Month: August 2023

Google’s artificial intelligence lab published a new paper explaining the development of the “first-of-its-kind” vision-language-action (VLA) model that learns from scrapping the internet and other data to allow robots to understand plain language commands from humans while navigating environments like the robot from the Dinsey movie Wall-E or the robot from the late 1990s flick Bicentennial Man. 

“For decades, when people have imagined the distant future, they’ve almost always included a starring role for robots,” Vincent Vanhoucke, the head of robotics for Google DeepMind, wrote in a blog post. 

Do you recall the 1999 sci-fi comedy-drama film featuring Robin Williams, titled Bicentennial Man?

Vanhoucke continued, “Robots have been cast as dependable, helpful and even charming. Yet across those same decades, the technology has remained elusive — stuck in the imagined realm of science fiction.” 

Until now… 

DeepMind introduced the Robotics Transformer 2 (RT-2), which utilizes a VLA model that learns from the web and robotics data and translates this knowledge into understanding its environment and human commands. 

Previously, training robots to perform simple tasks, such as throwing away trash or cooking french fries, have been achieved. But a whole new upgrade in intelligence has arrived by robots being able to perform these tasks below:

“Unlike chatbots, robots need “grounding” in the real world and their abilities. Their training isn’t just about, say, learning everything there is to know about an apple: how it grows, its physical properties, or even that one purportedly landed on Sir Isaac Newton’s head. A robot needs to be able to recognize an apple in context, distinguish it from a red ball, understand what it looks like, and most importantly, know how to pick it up,” Vanhoucke noted. 

The critical understanding is that robots are about to get much more intelligent than ever, with just enough brains to replace humans in low-skill jobs. In March, Goldman told clients that robotization of the service sector would translate to millions of job losses in the years ahead. 

Via The Cradle,

Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, warned on Thursday that the country’s total economic collapse will be imminent in the event that the Central Bank and its newly appointed governor fail to implement reform policies called for by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). 

“Lebanon will not be able to secure medicine or pay salaries in foreign currency, in the event that the monetary and economic plan presented by the Acting Governor of the Banque du Liban, Wassim Mansouri, is not approved,” the caretaker prime minister said. 

“Mansouri’s plan is consistent with the government’s plans, and our goal is to approve these plans and not waste time because the goal is to save the country,” he said.

In reference to consultations made recently between Mikati and the interim bank governor, the former said that there is “harmony [in the Central Bank] with the government’s plans.”

However, Lebanese media reported Thursday that the Central Bank is considering completely halting its funding of the state as of Monday, August 7. 

Upon taking the reins of the Central Bank following the end of Riad Salameh’s term last month, Mansouri said: “I will not sign on any expenditure for financing the government if it contravenes with my principles or the appropriate legal framework.” 

Days later, Lebanon’s parliament failed to pass a law that would allow the state to borrow foreign currency from the Central Bank. Mansouri’s condition for lending funds to the state from the Central Bank was the passing of the law, and the reimbursement of the funds “through a realistic plan,” Naharnet reported. 

The reforms that the caretaker prime minister referred to include capital controls, a bank restructuring law, and the 2023 state budget – which are all conditions imposed by the IMF for a bailout package. 

#LEBWatch: Lebanon is on the verge of economic collapse under the incompetent and corrupt Mikati government. By my measure, inflation in LEB is now surging at a SKY-HIGH 216%/yr. The only way for LEB to crush inflation is with a #CurrencyBoard. pic.twitter.com/5scAIlkZsP

— Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) July 28, 2023

Lebanon has been negotiating with the IMF in order to secure a bailout package to alleviate the severe economic crisis created by decades of corruption in the financial sector. 

However, Washington, the IMF, and the World Bank have been accused of exploiting the country’s economic crisis to exert political pressure on Lebanon. 

As a result of the financial crisis Lebanon faces, the country’s currency has lost 98 percent of its value, and the life savings of a majority of citizens have been wiped out. 

