A few readers have criticized WC and the Magpie Principle because, by definition, the Magpie Principle rarely involves doing any in-depth analysis on the potpourri of topics WC writes about. Mostly, that’s fair criticism, but occasionally an issue gets WC worked up enough that, after WC calms down enough to write coherently – to the…
A few readers have criticized WC and the Magpie Principle because, by definition, the Magpie Principle rarely involves doing any in-depth analysis on the potpourri of topics WC writes about. Mostly, that’s fair criticism, but occasionally an issue gets WC worked up enough that, after WC calms down enough to write coherently – to the…
Apollo Global Management is a private equity firm. Long-time readers know WC despises private equity firms. Former U.S. Presidential candidate and current U.S. Senator Mitt Romney made himself a rich man through his association with private equity. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that private equity is a legal way of looting and…
In the late 1980s, Alaska suffered one of its worst recessions, trapped between a commercial and residential real estate bubble and a collapse in crude oil prices. Fully half of Alaska’s financial institutions failed. The shockwaves echoed through the state’s economy for years afterwards. In this sometime series, WC will have a look at some…
Not that long ago, Rite Aid was the largest pharmacy company in America. The most stores, the second highest sales volume and the second highest profits. That apparent success hid a very ugly reality. Rite Aid had grown through the purchase of other companies, and had massive debt. Worse, the books were cooked – the…
This blog post contains a fact error. The price of copper is mis-stated. WC will leave it up – WC rarely takes down a blog post – but will get a revised version up in due course. WC’s apologies for the fact error. Last week WC wrote about the Ambler Mining Road, which is proposed…
As we struggle through a summer when, for many Americans, the air was unbreathable from wildfire smoke, the air was too hot, super-sized rain storms caused too many floods, altered climactic patterns led severe regional droughts, and Lahaina burned to the ground – all consequences of anthropogenic climate change – the consequences we were warned…
It may come as a surprise to WC’s non-Alaskan readers, but there is a spaceport of sorts on Kodiak Island in Alaska. The news possibly comes as a surprise to many in the rocket launching industry as well, which is likely part of the problem. The first launch, a sub-orbital effort, was in 1998. The…
Absent something unforeseen, the Alaska Permanent Fund will go broke between 2024-2026. More specifically, the earnings of the Fund will be inadequate to meet its obligations: inflation-proofing, paying the statutory 5.00% to the state’s general revenue fund and paying any kind of permanent fund dividend. No magic hand waving by Gov. Dunleavy, no mumbo-jumbo about…
Hillsdale College, a favorite of the far right and a bastion of half-baked constitutional “scholarship,” publishes a newsletter it calls Imprimis. WC has no recollection of ever subscribing to the newsletter, but has received it for some decades now. It’s always interesting to know what passes for deep thinking among those who don’t share WC’s…
First, consider Martin Shkreli’s business model: found a company. Use it to acquire sole-source drugs that treat life-threatening conditions in small populations of patients. Then dramatically jack up the price. In August 2015, Shkreli did just that, buying the rights to the decades-old anti-parasitic drug Daraprim for $55 million. Daraprim is used to treat the…
The technical, linguistic term for it is a Gricean Implicature.1 You know, the Mafia thug walks into the store and says, “Nice place you’ve got here. Be a shame if something bad happened to it.” Or, if you prefer, U.S. House Speaker Kevin “You’ve Sold Out” McCarthy2 looks around at the U.S. economy and says,…
The Biden Administration has approved a somewhat scaled back version of ConocoPhillips Willow oil drilling prospect in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The Willow oil field, over the 30 years of its production, will add about half a billion tons of carbon dioxide to the greenhouse gases already baking our planet. The Alaska Congressional delegation was…
The theory is pretty good. Where a very large number of person have been injured by a common cause, they can form as group, called a “class,” and collectively bring a lawsuit, called a “class action,” to recover their damages. Otherwise, you have millions of individual lawsuits. But, as the settlement recently approved and paid…
Fairly early in his legal career, WC helped an Alaska bank set up one of the first locally-branded credit card programs in Alaska. WC’s task was to conform the MasterCard “standard” agreements with Alaska’s arcane finance laws. Much of that Alaska law has since been amended to better conform to nation-wide practices, but the experience…
