Tyler Cowen makes some lemonade.

The next time you are waiting in line, take consolation in the fact that otherwise you might not have heard of the opportunity in the first place. If we see a line at a club, restaurant or movie, we figure something interesting is going on there, and so lines have become a driver of publicity.

Income inequality also may be encouraging sellers to use lines to better segment the market. The rich line-jump by buying Museum of Modern Art memberships, to see special exhibits before they open, while others line up. Restaurateurs give regular customers prime tables, especially if they are good tippers and order expensive wines, while others can’t get a reservation after 5:30 or before 11 p.m. This may seem unfair, but it extracts higher prices from those able to pay the most for New York’s cultural institutions and restaurants. In fact, the inconvenience of the line helps sell the more expensive line-jumping package to those who don’t have the time or the patience to wait.

Read it.

Do-it-yourself 3-D printing is good for more than a hobby: it can also allow ordinary Americans to get medical supplies and devices at low prices. The New York Times reports on the increasing popularity of 3-D printed prosthetic limbs for children. With one in every 1,000 children born with missing fingers (post-birth accidents only augment those numbers), there’s a big demand for prosthetics, but traditional ways of getting one are expensive….

Perhaps the answer to high health care prices caused by government interference in the health markets is for people to do it themselves.

Forbes dishes the dirt.

Democrats are supposedly the party of the poor and oppressed, mightily concerned about the distribution of income and the concentration of wealth – right? And Republicans are the party of business and the affluent, more concerned about expanding income, including that of the rich and wealthy, right? If these characterizations are correct, you would expect the political leaders for the Democrats to come from humble educational backgrounds befitting their allegedly populists beliefs.  You would expect Republican leaders to be graduates of our nation’s academically gated communities, the highly selective rich private schools where even today most students come from affluent backgrounds.

In reality, this is all wrong – badly so. Republican political leaders come from far more humble educational backgrounds than their Democratic counterparts. And, for all their talk about income equality, the Democratic leadership has historically protected and expanded educational inequality through its actions, widening the gap between the rich and poor colleges, those considered distinguished and those considered ordinary.

Steven Hayward at Powerline proposes a useful new term.

The term “Fisking” apparently originated with someone’s takedown of a really bad column by British journalist Robert Fisk about 10 years back.  I never read anything by Fisk, but this is what the Urban Dictionary says:

The word is derived from articles written by Robert Fisk that were easily refuted, and refers to a point-by-point debunking of lies and/or idiocies. 

So we need a similar term for debunking the serial nonsense of the Obama Administration. Fortunately an obvious term comes to mind: “Harfing.”  After you know who.  Helps that it rhymes with a certain act of retching that is also symbolically accurate for the kind of nonsense Marie Harf (and the ironically named “Josh Earnest,” if that is his real name) peddle on a daily basis.  I mean really—who knew that “Allahu akbar” means “We want jobs!”  Glad we have Harf around to explain it to us.  So maybe we can get the headline—at least here on Power Line—”More Harfing from the White House Today.”  Almost as good as “More Mush from the Wimp.”

Freeberg reminds us of some inconvenient truth.

These days you really have to live in a cave, or something, in order not to see it. The conflict isn’t between right-wingers and left-wingers arguing about how they should sit in the French Parliament relative to King Louis XVI. The argument is, and has been for awhile, about who should have a greater influence on the direction in which the country is taken: Those who believe next year should yield more bountiful rewards than this year did, or those who don’t believe in that and want everything “equal,” which really means, miserable.

I guess my counter-question would have to be something like: How can anyone pay attention these days, and not see all this?

And that is my question as well.

Read it.

There’s this video, which at least a dozen people have forwarded to me, is circulating the Internet at the moment purporting to “demolish every Hollywood myth” about archery and “prove that Hollywood archery is not historical.” Since apparently hundreds of sites have uncritically repeated its many preposterous and unsupportable claims, with the result that many people have asked me about it, I thought I should offer a detailed analysis.

The question really comes down to three separate categories; (1) the claims made in the narration; (2) the trick shots shown, and (3) Andersen’s actual archery ability.

I must admit I was impressed by Andersen.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

We propose a co-immunity theory of teaching, where attempts by a teacher to alter student neuronal structure to accommodate cultural ideas and practices is sort of a reverse to the function of the immune system, which exists to preserve the physical self, while teaching episodes are designed to alter the mental self.

An even more basic view is to look at ‘schooling’ as a means of sorting students by IQ — the farther you get, the higher your intelligence, so schooling credentials are a certification of intelligence more than a guarantee of specific knowledge.

Italian cultural critic and semiotician Umberto Eco made the connection between the metaphors of religion and technology in a famous essay in which he described “a new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world.” Eco’s tongue-in-cheek metaphor goes like this: The Apple Macintosh computer is Catholic and Microsoft Windows/DOS is Protestant.

Macintosh is Catholic because it is -counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach–if not the kingdom of Heaven–the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. “Everyone has a right to salvation.”

The DOS machine is Protestant because “it allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.” His analysis also includes the improvements made by Microsoft to upgrade DOS to Windows. Eco notes, “Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, tur there is always the possibility of a retum to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to.”

— Brett T Robinson, Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs

Check it out.

I’m with Scott on this one. Every good thing that has ever happened to me is because of a system, not a goal.

Read it.

The American Heart Association and the US govt have been recommending low cholesterol, low saturated-fat diets for over 50 years. However, mounting evidence is removing foods high in cholesterol from the “bad” food lists — and maybe someday foods with saturated fat won’t be perceived as unhealthy either.

Think about that the next time some whiner drones on about how All Right-Thinking Scientists Agree About Global Warming.

Take the test.

David Friedman speaks for all right-thinking people.

Taking a shower this morning I was struck, not for the first time, by how badly designed the mechanism for controlling the temperature is. Turn it a little to the right and the shower is uncomfortably hot. Turn it just a little back to the left and it is uncomfortably cold.

What is going on is pretty clear. The controller maps its position to the amount of hot water in the mix in a roughly linear fashion. All the way to the left is straight cold, all the way to the right is straight hot, any intermediate position is a proportional mix.

In practice, almost nobody wants a cold shower or, unless the temperature of the hot water is pretty low, a straight hot shower. What almost everyone wants is a mix within a fairly limited range—say from .6 hot to .8 hot—with the exact range varying both with the temperature of the hot and the cold water and the preferences of the person taking the shower.

Read it.

Poetry in the twenty-first century is like pottery, woodworking, or the making of carrot carnations. Sophisticated verse was never a major art, and having lost even a small non-practitioner audience, it has lost its status as a minor art. At hobbyist conventions, celebrated practitioners of a craft address an audience made up of other practitioners of the craft, who will then go home and work at the art themselves. Poetry has more residual cultural prestige than carrot carnation making and other hobbies, but that is only because most of the poet-hobbyists are professors with MFAs, while there are no professors of table-setting.

Joel Kotkin lays out some inconvenient truth.

It is unlikely that the American economy can sustain a healthy rate of growth without the kind of production-based strength that has powered Texas, as well as Ohio, North Dakota and Louisiana. De-industrializing states like California or New York may enjoy asset bubbles that benefit the wealthy and generate “knowledge workers” jobs for the well-educated (nationwide, professional and business services employment rose by 196,000 from October 2007 through October 2014), but they cannot do much to provide opportunities for the majority of the population.

By their nature, industries like manufacturing, energy, and housing have been primary creators of opportunities for the middle and working classes. Up until now, energy  has been a consistent job-gainer since the recession, adding  199,000 positions from October 2007 through October 2014, says Dan Hamilton, an economist at California Lutheran University. Manufacturing has not recovered all the jobs lost in the recession, but last year it added 170,000 new positions through October. Construction, another sector that was hard-hit in the recession, grew by 213,000 jobs last year through October. The recovery of these industries has been critical to reducing unemployment and bringing the first glimmer of hope to many, particularly in the long suffering Great Lakes.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, answers some frequently asked questions.

Someone—I think it was the late Larry Auster—said that there is no such thing as a right. There is a left, and it’s been pretty consistently the same across time and space, in all countries and at all times, at any rate since the French Revolution.

There is nothing that solid and consistent on the other side, only an anti-left with many factions, some of them wildly different from each other: libertarians, traditionalists, nationalists, Randian atheists, evangelical Christians …

My vague feeling is: sell libertarianism, buy nationalism. I’m not much of a stock-picker, though.

Read it.

The real cause of Robertson’s plight is more straightforward: The government does a terrible job of getting federal transit dollars to those who need them most, while at the same time constraining private initiatives that could make Detroit far more commutable without costing taxpayers a dime.

Robertson used to own a car, but after it broke down he didn’t replace it primarily because he couldn’t afford insurance. That’s no surprise, given that Detroit’s car insurance premiums are 165 percent the U.S. average, or the highest in the nation.

Why is basic liability coverage so costly? Michigan is the only state that doesn’t cap personal injury claims related to car accidents, and its no-fault insurance law means that drivers are responsible for their passengers’ medical costs whether they’re to blame for an accident or not.

It remains impossible, as it was in the Eighteenth Century, to separate the democratic idea from the theory that there is a mystical merit, an esoteric and ineradicable rectitude, in the man at the bottom of the scale–that inferiority, by some strange magic, becomes a sort of superiority–nay, the superiority of superiorities. Everywhere on earth, save where the enlightenment of the modern age is confessedly in transient eclipse, the movement is toward the completer and even more enamored enfranchisement of the lower orders. Down there, one hears, lies a deep, illimitable reservoir of righteousness and wisdom, unpolluted by the corruption of privilege. What baffles statesmen is to be solved by the people instantly and by a sort of seraphic intuition. Their yearnings are pure; they alone are capable of a perfect patriotism; in them is the only hope of peace and happiness on this lugubrious ball. The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!

— H. L. Mencken

Read it.

You’d be amazed.

Read it.

Most Americans are happy with their commutes and would be willing to trade off even longer commutes in order to live in more desirable housing, according to a survey by YouGov. Moreover, the detailed results indicate that these preferences are almost as strong among 18-29 year olds as among older age classes. YouGov describes itself as a “market research and data company.”

…

The numbers suggest that anecdotes indicating that large numbers of Millennials want to use transit and live close to jobs aren’t supported by the facts. Among other things, the survey found that differences in commuting and other preferences between Democrats and Republicans are greater than between people in their 20s and people in their 50s.

Thomas at Politics & Prosperity has an excellent fisking of Bryan Caplan on the subect.

“I sometimes think Obama thinks he’s in an episode of The West Wing or some other Aaron Sorkin version of reality where the facts always line up to preconceived liberal narratives. … It’s amazing to me how much Obama’s speeches depend on, and benefit from, the same things. The solipsism of the liberal egghead press is partly to blame. Obama goes out there and literally persuades no one about anything, but since he says exactly what a liberal president is supposed to say, they think it’s all brilliant soaring oratory and bold statesmanship.”

— Jonah Goldberg

Read it.

Four months ago, Demeteriya Nabire was killed by a crocodile when she went to the lake near her home to fetch water. The animal later came back to the area but found Nabire’s husband waiting, ready to take revenge.

Not something you read about every day.

Try it.

(The one for the 16th Amendment, by choice.)

Apparently I was at the Battle of Kursk. They don’t say which side I was on, although they do say that I ‘helped stop Hitler’ … so I’ve got that going for me.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem.

