Steve Sailer is a brilliant guy and one of the most insightful people going, but every once in a while he says something that is a bit nuts. That’s bound to happen when you spend all day every day commenting about the current scene. Blogging is about off the cuff commentary on a range of subjects. You’re going to get some stuff wrong. Some of that will be comically wrong. Here’s an example:

This post over at Marginal Revolution raises a question that never gets talked about in conservative circles. Conservatism today is mostly libertarianism with some lip service to cultural issues, so you would think they would be champions of scrapping business taxes entirely. Even if they could not muster the courage for that, they could certainly champion simplification. That seems like a thing that no one can oppose, as no one thinks more complexity is every a good thing.

Yet, we never hear much from supposed pro-capitalist types about a zero income tax on business. Politically, it has the obvious defect of seeming to be pro-rich people, but people are not that dumb. Some will fall for the liberal argument conflating business with the rich, but most could be persuaded to see that is false. Persuadable voters can also be sold on an idea that will get them a job or a raise, too. A zero business tax would instantly make America a magnet for every global corporation on the planet.

There’s another piece that would be good politics. The candidate running on this idea could tie it to political reform. Our politicians no longer serve the people. Instead they extort money from business by selling them indulgences in the form of tax breaks. John McCain has often said he spends too much time shaking down businesses and threatening them with taxes if they don’t give him money. Remove the weapon and he and his pals can no longer use that weapon to shake down business.

The other benefit is it would allow the Republicans to make the Democrats talk about the details of business taxes. Corporate taxes end up in one of two places. That’s the price of the product or the employee’s paycheck. Taxing business is a false populism. that the Left has for years used to fool the working man. A reasonably savvy pol could turn this on its head and argue it is a hidden tax on working people. It’s not an easy sell, but it shift the frame and breaks the Progressive paradigm.

But, Republicans are not called The Stupid Party for nothin’.

One of my themes is how the people ruling America look like Americans, make noises like Americans, but are nothing like Americans. Our rulers are act like how aliens would think human rulers would act. They studied our television broadcasts and made some visits, before training themselves to play the part of human rulers. As a result, everyday on earth, some starts noticing things and it goes like this.

Now, I don’t think aliens have taken over the country. Aliens would not be so foolish and stupid. If you can master interstellar travel, you’re going to have no trouble running a currency or negotiating with Putin. No, our rulers are human. They just work extra hard to be nothing like those over whom they rule. As Pat Buchanan noted decades ago, we may be the first country in history whose ruling elites hate the nation over whom they rule. A good example of it is in this hilarious Drudge story.

A White House aide set off a stampede of liberal media criticism for Internet news pioneer Matt Drudge over Obamacare – but his critics don’t seem to understand how small businesses pay taxes.

The brouhaha started when Drudge tweeted, “Just paid the Obamacare penalty for not ‘getting covered’… I’M CALLING IT A LIBERTY TAX.”

Jesse Lee, the Director of Progressive Media at Barack Obama’s White House, responded that that was a “Flat lie, no fee for previous year,” adding, “Scary how much influence he once had.”

Lee’s response to Drudge set off a firestorm in the liberal media, with many mainstream media and left-wing reporters countering him on Twitter and in their own articles to claim he does not have to pay Obamacare’s Individual Mandate tax until next year. The individual mandate went into effect Jan. 1 of this year, and most people paying their taxes right now are paying taxes for 2013.

“Dude, there’s no penalty until next yr,” Sahil Kapur of the leftwing Talking Points Memo tweeted.

Kapur’s colleague at TPM Dylan Scott wrote a full story with a headline alleging Drudge was “probably lying.”

“Americans don’t pay a penalty for not having health insurance until they file their 2014 taxes — in 2015,” Scott wrote. “So either Drudge is lying or he paid a huge penalty a year earlier than he needed to.”

“Penalty isn’t collected until 2015,” Sam Baker of National Journal tweeted at Drudge.

The Huffington Post’s Jeffrey Young wrote a full article in which he described Drudge’s tweet as “weird” and a “little head-scratching” because the Obamacare tax does not kick in until the 2014 tax year.

Drudge indicated in his followup tweets that since he is self-employed as the proprietor of The Drudge Report, he files as a small business. According to the IRS’s website for self-employed individuals, they are required to pay taxes quarterly.

“As a self-employed individual, generally you are required to file an annual return and pay estimated tax quarterly,” the IRS website reads.

