Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  The destruction of Twitter by the new management continues. Personally, I have for the most part moved my own micro-blogging to Mastodon.  If anyone else worries that twitter is turning into 4chan and they don't want anything to do with it, but they do enjoy the experience they have had there and want to replicate something like that elsewhere, Mastodon is one route.  It is a very decentralized social network, such that there is no asset or company that a billionaire could buy that would put him in charge of it. It involves a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or, sometimes, servers. Yes, the term "server" in this context can be confusing, given its hardware significance, with which this usage has nothing to do.  The counterpart to a tweet is a toot, more commonly though just called a post. I like "toot." It is a natural development of the term Mastodon itself -- suggesting a noise out of an elephantine trunk. Surely more impressive th

Continuing a subject begun last week. Let us assume that I would like to see state-legal cannabis enterprises thrive, on the whole. Of course, as a capitalist I recognize that some will fail and they should be allowed to fail. I hope not to see the day when any head shop is considered Too Big to Fail like the banks of 2008.   Because I wish well for the industry as a whole, while allowing for failures of independent firms, I want to see the cannabis industry have access to the bankruptcy courts and especially to chapter 11, which allows for a company to enter the court's protection from creditors, under the umbrella of that protection re-organize its financial stricture, then re-emerge into normal operations, out from under the umbrella.  Something like this is best for everyone in the case of a business failure: best for the customers and employees, best for the investors, best even for the principals, although they often end up having a lessened connection to the reorganized firm

There are different ways to do headlines, adopting by different journalistic organizations. The front page for the Wall Street Journal had the following headline on p.1, on Nov. 22, "Disney Executives Told Board They Lost Faith in Ousted CEO."  Note that every word there is capitalized except for a preposition, "in". Note also, as is common, that the headline is a full grammatical sentence in the present tense.  This is a form of what is known as an "Up style" of headline typography.  A more drastic Up style is one in which EVERY LETTER IS UPPER CASE. This is generally used only for very short and dramatic headlines. ARMSTRONG ON MOON.  Headlines suitable for all caps treatment at generally not sentences. They are phrases or sometimes single words.  But there is also a Down style, typified by the usage of The Guardian, a distinguished London publication. A Guardian headline might read, "China fury at broader US inquiry into Covid.' (See col. one,

I received a question in Quora about the use of a certain word. I explained as best I could, and am reproducing the result below.  ------------------------------------------------------------------   T o some extent “liberalism” is simply like the word “bark” It can be used in many different ways. One has to decide from context whether the bark in question is the outside of a tree or the sound a dog makes. It would be just goofy to argue about this: “no, the REAL meaning of bark is the outside of a tree! You are trying to subvert and distort the language by transposing the word to the canine context.” Many of the arguments about the word “liberal” that one encounters are confused in much the same way. In the United States, the term is often used for what one might alternatively call a social democrat: for someone who believes that (a) there is a role for profit-seeking activity in the production of wealth, but (b) the DISTRIBUTION of that wealth is a matter in which the state has to pl

 Question for my readers. Aliens take over the earth. They are about to use their advanced technology to erase from the world by the press of a button, all of the music, and any memory of any of the music, of one of these musicians: Steve Perry or Sting.  Which one would you beg the alien overlords to spare?  Personally, I'm gonna to try to save the music of THIS guy. 

There is some ongoing judicial indecision about the relationship between Schedule I and Chapter 7. Schedule I of course is the list of substances considered by the U.S. government to have no approved medical use.  Chapter 7 is the liquidation chapter of the bankruptcy law. It generally requires that a trustee be appointed, and the truistee liquidate the assets of the defaulted company. Consider what may happen if a state-legal marijuana company becomes insolvent. The owner/manager may file chapter 11 hoping for reorganization. Some of the creditors, looking for a better deal from liquidation, may petition to court for a chapter 7 conversion. But tah entails that the liquidating trustee, acting under the authority of a federal court, is going to get into the business of selling (liquidating) to inventory of a company in the business of selling a schedule 1 drug.  This has seemed to some courts TOO paradoxical. The bankruptcy system after all is a federal not a state system, and the stat

Trumpism is a sinking ship. It was an awful ship, in any case, and we should all cheer its voyage to the bottom of the ocean.  If that is your view as well as mine, then you and I may share something else, too: an appreciation of the entertainment value when the rats jump off so hastily.  So why does the MSN headline have to say "train" instead of  ship"?  Hmmmm.  One-time MAGA supporter Tomi Lahren appears to be abandoning the Trump train (msn.com)  

