Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Category: Right to Repair

  • Intersectionality

    My friend told me about a new used car dealership that opened up in town over by the railroad tracks. The owner decided he’d revolutionize the used car industry by offering cars at their true  market value plus a 5% bump for overhead and salary. He’d make up for the lower margins with volume.

    Possibly the woman who was the inspiration for this story.

    I strolled into his lot and started kicking tires. A 2009 Honda Fit caught my eye. 17K miles and the body looked perfect. “Why don’t you take it for a spin?” the owner asked as he flipped me the keys. It had responsive steering, supple brakes and decent power for such a small engine. “We’ve checked around and this model with this mileage and condition goes for $7,200, so we’re offering it for $7,530.”

    I stood there thinking about it for a long while. I had only $7,100 to spend. Of course, I needed the car for work and my job was essential to put food on the table, so I knocked $200 off his price in my head. Being a woman, it was obvious that I could be raped walking around at night, so I sliced another $300 of the price. Really, how much would it cost society to deal with another rape? And, isn’t this owner part of the raping gender? Also, I’m nearing fifty years old, so I’ll need money for retirement. If I don’t have enough for my old age, I’ll be a burden on society. I knocked another $500 off his price. Raised by a single mother: $600. Genetically prone to obesity: $450. Lesbian experience in college: $150. Bad teeth, left handed, bad at math, more than five vowels in my last name. The numbers were flashing through my head like John Nash working on differential geometry.

    Finally, I had my answer. “I’ll take the car. According to my calculations, you owe me the car and $2,600.” As I listed my deductions, the left side of the dealer’s face started twitching. When I reeled off the last deduction, he reached out his shaking arm and handed me the title.

    . . .

    She pulled out of the dealership in the purple Honda Fit and turned up the song that came on the radio. She had loved Alanis Morissette ever since she had heard it playing in the background while eating out her college roommate. She looked in the rear view mirror and saw the dealer waving good bye, some pinkish liquid running down his forearm. She thrust her arm out the window and flipped him off. “Fuck your white patriarchy!” she yelled and stomped on the gas.

    . . .

    BAAAAAAAM! “Hey, Boss. What was that?” the young mechanic shouted from the Fiat he was under. “No problem, kid. Just means the train was on time.” He started wiping off the brake fluid on his arm, proud of himself for not mansplaining to the lady that brake lines were bad.

  • Tails of the the Teufelhund, PT II, Poison!

    A few Sundays ago I decided to spend the afternoon with my best friend, discussing composing, arrangement, engineering and various audio stuff, when my phone rings.

    My Wife is calling in a panic because Bella is having a major seizure and come home NOW!, but continues rambling so I just hang up, and say, “Chuck, dog’s seizing, gotta go,” and I’m out.

    As I drive the 6 blocks to my house I’m wondering, “Poison? How? I can’t even leave for a few hours without someone killing my Dog?”

    5 minutes later as I walk through the door, my 25 yr old Son is acting like a 10 yr old sniveling version of Hillary, no help at all, so I go find my Dog.

    Poor baby is sitting in a corner of my office, drooling, spaced the fuck out, and the pollen is falling heavily. I just try to love on Her, but she won’t let me touch her, at first. So I go looking for poison. My office, clear. Bedroom, clear. Kitchen, clear. Then the back yard.

    She found my extra Roundup on top of a 5 foot shelf and knocked it over. She loves to open bottles you see. At this point I walk inside and pronounce, “She drank Roundup, she lives or dies,” being Her Daddy and the heartless motherfucker I am.

    An hour goes by and She drinks some milk. Another hour, then a puppy treat. And then finally eats dog food, THANK GOD!

    After my Wife explained that my son put her out back instead of my office, I knew what happened. Bella doesn’t stay alone unless she is in her den (my office) and panicked, or she was just mad because the People left her alone.

    We often give her milk for a treat, and she had some just prior to drinking Herbicide. Maybe this helped? But she apparently voided from all orifices, while screaming in pain, probably scary as fuck, and I’m glad I didn’t have to witness it. She is fine now, but lesson learned:

    Puppies Will Find Trouble.

    Secure all poison, take no chances.

    I almost lost my Belly.