So, when they file and pay those 2014 first quarter taxes, such individuals have to pay the Obamacare Individual Mandate tax if they opted to not have health insurance—like Drudge just did.

These people going after Drudge not only have never signed the front of a paycheck, they have no idea how taxes even work. They take their “stuff” to an accountant, who does all the work. It is not just the hard core liberals. It’s the whole ruling class. After all, if they want to know something about taxes, they will call a buddy from the BLS or Cato to give them something clever sounding to say on the issue. The mundane task of actually complying with the tax code is for the little people.

Up until the last couple of generations, all but the idle rich experienced real work in the private sector and they had experiences with the other classes. Maybe it was public schools or a stint in the military. Even playing sports gave kids a chance to rub elbows with other classes. Most upper middle-class kids got summer jobs, which was another way to mix it up with people outside their daily experience. the result was a somewhat classless society, in that people were united culturally.

That started to change when the Baby Boomer kids hit their teenage years. The upper middle-class kids stopped getting summer jobs and instead took trips to Europe or maybe interned somewhere swanky. Then this trickled down to the middle classes, as the migrants took up the jobs kids use to do. Of course, the segregation of public schools along class lines and the demographics of the military have made it more unusual for the classes to mix together.

The result, over the last few decades, is a ruling elite with little knowledge of what Americans do every day. How could they? They’ve never done any of these things. The people in the media prove their worth by displaying their cultural ignorance. Like braying asses, they make lots of noise in order to get the attention of their masters, not the audience for whom they allegedly work. Mainstream news organizations live entirely on charity, either the largess of patrons or through the cable bill.

We are now ruled by stranger that hate us.

I freely admit to being a fan of race realism. Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire do a great job laying out facts, as opposed to the wishful thinking, so popular with the ruling classes. I guess reading outlawed ideas is always going to appeal to a unconventional mind, but race realism has the benefit of being right. Understanding the broad difference between groups of people makes it possible to navigate through the world and make predictions about people and situations. Race realism is useful.

That said, I wonder, what’s the point? This Taki column by Fred Reed is mostly stupid, but it does brush up against this question. I’ve never understood the attraction to the cornpone offerings of Fred on Everything, but that’s an issue of taste. He does have a big following and his opinions probably track with what most white people think with regards to the human condition. Here’s the part that got my attention.

While I want to regard all of humanity as inferior, with regard to particular groups, vile ripples of unwanted evidence occasionally raise their ugly heads (if ripples have heads). Consider Latinos. After living for eleven years in Mexico, I cannot see that Mexicans are any stupider than anyone else. (This, of course, leaves ample leeway for being stupid.) The assertion among fans of IQ is that because of their admixture of Indian blood, Mexicans, and for that matter all mestizos of Latin America, are stupid. I don’t see it.

I know some Irishmen who never touch alcohol, but that does not change the statistics on Irish drinking. There are some black physicists in the university, but that does not change the fact that blacks are under represented in cognitive fields and wildly over represented in the crime stats. Averages are just a general representation of the whole, not an exact description of everyone in the set. How is possible for someone to not understand this? Well, belief is very powerful magic.

In a disorganized way, however, he does touch on three problems that face the race realists. The first is what you see in the Fred Reed column. Unless you are a liberal, you know lots of pleasant people outside your tribe. Most of the people I know are outside my tribe. Whatever the statistical differences, whatever the cultural differences, pretty much everyone has a soft spot in their heart for someone outside their tribe.

That makes discussing this stuff tricky, but not impossible. Where things get dicey is when you move from listing facts to forming public policy based on those facts. Think about it. Let’s say population X is not very bright and prone to violence. Let’s say you lay out the facts to everyone’s satisfaction and there is general agreement that population X is not very bright and prone to violence. Then what? What policy arises from these facts? What would be the point of the policy?

Let’s pretend you can come up with some policy, say for education, that handles the violent stupid people in a humane and productive way. They get some benefit without placing a burden on the rest of society. I don’t know, maybe a colony of some sort where this population is placed. What about the exceptions? What about those pleasant people who are not dimwitted or dangerous? Do you ship them off to the colony too? If so, how do you sell that to the people in your tribe?

Starting in the 1990’s, America started building and arming paramilitary units around the country. Most point to the North Hollywood Shootout as the genesis, but you can probably put the start date in the 1970’s when Daryl Gates formed the Los Angeles SWAT unit after the Symbionese Liberation Army ran wild in Compton. Radley Balko wrote a good book on the subject last year. Here’s a Wall Street Journal article from him last year that covers the important ground.

