steem

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

How Finland and Norway Proved Sweden’s Approach to COVID-19 Works

The coronavirus is back in force. Many nations around the world are seeing alarming rises in cases and deaths, totals that in many instances exceed the highs reached in March, April, and May.

From the beginning of the pandemic, governments around the world have tried to tame the virus. All have failed, to varying degrees.

Whether governments implement draconian lockdowns, modest lockdowns, or no lockdowns at all, the virus has spread. Some countries with harsh lockdowns have fared better; many have fared worse. As some have pointed out, the virus doesn’t seem to care what policies you put in place.

Belgium, for example, has the second highest COVID-19 death rate in the world even though it implemented one of the strictest lockdowns in the world (81.5 stringency). Italy and Spain had even harsher lockdowns, and both countries are also among the most devastated by the virus. (Italy’s current death rate is lower than that of Belgium and Spain, but the country is facing a resurgence of the virus that looks positively frightening.)

We can measure lockdown stringency because of a feature created by Our World in Data, a research team based at the University of Oxford that produces information in all sorts of wonderful charts and graphs.

While most of the world went into lockdown in March, Swedish officials chose to forgo a full lockdown, opting instead for a “lighter touch” approach that relied on cooperation with citizens, who were given public health information and encouraged to behave responsibly.

Our World in Data shows Sweden’s government response stringency never reached 50, peaking at about 46 from late April to early June.  (As a point of reference, the US averaged a stringency of about 70 from March to September.) This is well below the top stringency of Spain (85) and Italy (94). 

Yet, Sweden’s per capita death rate is lower than Spain, Belgium, Italy and other nations despite the fact that it did not initiate a lockdown. As a result, Sweden’s economy was spared much of the damage these nations suffered (though not all).

Despite the apparent success of Sweden’s strategy, the Swedes have found themselves attacked. The New York Times has described Sweden’s policy as a “cautionary tale,” while other media outlets have used it as an illustration of how not to handle the coronavirus.

Critics of Sweden’s policy point out that although Sweden has experienced fewer deaths than many European nations, it has suffered more than its Nordic neighbors, Finland and Norway.

This is true, but it needs to be contextualized.

Norway and Finland have some of the lowest COVID-19 death rates in the world, with 54 deaths per one million citizens and 66 per million respectively. This is well below the median in Europe (240 per million) and Sweden’s rate (605 per million).

What these critics fail to realize is that both Finland and Norway have had less restrictive policies than Sweden for the bulk of the pandemic—not more lockdowns.

Norway’s lockdown stringency has been less than 40 since early June, and fell all the way to 28.7 in September and October. Finland’s lockdown stringency followed a similar pattern, floating around the mid to low 30s for most of the second half of the year, before creeping back up to 41 around Halloween.

When people compare Sweden unfavorably to Finland and Norway to dismiss its laissez-faire policy, they are drawing the opposite conclusion from what the data point really reveals. Yes, Finland and Norway have lower deaths than Sweden—but they have actually been more laissez-faire than their neighbor for the majority of the pandemic.

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Join us in preserving the principles of economic freedom and individual liberty for the rising generation

Since June, Finland and Norway have had less restrictive government policies than Sweden, and both nations have endured the coronavirus remarkably well. They have been among the freest nations in the world since early June, and COVID-19 deaths have been miniscule.

Neither country even has a mask mandate, though both implemented mask recommendations in August. In Norway, private gatherings in public places are still permitted, though the capacity was recently reduced to 50 people (down from 200).

In Finland, people say daily life hasn’t changed very much.

“My daily life actually hasn’t been affected too much,” healthcare assistant Gegi Aydin told one local news station.

The lighter touch approach can be seen in their economies, as well. In the second quarter of 2020, Norway and Finland saw their economies contract by 6.3 percent and 6.4 percent respectively. That’s about half the 11.8 percent drop of the European Union, and well below that experienced by Spain (-18.5%) and the United Kingdom (-19.1%). It’s even lower than that of Sweden, which saw a decline of 8.6 percent.

Despite their low lockdown stringency, Norway and Finland are among the only places in Europe you’ll find considered safe for travel.

As I’ve pointed out before, people aren’t attacking the results of Sweden’s policies. They are attacking the nature of its policies. Of course, there are many nations that have been hit much harder than Sweden. But these nations are ignored because they don’t threaten the narrative that government lockdowns work, and that millions more would have died without them.