    Take Care of your puppies, Glibs

  • You Can’t Put a Price on Good Pussy

     

    I’m an immigrant to the United States, originally from the tiny Scandinavian kingdom of Denmark. I moved here as an adult, not to better my financial situation, but to marry my American girlfriend and improve my emotional life. It was hard to leave a secure job with good pay; it was a risk of the unknown, but I thought well worth the love of a good woman. After settling in, I managed to find a job in the same field, with an almost identical income. Financially my life should be the same, except it quickly became apparent that I have more disposable income here. A lot more.

    It can be difficult to understand the impact that such an increase in disposable income can have on a person’s life, without a tangible example. Americans shrug it off because they take it for granted. They can’t understand what it’s like living paycheck to paycheck or saving up for something trivial on an otherwise decent income. My Danish friends and family can’t understand the difference either. They think what I’m about to tell you shows how irresponsible or foolish I am with money, because spending money in this way is simply not possible without upsetting your financial life for months or years.

    Literal disposable income

    You get the idea: disposable income is nice, it allows you to be more carefree and buy nice things. But it’s also about more than being able to afford luxuries, and it can mean the difference between life and death for those you love. The main take away from the events you’ll read about here is this: had they played out in my native Denmark, I wouldn’t have been able to afford the medical care that saved my friend’s life. I probably wouldn’t even have been able to find anyone to provide the care because there is no market for something people cannot afford. He would have been killed humanely at my expense instead.

    My friend’s name is “BJ.” Scratch that, BJ is more than a friend, he’s family. He also happens to be a cat. We didn’t really plan on getting another pet, but he was irresistibly cute – a real scrapper. He was a skinny little thing and had a lot of scars and scabs, but he was exceptionally outgoing and had very high spirits. His personality is likely why he evaded being killed at least twice while passing through high kill shelters in the first 6 months of his young life. He miraculously found himself in a no-kill shelter near us, and we found him in a pet store that features locally adoptable cats.

    BJ had a clean bill of health from the shelter, and we decided to give him a chance. Having lost another cat recently, we decided to protect ourselves from heart-ache by offering to foster him, with the option of later adopting him. Yeah right. We decided to keep him within a couple of weeks. He quickly gained a bit of weight, his scabs healed, and his fur filled in. He got along with our 3 other rescue cats and was living a good life in his new home. He worked his way into our hearts, became part of the family, and we became inseparable.

    Cats are prone to upper respiratory infections; they result from a herpes-like virus that is in virtually all cats. Like cold sores in humans, it lays dormant most of the time, but when it flares up the symptoms are a runny nose, sneezing, and maybe a fever. All our cats would suffer from this occasionally, but BJ caught it really bad after having lived in our home for a couple of years. His symptoms were much worse and he didn’t really seem to spring back from it as easily as our other cats. One day last year after a bout of this, he started to drool a lot and bleed out of his mouth. We panicked and took him to a vet immediately

    It turned out he had several bad teeth, and one had to be removed. He was also presenting with enough other strange symptoms that the vet decided to do a few routine tests. BJ tested positive for FIV, the feline equivalent of HIV, and on top of that he was severely anemic. Because of the anemia it was uncertain if he also had the FeLV virus, which causes leukemia in cats. Shelters test for these viruses, but a cat can test negative for months after infection, so there are no guarantees.

    So cute!

    We were devastated. He was quickly getting worse, and we took him to an emergency animal hospital an hour away with an internist on staff. Honestly, it was uncertain if he was going to make it. BJ stayed in the hospital for several days, where he had two blood transfusions, a bone marrow biopsy, and a bunch of other tests and treatment. He was very sick, but through the whole thing he was friendly and alert, and you could tell the staff was rooting for him and giving him extra attention because of his personality. Being cute is a real survival skill for this little guy.

    Thankfully he didn’t have FeLV, instead the anemia was caused by something called a “mycoplasma.” This bug had a field day because his immune system was compromised by the FIV virus. It can be easily cured, but was damaging his bone marrow and keeping him from producing and sustaining viable blood cells. He was getting a cocktail of antibiotics to kill the mycoplasma, and steroids/immune-suppressing drugs to give his bone marrow a chance to heal and produce new blood cells and to slow down the FIV. To complicate matters, the steroid made him diabetic, a risk we accepted, and he needs insulin injections twice daily. For months we were taking it one day at a time. BJ will always be sick, but thanks to our ability to provide this care for him, he can feel happy and healthy. He pays us back every day.

