- Yay for artistic freedom! A Florida government has to make amends to a couple who painted their home to resemble Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”*
- Should a woman with drugs in her system be prosecuted as a murderer for breastfeeding her baby?
- Fighting back against FOSTA, the ridiculously broad new law that attacks both consensual sex workers and Internet freedom.
- The allegedly conservative Washington Examiner prints an op-ed in favor of the fedgov becoming a bank for the allegedly unbanked and underbanked. (Does it occur to nobody that more gov involvement in banking is precisely the problem?)
- Who would design — and who would want to use — a system that makes personal financial transactions public by default?
- You already know this, but Charles Hugh Smith puts it so well: We don’t trust our institutions because our institutions are failing.
- So in what way is this not a call for a military coup? Funny how they love “democracy” until the moment it doesn’t produce their favored outcome.
- You might be slightly conscious while under anesthesia. OTOH, I’ve heard a friend’s horror story about how he was much more than slightly so …
- Two good articles on the Thai cave rescue. One from the boys, another from rescuers.
- If you’ve ever seen the cliffs of Big Sur you know how amazing this woman’s survival is.
- What would dead pop stars look like if they were alive today? (Some of these are scarily good.)
- And your people-are-good story for the day.
* I note (speaking to Anonymous) that HOAs aren’t the only stupidly brutal code enforcers in our neighborhoods.
But the difference is there are no constitutional rights in a HOA, at least in my state as per the code.
I like the old-version Janis Joplin. Looks like a nice lady.
In the “real” world, I saw a documentary on Neil Young a while back. Saw part of it, anyway, before I bailed. Sure seemed like a mean old rich man, riding around in the back of a limo.
[…] Claire Wolfe brings us Midweek Links. […]
For all that I’m basically favoring the Starry Night folks, the fact remains that a next-door neighbor might have difficulty getting full market value if he wants to sell his house.
I’m guessing that those favoring a USPS bank are thinking in terms of interest rates in line with bank rates for those with good jobs and good credit. There is a reason that the private entities set up for the bottom layer of borrowers charge high rates: Default is common. IOW, a USPS bank would likely be costly to taxpayers.
As required under the settlement’s terms, Mayor Nick Girone on Wednesday told Nemhauser and Jastrzebski he was sorry the yearlong code-enforcement brouhaha became so controversial.
“We aren’t sorry we did it. We’re sorry you got so much publicity we had to back down.”
Despite the complexities of the USPS expanding their footprint to include nonbank financial services, postal banking could be a natural evolution in G2C lending that will drive down costs and improve access to needed credit for middle America.
I’m betting these are the same people who are destroying payday and car-title loans because the costs are so high. The P.O., that bastion of efficiency, will make cheap collateral-free loans to people, and leave taxpayers on the hook to subsidize the extra expense.
Default is common.
That isn’t the only reason. It costs money to do the paperwork to process a loan, and it takes almost as much paperwork for a small loan as a large one. So the cost/$ loaned is higher.