Category Archives: Business
The Hobby Lobby Decision
No, it’s not based on a “scientific mistake.”
And yes, the morning-after pill is an abortafacient.
Industry At The Edge Of Space
Leonard David reviews Erik Seedhouse’s new book
As an aside, how does Springer sell books at those prices? Almost thirty bucks for a Kindle?
The Hobby Lobby Case
…the only reason this conflict arose was a New Deal-era tax loophole that gave birth to our peculiar employer-based health care system. The main lesson of Hobby Lobby is that this system has to go.
Yes. Of course, ObamaCare should never have happened, either, for the same reason.
Hard Drive Prices
Seeing three terabytes for a hundred bucks at Newegg.
My problem is, I don’t know what I’d do with that much storage. I don’t need bigger drives; I’d like cheaper ones. But as with restaurants and food, the marginal cost of adding capacity is low, but the basic overhead of manufacturing a drive seems to set a lower limit on the price.
Hobby Lobby Boycotters
Culture warriors face two additional problems:
They tend to want to boycott places they never shopped at in the first place.
The company’s actual core demographic takes umbrage about the boycott and stages a much more effective counterboycott.I can’t tell you how many times I have had some version of the following conversation:
Angry person on the Internet: Wal-Mart’s treatment of its workers is shameful. I am not going to give that company any of my business!
Me: How much did you spend at Wal-Mart before you realized its treatment of workers was shameful?
The modal answer to this query is sudden disappearance from the conversation. I’m not sure anyone has confessed to spending as much as $1,000 a year at the stores. Of those who claim to shop there, most seem to do so almost entirely on vacation in rural areas.
If this describes you, you are not Wal-Mart’s core demographic, and its executives don’t care whether you boycott the business; the loss in sales is less than they experience from miscalculating what sort of sunscreen to buy. They care very much about what their core demographic thinks, but those people are, by and large, not interested in these boycotts; they’re interested in paying 12 cents a can less for tomatoes.
As she notes, Chick-fil-A is a canonical example.
Leaving California
Adrian Moore explains why he can’t take it any more.
Space Solar Power
John Walker reviews John Mankins’ new book.
Birth Control
If it’s not your boss’s business, why do you expect him to pay for it?
…the Hobby Lobby decision opens the door for closely held companies to deny coverage of all forms of birth control if they can plausibly argue that doing so would violate their conscience. The decision doesn’t apply to large, publicly held corporations, but even if it did, it is unlikely that many companies would go down that path. And even if they did, birth control would not be “banned” – employees simply would have to pay for it themselves. The notion that denying a subsidy for a product is equivalent to banning that product is one of the odder tenets of contemporary liberalism.
The cognitive dissonance required to be a leftist must be quite painful.
The EPA’s Empire Building
How it got in the way of its science.
It’s what happens to politicized bureaucracies.