Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Tyler Cowen does his economist thing.

Matt Yglesias suggests the notion is implausible, but I am surprised to read those words.  Keep in mind, we have had a recovery in output, but not in employment.  That means a smaller number of laborers are working, but we are producing as much as before.  As a simple first cut, how should we measure the marginal product of those now laid-off workers?  I would start with the number zero.  If a restored level of output wouldn’t count as evidence for the zero marginal product hypothesis, what would?  If I ran a business, fired ten people, and output didn’t go down, might I start by asking whether those people produced anything useful?

I’d like to know how many of them worked for the government. I have my suspicions.

This would actually seem to be a legitimate case of ‘right-sizing’. Firms are where they ought to be in terms of efficient use of human resources. And classical economic theory says that such is one of the benefits of economic downturns — business processes that were using resources inefficiently get that inefficiency wrung out, and sometimes that means that people get wrung out as well; the basic laws of economics really don’t care whether you as an individual had one of those misallocated jobs.

There is another striking fact about the recession, namely that unemployment is quite low for highly educated workers but about sixteen percent for the less educated workers with no high school degree.  (When it comes to income groups, the lowest decile has an unemployment rate of over thirty percent, while it is three percent for the highest decile; I’m not sure of the time horizon for that income measure.)  This is consistent with the zero marginal product hypothesis, and yeta few analysts ask whether their preferred explanation for unemployment addresses this pattern.axw

Eric Raymond is always worth reading.

One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap. In this essay, I will show that the kafkatrap is a form of argument that is so fallacious and manipulative that those subjected to it are entitled to reject it based entirely on the form of the argument, without reference to whatever particular sin or thoughtcrime is being alleged. I will also attempt to show that kafkatrapping is so self-destructive to the causes that employ it that change activists should root it out of their own speech and thoughts.

My reference, of course, is to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, in which the protagonist Josef K. is accused of crimes the nature of which are never actually specified, and enmeshed in a process designed to degrade, humiliate, and destroy him whether or not he has in fact committed any crime at all.

Much like traveling on a modern airline.

Read it.

When the New York Times was a pure newspaper, it was easy to appear agnostic about its editorial coverage, with no reason to play favorites with one business or another. But as the New York Times has branched out, making investments in external companies, it has acquired pecuniary [that means financial, by the way] incentives to favor those over rivals.

Still, the potential impact of the New York Times algorithm on the internet economy, not to mention the US economy, the US government and the world as a whole is such that it is worth exploring ways to ensure that the editorial policy guiding the New York Times is solely intended to improve the quality of journalism and not to help other businesses that the New York Times owns or the bottom line of its for-profit owners.

Some early suggestions for how to accomplish this include having the New York Times explain with some specified level of detail the editorial policy that guides what it decides to covers, what it doesn’t decide to cover, why it chooses to write a particular headline with a particular angle, to show all versions of a newspaper story that is written from start to finish, to reveal what’s been edited out. Another would be to give some government commission the power to look at all these aspects, perhaps the power to reside within the newsroom and ensure fairness.

Read it.

If you’re reading this article in print, chances are you’ll only get through half of what I’ve written. And if you’re reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion.

Of course, a lot of the problem is that what we’re presented with to read is mostly crap. The editorials in the Guardian will serve as a case in point.

The bear necessities.

Eric Raymond is always worth reading.

I’ve been thinking for some time now that the smartphone has achieved a kind of singularity, becoming a black hole that sucks all portable electronics into itself. PDAs – absorbed. Music players – consumed. Handset GPSes – eaten. Travel-alarm clocks, not to mention ordinary watches – subsumed. E-readers under serious pressure, and surviving only because e-paper displays have lower battery drain and are a bit larger.

This raises an interesting question: what else is natural prey for the smartphones of the future?

Consider. My Nexus One includes a GPS, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a magnetometer. That is, sensors for location, magnetic field, gravitational fields, and acoustic energy. Hook a bit of visualization and spectral analysis to these sensors, and bugger me with a chainsaw if you don’t have a tricorder. A quad- or quintcorder, actually.

Be sure to read the comments as well.

Read it.

Why only half?

Read it.

Two things are clear regarding the post-flotilla twist in the internal Palestinian dispute: It is not just a media war, and neither side is about to give up.

Read it.

