Read it.

Read it.

Everyone repeat this 100 times.

Read it.

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

Check it out.

This is, of course, all leading up to International Talk Like a Pirate Day, September 19th.

Read it.

Do not be surprised if electric cars do not follow the trajectory of personal computers and mobile phones. Leaving aside the prohibitive prices, the infrastructure needed to support wide-scale use of electric cars is nonexistent. How readily will the requisite millions of batteries be available when manufacturers are quick to unveil new, bold electric car plans but slow to commit to massive battery orders? And how will people in large cities, where 30 to 60 percent of cars are parked curbside, charge their vehicles? Mass construction of charging stations must precede mass ownership of electrics outside of the suburbs, where vehicles could be charged in garages. This is why researchers at IHS Global Insight put the share of pure electrics at just 0.6 percent of world sales in 2020, and why any claim that electric cars will soon take over the market is utterly unrealistic.

Janet Daley at the Telegraph understands America better than most.

Check It Out.

The calligraphy is pretty cool, too.

The Ochlophobist reflects on the current scene.

I have burned a lot of books in my day. It was a ritual at a former workplace of mine. We burned some old, beat up Qur’ans we didn’t think would ever sell, but, for the sake of fairness of course, we also burned translations of the Bible that we didn’t like and everything that Matthew Fox ever wrote and pretty much every work of pop spirituality that was published in English in the 90s. Burning books is fun, shooting them is funer, and blowing them up is funest. But since becoming Orthodox, a religion which burns holy things which are no longer usable, such as damaged icons, etc., it seems that burning as an act of dissent is not as fun as it used to be. Perhaps they could put a Qur’an into a jar of urine. No, wait, that is what Americans from blue states call art, and Muslims who know that our federal government occasionally pays to have Christian symbols thus treated might then think that Islam has finally made it as an accepted American religion, and I don’t think that is the purpose behind what had been planned for a Florida campfire tomorrow. We live in confusing times.

David Friedman looks at manners.

My objective is to get him to go back to the end of the line, getting me through a little faster, and to do it with a minimum of unpleasantness. By treating his act as a mistake I lower the cost to him of doing what I want, since doing so does not require him to implicitly confess a deliberate violation of local norms. Lowering the cost to him of doing what I want makes him more likely to do it. What my friend regarded as behavior due to courtesy appears to me as a simple application of economics.

Tom Smith puts the boot in.

It’s a perfectly obvious point, but perhaps still worth making.  When the government does not tax some income of a very rich person, that is not a “giveaway”.  That is the government not taking some money that was earned by some rich person.  Some people have a lot of money.  When you take their money from them, it is their money you are taking.  Indeed, this is what thousands of pages of tax law goes to determine:  Is it income?  Is it your income?  If it is neither yours nor income then it won’t be taxed as part of your income tax.  It is the most annoying thing tax people do — referring to income the government does not take from you as something it has given to you.

However little the rich may deserve their wealth, the government deserves it even less.

Eric Raymond spills his guts.

Ah, but then came the deadly disclaimers. “VEGAN GLUTEN-FREE NO GMOs NO TRANS FAT.” and “We support local and fair-trade sources growing certified organic, transitional, and pesticide-free products.” Aaaarrrgggh! Suddenly my lovely potential snack was covered with an evil-smelling miasma of diet-faddery, sanctimony, political correctness, and just plain nonsense. This, I find, is a chronic problem with buying “organic”.

The problem is, every time I buy “organic”, I feel like I’m sending a reinforcement to several different forms of vicious stupidity, beginning with the term “organic” itself. Duh! Actually, all food is “organic”; the term just means “chemistry based on carbon chains”.

Read it.

It could happen.

Joel Kotkin is always worth reading.

According to Columbia University’s Saskia Sassen, megacities will inevitably occupy what Vladimir Lenin called the “commanding heights” of the global economy, though instead of making things they’ll apparently be specializing in high-end “producer services” — advertising, law, accounting, and so forth — for worldwide clients. Other scholars, such as Harvard University’s Edward Glaeser, envision universities helping to power the new “skilled city,” where high wages and social amenities attract enough talent to enable even higher-cost urban meccas to compete.

