Events

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James Rodriguez reports today in Insider on two class-action lawsuits (one in the 8th Circuit and one here in the 7th) against the National Association of Realtors. The cases, both filed in 2019, allege that the NAR has violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by requiring buyers to pay 3% commissions on house purchases through a multi-step process whereby the buyer's agent commission is paid by the seller. These rules prevent buyers from negotiating over fees. Recent orders by the two courts have moved the...

First run

While "nobody knows nothin'" about why Yevgeny Prigozhin started or stopped his march on Moscow over the weekend, it exposed the horrible truth that under Vladimir Putin, Russia has become a failed, captured state governed by gangs: Prigozhin, like Putin, was born and raised in Leningrad, which was renamed St. Petersburg as the Soviet Union was crumbling. As a young man, Prigozhin was a petty criminal and was eventually arrested and sentenced to twelve years in prison for robbing apartments. He was...

First run

My neighborhood, yesterday morning: Unfortunately, tomorrow's parade might get a bit damp.

I think I finally cracked the nut on a work problem that has consumed our team for almost three years. Unfortunately I can't write about it yet. I can say, though, that the solution became a lot clearer just a couple of weeks after our team got slightly smaller. I will say nothing more. Just remember, there are two types of people: those who can infer things from partial evidence. Just a few articles left to read before I take Cassie on her pre-dinner ambulation: Titanic director James Cameron, who has...

I'll elaborate on this later, but I just want to list a couple of things I desperately want for my country and city during my lifetime. For comparison, I'm also listing when other places in the world got them first. For context, I expect (hope?) to live another 50 years or so. Universal health care, whether through extending Medicare to all residents or through some other mechanism. The UK got it in 1948, Canada in 1984, and Germany in 1883. We're the only holdout in the OECD, and it benefits no one...

Every time I travel to a country that competes seriously with the US, I come back feeling frustrated and angry that we consistently lose. In every measure except our military, on a per-capita basis we keep sliding down the league tables. We have more people in prison, more people in poverty, worse health-care outcomes, more health-care spending, more regressive taxation, worse environmental regulation, and more crime (and more gun crime) than most our peers. We also have horrible infrastructure. For a...