Fast food ↓

Is your favorite fast-food place in trouble? You probably wonder about that, if you see the take-out line of cars dwindling or the dining room looking old and shabby. Some old franchises just don't appeal to new generations.

Losing customers is one reason a business may fail. There are quite a few other reasons, including inflation. No business is untouched by inflation. Fast food may still be fast, but it's not so cheap anymore.

See if your favorites are in the video below:

McDonald's is on the list, but it still plans to expand with 8,000 new restaurants and some tweaking of the menu and prices. 

Tuition free 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

For many college graduates, the cost of their education wasn't justified by the results: 85% last year said, "I wish my college had better prepared me for the workplace." They paid the high price but didn't get the result they hoped for.

So, who loses when a college fails to deliver job-ready graduates? Everyone.

One wealthy individual is willing to try to change that dynamic by investing $100 million to make University of Austin tuition-free, with a vision as to how keep it free in the future:

"UATX will prepare students to become the next generation's leading entrepreneurs, innovators, scientists, and philanthropists. In turn, these successful graduates will financially support future generations of students . . ."

"UATX will live [or] die by the excellence of their graduates and the success they achieve in the world . . . If UATX doesn't deliver--in the eyes of its graduates and society--it will cease to exist. And it should."

"I'm Betting $100 Million on a New University"

Tuition free?

What if college were free to its students? How could that possibly happen? 

Universities and colleges are very expensive (image), usually requiring big loans that parents fervently hope will be worth it in terms of future income for their child. Often, it doesn't turn out that way. Many who borrow huge sums discover an ugly truth: the education they went into big debt for does not result in their having the ability to pay it back.

Higher education ought to build the character, skills, knowledge, judgment a student will need in order to flourish and contribute to society. But all that tuition must be paid to the school up front. 

The school gets paid before the student sees results. Some schools get money from the government. Harvard, for example, received $629 million last year from the government, while charging students $87,000 for one year of education. Does that pay off with wonderful results for the student or the taxpayers?

Something is not going right. Our higher education system is broken.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Oracle in TN

Billionaires have been fleeing California. Co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, moved his company headquarters to Austin TX in 2020 and Elon Musk did that with Tesla about the same time. 

Moving out is getting urgent for more of the state's billionaires now. A new state tax may be imposed on their assets (not their income, which is already taxed). That would include the collective worth of their businesses, art, stocks, collectibles, even intellectual property. Texas does not tax assets.

But Ellison (photo) is investing billions in yet another move for Oracle: to Nashville. It's been coming for a while, and Tennessee is willing to invest millions into the move because they see it as a big economic benefit for the state.

The deal included Oracle providing over a billion dollars' worth of development alongside the river downtown, and 8,500 new jobs by 2031 with an average annual salary of $110,000. That's a lot of new money coming into the city.

Yet Oracle employees are not flocking to Nashville despite big incentives and a fancy new headquarters. They seem reluctant. I have to wonder if there's just a significant miss match between wealthy tech workers or executives . . and the culture & politics of the area. What, if anything, will happen politically to the state when all this change finally happens? 

from MSN

Gen Z work

Social media is compelling, sometimes addicting. Among the youngest generation to reach adulthood today, it's been much more influential than it's been for older generations. Negative results have been noted.

A few people have leveraged social media (photo) for big incomes. Gen Z'ers do watch a lot of it and some have done what yesterday's post talks about: they dove into social media and used it to monetize their own lives. 

In fact, a few of them make a whole lot of money doing it. They're open about the money and their audience is impressed: "Watching influencers has changed my perception of what a good job is!"

As one 23-year-old put it, "Influencers are so open and honest about making four times as much as their old nine-to-fives, and having such flexible lifestyles, has opened my generation's eyes into what's possible. It makes you feel completely disillusioned, and it's made Gen Z completely nihilistic about working."

Add the higher cost of housing and issues of affordability to their situation, and working a regular job doesn't look so good.

What could go wrong?

from "Why Gen Z Hates Work"

Gen Z "slop"

Market researchers are trying to understand what Generation Z (born 1997 to 2012) people want in retail products, in entertainment, in jobs, etc. -- of course they are. And they're not the only ones. Even members of Gen Z themselves are trying to do that. 

One Gen Z writer sees something she doesn't want to be a part of:

"They say my generation are wasting our lives watching mindless entertainment. But I think things are worse than that. We are now turning our lives into mindless entertainment. Not just consuming slop but becoming it."

"Influencers" make their lives into a tv series on social media (photo) complete with trailers, cliffhangers, finales--with wedding episodes, new house episodes, baby episodes, etc. ("I have this horrible feeling now that some of us are having children for views! Babies for clicks!")

For her own life, she wants big personal moments with no camera rolling and no one posting it on Instagram.

from We Are the Slop

Buy a house?

Investor and entrepreneur, Peter Thiel (photo), has credentials. When it comes to knowing his way around money, people listen to him because he has real-world results, being a billionaire. 