The foolishness of building these paramilitary units is obvious in retrospect, but at the time it was just the normal consequence of allowing public sector unions. To get the cop endorsement, pols promised them every toy on the market. The result is we are one step closer to warlordism. This piece from William Kristol, of all people, is a good example of what’s coming to a town near you. Washington is now a Renaissance capital with armored limousines instead of gilded carriages. I

This story from California is yet another example of the police ignoring the law. Who is going to stop them? Apparently not the courts.

With a search warrant in hand, federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confiscated computers, customer lists and the questionable polymer 80 percent lower receivers from four Ares Armor store locations throughout San Diego County over the weekend.

“There were women and children inside our retail establishment when the (ATF) agents came in with guns drawn,” said Ares Armor Executive Officer Dimitrios Karras. “They came into our manufacturing facility with their guns up like they were invading Iraq.”

The raid happened three days after Ares owner was granted a temporary restraining by a judge to stop ATF agents from searching their stores.

The ATF confirmed they were investigating the stores for federal firearm violations.

The case stems from the sale of what is called an 80% lower receiver, which gun enthusiast use to build their own rifles and guns.

Building a rifle with specific versions of the 80 percent receivers is legal.   The polymer lower receiver appears to be manufactured differently with two parts, making them a firearm and illegal sell, according to the ATF.

“We did ask the court to clarify if these things were firearms or not,” said Karras. “We did ask for protection as this gets resolved within the court system.”

Karras said they had their polymer lower receivers locked in a closet ready to turn over to the ATF since Wednesday.  He was more concerned about the federal agents taking lists of his customers’ information.

“If anybody is a criminal organization that should be investigated, I think they should look in the mirror. We gave them a black eye publicly,” Karras said. “They tried to do an underhanded deal with us. They said, ‘Hey hush, hush. Keep it secret and nobody’s going to know that we took the customer list from you. Nobody’s going to know we took this from you.’”

The investigation has some customers nervous about their right to bear arms.

“I’m on that list, and I’m waiting for the knock on the door to tell me they are here to remove my second amendment rights,” one customer told Fox 5.

It is already happening.

An Ohio high school student has already been jailed and kicked out of school for having a pocket knife in his car, and now he fears he could lose his dream of serving in the Army.

Jordan Wiser, a student at Ashtabula County Technical School in Jefferson, is finishing up his senior year from home after school officials searched his car in December and found the folding knife and an Airsoft gun. School officials called police, who charged him with illegal conveyance of a weapon onto a school ground based on the three-inch knife.

“I declined to allow them to search myself or my car and that I wanted to talk to my lawyer or my father,” Wiser told FoxNews.com. “They told me it wasn’t an option.”

You don’t get the rest of those rights in the Bill of Right either, it seems.  The American ruling class has not cared for our Constitution since the outbreak of Progressivism in the 19th century. It has steadily grown worse to the point where the current president is openly hostile to basic guarantees in our Constitution. The courts laugh at the very idea of a restraint on government authority. Now, the cops look upon the masses with contempt. It’s not hard to see where this going to end.

You may say to yourself, “As long as you obey the law it is not a problem. These isolated issues are just that.” That’s not the concern. The trajectory is the concern. A century ago the average American rarely bumped against agent of the national government. The Post Office was his only regular interface with Washington. He infrequently had dealings with his local government. Today, everyone of us bumps into government at all levels We must get permission for everything we do now.

It used to be that public health was focused on the health of the public, which meant basic sanitation, medical care and so forth. An expanded definition would include education about nutrition and prevention of disease though vaccinations and public education. Today, public health means pointless virtue signalling from the ruling class over things that have little to do with public health. The news brings word that New Jersey’s governor is looking to tax e-cigarettes.

Cash-strapped New Jersey is leading the charge against e-cigarettes, with Governor Chris Christie and state legislators proposing high taxes that could propel sales into the black market and diminish the state’s tax intake.

Fox News reports that the booming, currently still unregulated e-cigarette industry is enticing a number of states to propose new taxes to cover for the sales. While the health effects of e-cigarettes are still not fully known, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claim that e-cigarettes have “far fewer of the toxins found in smoke compared to traditional cigarettes,” and many individuals suggest that they have been able to stop smoking cigarettes by switching to this nicotine-providing alternative. One study found that e-cigarettes are as effective as nicotine patches in helping smokers quit.