It was bad enough when Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy (R, Big Oil) would balance Alaska’s budgets using improbably high crude oil prices. Alaska’s state budget is funded, directly or indirectly, by crude oil. Using high crude oil prices makes the effort so much easier, even if doing so has exhausted the remainder of Alaska’s budget…
WC has written about TANSTAAFL before. The acronym stands for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch,” and is a reference to the bars and taverns that used to offer a “free lunch,” where, for the cost of two over-priced beers, you could have an over-salted, thirst-inducing lunch. The price of the lunch,…
It’s been a while since WC wallowed in some technogeekery here at Wickersham’s Conscience. Let’s start the New Year right with a case study of when capitalism and multinationalism meet the expectation of privacy. A few years ago, after a birding trip to the Snake River west of Boise, WC saw a series of hops…
A long while back, 20 or 25 years anyway, WC was at a holiday party at a friend’s house. One of the other guests was Johne Binkley, third son of Captain and Mary Binkley, and at that point a reasonably successful politician as well as the CEO of the company that owned the Riverboat(s) Discovery…
One of WC’s readers noted that while WC has heavily and frequently criticized Alaska’s fossil fuel-driven economy, there has been no suggestion of an alternative. WC, the reader suggests, should offer some constructive criticism for once. Okay. Here’s a 20 year plan to rebuild Alaska’s economy. It’s not going to please everybody – it likely…
You won’t find Lime, Oregon on a map; at least not one published in the last forty years. Lime isn’t even a ghost town; it’s obliterated, along with the cement plant that was Lime’s reason for existence. Today, Lime is a wide spot in a side road off Interstate 84, not too far from Baker…
Boondoggle: Futile or useless work. The word is of uncertain origin. cording to one account, it was invented in the 1930s by an American scoutmaster, Robert H. Link, for a type of braided lanyard. This took time and trouble to make, to no useful purpose; hence, the word passed to a futile task in general.…
The Anchorage Daily News has yet another opinion piece from Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy. WC likes the Binkley family, who own the newspaper, but cautions them they’re going to need to invest in case lots of Chapstick™ if they continue to give Alaska’s Least Competent Governor a platform. In his latest essay, Dunleavy’s quest for…
WC doesn’t want readers to think he is bashing HP, neé Hewlett Packard, in this post. After all, WC uses an elderly (2004) LaserJet 2055 laser printer for most printing, and a new HP Envoy 6458 color inkjet for his color printing needs. WC still owns and uses a truly ancient HP 12C calculator, manufactured…
WC is having surgery today. A few days of posts are written and scheduled, but depending on how his post-op recovery goes, there may be a break in blog posts. Comments may not be immediately approved. It’s nothing major and not a cause for alarm. But the chassis needs repairs. Major League Baseball – the…
A “baseline,” in science, is a measure where things stand, to be held up against a later point, for comparison. Six months ago, WC posted a series of data points at the transition from the Trump to the Biden Administrations. WC thought it would be interesting to establish a baseline at that transition. For convenience,…
At a terrible cost in human suffering, we’ve had recent lessons on why it is a terrible idea to deregulate natural monopolies. There are also object lessons in how poorly politicians sometimes respond to emergencies involving those natural monopolies. WC will explain. A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which there are high infrastructure costs and…
Readers may recall WC wrote a polite (at least for WC) open letter to U.S. Senator Mike Crapo (R, Idaho) regarding the Senator’s claim that the federal estate tax was the most unfair tax and required immediate attention. WC has now received a reply. WC has put Senator Crapo’s response in bold and WC’s responses…
A “baseline,” in science, is a measure where things stand, to be held up against a later point, for comparison. WC thinks it would be interesting to establish a baseline here, at the transition from Trump to Biden. For convenience, WC has broken the observations down into categories, with data points at the third week…
In WC’s forty-four year legal practice, the hardest kinds of cases to deal with were those where one or both parties were unable to recognize their own economic self-interest. For example, WC served as a mediator in an unsuccessful attempt to resolve a bitter dispute over land ownership. At issue was a strip of land…
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