Democrat regulations are holding the entire economy hostage. The impact of California’s Democrat legislative supermajority on truckers was just another data point alongside what was happening to freelancers of all kinds and a lot of small businesses. Stories like this were everywhere and there was little interest in them even in conservative circles outside the tarnished golden state. Back then we still lived in a world where you could walk into a thousand stores with fully stocked shelves. People ordered from Amazon and expected its burgeoning last mile delivery service to make products magically appear overnight. Just in time inventory systems were more efficient and any day now products would be delivered by self-driving cars or aerial drones. 2020 and 2021 have given this Big Tech fantasy world and the rest of us a good kicking. The massive supply chain mess that’s leaving stores empty and orders unfulfilled doesn’t have a single point of failure, but dozens of them. China’s energy shortages, the overhyped predictive powers of Big Data, the fragility of the global economy, fuel costs, and welfare state worker shortages are all players. But California’s truck bans are a key link in the great failure chain.
Business
Recent reporting on the influence of private funding of public elections by Mark Zuckerberg is long overdue and greatly appreciated by those of us who have been sounding the alarm about this for over a year. […] The New York Post‘s front-page package of articles and op-eds did an admirable job of covering the scandal, bringing much-needed attention to an issue that many Americans knew little about, even though it was arguably the decisive factor in the 2020 presidential election. The Amistad Project filed the first litigation seeking to block private funding of elections in September 2020, based on investigations that began months earlier. We have continued and expanded our investigate-and-litigate strategy ever since, with a particular focus on the swing states that ultimately decided the outcome of the election. What we have uncovered through litigation, discovery, open records requests, and witness interviews is deeply disturbing. In addition to over $400 million from Zuckerberg, The Amistad Project has identified hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of additional contributions in the form of talent, information, and monies from leftist individuals and nonprofits.
“The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection. Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040. Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash — five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius. The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013. GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002 successfully netted 9,000 kg, or around 20,000 lbs in its first trial. It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 mm in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life.
Ontario’s Liberal Party has announced on Sunday that, if elected, they will start a pilot project to look into “the potential for a four-day work week.” The idea is that people will work the same total number of hours, but during four days per week instead of five. […] Steven Del Duca, the Ontario Liberal party leader, stated: “I want us to understand if it has merit here. We’re a party that believes in science, expertise and evidence-based decision-making and so I want us to gather the facts in an open and transparent way.” “Let me be clear, improving the way we work does not mean that people don’t want to work hard.” De Duca continued, mentioning that he considers the four-day week to be a more healthy lifestyle choice: “People want the chance to work hard and work meaningfully, without their job having a brutally negative impact on families, mental health, the environment and quality of life.” One Ontario company has apparently already started implementing the four-day week, and has noted that, so far, it has been an overall success for the company and its employees. Del Duca has also recently criticized the Ford government, saying that more vaccine mandates should be in place for workers in healthcare and education.
The Chinese character for crisis also means opportunity. There are several blessings hidden amid the current supply chain crisis. You’ve likely heard about the dozens of ships lined up just outside the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. These ships and the millions of containers they are waiting to offload are filled with toys, electronics, textiles, automobiles, appliances, building supplies, tools, pet food, batteries, solar panels, car parts, microchips, and on and on and on, almost all made in China. Our decades-long offshoring of manufacturing has made us dependent on a foreign adversary. Our annual trade imbalance with China regularly exceeds $70B. We are overly dependent on China for many of the things that we consume. We should use this “opportunity” to re-evaluate our purchases. Do we need all this stuff? If so, can we not look to domestic alternatives and use this crisis to bring manufacturing home? Let’s use this season to resist buying more (and more) Chinese crap. Shop local, support your local mom and pop, and look for the Made in USA label. The “crisis” has also exposed the incompetence of Gavin Newsom, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and a myriad of government bureaucrats.
Is there anything Democrats can’t do…to kill off America’s innovators and entrepreneurs? Sure as heck not, given their latest sneaky plan to discourage small — and I mean really small — businesses. According to Jessica Pate, writing at Issues & Insights: The INFORM Consumers act would impose new requirements and burdens on the millions of people who run small businesses. Similar bills introduced in more than a dozen state legislatures are generally supported by big-box retailers eager to siphon online money back to their stores. Lawmakers should reject them all. On their face, the INFORM bills claim to make improvements to online marketplaces. In response to increasing instances of so-called “retail crime,” including counterfeit goods and online scams, the bills would require every online seller above a certain volume to disclose their current business and contact information to be available and searchable online. The threshold for “high volume” sellers who need to disclose their places of business to the public is literally $5,000 a year. Broken down and averaged out, that’s $426.67 a month, $104.17 a week, $14.88 a day, and a whopping $1.86 an hour.