Norway and Finland show that the coronavirus doesn’t care about government policy. Their numbers have remained low with moderately strict lockdowns and with laissez-faire policies. 

With the coronavirus resurging around the world, there is talk of implementing another round of crippling lockdowns. World leaders are facing immense pressure to “do something.”

This would be a mistake. Lockdowns come with severe and deadly unintended consequences. Moreover, they have proven utterly ineffective at taming the virus—which is why the World Health Organization is now advising against their use.

The reality is, humans are unwilling to accept how powerless they are to stop this virus. They are unwilling to admit they cannot control it.

Decades ago, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the economist F.A. Hayek warned of the dangers of such hubris. If man continued to live in ignorance of the limits of his knowledge, it would breed a “fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization…”

It’s a lesson that has never been more important. We’ll soon know if it's one we’re finally prepared to learn.

Jon Miltimore
Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

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

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (813-816)

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second 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 having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

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 (or perhaps a friend or family member) 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. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides 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 stamped or printed on them. 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.

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.

All of the photos in this set were taken in the early 1960s. The first is of a river somewhere, the second shows a guy sitting at his desk in an office somewhere, the third is a closeup of a young girl and the final shot shows a group of (mostly) kids hanging out. There's that one guy in a chair reading a book called "The Dogs in My Life"...




July 1961

August 1962

August 1962

August 1962

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

galforc01

Friday, November 13, 2020

GamePro (May 1994)

GamePro (May 1994)
GamePro wasn't my favorite magazine but there's no doubt it was one of the most popular. Personally, I preferred EGM. It always seemed to me that GamePro was aiming for a slightly younger audience than EGM. The May 1994 issue of GamePro includes:
  • Letter from the GamePros
  • The Mail
  • The Cutting Edge - Virtuality is back! Check out Zone Hunter and more from the virtual wizards at W Industries.
  • Hot at the Arcades - NBA Jam Tournament Edition, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Power Instinct, and Alien vs. Predator
  • Special Feature: Shooters! - ProReviews of Tempest 2000 (Jaguar), Sub-Terrania (Genesis), Grindstomer (Genesis), Rebel Assault (Sega CD), and Microcosm (Sega CD). Previews of Super R-Type III (SNES) and SoulStar (Sega CD).
  • Cover Feature: The Making of Mortal Kombat II - Inside the minds that brough us Fatalities, Babalities, and incredible digitized graphics.

ProReviews
  • Genesis
    • Pirates of Dark Water
    • Mutant League Hockey
    • Asterix and the Great Rescue

  • Sega CD
    • Tomcat Alley

  • Super Nintendo
    • The Ninja Warriors
    • Mega Man Soccer
    • Metal Combat
    • Spectre
    • Time Trax
    • King of Dragons
    • Lethal Enforcers
    • Choplifter III
    • Joe & Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics

  • Nintendo
    • Alfred Chicken

  • 3DO
    • The Horde

  • Neo Geo
    • Art of Fighting 2

  • Game Boy
    • Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 (Preview)
    • Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge
    • Sports Illustrated for Kids: The Ultimate Triple Dare!
    • Chase HQ II
    • Stop That Roach

  • Game Gear
    • Disney's Aladdin
    • Cosmic Spacehead
    • Captain America and the Avengers
    • Zool
    • Ms. Pac-Man

The Sports Page
  • World Series Baseball (Genesis)
  • Hardball III (SNES)
  • MLBPA Baseball (SNES)
  • RBI Baseball '94 (Genesis)
  • Super Bases Loaded 2 (SNES)
  • Bill Walsh College Football (SNES)
  • Suzuka 8 Hours (SNES)
  • NHL Hockey '94 (Sega CD)
  • NBA Showdown '94 (Genesis)
  • Chavez (SNES)
  • Caesars World of Boxing (CD-I)
  • PGA European Tour (Genesis)
  • Pebble Beach Golf Links (Genesis)
  • International Tennis Open (CD-I)

Role-Player's Realm
  • Nobunaga's Ambition (SNES)
  • Liberty or Death (SNES)
  • Young Merlin ProStrategy Guide: Part III (SNES)
  • RPG Industry Interview: Alex Jimenez

SWATPro
  • Secret weapons and tactics from the GamePros.