He notices things about our economy. Housing in America has gone way up in price over the past 5-6 years and you probably noticed it too. Part of the reason is that home building hasn't kept pace with our growing need for it and there are other reasons. But it is certainly true.

Is that good or bad news for all of us? It depends. If you owned property before this rise in prices, it could make you wealthier. But not in terms of income. You wouldn't be able to turn the new and higher value of your home into cash unless you sold it and moved into a much cheaper place. Other properties have risen in value too and you have to live somewhere.

But for everyone who has yet to purchase a property and wants to, it's bad news. Salaries and incomes have risen, but not as much as real estate. You'll pay more, in effect, for your first home than your parents did . . if you're even financially able to do it.

If real estate continues to rise, some segment of our population will be forever priced out. No one actually knows if real estate will keep rising in the future. But if you want to own a property and can do it, maybe you should get on the "real estate ladder" before it's out of reach.

from MSN

Charlie clips 1

After Charlie Kirk was murdered last September on a college campus, attention and controversy swirled around his work. He was loved by thousands (millions?) and hated by many on the other side. 

Opinions abound. If you have no experience in hearing him speak, you could be confused. But there's a simple way to find out what he actually stood for because there are lots and lots of videos of him talking with individuals on his campus tours: authentic and unscripted conversations.

Here's one:

Burned up 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Californians are used to the risk of fires, but the scope of this one was devastating, possibly caused by a century-old transmission line.

In less-affluent areas (where average properties were valued at one million instead of Pacific Palisades where the average was 3x that), some will never be able to afford to re-build. They may have to take the relatively low cash offers of vulture developers and even foreign billionaires who swooped in to scoop them up.

"This is about the end of a place. In the future, the fires will be a demarcation. There will be the times before and after the disaster, and the one will be remembered as this happy, gauzy surreality that never was" . . . When this is over, the politics of this place will be upended."

A local businessman got a call during these fires that his daughter's house was burning, and that the "firefighters' hoses ran dry because the fire hydrants didn't have any water." He says this is a "third world" sort of thing that should never happen in the America's second largest city.

He's expected to run against Los Angeles' current mayor for that office next June. I'll follow this story.

from The Free Press

Burned up

Today it's exactly one year since many Californians lost every material thing they had when their homes burned to the ground. That happened to a renter, Meghan (photo), and this is her account.

What she grabbed in her hasty evacuation by car was her: dog, laptop, change of clothes, dinner, handbag, shoes. She didn't really think the fires would reach her home. But on the 8th, ~nine hours later, her home was destroyed along with about 16,000 other homes in the Los Angeles area.

What she regrets not taking: family pictures, artwork, book manuscripts, etc.: "What haunts me is how much time I would have had to take more things, had I known what was about to happen."

from The Free Press

(cont'd tomorrow: LA fires)

Yes kings

Satire (not reporting) from Babylon Bee 😄

Angry left-wing protesters have made an amazing transition.

Last fall their signs read "No Kings" But now that a dictator (Maduro) has actually been stopped, their signs read "Yes Kings"!

from Babylon Bee

Resisting 5

Follow up to this post

Last summer in Venezuela, the presidential election was stolen by dictator Nicolas Maduro. Nelson Merino had worked the campaign for the opposition party and then worked to prevent Maduro from "illegally seizing power." He writes here about the subsequent suffering he endured for his efforts.

Despite the courage of the opposition and its leader Maria Machado, the dictator retained his power and declared his victory. Merino was soon arrested and charged with resisting authority, obstruction of public roads, incitement to hatred, and terrorism.

"We were tortured. We had no access to clean drinking water and no proper food . . . We had no rights--only what they called privileges." One of those privileges was the paqueteria: every 15 days, family members of prisoners were allowed to bring a 5-liter bottle of drinking water, five packs of crackers, and one chocolate bar. That was all." More details are given in his article below.

Like so many other (photo) Venezuelan patriots, he says "I celebrate and applaud the actions taken by the United States government against the narco-trafficker Nicolas Maduro . . ." 

"Today I am a refugee in Spain with an overwhelming need to return to Venezuela, out of love and commitment to freedom and democracy."

from "I Survived Maduro's Torture State"

Joyful fiction

Writer Andrew Klavan's favorite novel is A Christmas Carol. 

Charles Dickens, the 19th century author of this iconic story, was this sort of person: "joyful and loves humanity and is full of life and entertainment and humor." His characters are "larger than life." Sounds like an author you'd enjoy reading, doesn't it? 

Apparently the "intellectual class" doesn't care for Dickens, Klavan says, because they think darkness is "deeper" than light (which is not true). 

In some ways, reading a book rather than watching a movie based on it is a far richer experience. If you like fiction, consider reading a novel by Charles Dickens.

Everyone

People are working hard to bring The Chosen to a billion people around the world, a huge goal, and it's complicated. An organization outside the actual producing of the show was founded with the mission to accomplish that goal. It's called Come and See.

Spectacle

For wealth and luxury and spectacle, the world has a new icon: the city of Dubai on the coast of the Persian Gulf, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

New Year's Eve fireworks show at the Burj Khalifa was unique, an excessive display: