Tidewater News and Opinion Forum
A place for civil discussion of the events of the day for Tidewater residents without the limitations imposed by media forums.
The argument this story makes is a profound turnabout. Suddenly, a major liberal/progressive media outlet has embraced the premise that lockdowns/social distancing/masks should end and that Covid vaccination is no longer sufficiently effective to justify vaccination mandates.
I’m inclined to be cynical about this shift, blaming it on politics, not science. But, whatever.
The issue at hand illustrates a basic problem with government meddling in markets. Here, because government wanted to establish a minimum wage, it then needed to establish a subminimum wage, lest its first dictate make disabled workers unemployable.
Continue reading “End the Subminimum Wage for Disabled Virginians”Source: The Wall Street Journal.
George Gilder is one of the most interesting economic philosophers of all time. I think of him as being 9/10ths right about anything he chooses to talk about, except that the 1/10th he leaves out is the part the rest of us want most to grasp and fully understand.
Continue reading “Wealth is Knowledge”An excellent entertainment for a Sunday afternoon. Princeton history professor Stephen Kotkin responds to the following five questions:
Source: The Reformed Physicist.
The writer lives in downtown Ottawa, where the Canadian trucker protest is going on right outside his window. He reports on going down to the street to meet his neighbors.
The writer runs some numbers and shares his thoughts. The piece is informative, but I’m ambivalent about one aspect.
I am in favor of collecting accurate and detailed data for the statistical analysis of crimes in Virginia. I also dislike the term hate crime because it is legally ambiguous and can cause unintended perceptions in common usage. Maybe something like bias crime would be better.
Transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 among fully vaccinated individuals
A brief report in the prestigious medical journal comments on the impact of vaccination on community transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
Continue reading “The Lancet Reads Tidewater Forum”Source: American Institute for Economic Research.
I posted a note on the OneAmerica insurance company actuarial data some time ago, and took heat for suggesting that the reported 40 percent pandemic death surge might eventually be attributed to factors no one today wants to believe.
Continue reading “All Cause Mortality in the United States During 2021”I wrote a brief essay here on the Forum a while back which suggested that reciprocity as anthropologists understand the term may account for the historical origins of money. The theory (not my own) holds that humans are hardwired by evolution to repay kindness with kindness and insult with insult. In a natural (pre-civilized) society, these tit-for-tat obligations can build up over time until a crisis occurs such that the network of obligations must be resolved. Money, according to this view, came into use as a way of paying off or canceling social debts that needed to be quantified so that they could be settled.
Continue reading “Reciprocity (cultural anthropology)”This is a test. Who will argue that Soros should be prevented from making the political donation he has announced, and why?
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 