Lots of people who have switched to the e-cigarettes and then quit using nicotine entirely. Even heavy smokers, who have tried all of the other remedies have found relief through vaping. They don’t start vaping in order to quit nicotine, but that is a happy result of making the switch. it turns out to be an effective way to break the habit, because it first eliminates the link between the hundreds of chemicals in cigarettes and the nicotine. This seems to make quitting less difficult.

You would think that would be welcomed news by the anti-smoking people, but you would be wrong. They never gave a damn about the health of smokers. The people in these movements just like pushing people around. The advent of e-cigarettes is now making that plain. Instead of encouraging harm reduction, they are trying to ban this new gadget. New York City also banned e-cigs, which is hilarious as it is impossible to enforce, as the user can do it undetected with little effort.

Of course, the politicians just want the money. The hilarious part is this whole thing is it pits the busybodies against the legal plunder crowd. The anti-pleasure fanatics are out trying to ban the sale of cigarettes, while the blood suckers in every state capital are trying to figure out how to make more money from the sale of cigarettes. One side is quietly encouraging vice in order to tax it, while the other side loudly condemns, while quietly happy to have people to lecture.

A group of state attorneys general are asking the nation’s top pharmacy chains to follow rival CVS and stop selling tobacco products.

The prosecutors sent letters to Walgreens (WAG, Fortune 500) and Rite-Aid (RAD, Fortune 500) as well as three other retailers with pharmacies in their stores — Wal-Mart Stores (WMT, Fortune 500) as well as grocers Kroger (KR, Fortune 500) and Safeway (SWY, Fortune 500).

“There is a contradiction in having these dangerous and devastating tobacco products on the shelves of a retail chain that services health care needs,” the AGs wrote.

The push is being made by a bipartisan group of prosecutors, led by New York AG Eric Schneiderman and Ohio AG Mike DeWine, from 26 other states and territories.

The funny part is watching the pols struggle to come up with a way to tax something that may be impossible to tax. There are millions of sites selling these things. Taxing cigarettes is relatively easy. The distributors are licensed by the states and put a tax man on-site. Taxing bits of metal that can be shipped from anywhere on the planet for pennies is a different matter. You could tax nicotine at the manufacturer, but then you raise prices of all sorts of other goods. Nicotine is used in pesticide, for example, in the organic food business. There’s some irony.

People dismiss Elizabeth Warren as a light weight who got a little lucky. That may be true to a great degree, but she is an ambitious light weight. She wants to be the first fake Indian in the White House. She has carefully staked out the right turf and is a favorite of the hard bourgeois Left. When she was running for the Senate, middle-class women were ecstatic for her. Warren’s Facebook page has that cultish vibe to it. It is the sort of fawning that makes normal people uncomfortable.

Today comes news she is prepping a book for later in the year. This is a common thing for pols with an eye on a presidential run. They are written to make life easy for the press covering them. Well, easier for the liberal press swooning over a Democrat candidate. Republicans tend to write books that are used as ammunition against them, because Republicans are dumb. Warren’s next book smells like a campaign platform that her friends in the media can use to promote her candidacy.

The conventional wisdom is Clinton will run away with the 2016 nomination. It is her turn and she has dirt on everyone that could run against her. The Democrats usually abhor retreads and losers, but their bench is empty right now. Warren could probably challenge Clinton as both the authentic Progressive and the authentic Progressive women in the race. There’s a lot of bad feeling toward Clinton from the Left, but running against someone with Clinton’s body count is not wise.

In Washington it is an open secret that Warren is quietly feeling out supporters and donors. Hillary is old and looking rough. If she falters, Warren is going to want to be ready. Publishing a book no one will read is another way to touch the donor base. They will be asked to buy in bulk. If after the midterm the Party is looking for someone around whom they can rally, Warren could be right there to play the Bobby Kennedy role to Hillary’s Humphrey. If not, then 2020 is a possibility.

The thing that no one sees coming is the growing populism in the country. Someone on the Right may figuring it out, as the GOP is a fragile shell of a party. That said, the nation is led by the Left, so that’s where populism will have a real impact if it becomes a thing in politics. Warren is someone who could tap into that and become the new face of bourgeois Progressivism. That assumes that Hillary does not run and win and Hillary does not have these challengers killed.

This post over at Marginal Revolution by Alex Tabarrok is a good example of the neo-Taylorism growing like a fungus over the ruling class. A century ago, the new technocrats that were born of the Industrial Revolution, were sure you could use engineering principles to fix human society. Just as you could organize people inside a factory or even in an army, you should be able to use the same strategies to organize society a a whole. It was technocratic utopianism.

