Free Republic

Bloomberg say he can teach anyone to farm in 5 minutes. Didn't Pol Pot say the same thing? How did that turn out for the people of Cambodia?

I have devoted my entire adult life to learning about money. That might sound like cruel-and-unusual punishment, but I’ve mostly enjoyed it. For more than three decades, I’ve spent my days perusing the business pages, reading finance books, scanning academic studies and talking to countless folks about their finances. Yet, despite this intense financial education, it took me a decade or more to learn many of life’s most important money lessons and, indeed, some key insights have only come to me in recent years. Here are 10 things I wish I’d been told in my 20s—or told more loudly, so...

Of all the pandering showcased during Democrats’ attempts to win back the presidency, wiping out student debt ranked at or near the top.“I believe that education is the future for this country,” socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders barked during the first round of Democratic primary debates, explaining that’s why we must “eliminate student debt and we do that by placing a tax on Wall Street.� Sen. Amy Klobuchar spoke similarly. “I can tell you this,” the Minnesota senator demagogued, “if billionaires can pay off their yachts, students should be able to pay off their student loans.”There can be no serious...

PONCA CITY, Okla. (KFOR) – A Ponca City woman is upset after she says she was asked to leave a local barber shop because she’s a woman. Maliki Skowroski says she went to King’s Kuts with her husband to get him a cut and beard trim, but before he could even sit in the chair, she was getting kicked out. "The man kind of ignores my husband, directly approaches me and says, 'I'm sorry, but we have a strict no women policy,'” Skowroski told News 4. “You can't be here." Owner Daxton Nichols says he can see how some may...

In an extraordinary ruling, a state supreme court judge has ordered the developers of a nearly completed 668-foot block of flats in New York to remove as many as 20 or more floors from the top of the building. Scott Mollen, a lawyer with the firm Herrick Feinstein, which is representing the project, said the ruling contradicted earlier decisions from the Department of Buildings and the Board of Standards and Appeals that were based on a long-established zoning interpretation. SJP, one of the developers, said they would “appeal this decision vigorously”. What comes next is unclear. While further litigation would...

A standalone security update released as part of the February Patch Tuesday cycle has created headaches for some owners of PCs running Windows 10. After investigating reports of those issues, Microsoft has yanked KB4524244 from its update servers. Update 15-Feb-2020: The mess gets messier: Judging from a series of cryptic tweets by security experts, this update and its revocation are tied to a situation involving Kaspersky Rescue Disk and a signed bootloader that can circumvent the Secure Boot feature that is the bedrock of security on modern PCs. I'm still trying to figure out the sequence of events here. Stay...

This chart, from Gallup as reported by Bloomberg, shows as clearly as anything what a mountain the Democrats have to climb to win the presidency in November. The Democrats are selling pessimism, but the American people aren’t buying it. And young people, minorities and the less well-educated especially aren’t buying it:

Over the past two decades, China's People's Liberation Army has transformed itself from a large but antiquated force into a capable, modern military. Although China continues to lag the United States in terms of aggregate military hardware and operational skills, it has improved its relative capabilities in many critical areas. To advance the public debate, RAND used open, unclassified sources to compile The U.S.-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power. This comprehensive report examines U.S. and Chinese military capabilities in ten operational areas, and presents a "scorecard" for each.Each scorecard assesses the relative advantage or disadvantage...

Sorry The page you are trying to access does not exist. This might be because you have entered the web address incorrectly or the page has moved. For help please visit help.ft.com. We apologize for any inconvenience. Why wasn't this page found? We asked some leading economists. Stagflation The cost of pages rose drastically, while the page production rate slowed down. General economics There was no market for it. Liquidity traps We injected some extra money into the technology team but there was little or no interest so they simply kept it, thus failing to stimulate the page economy. Pareto...

CN yesterday announced it has initiated a "disciplined and progressive" shutdown of its operations in Eastern Canada until protest blockades on its lines in Ontario are removed, company officials said in a press release. The shut down will include stopping and securing all trans-continental trains across its Canadian network, including intercity VIA Rail service. The Metrolinx and Exo commuter-rail services will not be impacted, CN officials said. Earlier this week, protesters set up the blockades across the country in a show of solidarity for the Wet'suwet'en Nation, whose hereditary chiefs oppose the construction of a natural gas pipeline through northern...

