So I’m sitting in a Panera Bread. This place is terrible.* There’s this classical music playing. Marginally famous, it’s just violin music meant to provide a certain background. The #108 thing White People Like is “Appearing to Enjoy Classical Music.” Let me tell you that’s totally true. I guess it’s better than having nothing on in the background.

But Panera Bread is terrible. I ordered a cinnamon crunch bagel, which is the only reason to go into a Panera Bread in the first place, and asked for it toasted, with butter. I get the bagel, and it’s unevenly sliced, because Panera Bread uses an automatic slicing machine that cuts the bagels unevenly. Home bagel slicers do a better job, they just don’t do as fast a job. So I get a terrible bagel cut for the convenience of the people I’m paying. Don’t get me wrong, I get that I’m paying for this terrible stuff, and I’ve always been a kind of “there’s no such thing as a ripoff” guy who blames the victim for all the bad things that happen. But here’s my poorly cut bagel that’s been toasted and is now slightly warm to the touch. Panera uses a toast machine that features a little conveyer belt that runs the bagel, hovering, along a series of heat coils, and then slides out the front. You know when you toast a piece of toast at home, and the toaster pops up, or if you use a toaster oven (which is my preference), it dings, and you open the toaster oven door? The bread or whatever is so hot that if you reached for it and touched it with your hand, you’d burn your hand. You have to kind of poke at the toast with a knife and attempt to slide it onto a plate so it can cool enough to handle to put the butter on. So I get my bagel and there’s three packets of butter on the plate next to the bagel. They’ve been refrigerated in what seems to have been some kind of dry ice-based cooling unit that causes the butter to be rock-hard. So I get that you want to keep the butter fresh. But the butter is for spreading on a bagel, and the bagel isn’t hot enough even to begin melting the butter. So I end up cutting the butter into chunks and letting the chunks sit between the two halves of the bagel until they’re soft enough to shove around on the surface of the bagel.

My coffee and bagel cost $3.50. And I feel like an jerk for even coming in here. But honestly, the cinnamon crunch bagel is really tasty, even with mostly unmelted butter on it. That’s how this works. Places invent one tolerable product and everything else is possible because of that. Outback Steakhouse has a deep fried onion appetizer that’s people seem to like. I used to go to McDonalds all the time just so I could order Chicken McNuggets so I could get the Buffalo dipping sauce on the side to dip them in. I’d dip my fries in the buffalo sauce, I’d dip my hamburger in the sauce. The So what’s the cinnamon crunch bagel cost? $1.39. The regular bagels are 99c. So I paid an extra 40 cents for the cinnamon crunch bagel? Wrong. I paid an extra $3.25 for the cinnamon crunch bagel because I wouldn’t even be in here. I’d be at home with a store-bought bag of bagels, properly cut in half, toasted to scalding, with a cup of coffee that cost me less than a dime to brew. So Panera Bread sucks because the reason I’m in the door, buying all the complementary goods to the cinnamon crunch bagel, costs more at the margin as well.

But I have a meeting here. I have a meeting at a restaurant, and I guess that’s a cultural thing, you want to have a meeting, you want to have people meet you at a time they’re not obligated to meet you, you do a nice thing for them. You meet in a pleasant place, like Panera Bread, so you can pay a huge price for generic classical music and so other people can feel like it’s a treat. What’s a treat about paying for terrible food? I make better food at my house. I’d have people to my house and make them a fine breakfast but it’s not the same. The culture won’t allow it. People think they’re getting something good but they’re not. They’re just so lazy to make something good themselves that they’re willing to pay for something terrible and they get so used to how terrible things are that they have something that’s slightly less terrible and they think it’s good.

It’s my own fault for being here. But I’m aware of my own stupid stuff, and here I am acknowledging my own stuff, and in doing so, allow myself to cast stones at others for doing stupid stuff, and not acknowledging it. I get it. Have some humility. Be honest for once.