Now, guys like Tabarrok are not trying to use engineering or even corporate management techniques to reorder society. Instead, they come at the problem from articles of faith within modern economics. They believe they can reform society by using the right combination of incentives. In fact, they reject the very notion of society and instead see nothing bu collections of moist economic units. Adjust the market conditions the right way and those economic units will respond accordingly.

Now, Tabarrok  is a fanatic. For instance, his enthusiasm for open borders is slightly deranged at times. This post is a good example. One can reasonably debate immigration. There’s no debating a fanatic celebrating Open Borders Day. Santayana said, “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.” That seems to be the point of the open borders crowd. They no longer know why they worship at that alter. They are certain they must do so every day.

Anyway, this is what stands out in his post:

Tesla wants to sell directly to the public but more generally what we need is to restore the Coasean balance, put dealers and manufacturers back on a equal footing and let the market decide the most efficient means of retailing and distributing automobiles.

A feature of modern times is the fake nerd. That’s the guy who dresses and talks like he was a geeky kid growing up and now busies himself with science and math. The TV show Big Bang Theory plays on this. In reality these fake nerds are almost always toting liberal arts degrees of the soft kind, like sociology or psychology. These people are brought onto news chat programs to repeat conventional wisdom, but salt their language with statistics or references to science.

Sports TV has been infested with the fake nerds. Pablo Torre on ESPN is the prime example. He majored in journalism, yet pretends to be a math guy on TV. It is a fair bet he cannot do basic math with any degree of confidence, but there he is every day pretending to be a stat-nerd on TV. These guys cherry-pick language and concepts from stat-heavy sites that analyze trends. They don’t understand the math behind them, but they don’t have to, as their job is to play a role, like an actor.

The good news for the fake nerds is their rabbi is back in business. Nate Silver’s racket is back up and running with the help of ESPN. Silver is a bright guy, for sure, but he is an ideologue and that gets the best of him. He’s a lot like Richard Lewontin, who was undeniably smart, but consumed with ideology. So much so it led him to lie about his work and do so brazenly. That’s not to say Silver is a liar, but it shows the risk of allowing an ideologue to assume the role of empiricist.

The application of statistics to human activity seems like a fool’s errand. Sports is a great example. Using advanced metrics has not helped gamblers. It may have helped some gamblers for a short time, but gambling is not just a math puzzle. Games of chance rely on human fallibility. That’s true of sports. The key to winning at sports gambling, for example, is to find the game outside the 90%. That means the possible outcomes within the 90% probability are not going to be winners for the gambler. You need the upsets and unexpected blowouts.

That said, the new religion of economics is legitimizing the use of statistics to public policy, because it opens the debate to corruption. Instead of focusing on desired ends, the focus is on process. The statistics make people think the outcomes are ordained and that what matters is how you get there. It’s why economics often looks a lot like tarot card reading. That assumption the future is written is never said, but it is often assumed, so process is all that matters.

It is a bit ironic. The last time this sort of materialist zeal got a purchase with the public was in the 19th century with Taylorism. That was the application of engineering to the work place to eliminate waste. Sounds a lot like what the new religion means by efficiency. Taylorism eventually gave us The Efficiency Movement. Progressives “such as Herbert Croly, Charles R. van Hise and Richard Ely sought to improve governmental performance by training experts in public service comparable to those in Germany, notably at the Universities of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Schools of business administration set up management programs oriented toward efficiency.”

Herbert Hoover was a big fan of this. Contrary to Progressive mythology, he was not a small government conservative. Like Nixon, he accepted the main arguments of the Left. He just picked the wrong party and, it turns out, the wrong time to be President. The point being that the last time our elites had a religious zeal for a new science of efficiency, promising to bring heaven on earth, they almost destroyed civilization. For that reason I wish Nate Silver and his fellow monks nothing but the worst.

I’m fond of saying that government makes liars and weasels of the citizenry. A good example is the light bulb. Like everyone reading this, I have used incandescent bulbs by default for my whole life. Modern hipsters insist on calling them “Edisons.” The young guy who sold me the fancy new LED bulbs the other day seemed proud of himself when he had the chance to say “Edisons” with confidence of someone who is sure he is about to bring a new believer into his cult.

Anyway, I got talked into trying an LED the other day, so I decided to go to the local light bulb emporium. These stores are popping up all over. I guess that means we have joined the future in the same way small towns used to celebrate getting a McDonald’s. Right out of the chute you know we are headed to a bad place when you can build a nationwide retail chain around batteries and light bulbs. Then again The Christmas Tree Shops are built around a single holiday.

