Microtransactions in games don't really bother me. If it's taking away something tedious or just letting game players do something faster, no big deal. 

Yet imagine you paid a small fortune, probably at a premium since flag-waving capitalists running car companies make sure government won't let you buy a car without a dealer (car dealers love socialism when it makes them rich) only to find out your fancy electric car has features - like acceleration - that some grifter didn't tell you would cost another $1,200 per year. 

Welcome to Mercedes Microtransactions.

Welcome to modern colonialism. Literally, the parents of a wealthy cryptocurrency grifter got handed an expensive residence in the Bahamas once inhabited by plantation owners. And now the two Stanford law professors are going to have to try to hide behind age and confusion as to why they didn't see anything wrong with that.

Like the guy who ran WeWork, Sam Bankman-Fried used all the right buzzwords when raising money, and there is no more effective term to make wealthy elites squee in 2022 than "effective altruism." Like "smurf", it can mean anything you want it to mean. Like $300 million in homes for friends and family while $10 billion in customer assets are in some fantasy universe.

It's no secret that California is having a crisis of confidence. Water is too expensive and too scarce but politicians jammed through the implosion of four more dams anyway, while energy costs are high due to solar and wind subsidies. The state refused to pay for schooling for poor kids but is saying that college graduates who get their student loans waived won't have to pay taxes. While the state has a $25 billion deficit this year. It turns out that people selling stocks in a bad economy and paying capital gains taxes is not a business mode.

It is sort of forgivable if the wacky head of the Crossfit company claimed Coca-Cola causes diabetes because at least it has calories. And if you consume too many calories, be it in the form of Coca-Cola or salad, you will get fat. And being obese is the number one risk factor for Type 2 diabetes.

But light?

Welcome to epidemiology, where anything can be linked to anything and, if you can claim statistical significance, turn it into a paper you hope science will one day show to be true. 

Cultured Gallus gallus cells, with characteristics of myocytes and fibroblasts, don't sound delicious, but it one day soon could be.

It's chicken, except chicken without dreary activists going on about cages and without any heads being chopped off. And now it has FDA go-ahead. After looking at all of the data and the methodology, FDA has determined that it is as safe as chicken or other substitutes.

Given how it is created, it is likely far more safe. They call it 'cultivated' meat to distinguish it from its conventional counterpart and it is already approved in Singapore.

Years ago, California asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for permission to remove Klamath River dams that are currently part of a vast network of water and energy supply in the state.

What two things does California lack? Water and energy. And this will make it worse. But California invoked native tribes and environmental laws it helped push into existence as a reason to say the dams needed to be removed - at a cost of $500,000,000 and with very little study of the environmental impact of removing them.

Worst of all, a state that routinely has to ask EPA for permission to void all emissions regulations and run conventional fuel plants at full blast to avoid brownouts due to bizarre belief in solar and wind schemes now has even less clean energy.

If you live along the coastal US, you are almost certain to be a wealthy progressive, which means you are almost certain to nod your head at President Biden's pledge to cut climate emissions by 2030.

Yet progressive enclaves, which mean 9 of the 10 wealthiest counties in the US, are least likely to support climate-friendly plans that don't involve having poor people pay higher utility costs to subsidize solar panels for the rich. 

Writing in Reason, science journalist Ron Bailey notes that 18,000 megawatts of offshore wind power, on the coasts, are being tied up in federal environmental permitting battles, because either activists want concessions or residents don't want their expensive view affected, and any permit is a slippery slope to being overrun.

Is Senator Elizabeth Warren a Native American, as she routinely claimed she was when it helped her career? Actually, sure, in a world where anyone can identify any way they want it is logically (and increasingly legally) difficult to tell someone they can't feel like part of a group, especially if the history is limited to stories and scant archeology.(1)

After Democrats passed the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, and the Obama administration tightened the noose even more, the smoking cessation and harm reduction movement outside Big Pharma products has been slowly strangled.