The automobile’s potential is its greatest secret—an open secret and yet, it often seems, a forgotten one. The big SUV in my garage may occasionally make a 10-mile trip to Walmart or 2-mile run to the volunteer fire station when the siren sounds. But it has the potential—the size, the power, the range—to take me, my friends, and our bicycles over the mountain to a distant bike trail, or 1,100 miles with a load of furniture and books to my son’s house in Florida.

This is why trains suck unless you haven’t got anything better, and underlies the Crustian fondness for mass transit: because it constrains the ability of the Lower Orders to move about freely.

Read it.

Which means that most of them haven’t been paying enough attention. ‘Progressives’ have over a century of track record, most of it abysmal. Let’s hope that it doesn’t take another hundred years for the lessons of the last hundred to sink in.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading. Always.

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

A modern child doesn’t want some dumb fire truck that could be improved in 25 different ways. He wants a fully focus-grouped Transformers Inferno fire truck / alien robot that is part of a cartoon show and blockbuster movie series and that comes with dozens of other toys in the series to buy. If professional toy designers, researchers, marketers, McDonald’s Happy Meal executives, screenwriters, advertising agents, and web people haven’t taken dozens of meetings over the fire truck and exchanged countless Notes on how to make the entire branding concept more awesome, he doesn’t want it.

Read it.

Henri Pirenne’s posthumously-published Mohammed et Charlemagne (1938) presented to the academic world the results of a lifetime of research and study. His conclusions were stunning. The accepted narrative of western civilization, he maintained, was erroneous in a fundamental way. Classical civilization, the literate and urban culture of Greece and Rome, did not die as a result of the “Barbarian” Invasions of the fifth century. On the contrary, the great cities of the west, of Gaul, of Italy, of Spain and of North Africa, continued to flourish as before, this time under Germanic kings. These monarchs enthusiastically adopted the Latin language as well as Christianity, and regarded themselves as functionaries of the Roman Emperor — who by now however sat in Constantinople. Literature, as well as the arts and sciences, Pirenne found, continued to flourish in the western provinces until the middle of the seventh century. At that point, however, everything fell apart. Now, quite suddenly, a darkness — complete and total — descends. Gold coinage disappears and the great cities go into terminal decline. Within a generation, Europe is in the middle of a Dark Age. The light of classical civilization is utterly and completely extinguished.

What, Pirenne mused, could have caused such a total and dramatic disintegration? The conclusion he reached was almost as dramatic as the civilizational collapse he described. It was, to use Pirenne’s own phrase, explainable in one word: Mohammed.

Steve Sailer is always willing to talk about things that other people avoid.

Everybody is in favor of in-depth analysis of educational statistics in theory, but when they actually finally look at them, the obvious leaps out: Holy cow, compared to everything else, race really matters. You can’t adjust it away (except by using cynical proxies for race the way Steven Levitt tried to do a few years ago: e.g., favorite soda flavor is Grape or the rough equivalent). And when it comes to physics and a few other subjects, sex matters.

Steve likes to say that a ‘race’ is actually an endogamous extended family, concerning which genetic differences are not only natural but inevitable.

The Other McCain doesn’t shrink from saying what we all know to be true.

This pattern illustrates a common-sense truth so basic that it seems a bit silly to state it directly: Criminals commit crime.

Contrary to media distortions, criminality is not evenly distributed throughout the population. A small and fairly distinct group of career criminals — recidivists, habitual violators, call them what you will — account for the majority of serious crime in America.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

That’s a big transaction cost. It’s much more efficient to be able to trust somebody you are doing business with when he tells you orally that the diamond is flawless. But how do you trust him? Because if he gets a reputation for cheating his relatives, his children will never find spouses.

In addition to being a fascinating story, it also serves to limn Sailer’s oft-propounded thesis that a ‘race’ is merely a large extended family that practices endogamy. This is an idea worth exploring, but which doesn’t get a lot of attention from the Crust. And there are implications:

But, I was struck while reading Michael Chabon’s 2007 alternative history bestseller, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, that the book is pretty dull until the villains in black hats are finally introduced. And the villains are literally in black hats: they’re ultra-Orthodox men who wear black hats. The book takes wing when Chabon — who is quite representative of mainstream modern American Jewish ethnocentric sentiments (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) — gets to indulge his fine, fierce hatred of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Sure, there are a few pages about how much his Yiddish policemen heroes despise American Republican goyim, but Chabon’s heroes really, really hate the black hats.

Chabon is a 21st Century Jew — all that 20th Century Jewish teamplay might be falling apart.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

But, men play the Great Game not because it makes sense but because they like to win. So, it’s unlikely that China and India will sit out the Great Game for the rest of the century. Let’s assume that China and India eventually decide to play for dominance of the world.