The same person who would never trust an optometrist to repair her car’s transmission, or trust an automobile mechanic to prescribe contact lenses to correct her myopia, routinely trusts strangers who specialize in winning popularity contests called “elections” to interfere into her and her neighbors’ lives in many intimate and expansive ways.

And then, when a skeptic of the pretensions of politicians (and of their entourages) suggests that these politicians (and their entourages) address the problems they diagnose, not with government force, but by themselves risking only their own money and effort toward correcting the alleged problems, the response is one of utter dismissal.  ”Ha!  We don’t know anything about actually running actual businesses.  We have no experience at hiring and managing workers.  We haven’t the training or business connections or professional demeanor to, say, profitably employ the low-skilled workers who we nevertheless assure you are currently underpaid.  We have no ability, say, to persuade private investors to risk their funds on alternative-energy projects that we nevertheless assure you will be amazingly profitable.  We have no practical abilities at all!  Yet because we’ve won the most recent election, or because we’ve earned PhDs and read lots of books and academic-journal articles and know what a chi-square test is, we are uniquely qualified to force people to act in ways that we prescribe but which we, on our own, would never dare undertake.  We are paid to rule, not to risk; we are paid to demand of others, not to do of ourselves.”

The fact that such people continue to be called “Progressive,” continue to be considered to be unusually humane and (amazingly) empathetic, and continue to be taken seriously baffles me to no end.

— Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist

Read it.

Last century, William Stanley Jevons, the famous economist who was in part responsible for the marginal revolution, reasoned that because the easy-to-get coal was already gotten, what was left was coal that was harder and harder to reach. Therefore, he argued, we would reach a point where coal would be much scarcer and much more expensive.

As I wrote in my bio of Jevons, here was his error:

Jevons failed to appreciate the fact that as the price of an energy source rises, entrepreneurs have a strong incentive to invent, develop, and produce alternate sources. In particular, he did not anticipate oil or natural gas. Also, he did not take account of the incentive, as the price of coal rose, to use it more efficiently or to develop technology that brought down the cost of discovering and mining (see natural resources).

We have things that are supposed to be illegal that “really” are not, like sneaking across our national border, and we have things that are supposed to be allowed but are “really” against the “law,” like for example forming a Young Conservatives group on a college campus, smoking cigarettes, or wearing a “Proud to be American” tee shirt to a high school on Cinco de Mayo.

It is dangerous, living under two sets of laws like this. It’s not an Obama problem, it’s a baby-boomer problem. The hippies have reached the age where they’re expected to be in charge of things, but they still want to rebel against authority when they are the authority. Their generation has manufactured a contradiction which, I’m afraid, is not finished with doing all its damage yet.

— Morgan Freeberg

The Other McCain has some wisdom for us, if we only have the wit to listen.

We are heirs of a tradition. Each of us is born into circumstances that were created by our parents, by our grandparents, by our ancestors, and by the civilization in which they lived. Human life existed before we born and will continue after our deaths. As children we inherit the past. As parents we create the future. Wisdom requires us to understand ourselves as a single link in an infinite chain of human existence, rather than to imagine ourselves as free-floating atoms unconnected to others.

Popular ideas of “democracy” — the modernistic idolatry that speaks the language of “rights,” “choice” and “equality” — obscure the truth of human existence, trapping us in the present tense, isolating us as rootless individuals removed from the authentic traditions of our inheritance. Children are taught that the past is not merely useless, but actually harmful, because human history is nothing but a catalog of oppression, atrocities and victimhood. Thus, the modern child cannot be allowed to believe that his grandparents were wise or virtuous, that the great achievements of our civilization are worthy of respect.

Read it.

If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it.

The first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is to try to motivate yourself.

The second, somewhat unpopular and entirely correct choice is to cultivate discipline.

This is one of these situations where adopting a different perspective immediately results in superior outcomes. Few uses of the term “paradigm shift” are actually legitimate, but this one is. It’s a lightbulb moment.

