and metal companies located in the U.S., and the bill for the protection is sent to companies like Britax. The tax paid by the latter has shrunk its already slim margins even more.

Interesting about tariffs is that they bring about agreement among people with differing ideologies. President Trump’s NEC head Larry Kudlow strongly believes that tariffs are a tax, as does Democratic presidential hopeful, and frequent Trump critic, Pete Buttigieg. Tariffs raise the cost of doing business, which means they’re a tax on earnings. It’s all very simple.

Currency Devaluation Is a Tax

Which is why the quietude about President Trump’s dollar stance is so strange. As some know, Trump would like a weaker dollar. He incorrectly believes a debased greenback would make U.S. industry more competitive. Except that it wouldn’t, and one reason that a falling dollar wouldn’t enhance the health of U.S. corporations is because currency devaluation is 100 percent a tax.

Tariffs raise the cost of importing simply because a 10, 15 or 25 percent tariff is a tax above and beyond the price of the imported good in question. When Trump imposes tariffs that are paid for by importers, the U.S. Treasury ultimately collects the proceeds of same.

With devaluation, much the same is at work. In this case, devaluation of the dollar logically raises the cost of importing foreign goods. It also raises domestic prices, but that’s another piece of commentary for another day. For now, it should be said that money is an agreement about value. If the agreement is shrunk such that it means something different, or is exchangeable for less, it’s only logical that the cost of importing foreign inputs is going to rise unless foreign producers are willing to accept haircuts for what they send our way.

And what about the U.S. Treasury. While it doesn’t collect the “proceeds” of dollar devaluation in the way that it does the false fruits of tariffs, the result is the same. A dollar is yet again an agreement about value. If the exchangeable value of the dollar is shrunk, so shrinks what Treasury owes.

Devaluation is most certainly a tax, and it has a very similar impact on corporations as a tariff. Not only does it raise the cost of purchasing the inputs necessary to produce market goods, it at the same time shrinks company earnings. If the dollar is devalued, so must shrink the value of the dollars a corporation takes in.

The Value of the Dollar Can Change

For those who think a dollar is a dollar is a dollar, think again. No one earns dollars, as much as they earn what dollars can be exchanged for. There’s a big difference. If the value of the dollar decreases, so must we decrease the value of a dollar earned by a business.

The previous paragraph helps explain why periods of dollar devaluation (think the 1970s, think the 2000s) correlate with greatly subdued stock-market returns. If the market value of a company is a speculation by investors about all the dollars a company will earn in the future, it’s only logical that a devaluation of the currency unit that investors use to attach a value to corporations is going to negatively impact share prices.

Taking the previous point further, companies logically grow via investment; be it in people, processes, and nearly always both. Investors, as readers of this column well know, are buying future dollar returns when they put money to work. Devaluation logically shrinks the exchangeable value of those returns. Again, it’s a tax.

Which leads to the final question of this piece: why do honest members of left and right readily acknowledge the tax that is the tariff, all the while ignoring the tax that is devaluation? In each instance policymakers are shrinking the value of individual and corporate work, all the while shrinking what individuals and corporations can get in return for their work.

Yet Trump’s tariffs bring forth all manner of reasonable (and sometimes unreasonable) hand wringing, while his calls for a shrunken dollar happen mostly without comment. This despite them being the same. Yes, a tariff is a tax. And so is devaluation. Why don’t policy types and candidates for public office speak up about the other devaluation?

This article is republished with permission from Forbes. 

John Tamny

John Tamny is Director of the Center for Economic Freedom at FreedomWorks, a senior economic adviser to Toreador Research & Trading, and editor of RealClearMarkets.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Next Generation (September 1995)

Next Generation (September 1995)

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (457-460)

See the previous post in this series here. Feel free to skip the quoted intro text if you have read it before.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides recently. These are pictures spanning from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with some negatives is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives (an Epson V600). That was the most money I was willing to spend on one anyway. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job. The scanner has been mostly idle since finishing that task but now there is plenty for it to do.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. He career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides (thousands of them) contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them (month and year). I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

Two of these shots are of outdoor landscapes and the other two are of two different girls standing in front of the same house. One of the landscape shots has a handwritten date of 1956, otherwise these are all unlabeled. However, all are probably from the late 1950s or early 1960s.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

1956

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.