Read it.

There are small sidewalk-affixed plaques in many locations in Berlin, including on my street.  Here are some visual examples and here are many more.  They sit by the victim’s former home and list the victim’s name, the date he or she was taken away, and date and place he or she was murdered.  The word given is the more brutal “murdered” (ermordet), not “killed.”

A great idea. We could do the same in Washington, putting little plaques to memorialize where individual rights were murdered by the government.

Eric Raymond has some useful stuff to say.

No matter what you think you are and no matter what “reality” may be, the experience that you have to deal with (like every other human being) is of being thrown into a surrounding that does things independently of your thoughts. Shit happens, and you have to deal with it. The first step to dealing with it is to be able to predict it.

All truth claims can be unpacked as predictions. Sometimes they’re predictions about obvious, directly observable events in our immediate environment (”Rain will make your head wet.”). Sometimes they’re predictions about events we can’t observe directly but which have consequences we can observe (”Electricity is a flow of electrons,” or “Genetic information is carried by DNA.”) Sometimes they’re predictions about the distribution of outcomes in repeated tests (”A flipped coin will fall heads-up half the time and tails-up half the time.)

We can also say what “theory” is. A theory is just a machine for generating predictions. We judge the theory’s “truth” by whether those predictions are correct. And, remember, we make predictions because we need to cope with the shit that happens. A theory is a survival adaptation: we are theory-builders because we are prediction-needers because we are goal-seekers because we are survival machines.

Steve Sailer does the comparison. His conclusions seems to be that Eclipse is a pretty bad movie that nevertheless tunes in to the zeitgeist more effectively than Knight & Day. (Full disclosure: Herself and I did Date Night with Knight & Day and had a great time; while there, we saw a trailer for Eclipse and weren’t impressed.)

A weaker novelist than Rowling, Meyer less understands the adolescent girl’s mind than shares it. Her Bella epitomizes teen self-obsession, the ambition to have every boy fight over you and every girl hate you for it.

Today’s butt-kicking babe films are particularly odd because current audiences also prefer girlier leading ladies than back in the Golden Age of such formidable femme fatales as Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, and Katherine Hepburn.

Ah, those were the days.

In Eclipse’s funniest scene, Bella is livid after beefcake Jacob tries to kiss her, even though Jacob knows perfectly well that she loves Edward. So, like an Angelina Jolie heroine, Bella hauls back and socks Jacob on his square jaw. Jacob, whose neck is wider than his head, doesn’t even flinch, but Bella sprains her own wrist, leaving her whimpering in pain.

Bryan Caplan explains.

Judging everyone as an individual is expensive, and relying on statistical generalizations is a cheap and effective alternative.  You don’t clutch your purse when you see a bunch of little old ladies approaching on a deserted street.  You don’t offer a policeman a joint.  You don’t hire a guy with a mohawk as a receptionist at a law firm – even if he promises to get a hair cut.  Why not?  Because on average, little old ladies don’t commit violent crimes, policemen arrest people for possession of marijuana, and guys with mohawks have trouble with authority.

Read it.

Note how the 2010 election results mirror the 1864 boundaries almost precisely. If you are a Pole and live in a part of Poland that was ruled by Prussia in 1864, you almost certainly live in an area carried by Komorowski. If you live in one of the parts ruled by Russia or Austria, you almost certainly live in an area carried by Kaczynski, unless you live in a large city (over 100,000 people—those are the orange dots in the sea of blue).

That’s really freaky.

Read it.

France is considering forcing tourists and any others who shun government advice and travel to danger zones to foot the costs to free them if they are kidnapped.

What a remarkably sensible idea. Or, better yet, just leave them there.

Watch ’em.

Obvious lacunae: Nothing featuring Toshiro Mifune. But they’re still pretty good.

Freeberg performs an operation known in Biblical terms as ‘rightly dividing the word of truth’.

By “The Davids” what I mean in this case is Frum, although there are others. People who sell themselves as reformed or repentant conservatives, to other people who have no idea what a conservative really is and are never going to know. Conservatives who are “social moderates,” long to reach “across the aisle” — who voted for Barack Obama, not as a protest against the George W. Bush free-spending (heh!), but because “There’s Just Something About Him!”

