John T. Reed’s news blog

Interesting column by Greg Ip in today's WSJ. "Virus Hastens Shift to Asset-Light Economy." It us about businesses like Carvana and Vroom which have no traditional brick-and-mortar high-visibility stores. . I have been writing for decades about what I call dispersion. That is the ability of businesses to move to cheaper locations like the suburbs or exurbs or the middle of nowhere. . The event that triggered that to me was Citicorp moving their credit card operations our of NYC to SD. That was enabled by satellite communications which and toll-free phone service which made SD equal to NYC in...

But I just read the list of BLM stuff the NFL is going to do this season. I think I will skip the NFL. If you also are not interested in that garbage, I urge you to skip it. . Rioters have gotten the attention of the NFL owners It is time that viewers also get their attention, by not viewing. If they want to cultivate BLM viewers, let them pay the price for focusing on such a tiny market segment and spitting in the face of the rest of the market. The NFL teams are worth billions. But if...

I now have all the Glock magazines I wanted. Actually, I went over by three. At the end, I was getting on various online stores’s waiting lists and lost track because many had rationing limits like three per customer. Lessons learned: • Buy only Glock OEMs or Magpul, no Promags. I could not get more than 4 rounds into a 10-round Promag. • I could have and did buy all 40 from Hardtofindmags.net, but after the first five, they sent me 35 Promags instead of Glock OEMs or Magpuls. I later got 10 Glock OEMs from that same suppler at...

More home-defense thoughts: . An empty magazine is a paperweight. So is a semiautomatic weapon with an empty magazine or no magazine. . Seems to me all your magazines need to be FULL starting the day they arrive in your mailbox. They are useless until they contain bullets. You do not need to have a magazine in your weapon when there is no threat. Indeed, that may be illegal and is ill-advised for safety purposes generally. . When a threat arises, you can slap a magazine in fast. Filling empty magazines is NOT fast. It is excruciatingly slow if you...

A Facebook reader sent me this about putting money in foreign bank accounts.. Offshore out of reach would seem the only safe option. During hyperinflation I would think the US would use the FBAR to demand repatriation of overseas accounts and impose draconian penalties for failure to do so. I suspect they'd have similar compliance as they did with executive order 6102..And here is my answer: There is no precedent for demanding repatriation of overseas accounts. And the main purpose of overseas account is so you can BE overseas or abroad in places like Canada where you do not have to...