The store is not big and probably exists mostly on batteries. We have all sort or weird battery needs these days. I asked the kid for the LED bulbs and he took me to the display and started in on the sales pitch. While he was talking I’m looking at the price of these things. Looking at $19.99 for a light bulb is a bit of an eye-opener. I then hear the guy say something about the LED bulb producing the same amount of light as a much higher watt incandescent bulb.

At that point I started focusing again, realizing that it takes a good sales pitch to sell a $20 light bulb. He’s telling me about lumens and watts, while I’m thinking about physics.  A watt is equal to the amount of energy in 1 ampere of current flowing at 1 volt. A lumen has something to do with the amount of light visible to humans. It was one of those moments when I wish I had retained more of my physics training. It’s a safe bet the retail clerk really has no idea what any of this means.

I’m thinking about the lumens, trying to remember if there was a conversion to watts when he says, “The real benefit of the LED is that it will last 40 years.” I’m 48 so that means the bulb will still be going strong when I’m 88 or dead. I look at the kid and say, “So I can leave these bulbs in my will?” He just looks at me, probably trying to wrap his mind around the idea of his light bulbs lasting longer than my life. When you’re young, death is a foreign concept. I just give him the stony face to see what he will do.

Eventually, he just says, “I guess you could. I never really thought of that.” I take some pleasure in the knowledge he will now be thinking about that the next time an old person comes in the shop. When he gets ready to tell some old guy that the bulb will last forty years, but the old guy may not make it forty months. It underscores the ridiculousness of selling something people still think of as disposable, on the argument that it will last two generations.

Of course, no one thought about putting light bulbs in their will, unless they were a vindictive jerk. For close to a century now light bulbs cost a few pennies and you threw them away when you moved. The typical house may have a dozen or more bulbs. The total cost of all of them less than this one LED he was holding. Never have I heard someone complain about the bulbs in their house. Sure, you have to spend money on an outside spot light or those weird little bulbs in a dining room fixture.

Like everyone else to this point, I’ve never needed a professional consultation on my home lighting. At most, you spend time with an electrician on how best to wires the house or an outside area, so you can get proper lighting. That’s a different matter than getting professional advice on where to place the lamp. Government has created a whole class of people, who make a living helping people do what generations took for granted. We live in the age of make-work.

That’s not the end of it. The reason we’re now including our lighting choices in our wills is corporate titans figured this was a good way to monetize their country’s green obsession. In this case, “Big Bulb” got Congress to ban the cheap alternative so we will be forced to spend a mortgage payment to replace the light bulbs in the house. Phillips and GE are not even lubing up before they monetize us. It is just a full on prison rape with light bulbs. Yeah capitalism!

I know, these bulbs will save me money. I can do math. Looking at my electric bill, I fail to see how the energy savings is worth investigating. If I lived in a stadium or an arena, I could see it. The only real savings I can see is the replacement. Let’s pretend the guy at the battery store was right. My “Edisons” will cost about $20 until my death. That’s about the same as the LED. Since we know the LED will not last that long, I’m losing on that score. In fairness, the LED’s will get cheaper so the math will get better over time.

Here’s the math that matters. Big Bulb was making about 10% profit on bulbs before the green lunatics got involved. That’s about a penny per bulb when you consider the manufactured cost. If they have the same margins on the LED, they are making 100 times that per bulb. The bulb-person ration will not change anytime soon. Initially people will be buying these expensive bulbs in the same volume as the normal bulbs. Big Bulb gets to see their profit soar for a couple of years.

What are the odds that Big Bulb will go out of business in a few years after all of our bulbs are replaced with these lifetime bulbs? After all, if everyone goes to these new bulbs that last forever, how long before bulb sales collapse? That’s where you know the longevity argument is bogus. The LED will last longer, for sure, but the smart people at Big Bulb did the math and they know their new bulbs will not so long as to make the bulb business irrelevant.

The topper is the bulbs I bought are not all that great. Maybe it is just a matter of getting used to it, but my bedroom now looks like a film school scene. The area immediately around the lamps is brighter and whiter. Everywhere else is in shadows. Maybe I got bad bulbs, but for $20 a pop, well, I expected more. Forty bucks is not what it used to be, but it is lunch for the week. Thanks to the helping hand of government, I spent $40 to get monetized and I sleep in a film noir movie.