Anyway. Brock, Brooks, Frum, Weigel — there’s just something about that name “David.” They get a business opportunity and suddenly, there’s an awakening. (Not with Weigel of course, he was busted in a scandal; not that he was fooling anybody.) Oh my! We have to do this one thing — elect Obama, pass ObamaCare, whatever. I’m still a conservative mind you! Although I’m ashamed at some of my fellow conservatives, because it’s true we’re all a bunch of bigots. Except me! But I’m still a conservative. Just a moderate one.

Master Cadfan says:

There was an autistic named Jobs
Who sold shiny baubles to snobs.
They waited in line
For his latest design
And gave him their money in gobs.

To which Master Tadhg responds:

Of course, a technology geek,
When spending his money, is weak;
But when puberty hits,
It will focus his wits —
And it won’t be the Droids that he’ll seek.

Megan McArdle isn’t let marriage soften her brain.

I confess, I fail to see the liberal romance with Social Security.  I don’t mean the notion of making sure that old people don’t go hungry.  I mean an attachment to Social Security in its current form so strong that it interprets any change in benefit levels as tantamount to implementing an ice floe strategy.  The program was implemented in 1935.  What are the odds that its structure and retirement age are suitable for the current era?

Read it.

Might a legislature properly pass laws restricting what people eat? But of course we already have that. Might a legislature properly conclude that selling trans fats is as great a crime as it would be to sell heroin? If a legislature can forbid marijuana, why can’t it forbid tobacco? If you can’t sell carbon tetrachloride bombs as fire extinguishers (when I was a lad, there were Popular Mechanics advertisements inducing young people to make their fortunes selling carbon tet bombs door to door) why could not a legislature forbid you to sell butter?

But of course we are here discussing the powers of the states. I continue to ask this question: if it required the 18th Article of Amendment to the Constitution to allow the Federal Government the power to forbid the possession and sale of alcohol — prior to the 18th the Court threw out the Volstead Act — and the 18th was then repealed, under which provision of the Constitution does the Congress have the power to forbid the possession and sale of marijuana? Heroin? Cocaine? Forbid their interstate shipment, yes, perhaps, but forbid a California farmer from growing hemp for sale within California? The states have such powers, but does Congress?

I suspect that Kagan would not make such a nice distinction, but I have no way of knowing. Will the joining of a sociological jurisprudence law professor to a wise Latina make for a better Court? Or even add to its diversity?

Good questions all.

Read it.

Mencius Moldbug is back … and he’s Bad.

Pseudoscience will generally be found solving problems, such as climate prediction, in which the scientific method does not work at all. Rather, other forms of reason are the only reasonable ways to reason about the problem – or there may be no effective means of prediction at all. Thus, there are no scientists to fight. You can’t beat something with nothing.

Once the actual constitution of a country – the actual rules of decision by which its government operates – has diverged from its official constitution, what is the meaning of the latter? The answer is: it has no meaning at all. A constitution is a contract. Once broken, it is meaningless. “The Constitution” is an interesting historical document, no more valid than the Salic Law. Rather, it is “constitutional law,” ie, the precedents of the Supreme Court, which are the supreme law of the land.

Thus, in the terms of John Austin, who holds sovereignty in the United States? The Council of Nine, also known as the Supreme Court. For they are the unmoved mover, those whose decisions are final and cannot be overridden.

As we have seen, “rule by law” means “rule by judges,” and “rule by social science” means “rule by pseudoscientists.” Either, in other words, equates to “rule by men.” If these men are effective and responsible, they will govern well. Otherwise, they will govern badly. This has been true for all of history and will never change. Only in our time has it been so persistently denied.

To be brutally frank, these bureaucrats have no interest at all in Professor Hanson’s results. For one thing, his ideology is completely incorrect. Behind the veil of pseudoscience lies an oligarchy, of which Professor Hanson is not a member. He and his lessers in the George Mason School are of no relevance at all, because they are wingnuts at a Virginia cow college. At the top, power is always a matter of social exclusion.

Wisdom. Attend.

The Christian life is no different – for it is not a set of ideas to be memorized – but a life to be lived. For this reason, Christ had disciples. For this reason the Church had a catechumenate that often lasted for three years. We learn the Christian life by doing it. We learn to pray by praying and praying along with those who know how to pray. We read Scripture with those who have read it before us and from them we learn how it is that a Christian reads Scripture. Those who have not been trained in such a manner are like children building a house with bricks. They may have the proper ingredients – but the result is likely to be a house that falls down.

As the bumper sticker says: “If you can read this – thank a teacher.”