Read it.

So Obama has had to abandon his plan to tax 529 college savings plans to pay for his “free” community college proposal, because lo and behold lots of middle class people are 529 savers.  But Republicans could still enable Obama to pay for this proposal with a tax that actually hits the genuine rich: a surtax on large private college endowments—say on all endowments that are more than something like $1 million per student.  This would hit the ivy league schools that these days are raking in nearly $1 billion a year in contributions according to the latest reports.  (I recall an old line from Conan O’Brien—a Harvard grad—about Harvard’s donor pitch: “We’re Harvard.  We don’t need your money.  We just want it.”)  Or instead of a surtax directly on endowments, reduce the tax deductibility of donations to college endowments above a certain level.

And if Republicans really want to start riots in faculty clubs, they should pass Obama’s community college plan with one proviso: that all community college credits be fully transferrable to any four-year college that accepts any federal funding (which is every institution of higher learning except Hillsdale and one or two others).  Watch the four-year colleges sputter with indignation.  Watch Obama veto the bill.

Heh.

Lion of the Blogosphere has a theory.

In the comments, there is often talk about the fattening of America, yet I hardly see any fat white people in Manhattan. Thus I came up with the theory, this morning, that thin people are moving to Manhattan and other thin cities such as Washington, Boston, and San Francisco/Silicon Valley, leaving the fat people behind in the rest of the country. Those readers who live in the rest of the country are, therefore, getting the false impression that the population as a whole, is fatter than it really is.

There is also dysgenic breeding for fatness, because thin people in cities get married late, if at all, and have few children, while the fat proles in the rest of the country are a lot more fertile.

Can’t say he’s wrong.

Ammo Grrrll connects the dots.

In the endless, tedious discussions about “rape culture,” over and over I read testimony from coeds – adult women! – who willingly get into bed with guys and then are amazed when sex occurs. Is there some parallel universe where that is considered unusual?

…

Help me out here, young ladies, because I’m pretty Old School. How humiliating can it be if you get naked with a guy and yet you expect no response? (“Hey, nuthin’ to see here. Just your average naked woman from the dorm next door hoping to catch a few Zs while you watch ESPN. Carry on.”) Here we have a generation of women who have been putting condoms on cucumbers since kindergarten who apparently do not have even a passing acquaintance with actual male sexuality.

Read it.

Paris. February 26, 1635. The Abbé François de Boisrobert stands before the newly minted Académie française and denounces Homer as a base street poet who eked out a living by declaiming his verses to the mob. Boisrobert’s impassioned speech was perhaps the first skirmish in la querelle des anciens et des modernes, whereby one group of writers sought to differentiate themselves from those who paid undue deference to the Greek and Latin poets. But the ancients couldn’t be dislodged so easily. When the corpus of Western literature consisted largely of two dozen writers who had set the standard for plays, essays, verse, and satires, it was no simple matter to consign them to the past, especially when the past was still present.

Read it.

Up to around 1200 members of religious houses—monks and nuns—were the primary consumers of books. They produced the objects themselves and in high numbers, because religious houses could not function without them. The 13th century saw a sharp rise in the production and consumption of books outside the monasteries. Books were now also made for profit in urban shops, both for use by citizens, students and even monks.

Most medieval bookstores were empty because books were too expensive to have in stock. Instead, each customer would have a long talk with the shopkeeper, who would ask how much he wanted to spend, what materials he preferred, what kind of writing style should be used for the text—and so on. The medieval book is therefore always one of a kind. Users often modified the manuscript post-production, bringing it even more in tune with their needs. Bookmarks could be added for quick access to favorite chapters, while nota signs and maniculae placed in the margin marked important passages. Moreover, glosses and slips with notes were inserted where the text needed clarification.

Khan Academy is a magical place.

Read it.

Bryan Caplan examines human nature.

When you’re a normal member of your society, the appeal of collectivism is easy to understand.  Most people believe what you believe and enjoy what you enjoy.  So wouldn’t it be great if society as a whole continuously celebrated your worldview and lifestyle?  When you fit in, walking on eggshells to spare minority sensibilities is most tiresome.

If you’re weird, in contrast, the appeal of individualism is easy to understand.  Most people neither believe what you believe nor enjoy what you enjoy.  You already feel isolated and alone.  Public celebrations of popular values add insult to injury – especially when these celebrations are infused by the presumption that “These are the values that we as a society hold in common.”

Strangely, though, weird people often hail collectivism and scoff at individualism.  Marxists do it.  Greens do it.  And reactionaries do it.  They’re totally out of sync with their societies, but they nevertheless lament their societies’ lack of community spirit and common purpose.  “A country shouldn’t just be a bunch of people living next to each other” is a typical lament.  But weird collectivists rarely ask themselves, “What would happen if I couldn’t live next to anyone who didn’t share my identity?”  The unwelcome answer, of course, is that Marxists, Greens, and reactionaries would have to recant or relocate.

Read it.

This is an interesting piece in and of itself, but even more interesting for the context. This is not an article that would have been written by somebody who actually lived in Oklahoma; no, this is the sort of article written by someone from Washington, D.C. (or New York or Boston or San Francisco), a bona fide inhabitant of the Crust for whom the middle of America is effectively a foreign country, one inhabited by people who kind of speak the same language but in accents that Our Author only hears in movies or on TV by somebody trying to be funny or trying to express foreign-ness.

This comes out even in the opening paragraph:

The freedom of the open road holds no appeal for my 16-year-old son, Miro. Like many of his generation, he sees cars as agents of global warming and the reason American suburbs can be soulless places with no sense of community, let alone pedestrians. Plus, he gets carsick.

Typical Crustian kid being inculcated with typical Crustian concerns. His only experience with ‘produce’ is what shows up under plastic at Whole Foods. Being concerned about global warming is just What Kids Do, like posting selfies to Facebook. He might actually mow a lawn but more likely it’s done by somebody whose first language wasn’t English. (Full disclosure: as mine is.) The whole point of the family’s trip is to retrace a route, not as an actual family from the Dust Bowl era would have done it, but as characters in a Famous Literary Work were said to have done. (I suspect that the author was an English major in college.) This is like trying to learn medieval history by tracing the adventures of Lancelout from Le Morte d’Arthur.

I couldn’t believe how relevant the 75-year-old book—with its depiction of industrial agriculture squeezing out small farmers, climate-driven environmental woes, and migrant workers at the mercy of big landowners—felt today.

Note the desideratum: Relevance. Not accuracy, not authenticity, not getting into the head of people from back then; relevance. (Can ‘consciousness raising’ be far behind?) The author could be a Peace Corps volunteer tromping down Route 66 to See What The Natives Can Teach Us About Our Lives.

As they saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

Read it.

We know about seating plans, table arrangements, etiquette and procedure at many formal meals. Cookery books survive to reveal the kind of dishes that were informally served, and poems and stories attest to what poorer folk ate for supper and dinner.

Breakfasts, by comparison, do not have their literature. Chroniclers did not observe monarchs eating breakfast. The first meal of the day is thus one of those features of life that has slipped through the historian’s net.

Read it.

The fact that this fiery anti-union tirade passed the lips of a blue state Democrat tells you everything you need to know about just how thoroughly teaches union have alienated many of their natural political allies. And this isn’t merely some quirk of New York politics, as the same thing has happened on a local scale in numerous cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Democratic politicians everywhere are more willing to take on teachers unions than ever before.

Right back atcha, Andy — don’t say you represent the people.

Read it.

One of the great advantages of being a historian is that you don’t get your knickers in as much of a twist over how bad things are today. If you think this year is bad, try 1347, when the Black Death covered most of Europe, one-third of the world had died, and (to add insult to injury) there was also (in Europe) the little matter of the Hundred Years’ War and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (where the pope had moved to Avignon, France, and basically the Church was being transformed into a subsidiary of the French regime). Things are looking up already, aren’t they?