  • Fighter's Edge - More than 60 Fatalities, three hidden characters, how to play Pong, and more weird stuff.
  • GamePro Labs - It's the Pro Action Replay 2, SG ProPad 6, and Pro Control 6.
  • Short ProShots - Quick looks at some hot new games.
  • Overseas ProSpects - A look at Dracula X (PC Engine Super CD), Ganbare Goemon 2 (Super Famicom), Zoku: The Legend of Bishin (Super Famicom)
  • ProNews - All the video game news that's fit to print.
  • Index of Advertisers

Thursday, November 12, 2020

Commodore Horizons (July 1984)


Commodore Horizons (July 1984)
Commodore Horizons was a magazine covering the Commodore 64 and other Commodore 8-bit computers published in the U.K. The first issues was December/January 1984 and the final issues was March 1986. Starting with issue 27 (April 1986) it became Commodore and Amiga Horizons. The July 1984 issue includes:
  • Letters - This month Beaver Software bites back, we've some programming tips and the chart debate is revived.
  • News - The Evil Dead reach for your 64, games prices plummet and new hardware abounds.
  • Games software - Peter Gerrard among the spaceships, monsters, aliens and - plumbers?
  • Business software - Mike Grace reviews word processing packages for the 64.
  • Which printer - Daisywheel or dot matrix? Ken Casemore compares the merits of budget printers of each type - Commodore's MPS801 and the Smith-Corona TP1.
  • Profile - Taskset's Andy Walker explains his "64 only" policy to Chris Jenkins.
  • Star game - Ever fancied yourself as a space pilot? Test your skill with this 64 listing.
  • Super expander expounded - Colin Walls explains just what you can do with the Vic 20's Super Expander.
  • Software file - Readers' programs let you shoot, draw, print, calculate and more!
  • Clubnet - New clubs from Ireland and France and a list of your local groups.
  • Market view - Commodore's current plans and policies.
  • Answer back - Jack Cohen tackles your questions.
  • Classified ads - Your free marketplace for CBM goodies.
...and more!

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (809-812)

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second 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 having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

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 (or perhaps a friend or family member) 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. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides 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 stamped or printed on them. 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.

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.

The first and third photos feature a young woman sitting on a count. I have know idea what is going on in the second photo. The final photos is labeled July 1951 and is of an older woman looking in her purse. All of these photos were likely taken in the 1950s.






July 1951

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

yuna ss

How a Minimum Wage Hurts Those It's Designed to Protect - Foundation for Economic Education

In the final presidential debate, former Vice President Joe Biden gave full support to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, even in the midst of the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the government-induced lockdowns that followed.

President Donald Trump’s complaint was that raising the minimum wage would hurt small businesses as it would raise the cost of labor.

But raising the minimum wage would not just hurt many small businesses who need certain types of labor and don’t have the revenue to pay $15 an hour for it. It would also hurt employees whose labor is simply not worth the increase in price.

I don’t think any of us, regardless of what we think about the minimum wage, genuinely want anyone to be compensated unfairly for their work. Nor do we want to see people not make enough to suit their needs.

Minimum wage laws, however, do not help low-income workers make a living. They actually end up pricing them out of the market in many instances.

Imagine you own a small business – a bar, let’s say – and your bar has recently become the hotspot of your small town. You’ve seen a significant increase in profit over the past year, and you’ve decided to use that extra profit to hire someone to do the job you hate doing the most: cleaning the bathrooms.

You hire Ned. Ned is a low-skilled worker with no high school diploma. However, he is a hard worker and is voluntarily offering his labor for $5 an hour, 10 hours a week. If you pay him $5 an hour, you’d be making the same profits as you were before, except your job would be a lot easier with the extra hand.

Now imagine that the government comes to your bar and demands that you must now pay all your employees no less than $7 an hour.

If you pay Ned $7 an hour, you will be losing an extra $20 dollars a week. That’s around $80 per month and $1,040 per year. If your revenue stays the same – and that’s only if people keep coming to your bar at the rate they currently are – you’ll be making over $1,000 less in profit than you did last year.

Keep in mind, you’re fully capable of cleaning the bathroom yourself. Anyone can clean a bathroom. You just don’t want to do it if you can afford to pay someone else to. Are you going to take the loss or are you just going to clean the bathroom yourself?

Of course, you could up the price of your drinks, but maybe that’s one of the reasons your customers keep coming back – because they feel your drinks are affordable. Raising prices could actually deter customers.

Most people, I’d imagine, would just choose to clean the bathroom themselves. Ned, likely, would lose his job.

