Lion was right about crime increase!

On May 1st, the day that criminal charges were filed against the six police officers in Baltimore, I wrote:

[M]aybe no cops will quit their job because they can’t make as much money doing anything else. But they will stop arresting criminals in order to avoid getting in trouble. How long before we see an increase in crime?

Sure enough, just as I predicted, during the month of May, the number of arrests is down and there is a huge crime wave in Baltimore.

In a Newsweek article posted on Thursday:

The Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police said on Thursday that Baltimore’s recent rise in crime is linked to fear among police officers that they will be arrested for doing their jobs.

This fear, the union said, comes as a result of the arrests of six officers for the death of Freddie Gray. Gray was wrongly arrested and died of injuries sustained during his arrest. The State Attorney’s Office filed charges against six officers in Gray’s death.

“The criminals are taking advantage of the situation in Baltimore since the unrest. Criminals feel empowered now. There is no respect. Police are under siege in every quarter. They are more afraid of going to jail for doing their jobs properly than they are of getting shot on duty,” union president Lieutenant Gene Ryan said in a statement.

The high cost of avoiding proles when on vacation

There’s a travel article by Elaine Glusac in the Wall Street Journal about how she, her husband, and son, enjoyed seven days of touring Alaska on a small cruise ship.

The last time (and only time) I was on a cruise, it was exceedingly prole. In order to avoid proles, you need lots of money. I think this “un-cruise” costs about $4,000 per person double occupancy, and since her son had his own room, which costs 175% of the double occupancy rate, their family vacation cost $15,000.

Wow, that’s a lot of money. Does she make so much money as a travel writer? Was the trip comped because she’s a travel writer? Or does she have a rich husband who paid for the vacation?

Her husband is Dave Bartusek, is the founder of Prairie Home Builders. The company claims sales of 5 million dollars a year. If the profit margin is 7%, then maybe Dave brings home $350,000/year, before taxes.

I still don’t know the correct answer.

THE ANSWER IS:

Mark Caplan writes in a comment:

Last year The Wall Street Journal scrubbed a free-lance travel writer’s submissions from its website when it learned the free-lancer had accepted perks and discounts. “Such deals violate the Journal’s policy that forbids writers from accepting free goods or services or from taking discounts not available to the general public.”

I guess the answer is that, in order to be a travel writer, you either need to have a rich spouse or rich parents. Yet another example of how only the rich can afford to work.

iPhone 6 review

If you happen to have an iPod Touch 5G, then the iPhone 6 is like an oversized iPod Touch, a change from the blockier shape of the older iPhone 5. Even the way that the camera lens sticks out slightly is exactly like the iPod Touch 5G.

The increase in size combined with the thinner profile makes the iPhone 6 slippery to hold. I never felt I needed a case with any other pocket-sized device I’ve used, but I worry that maybe I need one with the iPhone 6. I’d hate to drop my $750 phone on the concrete and see the glass shatter. Does anyone have a case recommendation?

The Wall Street Journal app, which was very slow and unusable on older iOS devices, works a lot better on the iPhone 6, so I guess there is some benefit to having a device with faster microprocessors. Although there’s absolutely no excuse for a newspaper app using up so much processor cycles that it won’t run well on an older device. The Wall Street Journal must have hired the world’s crappiest H-1B programmers. (Even though I cancelled my Wall Street Journal subscription months ago, the app still seems to let me read everything for free.)

I haven’t tried using the camera yet. Maybe it can replace my Olympus E-P5?

* * *

I just realized that the home button in the iPhone 6 is also a fingerprint reader! Way easier than having to type in a security code to unlock your phone. And you can use it to approve a purchase with Apple Pay. That’s something I will have to try.

Are iPhones keeping the poor people poor?

I bought an iPhone 6 today. The cost of the phone, plus service, will cost more than $2,000 (probably more like $2,200) approximately $2,500 over the next two years. That’s a lot of money. Yet every poor person seems to have one of these things.

