“Vacation” is in quotation marks intentionally, because the largest part of our somewhat-shortened week was spent at my parents’ house, and this part of the week was, well, less than relaxing, with the bulk of the time spent visiting with Dad in the rehab facility and helping Mom out at home. For new readers, Dad has been hospitalized, then in a rehab facility, then hospitalized again, and now in another rehab facility, recovering from a fall and subsequent head injury,... Read more

Detroit is celebrating its area code birthday — yes, it’s 313 years old, and local writer Mitch Albom has written a nice piece on the city.  Is it earth-shattering?  Insightful?  No, not really.  But it’s still worth a read. Read more

This is a really interesting article from the Washington Post on the influx of immigrants, largely skilled, largely from EU countries where they have the right to relocate without any visa quotas, to Germany. Not a lot to say about this:  Germany has an issue with population decline and is open to immigration but is struggling to get it right.  They don’t bean-count racial groups like we do in the US, but they do measure the economic and educational attainment... Read more

So I was thinking about the affordable housing issue some more after my prior post on Detroit.   Mentally, I was dividing “housing affordability” into a couple issues: 1)  Supply/demand imbalances, both artificial (restrictions on dense housing construction, minimum home size/lot size) and more “natural” (geographic limitations such as mountains limiting the buildable area, or a sudden boom in an area meaning that there simply hasn’t been time for housing construction) 2)  Expectations beyond simply being adequately housed, e.g., families... Read more

[Originally written 7/26/14] Reiham Salam, who writes at Slate.com and Bloomberg and National Review and, well, all over the place, has multiple times proposed that the fix for affordable housing is zoning reform — and, as far as it goes, he is correct that, due to simple supply and demand, when there’s a greater demand for housing than supply, prices go up.  In places like the Bay Area, I imagine that this is a huge issue.  Certainly, no city should... Read more

Everybody’s talking about the statements of Jonathan Gruber in 2012 that have been unearthed and show him, a key architect of Obamacare, saying quite directly that subsidies are only for state exchanges as a carrot/stick (Ann Althouse here and here, and Megan McArdle here and here, for instance), but this article makes a key point that is even more of a “smoking gun” than the Gruber quotes. The only statement anyone has found in the legislative history that addresses this point... Read more

According to sellmycomicbooks.com, this particular issue is noteworthy for being the first solo appearance of Captain America in the “Silver Age,” and has sold for as high as $6,800. The copy we bought at the Goodwill for 10 cents earlier today?  It’s coverless and has a page missing — the title page for the second story — which renders it effectively worthless to collectors. But it’s interesting, in its own way.  The two stories were nothing much, really:  in the... Read more

I started thinking about the whole affordable-housing issue again because of a Chicago Tribune article in yesterday’s paper on a new affordable housing initiative; rather than the city itself managing a building, they will pay a private developer/landlord to provide reduced-rent units. I’ve said in the past that I have an issue with the way existing government programs aimed at providing affordable housing work. The huge waiting lists for Section 8 vouchers and government-run subsidized housing buildings (in those cities... Read more

Last night Ann Althouse linked to a Washington Post piece on the birth rate, which profiled one couple whose dreams of parenthood were dashed by the combination of uncertain finances and infertility — they married at the ages of 27 and 29, in 2008, both lost and regained jobs but worry about their financial future, need to cough up $15,000, minimum, for IVF after less expensive treatments failed, and push this off, wanting a bit more financial stability first, but... Read more

(Sorry, no sources below — I have a day job, but I wanted to type this up while I was thinking of it.  I’ll cut my lunch break short later.) No, I don’t mean the current situation in Iraq.  I’m thinking about the situation prior to the invasion in 2003. The UN’s approach to containing Saddam and his store of chemical weapons (because, remember, everyone believed he had them, not just Bush, and it was later determined that Saddam actively... Read more