The only problem is, these predictions may not be accurate. Yes, the percentage of people living in cities is clearly growing. In 1975, Tokyo was the largest city in the world, with over 26 million residents, and there were only two other cities worldwide with more than 10 million residents. By 2025, the U.N. projects that there may be 27 cities of that size. The proportion of the world’s population living in cities, which has already shot up from 14 percent in 1900 to about 50 percent in 2008, could be 70 percent by 2050. But here’s what the boosters don’t tell you: It’s far less clear whether the extreme centralization and concentration advocated by these new urban utopians is inevitable — and it’s not at all clear that it’s desirable.

Perhaps we need to consider another approach. As unfashionable as it might sound, what if we thought less about the benefits of urban density and more about the many possibilities for proliferating more human-scaled urban centers; what if healthy growth turns out to be best achieved through dispersion, not concentration? Instead of overcrowded cities rimmed by hellish new slums, imagine a world filled with vibrant smaller cities, suburbs, and towns: Which do you think is likelier to produce a higher quality of life, a cleaner environment, and a lifestyle conducive to creative thinking?

Dense urban areas are the product of societies with primitive transport and communication systems. People had to be close together in order to work together efficiently. That is growing increasingly untrue the more technology advances. Already we have companies that consist of a handful of people scattered across a continent. Are they going to want to live cheek-by-jowl, or in places where they have some breathing room? The only barrier to geographic dispersal is infrastructure, and with 4G wireless and satellites that is becoming less and less of a problem.

Read it and stretch your brain a bit. It will do you no harm.

Sections of the humanities have engaged in any amount of elitism.  If we wanted an example, we could look at how Latinists have eliminated J and V from texts, in favour of texts only using I and U — and then printed them, not in capitalis, but in the lower case script invented in the 15th century!  The process introduced a barrier to ordinary people, made the learning and reading of Latin harder, and privileged a caste of professional scholars.  Claims that it was more authentic merely sought to sugar-coat the real effect – and the real purpose — of the change.  Such elitism, the creation of professional classes, the claims that disciplines like history — or theology — are owned by those drawing salaries are malevolent.  Once the people who pay are excluded, they will naturally ask why they are paying.

I do not think any here will suspect me of undue reverence for the humanities.  My training is as a scientist, and the use of the humanities to decorate with authority the claims of some political or religious position is why I can’t take much of it seriously.  The manner in which some disciplines have been prostituted for political purposes is known to us all.  Sociology died of such a process; economics barely survived being gang-banged for the ends of state socialism.  Theology does not deserve to survive unless it purges its culture of Christian-baiting and seeks to escape the process whereby the assured results of scholarly investigation have always reflected the desires of those who control university appointments.  The way in which the scholarly study of Lucian in 19th century Germany reflected precisely the attitude of the state authorities towards anti-semitism, lucidly document by Holzberg in “Lucian and the Germans”, indicates that classics has no objective standard on which to operate.  The list might be extended probably endlessly.

Why history?  Why teach it?  What does it matter, how the despots of the Byzantine empire fought off their foes?  Do we care about the processes whereby the Fathers decided whether Cyril or Nestorius should be condemned?

It does matter.  It matters deeply to us all.  Our society came into being by the rediscovery of the classical world.  The education provided by the classics, both those of the Greek and Latin world, and of the English-speaking world, is one that can never become outdated, except in the eyes of those whose hate for our society exceeds reason or sanity.  To know them is to become an educated man.  To listen to their voices is to escape the tyranny of the present.  To love them is a liberal education.

Jeremy Wagstaff has some good things to say about the future that we’re seeing all around is.

I look at it like this: Written content is platform agnostic. It doesn’t care what it’s written/displayed on. We’ll read something on a toilet wall if it’s compelling enough (and who doesn’t want to learn about first-hand experience of Shazza’s relaxed favor-granting policies?)