NY Post says shootings are up in Manhattan

The New York Post reports that shootings are up in Manhattan:

There have been 50 “shooting incidents’’ since Jan. 1, compared with 31 in the same time period in 2014 — an increase of about 38 percent. Some of these “incidents’’ involved more than one victim.

The number of shooting victims nearly doubled, from 33 to 61.

Has the end of stop-and-frisk emboldened the criminal element to carry guns?

How about that Islamic State?

A 2013 Pew survey found that 91% of Iraqis favor Sharia being the official law of the land. Thus it’s not surprising that the Islamic State has a good amount of support among Iraqi Sunnis who favor the Islamic law imposed by the Islamic State over living with secular law imposed by a Shiite-controlled government.

What a huge mistake to think that Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds could live together in the same country without a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein to keep law and order. However, the United States insists on exporting it’s love of “diversity” to the rest of the world. In reality, nobody wants diversity besides Western liberals, and even Western liberals, when they have a choice, choose to live in an un-diverse place such as Portland Oregon (where everyone else is also a white liberal) rather than a diverse city like Detroit or El Paso.

Even though Barrack Hussein Obama and Saddam Hussein share a name, Obama lacks Saddam Hussein’s fortitude to do whatever it takes to ensure law and order. There’s an article in today’s NY Times about how the airstrikes are ineffective because the pilots are not allowed to strike anything next to civilians, and of course the Islamic State has learned to keep all of their military people in civilian areas to avoid being hit. Saddam Hussein wouldn’t have held back like that.

Obama also lacks the will to put American troops on the ground. Although that would probably turn into a Vietnam-type situation in which the American military is restricted from using its massive firepower to obliterate everything, and a lot of Americans just get killed. No one wants that. I don’t want that.

Is it really such a big deal if the Islamic State winds up becoming a real state? How would the Islamic State be any more dangerous than Iran? The Islamic State has no nuclear capability. Obama is worried about the wrong enemy.

I also like the Islamic State, because they keep disproving all of the liberal nonsense about Islam being a religion of peace. This is a good lesson for all to learn.

I feel bad for any moderate people living in the area who don’t want to live in a strict theocracy. And of course, it’s even worse for the people who are beheaded for being the wrong religion. In retrospect, the people of Iraq were better off under Saddam Hussein, and the people of Syria were better off under Bashar Assad.

Woman killed by cow

Reported by AgriLand, Ireland’s largest farming news portal:

Another farm death has occured, after a woman in Co. Monaghan died from injuries she sustained when attacked by a cow.

A reminder that it’s much safer to have a desk job than it is to work as a farmer.

28 shot, 9 dead in Baltimore over weekend

The breakdown in law and order, caused by the riots last month, has resulted in the criminal element running amok. This is the result. (Link to story.)

Black lives only matter if they are killed by police. They obviously don’t matter when blacks are killing each other. Only a strong militaristic police presence can prevent that from happening (absent better teaching of middle-class values in the public schools).

Soylent, it’s not just a movie with Charlton Heston

According to the NY Times, liquid food-replacement products, such as “Solyent,” have become very popular in Silicon Valley, because the coders are too busy coding to have time to eat anything else.

Soylent, Schmilk and some others typically taste like bland, gritty pancake batter. But never mind that, since the meal replacements save techies money and time. While a meal generally costs upward of $50 at Silicon Valley-area restaurants, a week’s worth of Soylent or Schmoylent totals $85

That sounds pretty disgusting. And not worth $85/week, which isn’t cheap considering the icky factor. If I wanted to eat practical and super cheap, I’d go with peanut butter and bread, plus a multi-vitamin in case that’s missing anything. Not saying I’d enjoy living only on peanut butter and bread, but it sounds more appetizing than Soylent for half the price, and it doesn’t require refrigeration. Plus it has a more wholesome name. Didn’t they bother to watch the end of the movie?

Satellite radio vs. Spotify

Avon Lon writes:

A friend recently tweeted that anyone who drives a car without satellite radio is “poor.”

Augustus responds:

Satellite radio sucks. Using spotify unlimited through your phone is much much better.