Jeff Jarvis waxes dyspeptic (and, in passing, gives a poke in the eye to the PC Language Police).

I don’t think that is society’s myth. We all know better than to believe that men have no beliefs — because we are all merely men* with beliefs of our own.

No, the opinionless man is an institutional myth, a fiction maintained by news organizations, political organizations, governments, businesses, churches, and armies. The opinionless man is meant to be an empty vessel to do the bidding of these hierarchies. But opinions and openness about them subvert hierarchies. Or to translate that to modern times, via the Cluetrain Manifesto, links subvert hierarchies. This is the age of links. So hierarchies: beware. One opinion leaks out of the opinionless man and it is shared and linked and spread instantly. The institutions treat this revelation as a shock and scandal — as a threat — and they eject the opinionated men. That is what happened to McChrystal and Weigel.

Read it.

Lots of lessons here:

1. They talk a lot but they’re afraid, profoundly afraid (can you imagine the RG generals talking to the Supreme Leader? “But Excellency, they will kill us all…”);

2. They will not risk direct confrontation, because any defeat will encourage the Iranian people to bring them down;

3. They talk a lot about the glories of martyrdom, but the martyrs they have in mind are the Arabs they send into battle or on suicide missions against us;

4. The trouble with American leaders is that they want to be loved, whereas a healthy dose of fear will do wonders for the region.

Read it.

As David H. Freedman notes in “Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them,” such cluelessness is all too common in our expert-mediated world. Look at all those economists who failed to predict the great crash of 2008 or the rating agencies whose metrics melted into mere wishful thinking. Realtors, who are supposed to know more than you or I about the housing market, predicted housing prices would trend up for 2008. Experts, schmexperts.

Read it.

A ‘monster’ great white shark measuring up to 20 ft long is on the prowl off a popular Queensland beach, according to officials.

Swimmers were warned to stay out of the water off Stradbroke Island after the shark mauled another smaller great white which had been hooked on a baited drum line.

The 10-foot great white was almost bitten in half.

Is it Shark Week yet?

Read it.

Six months ago, Kevin Rudd was one of Australia’s most popular prime ministers in history. The brainy and intense Labourite had beaten four-time PM John Howard in a smashing victory and his Australian Labour Party was comfortably ahead in the polls. Today he’s gone, resigning mid-term rather than be dumped by his own party. What happened?

Gotta love Australians. They may be crazy but they’re not stupid.

Read it.

Gotta love Australians.

Freeberg cuts to the chase.

Look how democrats run their own party. When there’s a position available, and there’s a person available to be appointed to it, all they seem to care about is whether he’ll be effective in that position. Nothing else matters. They want to win. If you’re available, and your skin color would inject some much-desired “diversity” into the ranks that’s missing now but you’re likely to fuck it up, then out you go. White, black, red, yellow, green, purple, gay, straight, male, female — if he can do the job, then what the hell, hire him.

It is quite alright, when a democrat runs up against some enemy of the democrats, to allow his passions to run unchecked and wild. They feel no shame about the fantasies they have about making that enemy sorry his parents ever met. It is commonplace that a democrat waxes lyrically about the day he’ll be able to waterboard Sean Hannity, and all of a sudden waterboarding isn’t quite so bad. I’d like to see my country defended with that kind of passion.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

One of the odd things about the topic of immigration is that the Canada, that beau ideal of progressivism, has always officially subscribed to the notion that the purpose of immigration policy is not to benefit immigrants but to benefit current Canadians, whereas in the U.S., that idea is considered almost unmentionable. Here, it’s considered just plain racist to point out that even illegal immigrants’ posterity aren’t likely to be big contributors to the common weal.

It’s also amusing that the author is concerned about the Harper government’s lack of enthusiasm for letting immigrants’ parents and grandparents immigrate. Immigration is publicly justified in Canada as providing the young workers who will pay for the pensions and free government health care of old Canadians. But, the immigrants themselves keep demanding that their aged parents and grandparents (!) be let in to provide them with uncompensated (and thus untaxed) child care.

Robert Samuelson takes a look behind the smoke and mirrors.

Just once, it would be nice if a president would level with Americans on energy. Barack Obama isn’t that president. His speech the other night was about political damage control — his own. It was full of misinformation and mythology. Obama held out a gleaming vision of an America that would convert to the “clean” energy of, presumably, wind, solar and biomass. It isn’t going to happen for many, many decades, if ever.