* * *

Meanwhile…

The US embassy in Beirut – which has driven the economic collapse of Lebanon and holds the nation’s political class hostage – preaches about Woke Shit to a country busy looking for its next meal. https://t.co/vSaAQR3KCH

— Sharmine Narwani (@snarwani) May 17, 2023

An estimated 8.7 million people are killed from tobacco each year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Of these, 1.3 million people do not use tobacco directly themselves, but are exposed to it second-hand.

While these figures are still high, Statista’s Anna Fleck notes that progress has been made in terms of countries adopting health-promoting policies to try to curb their populations’ tobacco usage.

In the WHO’s 2023 report on the global tobacco epidemic, released this week, the organization notes that now some 5.6 billion people live in countries where at least one of the six best practice measures promoted by the WHO (MPOWER) for tobacco control has been introduced – that’s 71 percent of the world’s population.

As the following chart shows, around 79 percent of WHO member countries have introduced warning labels on packaging, albeit not all to the same extent.

You will find more infographics at Statista

At the same time, almost 38 percent of the surveyed countries have implemented strict regulations on no-smoking areas, while around 34 percent have strict bans on tobacco advertising.

44 countries still have no tobacco control measures in place.

Via Remix News,

Germany’s right-wing AfD party openly expresses what many ordinary Germans believe today, something that traditional political parties, imprisoned in the circle of political correctness, do not want to admit…

German politicians have become accustomed to the convenient role of judges deciding which political parties and their programs in various countries are sufficiently European and deserving of acceptance in accordance with the prevailing canons of liberal Western democracy, and which should be condemned and separated by a “firewall.”

This severity and principality always clearly increase among German political and media commentators, especially when it comes to forming opinions about politics in Central and Eastern European countries.

There are exceptions, such as Wolfgang Schauble, a veteran of German politics, who tirelessly reminds us that Germany should not teach anyone in Europe how democracy should work. However, his voice has been relegated to the sidelines.

There are many indications that in the near future, German media and politicians will have to pay more attention to the situation on their own political scene.

This is all due to the increasingly popular right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD). This party, founded in 2013, was initially quite an exotic undertaking of a group of economists and university professors opposed to Angela Merkel’s then policy towards the crisis in the eurozone.

After a decade of isolation on the political scene, due to the effects of the migration crisis, Berlin’s restrictive policy in combating the pandemic, inflation, and the social and economic costs of stringent climate policy, currently one in five voters declares readiness to support AfD. In the eastern lands of Germany, it can even count on 30 percent of the votes.

During the party congress in Magdeburg, alongside slogans calling for freedom and sovereignty, the demand for peace was equally strong.

The AfD particularly attracts those who traditionally harbor resentment towards America, still see Russia as Germany’s strategic partner, and blame the West’s policies for the war in Ukraine.

The attractiveness of this party and its growing support can generally be explained by the fact that it openly and loudly expresses what many ordinary Germans believe today, something that traditional political parties, imprisoned in the circle of political correctness, do not want to admit.

The current climate in Germany has triggered a self-propelling mechanism in which the simple rejection of alternative citizens’ views pushes politics toward greater polarization and a growing loss of stability.

Authored by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

The Saturday Night Massacre That Wasn’t And The Threat Of Incumbent Party Rule

Talk about a coup d’ etat… even an existential threat to American Democracy. We’ve got it now. In spades.

We are referring to Jack Smith’s latest bogus indictment of Donald Trump, of course. Handing it down just as the Hunter Biden/Biden Crime Family saga is reaching its denouement, the Special Counsel has now proven himself to be a veritable anti-Thomas Jefferson, brandishing what amounts to a malefic Declaration of Incumbent Party Rule.

That’s truly the gravamen of this 45 page abomination. It has nothing to do with justice or the rule of law or the protection of Democracy, and everything to do with triggering a trial clock in the DC District Court that will result in a guaranteed guilty verdict before November 5, 2024.

And should that succeed, no incumbent party will ever again go into a presidential election without mobilizing the machinery of the DOJ to its partisan advantage. After all, this is the ultimate weaponization of the judicial branch of American government by the Incumbent Party—an attempt to cancel an election via “preventive detention” of the leading candidate of the Opposition.

Is this not the very thing that Banana Republics do? Is this political screed in the guise of an “indictment” not a fatal blow to the very essence of free elections-based democracy—the absolute insulation of the machinery of government from partisan influence and elections interference?

As it happens, this matter was settled long ago—way back in the Congressional elections of 1938, which swept the New Dealers from the US House and Senate. During the prior presidential election, FDR had wiped GOP candidate Alf Landon off the map—with no small help from millions of WPA employees who had been required to vote for Roosevelt in order to get on the Federal dole. But in those fair times the electorate was having none of the Incumbent Party using their tax dollars to re-elect itself, thereby putting the New Deal Democrats out to pasture for decades to come.

But now comes something far more nefarious. Not a mere bribe of the voters via tax dollars shuffled into their pockets, but use of the government’s badge, guns and detention facilities to insure that even a candidate as decrepit and unfit for purpose as Joe Biden enjoys a Rooseveltian sweep in 2024 for want of the leading opposition candidate’s name on the ballot.

To be sure, we do not quarrel with the end game here. To wit, the Donald is utterly unfit for the nation’s highest office. He never should have stumbled into the job by a hairline 100,000 votes in three battleground states (Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) in 2016, and must not be allowed within a country-mile of the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ever again.

But safeguarding the republic from Donald Trump’s egomaniacal incompetence, bilious rants, uninformed laziness, flagrant delusions and principle-free quest for power and glory is the job of the voters.

If they do not understand by now that they made one mistake, it is not the job of a rogue prosecutor to nail shut the GOP-side of the ballot box in order to save them from another.

And we do mean rogue prosecutor. Jack Smith has penned a potent Opposition Research paper, but it is utterly bogus as a criminal indictment. That’s because it embodies exactly the age-old ploy used by all zealous prosecutors when the don’t have hard evidence of a specific crime. To wit, they cobble together a spurious “conspiracy” narrative from a string of wholly legal and/or prosaic actions and events involving the defendant, and then backdate them with mens rea (guilty intent) and the assertion that that everything contained in the resulting made-for-TV narrative was done “knowingly”.

Well, when it comes to the very inner sanctum of American democracy—the conduct of free and honest national elections—that threadbare ploy is definitely not OK. Even when applied to crime bosses and alleged white collar miscreants, conspiracy charges are a prosecutors’ racket that more often than not results in an unfair miscarriage of justice.

But when applied to the leading Opposition Candidate for acts and behaviors that were par for the Trumpian course, done in the wide open public and which were essentially an exercise, albeit a reckless one, in protected speech, a conspiracy indictment is just plain beyond the pale.

For crying out loud. The criminal prosecution of an ex-president and current election front-runner entails a super-duper heavy burden of proof, not just enough plausibility to get a Mafia don into court. To the contrary, it needs be predicated upon a damn serious “high crime” and provable criminal actions by the target that actively threatened America’s national security or core democratic processes.

By contrast, Jack Smith’s latest indictment is the very opposite. It’s self-evidently another exercise in prosecutorial “I gotcha”, and is even more tortured than the classified documents case. For instance, Trump retweeted a post labeling the Republican leaders of the Pennsylvania legislature as “cowards”  on December 4, 2020. By the lights of Jack Smith that exercise in social media dissing was evidence of Trump’s complicity in a felonious conspiracy.

The same thing happened when several weeks later VP Pence called Trump to wish him Merry Christmas and Trump turned the conversation to the vice president’s role in the upcoming electoral vote count. So by merely raising the topic about an event to occur two weeks later, and a potential action by Pence that was still legally in play at least in the minds of a minority of Trump’s advisors, the sitting president of the United States thereby participated in said felonious conspiracy!

The indictment is packed with pages on end of such legal humbug. But before you get lost in the utter trivia, it needs be remembered that we are actually in the midst of a fraught exercise in democracy, not a law school Moot Court proceeding on the proposition, taken in splendid abstraction, that no one is above the law.

The plain fact is that Smith’s 45 pages of purported nefarious doings do not embody a criminal conspiracy at all. What the indictment actually describes is TrumpWorld at work in all of its pandemonium, bickering, incompetence and shoot-from-the hip recklessness. The self-evident reason that Trump pursued the election fraud canard right up until the wee hours of January 7th, when the electors finally certified Biden’s victory, is that the man is a megalomaniacal brute who just won’t take “no” for an answer.

After all, by then nearly everyone who knew anything had told him that the election was over, that he had lost and that while the election reeked from the odor of an unprecedented 60 million mail-in votes and massive but dubious Democrat “ballot harvesting”, the level of provable fraud did not rise to anything remotely determinative of a different outcome. In fact, his Attorney General, Bill Barr, had bailed weeks earlier, the White House counsels office had given up the ghost and three days earlier Trump himself had chickened out of the required Saturday Night Massacre redux.

That is, when he threatened to put the last remaining election fraud believer, Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark (co-conspirator #4), in the top DOJ spot on January 3rd, the acting AG and acting deputy AG threatened to resign. And they warned that much of the top DOJ escheleon would go with them.

But as Senator Lloyd Bentsen of 1992 vice-presidential debate fame might of said in behalf of the Washington ruling class, “We knew Dick Nixon, and you are no Tricky Dick.”

That is to say, Trump is a bully and blowhard, but ultimately a big chicken. To actually have committed the crime of election interference he would have had to fire the entire top tier of the DOJ on January 3rd, get a dubious opinion from their replacements that the Vice President had the constitutional authority to reject the Biden electors from the six battleground states (see below) and then intimidate Pence until he complied with Trump’s wishes.

Alas, the Donald didn’t have the cojones. And when push-came-to-shove his own government resisted his petulant defiance of the facts and law at every turn.

So there was no conspiracy and no threat to Democracy.

There was just the bitter end obstinance and bombast of a defeated old bully and his drunken companion, Rudy Giuliani, who had once capriciously welded the badge and gun that is soon to come down on his own head, too.

Still, expressing disagreement with and contradicting the advice of 95% of your advisors in a public venue like social media is not a crime, and not proof of a lie.

Likewise, endlessly pestering your Vice-President to read the constitution—to the effect that he could send the Biden electors home—in a manner that virtually all the lawyers in the vicinity of the nation’s Capitol disagreed with is not a crime, either.

At the end of the day the bomb that got dropped on American democracy last night by the beltway puppeteers who stage-manage Joe Biden is just a lengthy catalogue of all the advice that Trump rejected—advice that said he was wrong about whether there was sufficient fraud to alter the outcome of the election.

Indeed, even by the time the state electors first meet on December 16th the “rampant fraud” horse being paraded by nincompoops like Rudy Giuliani and the other alleged co-conspirators was pretty much out the barn-door. The fact that Trump persisted in grasping for its disappearing rear-end right until the end on January 6th is powerful reason why he is not qualified to serve again.

For want of doubt, recall that the popular vote was not even close with Biden’s 81.2 million ballots exceeding Trump’s 74.2 million by more than 7 million or 9%. Far more importantly, Trump’s electoral college deficit in the six swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania was 79 votes compared to Biden’ winning margin of 74 votes (306 to 232). Accordingly, there had to be sufficient fraud—–311,000 votes worth—- in these states to swing every one of them in the Donald’s favor and thereby alter the national outcome.

Well, here are the vote margins in these six state’s that had to be overcome by expurgation of any and all votes fraudulently cast or counted. Yet by mid-December every one of the big claims regarding dead voters in Georgia or a midnight ballot dump in Michigan or 2o3,000 more votes than voters in Pennsylvania had been pretty much debunked.

For instance, upon investigation the Republican governor of Georgia has admitted to only 2 dead voters, not the 10,000 that Trump had claimed. Similarly, the 203,000 more votes than voters in Pennsylvania turned out to be less than 8,000, as far as we can tell from official election results. And the mid-night dump of ballots in Detroit has apparently been par for the course in that godforsaken jurisdiction for a good while and thereby an indication of incompetence, not fraud.

