Read it.

Read it.

The value of £5,000 a year (in 1800 terms) is, of course, self-evident.

Read it.

This week and over the coming weeks the media and the nation will once again focus on healthcare. Before we launch into the next phase of the argument, though, we should first dismiss a couple of “Red Herring” claims that we spend too much on health care.

These claims are the ones based on a view of healthcare spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or that look at the increase in healthcare spending over time. Proponents say that spending 14 to 17 percent of gross product on health care is evidence that we spend too much. Or, they say that health care spending is increasing at a far faster rate than the economy is growing.

So what?

There is no optimal amount of healthcare as a percentage of GDP. Remember, healthcare is a good thing.

Arnold Kling has an interesting thought.

Russ Roberts is working on a paper suggesting that the fragility of our financial system could be the result of past bailouts, in which unsecured creditors and counterparties of financial institutions were always made whole. In some sense, the fact that the Fed fears contagion makes them turn such liabilities into ex post nearly riskless assets for investors.

Read it.

The article in Washington Monthly discusses a company called StraighterLine, which offers online college classes, but it totally disrupts the traditional business model of university learning. While the classic model is that you pay per class (or per semester as a fully matriculated student), StraighterLine has a simple model: you pay $99/month and get an all-you-can-eat offering. You go at your own pace — so if you have lots of time (and can complete the work) you can take multiple classes in that month. In the opening story of the article, a woman completes four full classes in just two months — for a grand total of $200. Taking those same classes at either local universities or online would have cost thousands, and would have taken much longer to complete. And, it’s not as if the StraighterLine courses skimp either. According to the article (and it would be great to hear from anyone who’s tried it to see if this is true), they use the same materials found in many college courses.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

You can get a better overview of how good a film is by looking at the average scores on an aggregator site like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB that give you the wisdom of crowds. (You just have to keep in mind the biases of the various crowds, whether underemployed ex-English majors on Rotten Tomatoes or bachelor fanboys on IMDB.)

My general prejudice is to view over-achieving films made by underdogs through the glass-is-half-full lens and underachieving ones made by overdogs through the half-empty lens. Thus, recent Quentin Tarantino films tend to annoy me because Tarantino long ago demonstrated his enormous talent, and elaborate meta-explanations about why it’s cool that he’s wasting his powers making ingenious crud bore me. It’s not that I’m not intellectually sophisticated enough to understand the rationalizations. I just don’t care.

Read it.

Nowhere did anyone address the fundamental question: under what principle do we all acquire a right to health care paid by someone else, and under what principle do those who have to pay acquire the obligation? Whatever principle that is must have some other consequences, and I’d like to know what those are. It’s a pretty fundamental change in our political philosophy. Does it mean that everyone is entitled to anything that someone else can afford? It probably doesn’t apply to health care alone. Where does this right stop? Does it apply to cosmetic surgery for burn victims? Those with genetic malformations? Aging skin sag? Breast implants? I don’t ask these questions frivolously: since I don’t know what principle is being applied to infer that everyone is entitled to health care whether they can afford it or not, it’s hard to see what else that principle implies. There must be other implications, but what are they?

Read it.

Ah, well, the Irish aren’t what they used to be — most of those came over here.

Read it.

A South African IT outfit has shamed telecoms operator Telkom by sending 4GB of data 60 miles by pigeon in two hours – faster than it arrived by the ISP’s broadband service.

We have the technology.

Read it.

The psychology of political attention and labeling here is fascinating. ‘Stimulus’, according to Merriam-Webster, is “something that rouses or incites to activity.” So the very terminology, ‘economic stimulus,’ already decides the debate in favor of the view that it boosts the economy.

Bryan Caplan examines an interesting thought.

The Other McCain waxes philosophical.

The September issue of Commentary has a symposium in which six writers discuss Norman Podhoretz’s latest book, Why Are Jews Liberals?

Read it.

It’s always fun to “run the numbers” with respect to politics; you can wind up with some very interesting stuff.

Read it.

Stuff about pens to make your brain hurt. Just sayin’.

Read it.

Joel Spolsky is always worth reading.

Lacking a program manager, your garden-variety super-smart programmer is going to come up with a completely baffling user interface that makes perfect sense IF YOU’RE A VULCAN (cf. git). The best programmers are notoriously brilliant, and have some trouble imagining what it must be like not to be able to memorize 16 one-letter command line arguments. These programmers then have a tendency to get attached to their first ideas, especially when they’ve already written the code.

Steve Sailer is always — let me repeat that: ALWAYS — worth reading.

From this perspective, the 1960s cultural revolution look like an Elites Liberation movement, in which Unitarians, Congregationalists, Jews, Episcopalians, Christian Scientists, and similar products of centuries of bourgeois culture decided that they, personally, could get by without the old rules, which, indeed, many of them could. Moreover, they were tired of being expected to be role models of starchy behavior for the proles.