  I recently binged my way through.... The Crown Season 5 on Netflix: Diana's interview, Prince Charles' breakdancing, and more. (slate.com) It was very well done. As the show moves through the decades, the cast keeps changing. So for example the part of Queen Elizabeth II was played by Claire Foy when she was a young woman, seasons 1-2, by Olivia Colman at greater age (seasons 3-4), and now by Imelda Staunton in season 5.  Staunton is best known, or has been best known until now, as one of the great villainesses of the Harry Potter books, Dolores Umbridge.  Staunton has not dislodged Colman as my personal favorite of the Elizabeths here. It was Colman who played off against Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) in some epic scenes, and against the younger version of Diana, Princess of Wales (as played by in season 4 by Emma Corrin).  Those three actresses had a great dynamic triangle going in that fourth season. The fifth?  Thatcher is gone. Neither John Major nor Tony Blair of

I was asked in Quora recently about the utilitarian argument in favor of punishing criminals.  I'm happy with my response and I will reproduce it here. Joe the Burglar is caught red-handed trying to carry a television out of a stranger’s personal residence at 2 AM. Now: what is to be done about Joe? Should the law concern itself only with getting the television back into the hands of the rightful owner, and, say, getting Joe to pay for whatever damage he did breaking in? That would be all there is to it in a purely compensatory system of justice. But that violates our intuitions. The Joe’s of the world figure out pretty quickly that if that is the only response to their burglary, they might as well try again If they didn’t get away with it the first time they might get away with it the second, or tenth. A utilitarian will generally believe that burglary is a bad thing. After all, whatever pleasure it wins for Joe is more than made up for by (a) the pain it brings his victim, (b) th

I have nothing to say about Tuesday's election.  Hence the illustration, such as it is, attached. I will take this opportunity to observe, though, that Monday saw the first written opinion handed down by the Supreme Court's newest Justice,  Ketanji Brown Jackson.  It was issued in dissent: she will become accustomed to that. She was writing for herself and Sotomayor, (they didn't have Kagan on board this time). They would have saved the life of death-row inmate Davel Chinn, accepting the contention that the state of Ohio had suppressed evidence that might have altered the outcome of his trial.  Jackson would have granted the writ and summarily reversed in order to require the Sixth Circuit to conduct a proper materiality analysis on the suppressed evidence. The brief dissent is at the end of a lengthy order list issued Monday.  :   Order List (11/07/2022) (supremecourt.gov)

 Last week I said a few words about private equity and private debt. My interest was in the investment funds that go by those two names. My chief point was that there is a trend that consists of mergers between PE and PD at one extreme, mere "alliances" among dyads of a PD and a PE fund on the other extreme. Creative contracting can create a lot of way-stations between those two extremes, but I won't go into that today.  What I'd like to do is to offer an answer to an obvious question: what does this matter? To those of you who aren't in the asset-management world, nor yet in the world of reporting thereon: should you care? Well,you might want to care IF you worry about efficiencies in either of the corresponding public markets. If those markets (stock exchanges, and the bond trading of government issuances or of the issuances of companies that have equity on stock exchanges) were as efficient as they could be there wouldn't be a pressing need for vigorous pri

  Finally got around to watching the pilot of Alaska Daily recently.  I wondered about the pitch meeting, when someone persuaded a network exec to greenlight this. What was the high concept? "Lou Grant meets Northern Exposure!"?  The central character, played by Hilary Swank, is a reporter named Eileen Fitzgerald who gets into some trouble in New York City and who sees Alaska as a chance to start over -- or at least as a refuge from her troubles where she can make a living doing what she loves while "working on her book" in her spare time. This seems akin to the central character of most of the run of Northern Exposure, played by Rob Morrow, who is a doctor named Joel Fleischman who dreams of returning to New York but must serve out a contractual obligation to practice medicine in Cicely Alaska for four years by way of paying off his student loan.     The milieu of much of the action of Alaska Daily, though, once the premise is settled and Eileen has moved in, is t

"Private equity" refers to the entity in any privately owned business that is NOT traded on a stock market.   Your neighborhood pizza establishment, if it is not part of a chain but is simply the result and destination for some local family's sweat, is a bearer of private equity. How much?  That can at best be guesstimated, until such time as they try to sell it. The guesstimation would depend on similar businesses that have been sold recently in similar places. More specifically, "private equity" can refer to a private equity investment fund, like Mitt Romney's Bain Capital. This is a fund that focuses chiefly on operating businesses that are not exchange traded. A PE fund might buy the pizza place we have in mind. Ma and Pa might be thrilled by this, and take off to Florida for a well-earned and now well-financed retirement. Then Bain or a similar operation, might bring in new management, improve the profit margins, and then start shopping it around to the

 Matthew Perry, the guy who used to play Chandler Bing on FRIENDS, has a new book out called FRIENDS, LOVERS, AND THE BIG TERRIBLE THING. If you aren't aware of that you must have been living in a cave on Mars for the last couple of months. I have nothing to say about the book, which I am very certain I will never read. I just want quite publicly to say UGH to all the publicity. UGH.