In that regard, the Republican Speaker of the Michigan House said all there was to be said about the Donald’s errant campaign to extract victory from the jaws of defeat—not only in Michigan but in the six contested states generally:

We’ve diligently examined these reports of fraud to the best of our ability. … … I fought hard for President Trump. Nobody wanted him to win more than me.  I think he’s done an incredible job. But I love our republic, too. I can’t fathom risking our norms, traditions and institutions to pass a resolution retroactively changing the electors for Trump, simply because some think there may have been enough widespread fraud to give him the win. That’s unprecedented for good reason. And that’s why there is not enough support in the House to cast a new slate of electors. I fear we’d lose our country forever. This truly would bring mutually assured destruction for every future election in regards to the Electoral College. And I can’t stand for that. I won’t.

Number of Electoral Votes and Popular Vote Difference By Swing State:

• Arizona (11 electoral votes; 10,457 votes)

• Georgia (16 electoral votes; 11,779 votes)

• Michigan (16 electoral votes; 154,188 votes)

• Nevada (6 electoral votes; 33,596 votes)

• Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes; 80,555 votes)

• Wisconsin (10 electoral votes; 20,682 votes)

In any event, it is evident from the above summary that the numbers just weren’t remotely there. Yet Trump persisted until there was almost no one left even in his inner circle except crackpots who thought he won. He thus tweeted this bit of bombast at 6:01 PM on January 6th when it was all over except the shouting:

 “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long……

That’s smoking gun enough. Donald J. Trump disqualified himself for another term then and there by issuing this preposterous bit of bombast.

And yet, and yet. That outcome was a matter for the voters to decide, not a rogue prosecutor leading a partisan witch-hunt.

In truth, this action by the weaponized Biden Justice Department amounts to a present day variation of the aphorism immortalized by Stalin’s security chief, Levrenti Beria:

“Show me Donald Trump and I’ll show you the crime”.

Prosecutor Smith has done exactly that now for the second time in as many months. And American democracy will pay a terrible price for such insouciance for a long time to come.

Of all the new fast food drive-thru concepts we have written about over the years, Chick-Fil-A may be on the verge of the coolest.

The popular chicken chain is testing a new concept where to-order orders will arrive at their destination vehicles down a chute. It plans on testing the concept at a new store in Atlanta, with a focus on trying to cut down its wait times, CBS wrote this week.

The chain will also be debuting a new walk-in concept store in New York City. 

In a statement the store put out this week, Khalilah Cooper, executive director, restaurant design, said: “Digital orders make up more than half of total sales in some markets – and growing – so we know our customers have an appetite for convenience.”

Cooper continued: “Understanding this desire for convenience, the locations for these tests were intentionally selected with the customers in mind, giving them more control over their desired experience and cutting down wait-time, while continuing to provide genuine hospitality and care to every guest.”

The new Atlanta store is going to have 4 drive-thru lanes, with two of them dedicated to mobile order pickups. The lanes will run under the restaurant, instead of around it, like current stores. This will allow the kitchen in the new concept store to be twice as large. 

“Orders will travel through an overhead conveyor belt connected with chutes that run down the sides,” CBS wrote. 

“By building the kitchen above the drive-thru lanes, meals are expedited to the Team Member who delivers the order directly to the customer in a space protected by the upper level, so hospitality won’t be sacrificed for speed of service. Regardless of how you choose to order your meal, the restaurant design is made to elevate and accelerate the experience but keep the human interaction at its core,” the company said in its statement. 

“We want to leverage technology to elevate the human touchpoints in our restaurants,” said Cooper. “These new digital formats make the customer and Team Member experience more seamless, and therefore more memorable, and give back precious time to connect with each other.”

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

People with jobs, children, and actual responsibilities might not have noticed, but Hollywood is nearly shut down right now thanks to both a writers’ strike and an actors’ strike. Or more accurately: only the writers and actors who are members of unions are on strike. Members of SAG-AFTRA (SAG) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) are refusing to work until TV and movie studios agree to a variety of demands.