    It wasn’t cheap–it cost us thousands of dollars, and he still needs medications and frequent trips to the vet. But it was our choice. If BJ lived with me in Denmark, that choice – and consequently his life – would have been extremely limited by how others think my income should be spent. BJ would have died to pay for an artist’s paint, a politician’s plane ticket, and the Queen’s morning cup of organic fair-trade coffee.

    Tophat-tip to Animal for the title.

  • James Comey: Jilted Lover or Spineless Chump?

    As far as I can tell, there is no other plausible explanation for his actions in retrospect.

    Many of you watched the hearing as I did. Hell, I think it was watched by half of America (not including John McCain apparently). And its hard for me to comprehend how there are any true winners or losers here from either a legal standpoint other than maybe Loretta Lynch losing some footing as being above partisanship when it comes to her department’s handling of the Clinton private email server investigation.

    John McCain in his natural state.

    But what should be attacked vigorously by any responsible authority tasked with oversight or any media talking head is Comey’s ability to be a man and do his job with any form of integrity whatsoever. Because he completely contradicted prior sworn testimony today by suggesting that Trump was attempting to influence him. And that he should have carried himself differently many times with interactions with the President in regards to how he reacted and how he reported (or failed to report) what he perceives months later as attempts to coerce or manipulate the FBI head into dropping investigations.

    I’m sure there is some sense of being awe-struck by someone being summoned to the White House. I would like to think I’d be immune to that, but you never know. But the head of the nation’s federal law enforcement apparatus should never be of that mindset unless he is feeling guilty about something. He has spent his life climbing into situations and relationships that are complicated and him being somehow cowed by a President he believes is acting in an unprofessional and borderline-illegal way defies common sense.

    I swear to tell the truth. Even if its different than the “truth” I told the last time I was under oath here.

    Which leads me to my personal opinion: Comey is changing his tune because he feels like he was wronged. He deliberately leaked government property to a friend so they could be sent to the media. He allowed erroneous leaks to remain in the news in order to damage a President he didn’t care for. He contradicted prior sworn testimony in an attempt to change the public narrative on meetings that he considered “notingburgers” until he was fired to “possible attempts at coercion” in the aftermath of that termination.

    Whatever your thoughts about Donald Trump are, whatever you think his relationship with the Russians was, and whatever you think the Democrats are attempting to accomplish here, one thing should be taken away by anybody with an ounce of brains: Comey is gutless or Comey is grinding his axe. I’ve made my decision. Please discuss yours in the comments.

  • Another Day, Another IP Think-Piece. We’re Such Party Animals Here At Glibertarians.com!

    Greetings!

    Some time ago, I brought you a piece the primary function of which was to provide a free resource to understand the radical notion, largely held only in libertarian circles, that IP laws are not compatible with libertarian principles. You can find a link to that earlier piece here.

    I’d like to direct you now to a piece that I perhaps should have led off with. It is still by Stephan Kinsella, a Houston, TX patent attorney*, Executive Editor of Libertarian Papers and Director, Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (c4sif.org). However, it is a smaller, more condensed version of his primary argument, and is rife with excellent citations and thorough notes that any budding libertarian or anarchist theorist will find invaluable.

    Those aren't creations of the mind, they're creations of a fucking factory. What are you, Q?
    There aren’t many useful pictures that come up when you search “Intellectual Property Images”

    In the article Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society, Mr. Kinsella takes the reader through a very brief but illuminating explanation of the evolution of the view of self-ownership and how property rights are inherent to this concept. He then goes on to reiterate how IP laws contradict those property rights, which argument those of you who read Against Intellectual Property will already be familiar with.

    The portion that I think our small army of arm-chair commenter-philosophers will find most interesting and conducive to discussion is the latter part of the article. Mr. Kinsella discusses what an IP regime might look like in a stateless society. This directly addresses those who dismiss an idea as being too radical, or unworkable, if no direct formulation is provided of how the idea might play out in a practical fashion.

    When downloaded, the PDF shows a length of 44 pages, but due to the voluminous notes, there is really only about 25 or so pages of narrative text. You can read it over your lunch break! Assuming you work for a weak-kneed progressive who actually allows you to not be working for a precious few minutes in order to eat. No true libertarian master would ever permit such indulgence among his (and I do exclusively use the male pronoun when discussing both libertarians, and business owners) chattel.