Another thing is economics. Everyone complains about taxes, prices, and how expensive it is to live any more. I’m not going to go into taxes – that way lies madness. But I can tell you that living has never been cheaper. We live in a country awash in stuff – food, clothing, appliances, machines, cheap crap from China – but it’s never enough. $4 t-shirts? Please. We want five for $10, and even then, can we get them on sale? And yet, compared to a world where everything is made by hand – we’re talking barely 200 years ago – everything is cheap and plentiful, and we are appallingly ungrateful.

…

Anyway, with clothing that expensive and hard to make, every item was something you wore until it literally disintegrated. Even in 1800, a farm woman would be lucky to own three dresses – one for best and the other two for daily living. Heck, my mother, in 1930, went to college with that exact number of dresses to her name… This is why old clothing is rare: even the wealthy passed their old clothes on to the next generation or the poorer classes. The poor wore theirs until it could be worn no more, and then it was cut down for their children, and then used for rags of all kinds, and then, finally, sold to the rag and bone man who would transport it off to be made into (among other things) paper.

Read it.

On May 20th, 2009 Jordan’s King Abdullah officially opened the King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center (KASOTC), a facility set against a dramatic pocketed plateau on the northern outskirts of Amman. It is called the most advanced special operations training complex in the world and it looks like a life-sized GI Joe dream set.

Now, ask yourself why Jordan, of all places, has need for such a training facility.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, takes a delightful look at an alternate reality.

… news reports would regularly include stories of “grocery experts” offering new and “pioneering” proposals to improve grocery distribution, and the citizens of “grocery districts” meeting with their local “grocery boards” to discuss and debate these different proposals.  Each affiliate of a major national network (like each of the national networks), as well as each newspaper and other significant news outlet, would have its own “grocery reporter” (or “grocery correspondent”) to keep tabs on the latest efforts to improve the way government delivers groceries to citizens.

When new big-city mayors are sworn into office they would typically replace the incumbent “Grocery Superintendents” (or “Grocery Chancellors”) with their own preferred “Grocery Superintendents” (or “Chancellors”).  The local policy punditry would discuss in great detail the differences in the grocery-supply philosophies of the new Grocery Superintendents compared to those of the outgoing Superintendents.  ”Grocery-beat reporters” would often solicit from people on the street these people’s opinions of the different methods proposed to improve grocery distribution.  Question such as “Do you think new Grocery Chancellor Smith’s proposal to allow a handful of people to buy their groceries from charter grocery stores is a good idea?  Or do you side with former Chancellor Jones in staunchly opposing charter grocery stores?” would be asked and seriously answered.

…

Anyone proposing to get government out of the grocery-supply business would, of course, be ridiculed as being totally unrealistic or being an out-of-touch ideologue, or accused of harboring a secret desire to see the the vast majority of people suffer starvation while only the top one percent of the population continues to enjoy excellent access to superb groceries.  Likewise, proposals to cut (or to not increase) grocery-district funding would be widely condemned as being pro-starvation proposals.  And efforts to measure the performance of grocery-store workers would be mocked as impossible as well as unfair to such workers.  Efforts to restrain the pay of grocery-store workers would be portrayed as efforts to deny ordinary citizens access to the best possible supply of groceries.

Have I mentioned that I don’t fly?

Read it.

Last year, AT&T and the online educational organization Udacity teamed up to offer a “nano-degree” that directly trains students for a job with AT&T. This move is in line with a new government report that suggests that more cooperation between universities and businesses is the key to economic success in the future. However, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, is skeptical of nano-degrees. The degrees, he claims, are no substitute for a liberal arts degree.

Indeed not. Unlike a liberal arts degree, they will actually help you get a real job.