We knew this already. (The fact that content doesn’t care about what it’s on, not how Shazza spends her discretionary time.) We knew that paper is a great technology for printing on, but we knew it wasn’t the only one. We also knew the size of the area upon which the text is printed doesn’t matter too much either. From big notice boards to cereal packets to postage-stamps, we’ll read anything.

So it should come as no surprise that reading on a smartphone is no biggie. The important thing is what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi defined as flow: Do we lose ourselves in the reading? Do we tune out what is around us?

Surprisingly, we do. Usually, if I’m in a queue for anything I get antsy. I start comparing line lengths. I curse the people in front for being so slow, the guy behind me for sneezing all over my neck, the check-in staff for being so inept.

But then I whip out my phone and start reading a book and I’m lost. The shuffling, the sneezing, the incompetence are all forgotten, the noise reduced to a hum as I read away.

Wagstaff’s blog, Loose Wire, is always worth reading.

Read it.

“Gold is money because people make it money. Paper money is money because governments make it money,” says Peter Schiff, President of Euro Pacific Capital Inc. in Westport, Conn., and a notable dollar bear. “But what happens if people lose their faith in governments, and the U.S. government in particular?”

A very good question.

This latest quest to wean the world off dollars actually began in Adam Smith’s homeland, Scotland, when an aspiring actor named Ian Dallas left his home near Glasgow to seek out the bright lights of London in the 1960s.

Mr. Dallas, now 79 years old, fell into the hippie circuit and played a telepath in the Federico Fellini movie “8½” before ultimately converting to Islam in Morocco.

Mr. Dallas took the name Abdalqadir al-Sufi and set up his own sect, the Murabitun—or “the people of the outposts”—before settling into a wind-blasted mansion named Achnagairn near Inverness in the Scottish highlands.

There, Mr. Dallas and his followers surrounded themselves with banks of computers and began work on creating an Islamic currency to replace the dollar and help speed up the collapse of the West’s credit-driven financial system.

See? It’s impossible to be a Muslim and leave other people the hell alone.

Read it.

Don’t have to say that twice.

The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve want to fix the United States economy by spending more money. But while that approach might work for Europe, it is risky for the US. The nation would be better off embracing traditional American values like self-reliance and small government.

And this is written by a European.

Read it.

The University of Haifa team say people use both sides of their brain when they begin reading a language – but when learning Arabic this is wasting effort.

The detail of Arabic characters means students should use only the left side of their brain because that side is better at distinguishing detail.

I can’t imagine that it would be harder than, say, Japanese or Chinese.

When someone learns to read Arabic they have to work out which letters are which, and which ones go with which sounds.

It is the ability to tell letters apart that seems to work differently in Arabic – because telling the characters apart involves looking at very small details such as the placement of dots.

Not sure how this differs from Hebrew.

Characters in English and Hebrew are easier to tell apart because there are clearer differences between them than there are in Arabic.

Oh, okay.

Read it.

This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Or perhaps just killing everyone who tries to find you. Word gets around.

But that’s just me.

Read it.

To answer the question specifically: technologies that show the potential to be most widely adopted will have a combination of network effects, a sticky user experience, and a low-resistance path-to-market that focuses on users and circumvents institutional decision making.

Works fine, lasts a long time, fails safe, and drains to the bilge.

Education is what happens while we’re going to school, even though there is no necessary connection between the two.

Read it.

Perhaps we just need a new metaphor to point the way to salvation.

David Friedman ponders a zombie.

Macro is not my field. One of the reasons it is not my field is that, so far as I can tell, it lacks a theoretical structure as solid or as well supported as price theory—popularly but misleadingly called “Micro.” One result is that a course on the subject is a tour of either a cemetery or a construction site.

The cemetery is the orthodox Keynesian account according to which a depression is the result of insufficient demand due to the exhaustion of investment opportunities, monetary policy is useless because the economy is in a liquidity trap, and the proper solution is for the government to run a large deficit, converting the excess savings into government expenditure. That was the accepted wisdom fifty years ago. As best I could judge, as observer not participant, it fell out of favor among academic economists in the ensuing decades, due to both theoretical and empirical problems.

