We’ve all heard the stories about the tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars allocated to government programs that, in the end, wound up providing things like broadband Internet access to eight houses or, like here in California, the decades spent on the high-speed rail system which has gone absolutely nowhere (and never will).
Preface to All Six Segments: At the end of each year, I take hours to go through the thousands of posts from the year to gather together what I consider the very best of them. I urge you to read them, since these are the best-of-the-best, and frankly I’m surprised not only how excellent they are but how amazing the predictions turned out to be. Slope truly is the greatest undiscovered gem on the Internet, and I’m glad you’re here to make it possible. Click on any title to read the accompanying post (those marked PREMIUM remain accessible strictly to Gold and Platinum members, God bless ’em).
Once a year, I offer a deep discount on memberships. Slope is a ridiculous bargain to start with, but some people just need an extra nudge. This sale ends promptly on the 31st, so grab it while you can. Click here for Gold with a lifetime 50% discount and here for Platinum on the same insane terms. I mean, give me a break. My UTILITY bill alone was $1,411 last month. You can afford a few bucks, for Christ’s sake.
As I mentioned about a week ago, I took it upon myself to read the book The Gulag Archipelago by Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The actual Archipelago series is three volumes, and about 1200 pages. I read the approximately 500 page trimmed-down version of it, making copious highlights along the way.
The book certainly had an impact on me, and I wanted to offer you a smattering of snippets, with remarks along with each one, and perhaps by the time I get to the end, I’ll have some personal insights to offer
I originally was going to break this into multiple parts, due to its length, as well as to satisfy my neurotic need for a large quantity of posts every day. But this post is very long for a reason, and some people will want to consume it all in one sitting. So this will be the only post for twenty-four hours. It took a tremendous amount of work, and it deserves the time.
These snippets are not meant in any way to substitute for the reading of a 500 page book (which itself is less than half the content of the original work), but to instead serve as small jumping-off point for various thoughts and impressions I had. We begin with a description of the ubiquitous and omnipresent risk of being arrested anytime and anywhere during the era of the gulag
(more…)Let us begin with a thesis: scarcity breeds excellence, and abundance produces garbage.
I am compelled, naturally, to write about this topic thanks to yet another multi-trillion dollar federal boondoggle, this one in the form of the “once in a generation opportunity to invest” announced by the President. Of course, this statement implies that the federal government has been cautiously and conservatively watching every penny for years and now, at long last, it will finally loosen the purse-strings and actually spend a bit on the country. This is, of course, patent nonsense, as the $28 trillion in debt incurred by countless years of government waste, quite plainly attests.
Welcome to a new week, everyone. First off, unrelated to anything, I’ve just got to see that this story about how California’s high-speed rail is going way over budget (tens of billions) and is going to be many years late is the least-surprising thing I’ve ever witnessed. California came up with this thing in the throes of the financial crisis, I guess as a changey-hopey way to convince citizens they were forward-thinking, but I immediately concluded it would be an utter debacle.
For those unfamiliar with it, the idea is basically to retrofit existing tracks, as well as build new ones, to create a sorta-kinda “high” speed train between San Francisco and, frankly, Disneyland (portrayed as “Anaheim”). This is not going to be anything like those amazing multi-hundred MPH beauties from Japan or China. No, in the end, it’s going to be an incredibly expensive, incredibly late, slightly-modernized train which they’ll probably wind up driving at 80 mph or so. My dire prediction seems to be right on target so far.
Anyway! (more…)