As 1809 is nudged toward the darkness, the Baron of Bork has plans for 1903 and 1909 There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and duff patches from Microsoft. So, yes, some Windows 10 users have found their PC unhappy following Tuesday's patch shenanigans.A helpful forum posting from one of Microsoft's loyal MVPs concerning the arrival of KB4532693 for Windows 10 1903 and 1909, and KB4532691 for 1809, has seen some customers reporting that the updates had left their systems a little distressed.Users have found things reset to a seemingly default state and a temporary user account used for...

You may soon be getting your groceries delivered to you by a car with no driver. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) just approved an exemption for the autonomous vehicle startup Nuro to deploy 5,000 driverless electric delivery vehicles. The exemption is for Nuro's R2 delivery vehicle, which is the company's second-generation self-driving vehicle. It is designed only to carry packages, so there won't be any passengers inside. Nuro wrote in a blog post that the company is excited about this development. "We custom-designed R2 to enrich local commerce with last-mile delivery of consumer products, groceries, and hot food...

Nobody is quite sure if, or when, self-driving cars will become fully mainstream. But an experiment run by Lyft with the technology appears to have been an unadulterated success. The ride-hailing service partnered with an automotive technology company called Aptiv back in 2018 to offer self-driving car rides in Las Vegas, and the companies have just announced that they've now served 100,000 customers. In a blog post, Aptiv President Karl Iagnemma writes that people were overwhelming satisfied with their experiences in the self-driving cars. "Notably, 98% of these paying passengers have rated their Aptiv self-driving rides 5-out-of-5 stars, with most...

An interview from 1980 which reveals the uncanny vision and consistency of Donald John Trump.

Censorship. It’s everywhere. Mainstream media daily silences opposition. Social media giants suppress content and suspend accounts at alarming rates. But the form of free speech suppression that goes largely unnoticed is very public. We’re surrounded by it. Our roadways are adorned with billboards selling services, products and worldviews. When it comes to abortion, outdoor advertising companies are increasingly promoting pro-abortion lies while banning pro-life truths. Ten years ago, the organization my wife and I founded—The Radiance Foundation—was the first to launch public ad campaigns that confronted the leading killer in the black community. Abortion outnumbers the top fifteen causes of...

China’s Huawei Technologies Co. and two of its U.S. subsidiaries were charged with racketeering and conspiracy to steal trade secrets in a new federal indictment unsealed Thursday. The additional charges come in a criminal case the company already faces in federal court in Brooklyn. They build on allegations the U.S. filed against Huawei in January of last year. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said the new charges related to an effort by Huawei and its subsidiaries, both in the U.S. and China, to steal intellectual property, including from six U.S. technology companies. Prosecutors said Huawei’s efforts were successful, and resulted in...

Corporate marketing execs clamour to catch the next big trend and run with it. They want to sell an image, a lifestyle, and look compassionate and caring while they do it. That’s what makes Fitbit’s latest move so surprising, and Starbucks’ approach so predictable. Fitness tracker Fitbit’s failure to fabricate gender categories for nonbinary females using the “female health tracker” engendered a freakout from Twitter user Lilo the Autistic Queer. She wanted the app to facilitate period tracking but didn’t fancy claiming femaleness to do it.

Hundreds of F-35s could have the wrong fasteners in “critical areas,” according to the Defense Contract Management Agency. But F-35 builder Lockheed Martin says the problem may not need to be fixed. “All aircraft produced prior to discovery of this [problem] have titanium fasteners incorrectly installed in locations where the design calls for Inconel,” the F-35 Joint Program Office said in an email in response to a query from Air Force Magazine. “Because of this, the engineering safety analysis of the issue has assumed that each critical F-35 joint was assembled with the incorrect fasteners.” Inconel is an alloy of...

<p>STAFFORD COURTHOUSE, Va. (AP) — A black man seen wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood at a Virginia shopping center Tuesday told sheriff’s deputies that he was performing a social experiment, according to authorities.</p> <p>The Stafford County Sheriff’s Office was called to a Target store at the Stafford Marketplace around 2:30 p.m. to investigate reports of someone wearing the costume, Maj. Shawn Kimmitz said in a video statement posted to social media. Deputies found the person in the robe, identified him as a black man and determined he didn’t live in the area, he added.</p>

The term "millionaire" once inferred that a person was part of society's upper crust, able to enjoy luxuries most only dreamed of, including vacation properties and early retirement. The Gilded Age of the 1980s was all about flaunting excess, as echoed in movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and television series like Dallas and Dynasty. Back then one was perceived to be "rich" if he or she had an income of around $100,000, according to a USA Today article released on May 22, 1987. How Many Millionaires Are There in the U.S.? By 1989, American millionaires had become quite...