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The problem, of course, is what happens when you actually open these up to regulatory interference. Suddenly, they become political footballs. We’ve seen this with copyright, where it’s become a case of regulatory capture — laws are pushed to protect entrenched interests, rather than to support what copyright is supposed to do (promoting the progress).

Jacob Sullum at Reason weighs in.

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Might even be purple. You never know.

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The New York Times finally arrives at the party.

Bryan CaplanIf we were starting from scratch, I agree that it would be great to scrap both “capitalism” and “socialism.”  Etymologically, capitalism does sound like a system of rule by capitalists for capitalists – and socialism sounds like a system of rule by society for society.  Since neither etymological suggestion is true, I wish the terms had never been coined.

As Sheldon admits in his talk, however, changing words is like changing currencies.  If they’re already widely accepted, you need a really good reason to abandon them.  Awkward etymology notwithstanding, I think the concepts of capitalism and socialism are good enough to keep using.
picks a nit or two.

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Gotta love Australians.

Jeremy Wagstaff does some deep thinking.

We watch, read, scan and listen to news sources not only to discover information, but to discover, or confirm, the absence of information: the absence of news. Non-news.

We need to know, in other words, what isn’t happening because that way we can be sure that we’re safe. That we’re not about to be swallowed up by a tsunami, or a rate cut, or a virus.

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Roy, this is the blog I was talking about. (I love the author’s pseudonym, too.)

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The responses tended to split into two categories: One said that I was overemphasizing the pragmatic aspects of graduate school at the expense of the “life of the mind” for its own sake. The other set of responses, and by far the more numerous, were from graduate students and adjuncts asking why no one had told them that their job prospects were so poor and wondering what they should do now.

More discussion about graduate study in the humanities.

The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother—who was never very good at school—makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)

Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon “the life of the mind.” That’s why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.

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PG has just released their proposal today, in a “healthcare manifesto.” The central problems facing hospital design happen to have already been solved in the design of first-class cabins for airlines, they say.

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Well, they are French, after all.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

When all is said and done, what’s in it for you? Or, better yet, what’s in it for them, the “social-justice queers”? They’ve got their tenured positions at the universities or their jobs at liberal magazines or their book contracts. They’ve got their six-figure executive salaries at gay-rights groups and their prestigious appointments to government jobs. And you’ve got (maybe) some symbolic policy change that is, at most, of indirect value to your quality of life.

Wake up, chumps. The poverty of the poor is not caused by the wealth of the rich, and discontents of gay people aren’t the result of heterosexuals monopolizing happiness. The politics of spite and envy — which is to say, the agenda of the Democratic Party — can never lead to “social justice,” because there is no such thing as “social justice.”

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I don’t think I’ve ever been sad when a Supreme Court Justice has retired.

Preach it, brother.

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This is news?

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After 4 years of no numerical or posted daytime speed limits on these classifications of highways outside of urban areas, Montana recorded its lowest number of fatal accidents on the affected roadways.

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A few weeks ago, I linked to a picture of civil rights activist John Salter being attacked by a mob during a lunch counter sit-in during the 1960s. I also linked to a newspaper op-ed in which Salter explained how he and other civil rights workers used firearms for protection from Klansmen and other terrorists—when Klansmen knew that a homicide would not be witnessed by the news media. Since that blog post drew great interest from the readers, I thought that some persons might be interested in the longer version of Salter’s history of the role of armed self-defense in the Civil Rights Movement.

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Scientists worship at the altar of peer review, and I use that metaphor deliberately because it is rarely if ever questioned.

There are a few studies that suggest peer review is somewhat better than throwing a dice and a bunch that say it is much the same. It is at its best at dealing with narrow technical questions, and at its worst at determining “importance” is perhaps the best we might say. Which for anyone who has tried to get published in a top journal or written a grant proposal ought to be deeply troubling. Professional editorial decisions may in fact be more reliable….

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I have always fancied being bored on a huge and stylish scale. I’m talking Great Gatsby boredom, with everyone lying around in white clothes and floppy hats, sipping long drinks with cooling names, and being utterly and divinely bored. How sophisticated can one get, goes my thinking, that even when surrounded by the best things in life, it’s not enough? Boredom wins through.

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The flowchart is especially amusing.

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The way you get to be a colonel is by being a good soldier. The way you get to be a general is by being a good politician. Everybody in the officer corps of the United States soon learns this.

There remains a distinction, however, between generals who become even better soldiers (Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, Creighton Abrams, Norman Schwarzkopf, Tommy Franks, David Petraeus)  and those who phone-in the soldier part and concentrate on becoming better politicians (Dwight Eisenhower, William Westmoreland, Colin Powell, Wesley Clark, Alexander Haig). The latter are a serious danger to our Republic, but unfortunately their chosen career path gives them the inside track to success in an increasingly political world.

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If everyone else obeys such a ‘ban’, then that leaves more for the Japanese. Most nanny-staters would characterize this as a solid example of the ‘freeloader problem’.

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Historians have finally revealed what they reckon is the definitive site of the Battle of Bosworth – the 22 August 1485 scrap in which Henry Tudor’s army defeated Richard III’s forces.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Doesn’t that sound like a great name for a high-school football team? The Balch Springs Cane Toads!