The construction site is the attempt to replace the old orthodoxy. Some of it gets labeled “monetarism,” some “neo-keynesianism,” some other things. None has been sufficiently successful to have achieved the status of a new orthodoxy.

Read it.

Loners often hear from well-meaning peers that they need to be more social, but the implication that they’re merely black-and-white opposites of their bubbly peers misses the point. Introverts aren’t just less sociable than extroverts; they also engage with the world in fundamentally different ways. While outgoing people savor the nuances of social interaction, loners tend to focus more on their own ideas—and on stimuli that don’t register in the minds of others. Social engagement drains them, while quiet time gives them an energy boost.

Yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about….

Read it.

There are many passages that now appear quaint, and a few that will offend the kind of person who believes that it was wicked of our ancestors not to subscribe to late-twentieth-century intellectual fads. Towards the subject peoples of the British Empire, Baden-Powell nursed the same mixture of disgust, paternalism, and respect that one finds in Kipling — that was, in fact, normal among thoughtful, humane Englishmen at the height of the Empire (Baden-Powell was born in 1857).

This edition includes, as an appendix, Baden-Powell’s warning against self-abuse, headed “Continence.” The author had wanted this section in the 1908 edition, and in fact fought for its inclusion. Both publisher and printer believed the material to be obscene, and the printer finally resolved the matter in their favor by simply stopping his presses until Baden-Powell gave way. Reading the passage now, it seems unexceptionable. Baden-Powell probably overstates the negative physical and mental consequences of excessive masturbation, but his advice here, as almost everywhere else in his book, is on the whole practical and sound: “[I]t is easier to stop it at first than when it becomes a habit … Avoid listening to stories or reading or thinking about dirty subjects … Restrain yourself when you are young and you will be able to restrain yourself when you grow up …” etc., etc. Of course, anyone suggesting such self-control to young boys nowadays would very likely end up in jail for some offense against political correctness — “onanophobia,” perhaps. That, however, is our fault, not Baden-Powell’s.

Read it.

For the first time in more than 30 years, the U.S. military has allowed an enlisted Sikh soldier to maintain his religiously-mandated turban, beard and hair while serving in the Army.

Lamba was recruited by the Army in 2009 through the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest program for his language skills in Punjabi and Hindi. He was initially advised by an Army recruiter that his Sikh articles of faith would likely be accommodated. But the Army’s current regulations do not permit a new recruit to request a religious accommodation.

It would seem foolish to reach out to someone for specific skills and then get all bureaucratic on him.

The Onion is on the case.

With audible murmurs of “This is no way to live,” “What the hell am I doing here—I hate it here,” and “Fuck this place. Fuck this horrible place,” all 8.4 million citizens in each of the five boroughs packed up their belongings and told reporters they would rather blow their brains out with a shotgun than spend another waking moment in this festering cesspool of filth and scum and sadness.

But municipal unions still hold out for wage and benefit increases.

Read it.

ANY reasonable observer might have thought Bill Millin was unarmed as he jumped off the landing ramp at Sword Beach, in Normandy, on June 6th 1944. Unlike his colleagues, the pale 21-year-old held no rifle in his hands. Of course, in full Highland rig as he was, he had his trusty skean dhu, his little dirk, tucked in his right sock. But that was soon under three feet of water as he waded ashore, a weary soldier still smelling his own vomit from a night in a close boat on a choppy sea, and whose kilt in the freezing water was floating prettily round him like a ballerina’s skirt.

But Mr Millin was not unarmed; far from it. He held his pipes, high over his head at first to keep them from the wet (for while whisky was said to be good for the bag, salt water wasn’t), then cradled in his arms to play. And bagpipes, by long tradition, counted as instruments of war. An English judge had said so after the Scots’ great defeat at Culloden in 1746; a piper was a fighter like the rest, and his music was his weapon. The whining skirl of the pipes had struck dread into the Germans on the Somme, who had called the kilted pipers “Ladies from Hell”. And it raised the hearts and minds of the home side, so much so that when Mr Millin played on June 5th, as the troops left for France past the Isle of Wight and he was standing on the bowsprit just about keeping his balance above the waves getting rougher, the wild cheers of the crowd drowned out the sound of his pipes even to himself.

