Jacob Davies

by Jacob Davies You can tell from the first sentence that this story isn’t going to end well: Timothy McCollough freely admits that he stopped making payments on his Chase Manhattan credit card in 1999. He says he did not have the means to pay after he was disabled by a head injury that cost … Read more

by Jacob Davies Back on the Well (in the stone age of the Internet), there was a tradition of having an introductions thread when a new forum was opened. The hosts and the regular users would introduce themselves and invite any new members to do likewise. The nice thing about it was that even if … Read more

by Jacob Davies I’m often surprised to read or hear from Americans who believe that the US has fallen behind other industrialized countries in output or standard of living. Sometimes people even believe that China is about to eclipse the US in standard of living. Now, anyone who’s read what I have to say knows … Read more

by Jacob Davies Via Ezra Klein, a novel argument from the hydraulic-fracturing natural-gas industry: if you knew what we were doing, you wouldn’t let us do it… so we have to keep it secret. Here’s the industry’s appointed spokesman: Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma said the new requirements could effectively end onshore natural gas production. … Read more

by Jacob Davies You have to hand it to the New York Times: they really know how to pick a perfect link-bait case study. This one is a classic: Tremaine Edwards, 35, a former computer technician who had been unemployed for two years before he was hired in May by Gallery Guichard, a private gallery … Read more

by Jacob Davies We may not be the New York Times, but we can still have fancy interactive features: The gradual squeeze of everyone but the upper 10% is like trying to get out the last of the toothpaste from the tube. Now I know that income share isn’t the whole story: in theory, at … Read more

by Jacob Davies There’s a schizophrenia over Social Security among those who would like to see it done away with. On the one hand, the payroll taxes that fund Social Security – and have been subsidizing the rest of the budget for 25 years – don’t count as “taxes” when it comes to asserting that … Read more

by Jacob Davies Optimism is a fine thing, even in dark times. Things generally will return to getting better sooner or later, and despair is useless in helping get there faster. But there is optimism and optimism; “One day I’ll get a job so I won’t stop looking” is the good kind. “We can’t pay … Read more

by Jacob Davies Chicago, in 1948: (Via the Ebert Club; no link.) This video reminds me of driving through St Louis on the way back from Milwaukee. Unexpectedly, knowing nothing of what to expect, downtown St Louis was a spectacular metropolis rising out of an endless plain; the civic buildings rival the Parthenon, as if … Read more