“Up up with speculation, down down with regulation”

Really amazing stuff

re: airbnb discourse in college I worked as a server at an upscale steakhouse. we had a few different steak sauces that were made from scratch daily. they were expensive to make, and less than half of the customers that ordered steak wanted sauce, so the restaurant charged $3 for it we got complaints constantly. just at my own tables, half a dozen times a week I'd get complaints about being "nickel and dimed" for $3 of sauce on a $70 steak. a few times a month someone would mention it in an angry online review, or ask to speak to a manager and demand that it be removed from the bill because "who the hell charges for condiments?" after several years of this, finally management had enough. they raised the price of every steak by $3, and now complimentary sauce was included with each steak on request. want to hazard a guess about how many customers complained about the $3 price increase on steak? essentially zero. it was great, from the restaurants perspective! no more complaints, and instead of making $3 on 40% of steak orderers, they made $3 on all of them. and the customers were much happier, despite this deal being absolutely, unequivocally worse for them. consumers are not rational agents from microeconomics textbooks. very often the *feeling* of what they're being charged for matters way more than the absolute value of what they're being charged. I think that's more or less what happening with airbnb. people don't want to be charged a cleaning fee and then also told they have to clean, even if in the counterfactual world the additional cleaning fee is more than they'd be willing to pay someone to do the required cleaning. a $100 cleaning fee *feels* better than a $50 cleaning fee + "load the dishwasher and take the trash out to the dumpster", even though most people would not pay $50 to not have to do that.

One of my least favorite traits in liberals is the tendency to assign to bigotry claims made against members of minority populations that, when made against non-minorities, would be obviously in-bounds. This has happened twice to me recently, re: Abdul el-Sayed and Ilhan Omar. Abdul el-Sayed's birth mother was a Muslim Brotherhood activist. His half-sister posted publicly about being ardent supporter. He denied the existence of family ties rather than addressing them when asked. He signed a petition in support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The question of his support for the Muslim Brotherhood is not because he is Muslim; the story has legs because he has close family ties and lied about them. Ilhan Omar married one man in a religious ceremony, then married another civilly, claimed to separate after two years, then divorced after and remarried her first husband civilly. During her marriage to her second husband, she filed taxes jointly with her first. The circumstances of her second marriage are very obviously suspicious. People have investigated whether he was her brother and whether the marriage was for immigration reasons. The core of the allegation is not incest, but immigration fraud, and it has legs specifically because the circumstances look very very weird. I absolutely and categorically refuse to turn my brain off when I see things I would flag as weird in any other context simply because the context is that Republicans are using those things in partisan ways against Democratic politicians from minority backgrounds. That leads to a toxic dynamic, a sort of incuriosity-of-low-expectations, where the only anomalies people are "allowed" to take seriously are ones that do not possibly implicate identity traits. No. It is reasonable to ask Abdul el-Sayed about the Muslim Brotherhood; it is reasonable to scrutinize Ilhan Omar's second marriage. I will hold this line and I will not apologize for it or hedge when people choose to selectively see scrutiny as bigotry.

There is a nonzero possibility that the Roman Catholic Church will someday accept the Book of Mormon as canon scripture.

Railway has been hacked.

I am very sad to be canceling my subscription for @theblaze. The hatred and vitriol spewed by @conservmillen towards the members of my church is too much. How she can say such horrible things to people who have supported her career is absolutely disgusting.