Read it.

The President’s fashion statement gets no respect across the pond.

I don’t know about you, but I had never considered words on my carpets. Where will it all end? Garage doors with: “Open the gates of new life” (Browning)? A chair with: “Sit thou still when kings are arming” (Scott)? A loo with: “Roses for the flush of youth” (Christina Rossetti)?

It is not that household goods have been quite free from writing. “Bathmat” it says, in a gnomic kind of self-reference, on some bathmats. “Bread” it says on some breadboards, though never “Board”. The next step is the “Welcome” on the doormat.

I have a front door mat that says ‘LEAVE’.

Read it. And watch the video.

Unfortunately, The Other McCain doesn’t tell us the name of the movie.

Read it.

Read it.

Read it.

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.

On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

Tim Cavanaugh ‘fesses up to his guilty secret.

Yes, he’s trying, as Moynihan memorably put it, to learn history and teach it at the same time. But so what? Like the dumpy woman with low self-esteem we all dream of, Beck makes up in enthusiasm what he lacks in natural gifts. I like the sense that he’s bringing you his findings as fast as they come in. You get the impression that two weeks ago Beck had never heard of Woodrow Wilson, yet now he has figured out that Woodrow Wilson was one of the most evil people of the 20th century, and he wants to tell everybody. There’s something fun about that, a performance that invites you to help fill in details and fix errors. It’s certainly something you don’t see anywhere else on TV, a medium populated almost entirely by people who are more cocksure about everything than I am about anything.

And he’s right about Woodrow Wilson.

Read it.

Nick Gillespie doesn’t take himself or his movement very seriously … which is why he’s one of the best writers at tReason Magazine.

I think part of the problem with these sorts of discussions, including Brink Lindsey’s liberaltarianism, is that participants are constantly mixing levels of discussions (I know I do). Liberals and conservatives are used interchangeably for Democrats and Republicans, right wing and left wing, etc. While the Dems are reliably more liberal (in a contemporary sense) than Republicans, the overlap isn’t perfect and many liberals have libertarian or even conservative sympathies. And while their numbers are small, there are in fact libertarian Democrats along with liberal Republicans. Most importantly, how someone governs is probably less a reflection of ideology than other material concerns (there’s the Marxist libertarian in me!).

Jonah Goldberg has a newsletter called the G-File which used to be posted on the National Review site but now requires subscription:

I’m not necessarily advocating that we take him out. First of all, even if it were a good idea, it’s too late now. But think about it. If you go by nearly every Hollywood treatment of the CIA or the NSA, Assange is precisely the sort of guy who should have been garroted in his French hotel room years ago. He’s setting up a website — a series of websites, really — that will allow whistleblowers, traitors, cranks, and misguided morons to publish the government’s most closely kept secrets. Some of these disclosures are guaranteed to damage American national security and put U.S. interests and lives at risk. What are super-cool CIA assassins for if not stopping this sort of thing in its tracks? Whether you think the CIA is an honorable  and unfairly maligned outfit that does democracy’s dirty work, or if you think it’s a hotbed of lawless evil setting back human progress at every turn, you would still expect the spooks to off this guy quietly before anyone had heard his name.

Indeed.

The Other McCain has an excellent rant.

Top-down political organizations tend to destroy grassroots enthusiasm, driving away volunteers and chilling voter enthusiasm, because Ordinary Americans aren’t stupid. You can fool the people only so long before they start wising up and figure out that there is a scam afoot. They may not understand exactly how the scam works, but when the people at the grassroots see powerful insiders trying to handpick their nominees – ask yourself, how did John McCain’s presidential campaign come back from its summer 2007 near-death experience? — they understand that it’s a crooked racket, and that’s when they decide they’d rather stay home on Election Day.

