Somehow I have never heard of this. From Wiki:

No True Scotsman

130 Unusual Maps That Might Change How You See The World, As Shared In This Online Group

I was born and grew up in Louisiana, a 3rd generation New Orleanian on both my mother’s and father’s side of the family. It was a prosperous place and had been for as long as anyone could remember. It was a natural commerce hub at the mouth of the Mississippi River, and if that wasn’t enough, huge oil and gas deposits fuelled (ahem) the prosperity I remember in my youth. Although I can’t say it felt like prosperity at the time. It felt normal.

Sometime in the 1980s something happed to oil. Suddenly, things weren’t so good any more. Looking back, it was mostly met with a sort of denial, even as the city emptied out and it seemed like everyone was moving somewhere else, mostly to Houston.

For whatever reason, Houston somehow took over New Orleans’ place as the main hub for the petrochemical industry, and turned itself into a modern American metropolis. Meanwhile, New Orleans seemed to sink into decadence like a character from a Tennessee Williams stage play.

I went away to college on the east coast right around this time, and being young, I didn’t see anything unusual about the changes taking place. The friendly, easygoing place I grew up in had turned, well, ugly. By no coincidence a racist huckster named David Duke became prominent in local politics, nearly becoming governor. Still I didn’t see any connection, and neither did anyone else I knew.

I always imagined I would move back to New Orleans and had a low level, ongoing search for jobs there. I was in tech and New Orleans wasn’t known for tech jobs but I figured I could turn up something. But I never did. Jobs there paid a small fraction of what I could make in nearby Texas. I recall my Texas salaries being about 5x of anything I could scare up in New Orleans or even nearby places. Meanwhile, Austin, TX became home and reminded me more than a little if New Orleans. It had good music, a free and easy spirit and a live and let live ethos not often found in the south.

After pretty much my entire adult life in Texas, I find myself looking at the same sort of decline, for the same reasons, and with all of the same symptoms, that I saw in Louisiana in the 1980s. The oil industry seems to be in serious and permanent decline, for a variety of reasons. The decline in infrastructure has become impossible to ignore. Finally a right wing lurch, politically, is happening that is unlike anything I saw in Louisiana.

Over the years I half-joked that I was an economic refugee from Louisiana. Soon I will be a political refugee from Texas. I watched the slow decline of Louisiana and have no interest in living through the decline of Texas. I am retired and don’t have much of a stake in this like I used to. I might have stayed in Texas for my kids, since it is their home. But my kids have no interest in living in Texas, which has surprised me a bit. I suppose we will do what Americans have always done in these sorts of times, move west.

I’ve always been skeptical of cryptocurrency because I have never understood what problem it is attempting to solve. I joke that it has all the disadvantages of cash combined with all of the disadvantages of a credit card. As best I can tell it is only really useful for illegal transactions. Jackson Palmer, originator of Dogecoin, made some statements on Twitter recently that are worth reading and perhaps even thinking about:

After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity.

there is more:

Jackson Palmer on Twitter

I like Mimi Swartz. She sums up the way lots of people I know are thinking right now. This isn’t the Texas of LBJ or Ann Richards, where there seemed to be room for everyone. Austin isn’t the little college town I moved to all those years ago, either. Time to do what Americans have always done at times like this: move on.

A long one from the Economic Policy Institute. Haven’t read it all yet. It claims the reasons from inequality are deliberate and policy choices. Specifically:

• Austerity macroeconomics, including facilitating unemployment higher than it needed to be to keep inflation in check, and responding to recessions with insufficient force;
• Corporate-driven globalization, resulting from policy choices, largely at the behest of multinational corporations, that undercut wages and job security of non-college-educated workers while protecting profits and the pay of business managers and professionals;
• Purposely eroded collective bargaining, resulting from judicial decisions, and policy choices that invited ever more aggressive anti-union business practices;
• Weaker labor standards, including a declining minimum wage, eroded overtime protections, nonenforcement against instances of “wage theft,” or discrimination based on gender, race, and/or ethnicity;
• New employer-imposed contract terms, such as agreements not to compete after leaving employment and to submit to forced private and individualized arbitration of grievances; and
• Shifts in corporate structures, resulting from fissuring (or domestic outsourcing), industry deregulation, privatization, buyer dominance affecting entire supply chains, and increases in the concentration of employers.

Identifying the policy levers generating wage suppression and wage inequality

He was a crook and a liar but difficult to dislike. He was a true populist in the mold of Huey Long. I was tempted to call him a true Louisiana Original, perhaps it is better to say he is what nearly every Louisiana politician (and many outside of Louisiana) aspire toward.

Ex-Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards dies; knew power and prison

Bolsanaro should spend the rest of his life in jail for crimes against humanity. From the BBC:

Covid-19 pandemic: ‘Everything you should not do, Brazil has done’

So proud that our cat, Rino, was selected for today’s Cats of Brutalism.