Unless we shut down the economy, we need fossil fuels. More efficient light bulbs, energy-saving appliances, cars with higher gas mileage may all dampen energy use. But offsetting these savings will be more people (391 million vs. 305 million), more households (147 million vs. 113 million), more vehicles (297 million vs. 231 million) and a bigger economy (almost double in size). Although wind, solar and biomass are assumed to grow as much as 10 times faster than overall energy use, they provide only 11 percent of supply in 2035, up from 5 percent in 2008.

Read it.

I have lived in the country all my life and I know what a pub means to a village or a hamlet. When I was a student, I used to work in a country pub, which I still think – thanks to the charismatic personality of the landlord – was perhaps the best I have ever set foot in. It was truly the centre of the village’s life; it had the atmosphere of a rather good club, though one without a waiting list or any sense of social exclusivity.

Apparently the old Britain is not yet dead.

Read it.

When Stella Hardesty had taken all the abuse she could handle from her no-good husband, she took him out with a wrench. It was self defense, plain and simple, and Stella was acquitted. Nowadays she owns Hardesty Sewing Machine Repair & Sales and runs a little vigilante attitude adjustment service on the side. Word gets around, whispered from woman to woman. When a wife or girlfriend needs protection from the jerk she hooked up with in a moment of stupidity, she’s likely to hire badass Stella to pay the jerk a not-so-friendly visit.

I am actually motivated to read this book.

Read it.

This is the sort of original thinking that usually winds up getting somebody arrested.

Read it.

A lot of heavy thinking in one place. Check it out.

Seth Godin is always worth reading.

I think #3 is the dominant factor here.

Freeberg does the flip side.

It occurs to me that perhaps there’d be less consternation and contention if alternatives were provided. How can people show off their wonderfulness? My short answer would be: Just stop showing off. After all, if you look to others to confirm that you’re wonderful, and what you’re really after is self-confidence, obviously you’re never going to get there — you have to develop your own internal barometer for your wonderfulness. You need to be sure. You have to get hard-nosed enough that a whole room full of people can tell you you’re wrong about something, and deep down you’ll still know you’re right. You have to measure this independently.

Read it.

Scott Adams is an absolute genius at making money from things that suck. Here’s how.

People ask me how it feels to take the side of moral bankruptcy. Answer: Pretty good! Thanks for asking. How’s it feel to be a disgruntled victim?

I hate BP, but I admire them too, in the same way I respect the work ethic of serial killers.

Instead of investing in companies you hate, as I have suggested, perhaps you could invest in companies you love. I once hired professional money managers at Wells Fargo to do essentially that for me. As part of their service they promised to listen to the dopey-happy hallucinations of professional liars (CEOs) and be gullible on my behalf. The pros at Wells Fargo bought for my portfolio Enron, WorldCom, and a number of other much-loved companies that soon went out of business. For that, I hate Wells Fargo. But I sure wish I had bought stock in Wells Fargo at the time I hated them the most, because Wells Fargo itself performed great. See how this works?

If you buy stock in a despicable company, it means some of the previous owners of that company sold it to you. If the stock then rises more than the market average, you successfully screwed the previous owners of the hated company. That’s exactly like justice, only better because you made a profit. Then you can sell your stocks for a gain and donate all of your earnings to good causes, such as education for your own kids.

Read it.

Nearly three decades ago, Gary Lauder received a traffic ticket. “I didn’t come to a complete stop at an intersection,” he said in a phone interview. “There were zero oncoming cars, and I rolled. The ticket only raised revenue and maybe filled a quota. It really bugged me.”

Mr. Lauder’s idea is informed as much by environmental stewardship as a desire to avoid unwarranted stops. “By bringing a vehicle to an unnecessary stop, energy is wasted on multiple levels,” he said. “Efficiency is more than just about the vehicle, it’s also about the road.”

Read it.

Rather than betting that aid dollars can beat poverty, Romer is peddling a radical vision: that dysfunctional nations can kick-start their own development by creating new cities with new rules—Lübeck-style centers of progress that Romer calls “charter cities.” By building urban oases of technocratic sanity, struggling nations could attract investment and jobs; private capital would flood in and foreign aid would not be needed. And since Henry the Lion is not on hand to establish these new cities, Romer looks to the chief source of legitimate coercion that exists today—the governments that preside over the world’s more successful countries. To launch new charter cities, he says, poor countries should lease chunks of territory to enlightened foreign powers, which would take charge as though presiding over some imperial protectorate. Romer’s prescription is not merely neo-medieval, in other words. It is also neo-colonial.