Read it.

The secret of Big Macs is that they’re not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way. If you’re willing to live with not-very-goodness, you can have a Big Mac with absolutely no chance of being surprised in the slightest.

I think this is just Urban Snobbery – it’s fashionable to sneer at McDonalds, so he sneers. I rather suspect that a Big Mac is superior to any burger that Joel Spolsky could cook. I am notoriously picky when it comes to food — ask anybody who knows me — and I find the Big Mac perfectly adequate. It isn’t the best, but it’s FAR from the worst.

Anyway, he’s really talking about software, and I suspect he knows more about software than about cooking. Enjoy.

Read it.

In the recoveries from the previous two recessions, small businesses led job creation. This time, however, small businesses aren’t hiring. Here’s why.

Read it.

But where the two groups do not overlap, I am not sure that the group we are rescuing from sudden interest rate changes and late fees is more needy than the group who is now paying higher interest rates to counterbalance the fees.    Indeed, the higher interest rates could conceivably tip some people into the “misses bills” group.

I don’t often disagree with Megan McArdle, but this appears to be one of those times. I disapprove of her apparently willingness to use “more needy” as the primary criterion as to how the credit card business ought to be structured; I’d prefer “more fair”, which I think this legislation promotes.

Read it.

It’s clear now with devices like the Kindle and the iPad that the bookcase is going the way of the LP. It will be a slow death, with paper enthusiasts holding on for decades. While the LP lived for less than 50 years before it started to be dwarfed by newer technologies, the book and bookcase had an extraordinary life.

Arnold Kling has the low-down.

The locavore movement says, in effect, that it knows better than the market the true cost of locally-grown vs. shipped-in produce. In fact, locavores know much less than the market. This is a basic and important point of economics. If I were to make a list of ten things that I hope that my students still understand years after they have taken my course, this would certainly be one of them.

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Watching the Treasury conference on housing finance earlier this week, I was struck by the gloomy thought that we will never get out of this housing mess until we are ready to face facts. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s remark that the demise of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was caused by their pursuit of short-term profits was not a constructive contribution to the resolution of the major issues before us. In reality, Fannie and Freddie were doomed by a badly designed government housing policy, and government efforts to disguise its responsibility with a false narrative will only make a solution more difficult.

Watch it.

This is one of the funniest things I’ve see this year. Colbert should be this funny.

Read it.

As so often happens, what the Crust views as a moral crusade is in actuality merely a fashion statement.

A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy. That assumes it’s one of the latest high-efficiency models; otherwise, you can double that figure. Cooking and running dishwashers, freezers and second or third refrigerators (more than 25 percent of American households have more than one) all add major hits. Indeed, households make up for 22 percent of all the energy expenditures in the United States.

Agriculture, on the other hand, accounts for just 2 percent of our nation’s energy usage; that energy is mainly devoted to running farm machinery and manufacturing fertilizer. In return for that quite modest energy investment, we have fed hundreds of millions of people, liberated tens of millions from backbreaking manual labor and spared hundreds of millions of acres for nature preserves, forests and parks that otherwise would have come under the plow.

Don’t forget the astonishing fact that the total land area of American farms remains almost unchanged from a century ago, at a little under a billion acres, even though those farms now feed three times as many Americans and export more than 10 times as much as they did in 1910.

Read it.

Another excellent reason to stay away from Facebook.

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A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country’s industrial might.

Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and reached a surprising conclusion — unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.

Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development — in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.

Read it.

Rich people typically become rich because they don’t accept the conventional wisdom in their chosen fields, being more ready to ‘think outside the box’ and achieve success thereby. But intellectually they’re as stuck in the box as everybody else. And it’s a pretty silly box.

Successful entrepreneurs-turned-philanthropists typically say they feel a responsibility to “give back” to society. But “giving back” implies they have taken something. What, exactly, have they taken? Yes, they have amassed great sums of wealth. But that wealth is the reward they have earned for investing their time and talent in creating products and services that others value. They haven’t taken from society, but rather enriched us in ways that were previously unimaginable.