But the tenor of the times demanded that this Elites Lib movement be cloaked in egalitarian and civil rights rhetoric and policies (such as refocusing AFDC from Roosevelt’s aim of supporting widows to supporting single mothers, because we wouldn’t want to discriminate against blacks), with disastrous effects on people toward the bottom of society, especially blacks.

Read it.

I am saddened to see no Democrats on this list. Well. Perhaps the Internet is not the panacea that I had hoped it would be.

Read it.

Ted Kennedy’s death sort of shook up the list, I don’t doubt.

Megan McArdle is on the case.

It seems clear to me that switching freight to rail whenever possible should be a policy priority, but it’s the red-headed stepchild of the environmental movement.  We need freight cars that look more like pandas.

Mencius Moldbug continues the seminar.

For example, your old decision structure might be: the Constitution of the United States of America, under the laws of Congress and the several states, as executed by the President and judged by the Supreme Court, answering through free and fair democratic elections to the self-governing American people. Your new decision structure might be: Chuck Norris.

Michael Pollan talk about food. A fascinating guy, for a communist.

But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

Read it.

Bryan Caplan is not afraid to ask the Politically Incorrect question.

Textbook accounts of monopoly usually take the existence of a monopoly for granted, then analyze its consequences.  When I was an undergraduate, this usually provoked me to argue with the textbook.  “Where did this ‘monopoly power’ come from?!” I’d ask.  My inner rant then continued: “If the firm has a monopoly because the government made competition illegal, the solution isn’t antitrust; it’s legalizing competition.  If the firm has a monopoly because it’s the best, the solution isn’t antitrust; it’s a little freakin’ appreciation.”

Read it.

Hey, whatever works. (Actually, they were wondering how this dork ever came to be considered funny, but he obviously doesn’t speak gorilla.)

Jerry Pournelle runs what may be the original blog and always has interesting things to say.

On education, the usual critique of charter schools is that they are guilty of “cherry picking” which is to say, they accept only students who want to learn something and are willing to be disciplined. Thus an academically accomplished charter school in DC was not allowed. Cherry picking is supposed to be a bad thing? As opposed to the current practice of making those who would like to learn in DC go to a school that accepts those who do not want to learn and refuse to be disciplined? And this from people who are supposed to be liberal? It seems to me a very good way to keep the blacks in their place. Make them go to lousy schools filled with disorder while you send yours to schools that have discipline, and then on to Harvard. Is that the goal of liberalism? To keep the blacks down? Because I think of no better way to accomplish that goal than what is happening in DC. Tons of money spent on truly horrible schools that no one who could possibly escape them would go to? Would anyone who had in mind the good of black children in DC permit the current school system there to exist for ten minutes more?

The money is spent, and the results are known, and nothing is to be done. Yet under the Constitution the Congress is responsible. One presumes that both parties intend the results obtained since neither party makes any attempt to do anything about it.

Megan McArdle is always worth reading.

First of all, as it shows in the articles I linked earlier, something like 90% of homicides are committed by people with criminal records, i.e. people who probably cannot legally own a gun. A lot of the rest are committed by juveniles, or mentally unstable people, who also cannot legally own a gun.

It is perfectly true that adding a gun to a dispute involving violent criminals increases the likelihood that someone will be shot.  But violent criminals are not like the rest of us.  They have very poor impulse control, and, well, a demonstrated willingness to use violence.  They also are not likely to apply for a permit before packing heat.

Read it.

The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption.

This will be interesting.

Read it.

One might still ask why the power-seekers tend to predominate over those who place a higher value on the public good. The key explanation is selection effects. A politician willing to do anything to take and hold on to power will have a crucial edge over an opponent who imperils his chances of getting elected in order to advance the public interest. The former type is likely to prevail over the latter far more often than not. This is especially true in a political environment where most voters are often ignorant and irrational about government and public policy. Candidates have strong incentives to pander to this ignorance and exploit it in order to win elections. Those unwilling to exploit public ignorance because they place the public interest above political success are likely to be at a serious disadvantage relative to their less scrupulous opponents. Thus, those who value power above other objectives are more likely to succeed politically. As economist Frank Knight wrote back in the 1930s, “[t]he probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation.”

Not a very complicated notion, but apparently some people have to have Gresham’s Law explained in simple terms.

Read it.

Ambrose Bierce had some language issues.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

If you think of CIA less as the puppet-master of world history and more as merely one well-funded player in an international version of the municipal Favor Bank familiar from Bonfire of the Vanities and The Wire, then the idea that Obama got help from CIA-connected individuals along the way seems less shocking and more plausible. He’s not the Manchurian Candidate, he’s just a kid whose parents exploited Cold War tensions to get him a favor or two.

Steve Sailer is, yet again, not afraid to look hard issues square in the eye.

The main positive finding of the comprehensive Coleman Report of 1966 (funded by LBJ’s the 1964 Civil Rights Act) was that after all the differences in student backgrounds were accounted for, the one thing that schools could do to help students was give them higher IQ teachers. (Coleman, as he admitted in 1991, downplayed this finding in his report because black teachers averaged lower IQs than white teachers.)

