—S. H., a prisoner
Sunday, June 19, 2022

—S. H., a prisoner
Sunday, July 10, 2022

ply some “equality” here?  Those who would be beneficiaries of white-paid reparations, you “equally” pay reparations for all our cities & businesses ”y’all” burned down & looted....

Here are some thoughts about reparations.  If the slave trade hadn’t brought to this continent the ancestors of the black Americans who live here today, then those ancestors wouldn’t have come here, and the black Americans who live here today wouldn’t have been born here.  If, by some quirk of genealogical magic, the same black Americans who live here today had been born anyway, but in Africa, then today they’d probably be living in refugee camps and wishing that they were in America.  Instead, they are in America.  I don’t believe that they’re entitled to reparations for how their ancestors got here.   
Sam Aurelius Milam III
More than once, I worked at some job where somebody had to pay me by the hour but charge the customers by the job.  I couldn’t work fast enough for the boss to make a profit, and I wasn’t even getting so-called benefits, just pay.  Those businesses went broke.  Such situations suggest an unacknowledged principle of economics, which is this.  Hourly pay is a ruinous practice, because it mandates a need for fast, cheap work, encouraging such things as disposable products, cheap products, overproduction, and forced obsolescence.
My father told me, way back in the 1960s, that the labor unions were going to negotiate themselves right out of existence.  How a business that has to employ people can survive at all is a mystery to me.  People are just too expensive, and they’re getting more so.  That’s why there’s such a push for automation and AI.  Those labor unions, and apparently everybody else, fail to understand that the law of supply and demand applies to people just like it applies to everything else, and that it’s a mistake to confuse the value of a worker with the value of a human being.  They aren’t the same thing.  The more people that there are in a labor market, as compared to the need for them, then the less they’re worth, as workers.  Human dignity is beside the point.  We can’t expect a business to behave as if it was a charitable organization.  Charities get by with donations and volunteers.  A business must make a profit or it will fail.  No business, no jobs.  The real minimum wage is zero.
  
Car Tech
Original Source Unknown.  Forwarded by Sir Donald the Elusive.
Bill Gates allegedly commented, long ago, that if GM had kept up with technology, like Microsoft did, then we’d all be driving cars that cost $25 each and get 1,000 miles per gallon.  GM reportedly replied that, if GM had kept up with technology like Microsoft did, then we’d all be driving cars with these characteristics:
    11.    For no reason, your car would crash.
    12.    Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you’d have to buy a new car.
    13.    Occasionally, your engine would die for no reason.  You’d have to close the windows, switch off the ignition, switch it back on again, and reopen the windows, in that order, before the engine would restart.
    14.    Occasionally, making a left turn would cause everything to shut down.  You’d have to reinstall the engine.
    15.    Macintosh would make a car that was more reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but it would run on only 5% of the roads.
    16.    The oil pressure, water temperature, and alternator lights would be replaced by the message “An Unknown Error Has Occurred”.
    17.    The airbag would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.
    18.    Occasionally, your car would lock you out until you simultaneously lifted the door handle,  turned the key, and grabbed the radio antenna.
    19.    Every time a new car was introduced, you’d have to learn how to drive all over again.
    10.    You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn off the engine.

— editor