These actors and writers may be in for some unpleasant surprises, however. Studio revenues and advertising income isn’t what it used to be. Cable subscriptions are down. Theater attendance has not recovered from covid. When revenues are stagnant or falling, it’s harder to get the studios to raise compensation.

Another big problem writers and actors face is that we now live in an age when mid-budget content creators who can reach millions of viewers through platforms like Youtube and Tiktok and Twitter. These people are usually not union members, and that means a lot of non-union competition for Hollywood content creators.

This all highlights a central problem that unions have always faced: labor unions do not—and never have—raised wages for all workers in any particular industry. They can only raise wages for union members. But, if non-union workers can still write, film, edit, and act outside union control, they will always offer an alternative to union workers. Moreover, rising wages can only be supported in the long run by rising levels of productivity. That is, writers and actors can only expect sustainably larger pay if they’re also bringing in more net revenue. But it’s not clear rising revenue is something that Hollywood actors and writers should expect.

In this new age of decentralized and democratized content creation, union members’ demands may simply be based on wishful thinking for a bygone era.

The Decline of Hollywood Dominance

The last substantial actors’ strike was in 1980. The last time both actors and writers went in strike together was in 1960. That was a very long time ago. In those days—whether we’re talking 1960 or 1980—the big-three television stations, the large movie studios, and the artists behind them utterly dominated the world of visual entertainment. There were few viewing choices outside of what was only a handful of television stations or what was playing in movie theaters. Actors were in a fairly good position to demand higher pay for their work which in many cases enjoyed a near-captive audience. After all, summer blockbusters were a rising trend. Movie stars were household names. Prime time television commanded enormous nationwide audiences.

In 2023, the situation is very different. Yes, videos and podcasts from online content creators is not the same product as shows produced by big studios. Yet, it is nonetheless a “substitute good,” as the economists say, and it does offer competition in the form of pulling viewers away from traditional media. Ten-minute comedy videos on Youtube may be very rough around the edges compared to a slick 30-minute program on cable, but the non-studio content nonetheless competes with the studios for the viewers’ time. An hour spent watching Youtube content is an hour not spent watching something on NBC.

As a result, ad revenues are down and studios are losing revenue in many areas. A report on TV advertising by Enders Analysis concludes “TV advertising is expected to decline over 10% in Q1 2023 and by approximately 5% overall in 2023.” David Bloom reports at Forbes that “Disney has reported its linear networks revenue (which includes its cable operations) dropped 7% percent while operating income dropped a painful 35%.” Overall net revenues continue to grow for many studios, but positive revenues have come largely through cost-cutting measures. Studios have been cutting back new film and television projects which means lower overall wages for many writers and actors.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros Discovery endured an 11-percent drop in revenue in late 2022 as advertising revenues softened. Hollywood studios have endured a variety of box office disappointments this year from The Flash to Pixar’s Elemental to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Variety also reports on how movie stars are no longer reliable money makers. Since the collapse of the DVD business in 2008, few new actors have reached the heights of an Arnold or a Stallone. This makes it harder to predict which films will be a success. There are few “sure things” in movie production in 2023, which leads studios to become far more cautious about what they’ll pay out ahead of time to writers and actors.

What do the Actors and Writers Want?

Indeed, what appears to be keeping the studios afloat at all are the streaming services such as Peacock, HBO MAX, and Disney+. Yet, actors and writers are compensated differently for streaming content than theatrical releases and TV broadcasting. Thus, the demands by both unions center largely on changes like the shift to streaming. For example, pay for actors and writers is currently constructed in such a way that big pay increases can be had through box office revenues and syndicated television. Thanks to the rise of streaming services, however, these older means of getting at the big bucks are no longer nearly as rewarding for actors and writers.

Other concerns center around artificial intelligence and computer-generated images. There are rising concerns among writers that AI programs could be used to complete or write screenplays and teleplays. Actor are concerned that CGI will allow studios to use an actor’s likeness without actually paying the actors in question.

The reluctance by studios to expand compensation to these platforms is not necessarily a function of nefarious intent as union activists often imply. (Note, for example, actor Ron Perlman’s threat to burn down the houses of studio executives.) Rather, studios continue to face large threats to advertising revenues, cable-TV income, and box office gains. Simply as a matter of responsibility to stockholders, the studios have to find ways to cut costs, and are naturally reluctant to cut into their most reliable cash cows right now: streaming.

Eventually, however, a deal will be struck, and Moody’s predicts this will cost media companies from $450 million to $600 million per year.

This may prove to be a late rearguard action, however, as neither studios nor writers nor actors can escape competition from outside Hollywood. Consider the sheer volume of content from highly popular Youtube creators like Mr. Beast or popular podcasters like Joe Rogan. People can spend hours per week consuming their content, without any dollars going to traditional content from studios. This content is far more decentralized than Hollywood and enjoys much less overhead. 

So, any new demands from writers and actors will have to come in light of the fact there is a large entertainment world beyond the reach of the Hollywood unions and studios. This naturally presents a challenge to unions which thrive on the idea that they control at least a sizable portion of the available labor within a certain field. Moreover, there is a nearly constant stream of new writers and actors willing to offer their services to the big studios in the hopes of making it big.

Henry Hazlitt explains how this is a problem for the unions:

It is important to keep in mind that the unions cannot create a “monopoly” of all labor, but at best a monopoly of labor in certain specific crafts, firms, or industries. A monopolist of a product can get a higher monopoly price for that product, and perhaps a higher total income from it, by deliberately restricting the supply … But while the unions can and do restrict their membership, and exclude other workers from it, they cannot reduce the total number of workers seeking jobs. 

These unions are in less of a position than ever to control the work of actors and writers. There are just too many platforms offering too many opportunities to outsiders. 

Hazlitt notes unions “claim the ‘right’ to prevent anybody else from taking the jobs that they have abandoned [during the strike]. That is the purpose of their mass picket lines, and of the vandalism and violence that they either resort to or threaten. This constantly undermines the facade of a union monopoly on labor.”

This facade is more obvious than ever as non-Hollywood entertainment continues to grow in both quality and availability. The actors and writers will likely get their raises this year. But their old-fashioned studio-labor model may not survive much longer. 

The most commonly abused drug in the US is alcohol. Since alcohol is socially acceptable, more people are addicted to alcohol than any other drug. A new study by the finance website Insider Monkey has revealed the top ten US cities with the highest alcohol consumption per capita. 

Insider Monkey said Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ranked number on the list because of its “lowest alcohol tax rates in the country, resulting in lower retail and wholesale prices.” Milwaukee is a Democratic stronghold with an excessive drinking rate of 24.6%. 

Analysts with Insider Monkey used County Health Rankings and Roadmaps, the US Census Bureau, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data to find metro areas with the highest excessive drinking rates. Only cities with populations of 200,000 or more were analyzed. The rate measures the percentage of a city’s adult population that reports binge or heavy drinking in the last month. 

Number two is Minneapolis, Minnesota, yet another Democratic stronghold. It has an excessive drinking rate of 23.5%. Third is Boston, Massachusetts, another Democratic stronghold with an excessive drinking rate of 23.1%. Fourth is Buffalo, New York — you might have already guessed it — another Democratic stronghold — has an excessive drinking rate of 22.8%. 

Fifth on the list is crime-ridden Chicago, with an excessive drinking rate of 22.7%. And sixth is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with an excessive drinking rate of 22.5%. Seventh is New Orleans, with an excessive drinking rate of 21.9%. Eight is Sacramento, California, with a 21.6% excessive drinking rate. Nine is Portland, Oregon, and last but not least is Austin, Texas. 

So what’s the commonality between all of these cities? Well, they’re all Democratic strongholds. And excessive drinking cost the US economy $250 billion in 2010 (Latest figures available by the CDC).

Virtue-signaling Democrats who say they’re for the people but are letting their cities implode with rampant drug use, an explosion in homelessness, and a surge in violent crime. Do they even care about law and order?