TAIL TRACK.

Barring signal troubles, links to any posts of substance ought to work.

KEEP MY REFRIGERATOR SIMPLE.

As information technologies improved, and my academic career wound down, I would caution students that perhaps the full-information economy we so blithely assumed in order to make the blackboard equilibrium equilibrate might not be such a good thing to live in.  If it's connected to the internet of things, there's the risk of somebody hacking it, or your private life revealed even if you never take your illicit date to a sporting event.  (That refrigerator is cycling an awful lot for a kitchen supposedly supplying one, isn't it?)  There's another, mundane dimension to that argument.

Simple: the more electronic components there are, the more ways there are for stuff to go wrong. An appliance repairman recently suggested I stick with my old school appliances (circa 2007 is old school these days) for as long as they last, as the new ones have a mean time to some sort of failure of less than a year. Most of his service calls these days are for the new ones, and one of the advanced features tends to be what fails.

So too let it be with owners of the latest smart refrigerators.  "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges."  Absurd, embarrassing, and totally unnecessary.

Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”

There are numerous reports on Samsung’s Korean community forum detailing the problem. Some users claim that they have owned their affected fridge for just a year or less.

“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote, per a translation.

Hard pass.  All I want my refrigerator to connect to is a power grid, and all I want to start my car is an ignition key.  Other internet-connected home appliances?  No thanks.

The obvious alternative, of course, is to avoid fridges that get updates altogether. Dumb fridges can suddenly break too, but that usually doesn’t happen if that fridge’s hardware components are all working properly and if it’s just a year or two old.

While most of the complaints this week center on rotten food, an abruptly broken fridge can cause other serious problems, like ruining medication. As other poorly issued smart home gadget updates have proven, extraneous technology can spoil a simple product.

I'm willing to use electric or gas appliances connected to the respective mains.  Adding internet connectivity brings avoidable first world problems that might not be worth the convenience of having the roast defrosting or the wine chilling or the oven preheating or food in the doggie dish (don't you have to activate the robot to get that out of the 'fridge?) before the owner gets home.

A PRODUCTIVE PERSON'S FAIR SHARE OF TAXES IS NEVER ENOUGH.

The sort of achievement-resenting egalitarian who complains about wealthy people being "undertaxed" is often an innumerate who cannot distinguish stocks from flows.  It's one of my pet peeves.  "Tax incidence is messy, and distinguishing stocks from flows is hard, but never let that get in the way of The Narrative."

Meet the latest innumerate achievement-resenting egalitarian, Chuck Collins representing a nest of whiners calling themselves "Inequality."  It's the predictable rile-up-the-losers Common Dreams stuff.  "These 22 California Billionaires Don’t Want to Pay Their Fair Share."

EVERYTHING ELSE IS ELABORATION.

Jonathan Turley concludes his "Why We Shouldn’t Cancel the Supreme Court" with "In revolution after revolution, newly-established courts carried out the purported will of the people with terrible consequences. In an age of rage, it is too often reason itself that is canceled."

His essay, as befits a student of constitutional law, focuses on the role of the United States Supreme Court.  In the course of establishing his argument, he makes the following points about the American Founding.

Today’s attacks on the American judiciary do indeed harken back to the rhetoric that raged before the advent of “The Terror” in revolutionary France—the rhetoric that gave rise to the kind of “mobocracy” that the Founders sought to avoid by designing our constitutional order as they did.

To help understand this, it is useful to recall the fundamental differences between the American Revolution, which led to the world’s oldest and most prosperous republic, and the French Revolution, which led to a short-lived, blood-soaked tyranny. Both revolutions were based on Enlightenment ideas. But America’s revolution was closely tied to the political philosophy of John Locke, who held that our rights come not from the government, but from God. The institutional arrangements of the Constitution, including the independent court system, were designed to protect these God-given individual rights.

Conversely, the French Revolution was inspired in the end not by Lockean principles but by the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which extolled the “general will” of the people and opposed institutions (including courts) that interfered with that will. This concept of a general or popular will served as a license for French revolutionaries like Robespierre—who declared that “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible . . . a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy”—to unleash a torrent of executions that would eventually come to turn on the revolutionaries themselves.

There is a radical movement rising in the U.S. with chilling parallels to the French Revolution. Demands for the elimination or packing of the Supreme Court and other measures are ripped from the French revolutionary handbook.

My stance, more as citizen with some knowledge of political economy than as constitutional or legal scholar, is that perhaps in a quarter millennium we got a few things right, as witness the Declaration and Constitution still governing, while France has had Bonapartism and four or five republics over the same time horizon.  Steven Hayward introduces the likely instabilities of any such reforms more directly.  "Progressive reforms would likely cause greater instability in our already unstable politics."  Why?  "If you think government is slow and ineffective now, that Americans are dangerously polarized, and that policy instability is a drag on the public interest, just wait till the Progressives get their way, and then demand another round of constitutional 'reform' when it doesn’t work out the way they hope."  Indeed, or perhaps mais oui!