Was the government helping Ned? Were they helping you? What about your consumer? No! Not at all!

The government only caused Ned to get laid off. You, now, are going to have to spend your mornings scrubbing that nasty commode! And are your customers going to be able to get a better deal on their beer? No!

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Join us in preserving the principles of economic freedom and individual liberty for the rising generation

Let’s assume the government actually wanted to help Ned. Where did they go wrong?

The government was ignorant of basic economics.

They never took into account that the demand for Ned’s labor simply didn’t equate to $7 an hour.

It’s important to understand that employers are consumers of labor and employees are producers of labor. An employee is one who has sold his work (whether that be cleaning your bar’s dirty toilets or designing rockets for SpaceX) to an employer for an agreed upon price.

In any market, the producer is tasked with setting a price that balances the supply and demand of their good or service.

When a price is set below that equilibrium, a shortage is created. Consumers will buy it up too quickly and drain the supply before it can be replenished.

The opposite effect, a surplus, results from setting the price higher than the equilibrium. Most consumers will find the good or service not worth the price. The producer, then, will be unable to sell all of their goods or hours of their services.

That’s exactly what happened to Ned. You – the consumer of Ned’s labor – decided his labor was not worth the extra $1,040 at year. Ned’s labor is at a surplus.

And a surplus in the labor market does not mean abundance. It does not mean a bunch of goodies stored away in some warehouse waiting to be used. It means unemployment.

If it were up to Ned, do you think he would rather offer his labor at $5 an hour and keep his job or offer it at $7 and lose it?

Though the government told you that you could not pay Ned less than $7 an hour, they, in turn, also told Ned that he could not offer his labor at less than $7 an hour. This takes away Ned’s freedom to choose. It takes away his ability to use his labor the way he wants to. Now, unless Ned is able to make his labor worth $7 or more an hour, he will inevitably receive $0.

This obviously won’t happen in every situation. Some small businesses may be willing to reduce profit so they don’t have to let anyone go and many larger businesses can probably afford the increase, but it nevertheless provides incentives for both to let low skilled workers go and either do the jobs themselves or replace them with less expensive alternatives such as machines and computers.

Many who support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour do so because they truly want something better for other people. But before we make decisions about policy, we must always ask whether or not it is effective at achieving its end goal.

Minimum wage laws price low-skilled workers out of the market, while inviting the government to get more involved in how we sell our own labor. And, to me, neither is desirable.

Will  Blakely
Will Blakely

Will Blakely is a student at Auburn University studying public relations and political science who hopes to pursue a career in public policy.

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

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Guild Wars: Eye of the North

Guild Wars: Eye of the North
Guild Wars, introduced in 2005, was one of the most popular MMORPG's. It was one of the earliest such games to feature a business model not based on a monthly subscription. It was popular enough to spawn multiple expansions including teh 2007 Guild Wars: Eye of the North.
Eye of the North, released in 2007 and available for Windows and OS X, was the 4th campaign and was the first to require that the user have one of the previous three. It was very much designed for veteran players who knew the game well (there was no tutorial) and had reached level 10 or higher. Eye of the North featured 18 new dungeons, 150 new skills, 40 new armor sets and 10 new heroes as well as a number of other new items. There were also two new races introduced including the Norn and the Asura.
Eye of the North largely takes place in dungeons and really acts as a bridge to Guild Wars 2 which was first introduced in 2012 and is still active. The image at the top is from Girls of Gaming and features Jora who is a Norn NPC involved in a number of quests in Eye of the North. If you are a fan of MMORPG's (and have the time), then Guild Wars 2 is worth checking out. At least it doesn't have a monthly subscription fee.

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (805-808)

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second 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 having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

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 (or perhaps a friend or family member) 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. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides 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 stamped or printed on them. 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.

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.

There's not much I can say about this set. No labels or dates. They appear to have been taken in Mexico or perhaps somewhere else in Central or South America and were likely taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s.






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

Monday, November 9, 2020

Yunald

PC Format (May 1997)

PC Format (May 1997)
PC Format is a U.K. based PC magazine published from 1991 until 2015. It was an entertainment oriented magazine that covered things like gaming, video editing, etc. The May 1997 issue inclues:
  • Comics - Put away your pen, your ink and your drawing board, and pull out your PC instead. PC Format gets together with 2000AD and tells all about creating comics on your desktop, with tips from the experts on achieving graphic perfection.

  • Gameplay - Judgement day is here. Will these games be swept up in the rapture?
    • Coming Soon
      • Slam 'n' Jam
      • X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter
      • Sierra Golf
      • HardWar
    • Reviews
      • Comanche 3
      • Yoda Stories
      • Magic: The Gathering - Battlemage
      • Phantasmagoria: Puzzle of the Flesh
      • Air Warrior 2
      • Fallen Haven
      • Darklight Conflict
      • Battlecruiser 3000AD
      • X-Men
    • Gameplay extra
    • Budget games
    • Tips & Tactics

  • Tried & Tested - Hardware, software, vaporware - we tar it all with the same brush.
    • Supertest: Storage - A bit like floppy disks, only a lot bigger. We stare at the latest multi-megabyte units.
    • Hardware reviews - MIDI keyboards for any wallet size, and the rest of this month's new hardware.
    • Software reviews - Microsoft Office 97 gets a going-over, as do system tools and Micrografx's new suite.

  • Interview: Kai Krause - The might morphing Power Goo ranger, the man who brought graphic wizardry to the masses with Bryce and Kai's Power Tools, talks to us about Soap, the art package for all.

  • Regulars - Swill down a gallon of the fizzy features you know and love.
    • News - Vote Conservative! It says so on the Internet...
    • Interview - We say: "How do you Goo?" to graphics king, Kai Krause.
    • Mail order & subscriptions - And look, some back issues!
    • Technique - Know it all, fairly quickly.
    • Wired World - Challenge McCauley returns!
    • PCF Helpline - Come cry on Luis' shoulder.
    • PCF Letters - Why don't you write me?
    • Competition - Win 2D and 3D happiness.
    • The Final Insult - The truth isn't out there.
...and more!

Thursday, November 5, 2020

Kirby's Avalanche (Super Nintendo)

Kirby's Avalanche (Super Nintendo)

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (801-804)

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second 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 having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

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 (or perhaps a friend or family member) 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. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides 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 stamped or printed on them. 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.

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.

There are no labels or dates on these photos. The first photo is of a church in winter. The next three appear to have been taken in Central or South America. These were proably taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s.






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

Government Can't Count Ballots. How Can It Possibly Manage a Pandemic or Our Health Care?

Elections are a nasty business, but sometimes they can be clarifying.

We don’t yet know who won the US presidential election, and we may not for days or weeks to come. This stems largely from the ineptitude Americans witnessed on Election Tuesday.

It wasn’t just the fact that pollsters once again failed disastrously, or that networks fumbled their election coverage.

The bigger issue is that America’s governing bodies look incapable of managing something as simple as a vote, something Americans have managed to do efficiently for centuries without the benefit of computers, digital communication, and mass transportation.

As an American, I find this a tad embarrassing. As the journalist Glenn Greenwald observed Wednesday, countries with far fewer resources and less advanced technology regularly manage to hold speedy, efficient elections. This is something the US failed to do on Tuesday, Greenwald noted.

The richest and most powerful country on earth — whether due to ineptitude, choice or some combination of both — has no ability to perform the simple task of counting votes in a minimally efficient or confidence-inspiring manner. As a result, the credibility of the voting process is severely impaired, and any residual authority the U.S. claims to “spread” democracy to lucky recipients of its benevolence around the world is close to obliterated.

At 7:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, the day after the 2020 presidential elections, the results of the presidential race, as well as control of the Senate, are very much in doubt and in chaos. Watched by [the] rest of the world — deeply affected by who rules the still-imperialist superpower — the U.S. struggles and stumbles and staggers to engage in a simple task mastered by countless other less powerful and poorer countries: counting votes. Some states are not expected to [finish] their vote-counting until the end of this week or beyond.

This, to be blunt, is unacceptable.

The most prosperous country in the world cannot manage to do something as simple as collect and count ballots. Think about that for just a moment.

Unfortunately, this incompetence carries consequences that are quite real. Americans are beginning to lose faith in the integrity of elections. I’m not just talking about voters in the fever swamps of Twitter.

Many impressive journalists, thinkers, and students of various political stripes have expressed alarm at what they witnessed in the last 24 hours.

Many readers can probably relate to some of these concerns.

The reality is, the inability of election authorities to do something as simple as gather and count votes is undermining Americans’ faith in the constitutional system. As Greenwald notes, this is dangerous; but it’s also rational.

Because of the power and breadth of the federal government, there is a great deal at stake in presidential elections—too much at stake. Americans sense this, and when they see mail-in ballots missing, precincts that can’t get votes counted, voting delays, errors in data feeds, and other problems it naturally creates a feeling of uncertainty. Uncertainty in turn breeds distrust.

One could argue that this year’s election was unique. Turnout was unprecedented (at least in raw numbers), perhaps in part because of the coronavirus pandemic and the record number of mail-in ballots.

Perhaps that’s true. But the fact remains: how hard is it to collect and count ballots? I don’t wish to disparage the people working these elections. The process is probably far more complicated than many Americans realize. But this is true of most systems, which brings me to a key point.

Is collecting and counting ballots more difficult than running a vast health care system that involves pricing, insurance, medication, billing, and the very lives of individuals? The answer is no.

Is collecting and counting ballots more difficult than attempting to manage the spread of an invisible virus without ruining the livelihoods, spirits, educations, and very lives of hundreds of millions of people? Again, the answer is no.

In some ways, we should not be surprised to see governing bodies fail to manage something as elementary as an election. For decades we’ve watched the United States Post Office bungle something as simple as collecting and delivering mail. The USPS bleeds billions of dollars every year doing something a private company would make a profit doing, while delivering substandard service. (This is why libertarians have been arguing for more than a century that the Post Office should be subjected to competition.)

It’s no coincidence that the election debacle of 2020 happened in the year the Post Office played its largest role ever. It was bound to happen.

As the economist Ludwig von Mises observed in his 1944 book Bureaucracy, government agencies can never be anywhere near as efficient as private businesses. The competitive market compels entrepreneurs and their employees to competently and efficiently serve the buying public or go out of business. And profit-and-loss accounting enables them to figure out exactly what’s working and what’s not. In contrast, as Mises wrote:

“Public administration, the handling of the government apparatus of coercion and compulsion, must necessarily be formalistic and bureaucratic. No reform can remove the bureaucratic features of the government’s bureaus. It is useless to blame them for their slowness and slackness. It is vain to lament over the fact that the assiduity, carefulness, and painstaking work of the average bureau clerk are, as a rule, below those of the average worker in private business. (...) In the absence of an unquestionable yardstick of success and failure it is almost impossible for the vast majority of men to find that incentive to utmost exertion that the money calculus of profit-seeking business easily provides. It is of no use to criticize the bureaucrat’s pedantic observance of rigid rules and regulations. (...)

All such deficiencies are inherent in the performance of services which cannot be checked by money statements of profit and loss.”

That isn’t to say that bureaucracy is inherently evil. Mises clarified that, “bureaucracy in itself is neither good nor bad.”

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“There is a field,” he continued, “namely, the handling of the apparatus of government, in which bureaucratic methods are required by necessity.”

Elections, for example, are necessarily a bureaucratic affair, even if that means they often get bungled.

The big problem is when governments bureaucratize things that don’t need to be bureaucratic. The evil lies in, as Mises said, “the expansion of the sphere in which bureaucratic management is applied.”

For example, health care does not need to be bureaucratic. It can and has been provided through the market. To the extent that it has been, market forces and signals have made it better.

But if health care were to be socialized—as in a single-payer scheme—it would have to be managed bureaucratically and would inevitably suffer all the deficiencies of a bureaucracy: ineptitude, slowness, neglect, etc.

Just imagine having to depend on the DMV or the USPS for your medical treatment. (If you’ve ever had to deal with the Veterans Administration, perhaps you don’t have to imagine.)

One may object that our health care system already suffers from those failings and is already quite bureaucratic. But that is because the government is already so heavily involved in it. As Mises wrote, “Every kind of government meddling... breeds bureaucratism.”

It is the absence of market forces and signals that makes governments inefficient. The normal mechanisms in markets that lead to efficiency, productivity, and prosperity simply cannot be replicated in a government system. Ever.

This is not to say some government systems cannot be managed more effectively than others. Naturally, they can. Just as many countries manage to hold elections and quickly get reliable results instead of the fiasco Americans witnessed this week.

The point is bureaucracy is inefficient by nature. We saw that Tuesday night.

And we should all be asking ourselves an important question: If government cannot manage something as simple as an election, how can it possibly make rational decisions about health care and pandemics that affect hundreds of millions of people?

Jon Miltimore
Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

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