(via marginal revolution)

I thought this was really sad at first, but in thinking it through, it also makes sense. In a country that no longer makes things, I suppose one of our last commodities that can be bought and sold is our attention.

Drank a half bottle of wine tonight that cost $28 (for the carafe) and tasted EXACTLY like Kool-Aid dosed with brandy. Yes; I’m back in NYC.

— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) January 29, 2012

Spent too much money tonight on books, booze, and pizza. In other words, happiest guy in the world.

— Frank Chimero (@fchimero) January 29, 2012

One freezing evening we happened upon the young men in this film, who were illegally dismantling a former Cadillac repair shop. They worked recklessly to tear down the steel beams and copper fasteners. They were in a hurry to make it to the scrap yard before it closed at 10 p.m., sell their spoils and head to the bar.

Surprisingly, these guys, who all lacked high school diplomas, seemed to have a better understanding of their place in the global food chain than many educated American 20-somethings. The young men regularly checked the fluctuating price of metals before they determined their next scrap hunt, and they had a clear view of where these resources were going and why.

Well now here I’ve wasted a lot of your time with technicalities and jibber jabber, I’ll come to my point quickly. Let me ask you just one question:

Have you ever wanted to have a spleen named after you?

This 1917 beauty, known as the Lockheed Lakester, will be up for auction at Barret-Jackson later this month.

The car, registered for road use as a 1917 Crow Lakester Custom, was hand-built from the wing tip tank of a Lockheed Super Constellation and uses a mix of automotive and aircraft parts. Wedged inside the tank is a 1.8-liter turbocharged Hemi four-cylinder mated to a five-speed manual transmission, and the two-person cockpit features gunner seats and an air-speed indicator in lieu of a speedometer.

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

My daddy went to work at the aircraft firm of Chance Vought in 1935, I think, when he was nineteen or so. Jobs were hard to come by, but he was smart and mechanically inclined and he had a high school degree.

When the US entered WWII, my daddy was exempted from the draft on account of his working in a ‘critical industry’. Vought’s biggest customer was the US Navy.

After the war, Vought’s military contracts must have dwindled. Or maybe moving operations inland seemed like a good idea. Anyway, the company transferred 1300 key personnel from Connecticut to the right-to-work state of Texas. It was the biggest-ever US corporate move at that time. A Hollywood film inspired by the move even went into pre-production, and Spencer Tracy was said to have been cast. I imagine my mother in a Katharine Hepburn role.

The F4U Corsair (1940-1952) was Vought’s triumph.

The Japanese are said to have called the plane Whistling Death.