     

    *Don’t we have a commenter who is also an attorney in Houston? If you disagree with Mr. Kinsella’s positions, you should meet him for lunch and fight to the death. It’s the only way to prove which one is right.

  • UnCivil Doesn’t Like Anything : Low-Flow Toilets

    Once again a premature curmudgeon yells at clouds.  You have been warned.

    Always appropriate. -sloopy

    When I bought my house the toilet that came with it was too small, to the point of being uncomfortable, and prone to clogging.  So when I had a contractor fixing some exterior woodwork (I knew it would need to be done at the time of purchase, so this was not some shock) I inquired about people to replace the toilet.  (It was a general contractor, so they had plumbers either on staff or in their contact list).  The price quoted was cheap provided I got the actual replacement unit.  Fair enough, it would let me pick what I wanted in a replacement.

    Except for a proper water volume.

    It is illegal to sell a new toilet that uses more than 1.6 gallons per flush.  The canned answer I get to the question “Why?” is always “to conserve water”.  This annoys me on three counts.

    Low flow toilets: scourge of ISIS

    Count one – If a toilet clogs I end up cycling it three to four times in the process of clearing.  Meaning 4.8 to 5.6 gallons go down the drain.  This ends up using more water anyway while wasting my time unclogging the system.

    Count two – I live in New York.  New York is a literal swamp.  Admittedly, one that was drained before the founding of the EPA.  It gets more precipitation per annum than Louisiana (one of the random facts I learned in our less than stellar public schools).  My house in particular is near the confluence of two rivers.  Millions of gallons of water flow past it towards the sea each minute undisturbed.  (The Mohawk spits an average of 5,900 cubic feet of water into the Hudson per second.  Or 2,651,694.5 gallons per minute.  Then add in what’s already in the Hudson from up north…)  We have water to spare.

    Count three – I get billed by the gallon for my water usage and that amount is doubled to cover sewerage.  I am paying for what I use.  I should be the arbiter of how much gets to be allocated to what purpose.  A rule that was written by econuts living in a desert with no idea how physics works just isn’t appropriate to my circumstance in a swamp.

    The only upside of the tale is that innovators will find a way to work around horrible rules until they literally fly in the face of the laws of physics *cough*automobile emissions*cough*.  So the new Kohler is actually fairly reliable.  But just because there are people smarter than the regulators out there is no excuse for stupid rules to be on the books for stupid excuses.

  • Intellectual Property and You: An Introduction

    Hello libertarians, anarchists, minarchists, fellow travelers, and those who just kind of experimented in college but have been curious ever since.

    Today we bring up a subject only slightly less contentious among the aforementioned ideological groups than abortion or deep-dish pizza. I am speaking, of course, of intellectual property laws.

    Many commenters in the precious few articles we have seen on this issue in our previous lives expressed a desire to rein in the perceived outrages and over-application of IP, without necessarily wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were.

    Texas Tech's football coach looks like this. I am a huge booster of Texas Tech Football. What I'm saying is that I want to have gay sex with Kliff Kingsbury.
    Texas Tech’s football coach looks like this. I am a huge booster of Texas Tech Football. What I’m saying is that I want to have gay sex with Kliff Kingsbury.

    Linked here is a free copy of a book, Against Intellectual Property, that I hope you will take the time to read. The author, Stephan Kinsella, is a critical voice in the current milieu of libertarian, anti-state, anarchist, and minarchist thought, and even when I disagree, I always enjoy his thorough and rigorous logic.

    I believe the title tells you where Mr. Kinsella stands on the topic, however, for those of you uncertain either of the practical or ideological underpinnings of IP as it currently exists and why the system should be abolished rather than merely reformed, I hope that you take the time to grapple with the presented material and hone your own thoughts and arguments.

  • Protect Us from Our Gadgets!

    I happen to be a gadget guy who likes tinkering with electronics. I’ve built computers, 3D printers, a primative blindspot warning device, and a sous vide cooker that worked. I’ve done plenty of wiring and harness changes, too. So this Right to Repair legislation is close to my heart. If I can’t tinker with it, I don’t own it. I understand that I am voiding the warranty and assuming risk. Thank you.

    (more…)