The tax breaks are pretty big: “The tax breaks exempt companies in the Mid-Market neighborhood from the city’s 1.5 percent payroll taxes on new hires for six-years. Twitter tax breaks are estimated to be worth $22 million over six years.”
Archive for 2013
January 27, 2013
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN FOR TOMORROW: Why Not A Waiting Period For Laws? “I’d like to propose a ‘waiting period’ for legislation. No bill should be voted on without hearings, debate and a final text that’s available online for at least a week. (A month would be better. How many bills really couldn’t wait a month?) And if the bill is advertised as addressing a ‘tragedy’ or named after a dead child, this period should double.”
OF COURSE, IT’S STILL JANUARY: The Most Ridiculous Law of 2013 (So Far): It Is Now a Crime to Unlock Your Smartphone. “When did we decide that we wanted a law that could make unlocking your smartphone a criminal offense? The answer is that we never really decided.”
JUST A REMINDER: Amazon carries shooting supplies.
COMING TO A CITY NEAR YOU: National School Choice Week!
THOUGHTS ON conservatives and dating sites.
A DIALOGUE ON WOMEN IN COMBAT.
POPULAR MECHANICS: SHOULD YOU BUY A STANDBY GENERATOR? “Standby generators offer a steadfast solution to extended outages. Unlike portable generators, they’re installed permanently on a concrete pad in your yard and will provide uninterrupted backup for days. That’s because they’re connected directly to your home’s electrical panel and powered by an external fuel supply, such as natural gas, liquid propane, or diesel. Smaller, air-cooled essential-circuit units (below) are slightly larger than portable generators and can energize just a few circuits at a time. Larger, liquid-cooled whole-house systems will do just as their name suggests—they’ll comfortably power an entire home.”
If I were building my home from scratch today, I’d run everything off propane instead of natural gas, add a big propane-powered standby generator, and have a big underground propane tank. I’d be good for weeks off the grid if necessary. And, as Sandy — and some of PEPCO’s failings in the DC area — demonstrated, that can sometimes be necessary.
AT AMAZON, markdowns on Athletic Shoes.
IF YOU GET A WEIRD EMAIL FROM MY BELLSOUTH ACCOUNT WITH A LINK, don’t follow the link. It’s some kind of spambot. I’ve changed the password on my Bellsouth account, but I’m not even sure that’s where it’s actually coming from.
Giffords can only get a few words out — “so slowly” — and Diane Sawyer has no compunction about supplying words all around Giffords’s words, most notably at the end of the interview — you have to watch the video — when she turns Giffords into a puppet who voices the last word to a long sentence yammered out by Sawyer. Sawyer repeatedly assures us that Giffords understands everything and is able to think well, that her only intellectual deficit is in speaking. We’re told how effective Gifford will be in pressuring Congress to enact gun control. She will be taken around to the members of Congress so they will be subjected to the ordeal — if they want to say “no” — of saying “no” to her face.
This is how it’s done. At what point do you say “no”… enough?
Resort to theatrical efforts at emotional blackmail is an admission that you have no intellectual arguments. Which is par for the course with the smarmy Diane Sawyer, of course, and with the even-smarmier gun control movement.
I would ask “have you no decency?” — but we already know the answer to that.
Plus, from the comments:
The members of Congress that will be subjected to this ordeal, will be Republicans.
Democrats running for re-election in places like Minnesota will not be called on.
The love-and-caring bit is all a con. Every time.
THOUGHTS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF CHANGING THE CULTURE. “Glenn Reynolds was spot on when he suggested after the 2012 presidential election that wealthy Republicans stop wasting their money on Republican politicians and buy women’s magazines, which virtually operate as a ‘propaganda arm of the Democratic party.'”
Plus: “It is perfectly proper to be taught by one’s enemy.”
SARAH HOYT ON BOYS AND THE CULTURE: Blowing Steam — or The Counterfactuals Can Harm You. “Well, it’s just that girls get to do ALL the fun stuff.”
TRANSPORTATION TRUSTBUSTER: Andy Kessler interviews the CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick. Key bit:
“We don’t have to beg for forgiveness because we are legal,” he says. “But there’s been so much corruption and so much cronyism in the taxi industry and so much regulatory capture that if you ask for permission upfront for something that’s already legal, you’ll never get it. There’s no upside to them. . . . It’s anticompetitive behavior. If a CEO did that kind of stuff—-you’d be in jail.”
The joys of regulation.
JOHN TIERNEY: Prison Population Can Shrink When Police Crowd Streets.
Now that the United States has the world’s highest reported rate of incarceration, many criminologists are contemplating another strategy. What if America reverted to the penal policies of the 1980s? What if the prison population shrank drastically? What if money now spent guarding cellblocks was instead used for policing the streets?
But here’s the key quote:
“If you had a dollar to spend on reducing crime, and you looked at the science instead of the politics, you would never spend it on the prison system,” Dr. Jacobson said. “There is no better example of big government run amok.”
Indeed.
AT AMAZON, markdowns on Cellphones & Accessories.
Also, on Blu-Ray, The Ultimate Matrix Collection, $24.99 (62% off).
PROGRESS: ‘No Budget, No Pay’ Advances Despite Reservations.
In an earlier era, a move like the one engineered by House GOP leaders to pass a “no budget, no pay” measure probably would have been stopped in its tracks.
But with Congress’ approval ratings in the gutter, House lawmakers pushed aside questions about fairness and constitutionality and tacked the idea on to an unpopular, must-pass measure to increase the government’s borrowing cap.
This AP story is an apologia for the bill’s opponents, but it still can’t obscure the fact that with Congress deeply unpopular for failing to do its job, reform proposals that would normally not have a chance might make it now. Which is a good reason for someone to introduce my revolving-door surtax for government officials who leave for higher-paying jobs elsewhere.