* I’m trying to keep it clean here, but honestly, the words “terrible,” “jerk,” and “stuff” are just substitutes for the appropriate four-letter words that makes the most sense. There is impact in the use of foul language, but I live in fear because I’m surrounded by SWPLs.

Here’s Half Sigma on how to “save our country’s future “:

The reason why U.S. job growth is so anemic is because the job growth is happening in China, India, the Philippines, and anywhere else where there are people who will work for a fraction of the cost of a U.S. worker.

This usually results in a classic discussion. How much value does a worker produce, and how much is he paid? For many jobs in the US, the value produced is below the minimum wage. For this reason, people are employed in the countries HS mentions because the value vs. wage is positive for employers.

You’d think this would be followed up with something about how to address the disparity in wages, but no.

This is not going to change.

Hmm. Okay.

The only way to prevent unemployment from increasing year after year until we reach Great Depression levels is to cut off all immigration.

Driving up the cost of domestic manufacturing by making inexpensive labor scarce, which will further encourage foreign employment.

Just because I subscribe doesn’t mean I agree, etc.

Richard Hoste:

I would bet that if [Martin Luther King, Jr.] were alive today he would see affirmative action, other black supremacist legislation and big government in general as just reparations, as blacks in general tend to. But what the man’s true ideology was is irrelevant.

Latin American socialists claim Jesus as one of their own, as do American Christian fundamentalists.  His teachings have been used to justify everything from anarcho-capitalism to communism.  What creed would the Savior believe in if he were resurrected today? The point is it doesn’t matter what Jesus would think about progressive taxation from a political perspective, but what you can convince people he would want.

Hoste has identified an important point: there’s a difference between a person and his actions or ideas, and certainly in the way his legacy is employed.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was not perfect, but it’s OK.

For example, Martin Luther King, Jr. is undisputably an important historical figure for what he represents… but the man was a minister that cheated on his wife. Beyond this, he was a blatant plagiarist. These despicable behaviors could arguably disqualify MLK’s legitimacy as a leader of any community, and certainly as a heralded historical martyr… but no one seriously expects to see the MLK discredited. Indeed, far too much is invested in his maintenance on a pedestal for that to change.

As an alternative to attempting to ignore history, it’s time to recognize that the MLK did some bad bad things, but that it simply doesn’t matter. To recognize his indiscretions isn’t to somehow discredit his ideas or his dreams. We have a dream because he had a dream. It isn’t his dream anymore. It’s ours. Martin Luther King Jr. is dead, so he doesn’t get to have anymore dreams, and people who would co-opt his legacy to lend legitimacy for their own dreams are being dishonest.

What Would Jesus Do?

The same is the case with Jesus, I’m afraid. More than with the MLK, there are people who do things “in the name of Christ” whose actions, were it not for that desperate grasp at legitimacy, are totally unacceptable. Even if a person is doing something motivated by good, a third party would do well to keep in mind that when a person invokes the name Jesus Christ, he is saying something about himself, and is saying nothing at all about Jesus Christ or what he would want or do.

META: The road to hell, founding fathers’ intentions, living document, natural law, bible as fiction, the Book of Eli, Richard Hoste is an idiot, etc.

The women of The Daily Show:

The idea that [Daily Show host Jon Stewart] would risk compromising his show’s quality by hiring or firing someone based on anything but ability, or by booking guests based on anything but subject matter, is simply ludicrous.

Yet the opposite of this idea is posited by proponents of affirmative action and laws opposing discrimination all the time. Indeed, there could be no other basis for the assertion but that people are willing to harm not only their victims, but also themselves in engaging in discriminatory practices.

Is it conceivable that Stewart is sexist? Of course it is. And just because being a sexist is bad business doesn’t mean he isn’t. People are often irrational.

The upshot here is that people need to either trust that Stewart is aware that being a bigot is bad business and conclude that he must not be one. Alternatively, people can just leave it alone. Stewart can make bad business decisions if he wants to… Comedy Central doesn’t have to broadcast his show, and you don’t have to watch it. Most importantly, women don’t have to work there.