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So how come I can’t wear jeans to work?

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It’s good to know that the Central Incompetence Agency isn’t the only thing standing between us and the Bad Guys.

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Grant Achatz is probably one of the best chefs now living; El Bulli was reputed to be the best restaurant in the world. This is an amazing story.

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There seem to be reports of sudden acceleration of spending, and of brakes failing. Toyota has shown us the way.

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Although analysis of the man’s mitochondrial DNA proves that he was of Asian origin, the archaeologists are unable to say whether he himself settled in Italy or whether he was the descendant of an Asian family which was already living there.

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Megan McArdle does what she does best.

The possibility that no one risks death by going without health insurance may be startling, but some research supports it. Richard Kronick of the University of California at San Diego’s Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, an adviser to the Clinton administration, recently published the results of what may be the largest and most comprehensive analysis yet done of the effect of insurance on mortality. He used a sample of more than 600,000, and controlled not only for the standard factors, but for how long the subjects went without insurance, whether their disease was particularly amenable to early intervention, and even whether they lived in a mobile home. In test after test, he found no significantly elevated risk of death among the uninsured.

If gaining insurance has a large effect on people’s health, we should see outcomes improve dramatically between one’s early and late 60s. Yet like the Kronick and Rand studies, analyses of the effect of Medicare, which becomes available to virtually everyone in America at the age of 65, show little benefit. In a recent review of the literature, Helen Levy of the University of Michigan and David Meltzer of the University of Chicago noted that the latest studies of this question “paint a surprisingly consistent picture: Medicare increases consumption of medical care and may modestly improve self-reported health but has no effect on mortality, at least in the short run.”

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Australia is witnessing the emergence of “Kangatarians” – people who limit their diet to vegetables and kangaroo meat only.

I love the use of the word ’emerge’ – as if this were some new species.

Gotta love Australians.

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“At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be ‘What Is Hell?’ Come early and listen to our choir practice.”

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Works for me.

The foundation admitted people would earn less, but said they would have more time to carry out worthy tasks.

And, as we all know, Worthy Tasks are our chief priority.

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Too many Americans live in two-story homes, and/or have basements, yet have no easy access to the upstairs bathroom and Halloween decorations in the attic, or to the aunt living up there. They are forced to rely on outdated “stairs” technology. (And stairs are dangerous! So this is far more urgent than broadband! Show your outrage! Etc.!) So I ever-so-slightly tweaked the letter; this bold new campaign is meant to rectify this injustice and I hope you’ll sign on and spread the word.

Joel on Software.

At one point I entertained the quixotic and, retrospectively, stupid idea of requiring every employee at Fog Creek to be a programmer… even the receptionist would have to have done some BASIC programming in high school to qualify. In the US Marines everyone, even the cooks, is a rifleman. Of course that’s because the cooks are in friggin Afghanistan getting shot at so they better be riflemen, whereas our receptionist almost never has to drop into the source code and bang out a class. Almost never.

The population of the planet is so large, and the effect of sales and marketing so hard to scale, that by the time your product is really great, the optimal ratio might be very heavily tilted in favor of sales and marketing. Large software companies might have 5 or 10 or 20 people in the sales organization for every developer.

This explains, among other things, why US software companies can’t expect to get sustainable advantage by offshoring software development to cheaper countries. If a developer in Russia, India, or China costs 50% as much as a developer in Seattle, San Francisco, or Boston, but software development is only 10% of your costs, you can only get a 5% advantage from offshoring development. The offshoring that does happen is strongly biased to custom software development which, by design, can only solve one person’s problem, so more developers than marketers are needed.

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Not necessarily a bad thing.

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Like the space race, the America’s Cup race brings out the rich-guy toys that advance tech for the rest of us.

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It’s all about motivation.

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In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) describes the tendency to over-value dispositional  or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. It does not explain interpretations of one’s own behavior – where situational factors are often taken into consideration. This discrepancy is called the actor-observer bias.

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The young men and women of America’s future elite work their laptops to the bone, rarely question authority, and happily accept their positions at the top of the heap as part of the natural order of life.

Training the Crustians of Tomorrow.

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Hey! I like Spam!

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Take a look at this amazing color film footage of London in the 1920s.

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These are astonishing.

Megan McArdle is as unimpressed with the iPad as I am.

I do not want to go to school today.I’d rather just relax at home and playComputer games, or maybe read a book;then, at the proper time, perhaps I’d cookA meal that takes some time and thought to do;Not like our lunches, spare and quickly madeBefore commuting to our daily trade,Where moments to relax are brief and few.

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This is what the monster movies don’t show you: The enormous commercial possibilities of, say, crabs the size of SUVs.

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Japanese horseradish, whose smell is more usually found in sushi restaurants, contains allyl isothiocyanate – the same chemical compound that gives mustard its bite – and tests at the Shiga University of Medical Science have shown that virtually all the hearing-impaired people exposed to the odour of wasabi woke up within two-and-a-half minutes.

That would certainly make me wonder what was going on.