Read it.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Mercies and the God of All Comfort, who comforts us in all of our afflictions.

Problem solved.

Jerry Pournelle discusses the health care debate.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

The fundamental observation of colonialism is that non-European societies thrive under normal European administration, at least in comparison to their condition under native rule. This observation was obvious during the colonial period. Since, it has only grown more so – at least, to those who can handle the truth.

The various colonial regimes were by no means perfect. But to assert that their average quality of government service was anything but far better than either their predecessors, or their successors, is a political distortion of history which I have no trouble at all in comparing to Holocaust denial. Far more people were murdered in decolonization and postcolonial violence than in the Holocaust. Moreover, only a few fringe nutcases deny the Holocaust – whereas anticolonialism is a core tenet of everyone’s college education. Oops.

Read it.

Let us not, therefore, pretend that there is a deeply rooted ethos of ownership in America; the main tradition in our culture was conceived on wealth, not on property, and on “booming” not on “sticking” (to give Wendell Berry his two cents).  Tocqueville rightly found the sight vertiginous, a threat rather than an achievement in the first modern nation.  He correctly predicted it would aid in the creation of an elite plutocracy and the barbarization of the great masses.  Our culture seems even now to have a weak conception of what ownership and property really mean, and indeed this misconception contributed substantially to our present depressed economic condition.  The belief that housing was a financial investment, rather than an investment in a family’s long term stability and rootedness, led to a conception of property as measurable in terms of wealth.  But homes cannot be measured in terms of wealth primarily because, first, they cannot consistently and perpetually accrue in monetary value and, second, they are peculiarly illiquid assets — which suggests they should not be thought of as assets in any case.

Watch it.

“You see it was your identity. They said they were you!”
“And you believed them?”
“Yes, they stole your identity.”
“Well, I don’t know. I seem to still have my identity, whereas you seem to have lost several thousands of pounds. In light of that, I’m not sure why you think it was my identity that was stolen instead of your money.”

The problem isn’t “identity theft.” It’s bad security and verification processes by a financial institution.

The Hog is no longer doing politics.

It bothers me when the stock market rallies. I don’t want the economy to turn around until our immune system kills the socialist flu. If Obama’s Marxist approach fails to prevent a recovery, everyone on the left will say he saved us, and the swing voters in the middle will believe it, because they are the most gullible, least informed people on earth. Then we’ll get more socialism, and the economy will tank, and we’ll be told the answer is even more socialism, and before you know it, we’re Italy or Greece or England.

Nope, no politics. Just tools and God, not necessarily in that order. Politics has no room in this bus.

Jerry Pournelle goes back to first principles and takes a look at the whole thing.

Assertion: everyone has a right to health care.

Questions: from whence does the right come, and on whom falls the obligation to provide it or pay for it? How is that obligation acquired or imposed?

Read it.

This may not be all that funny to people who don’t (as I do) haunt the blogs of literary agents, but it’s still pretty funny.

As for the main protagonist – is it likely that children will relate to a fifty-something man with hairy feet who lives in a pit? Might I suggest making Bilbo younger and perhaps a tad less hairy?

Someone who looks like Elijah Wood, for example. (I’m sorry, I just can’t see Elijah Wood as being 55, which is the age Frodo is when he sets off from the Shire. But that’s me.)

Read it.

Now there’s a scary thought.

On the other hand, the Scots could use the business.

Read it.

If you find yourself trapped in the middle of the woods without electricity, running water, or a car you would likely describe that situation as a “nightmare” or “a worse case scenario like after plane crash or something.” White people refer to it as “camping.”

In theory camping should be a very inexpensive activity since you are literally sleeping on the ground. But as with everything in white culture, the more simple it appears the more expensive it actually is.

Read it.

While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone:….

I’m sure that “eat more arugula” is in there somewhere, but I’m too lazy to look for it.

Megan McArdle kicks ass.

I was writing about my deeper opposition to the entire project of providing, paying for, or otherwise guaranteeing health care.  Since for most people on the left, this is akin to declaring that I would like to take up killing orphans in my spare time, I outlined why I think that this is morally correct even if you take the liberal set of initial values, and don’t place any moral weight on taxation or other coercive action by the state.  I have voiced my various practical objections to the particular options on the table at various moments.  But the main thing is that I don’t want to give the government a greater role in health care markets.  Nay, not even if all the other countries . . . well, all the cool countries, anyway . . . are doing it.  To the liberals proclaiming that, unlike those of us in the conservative or libertarian camps, they are practical people just seeking the best way to make us all better off, I say:  I think your utilitarian calculus is badly wrong.

Read it.

Remember that the next time you watch one of those stupid action/adventure movies.

1. No, the CIA and the military don’t get the latest and greatest equipment. Typically their stuff is 20 years out of date, and was provided by the lowest bidder.

2. No, you can’t plunge through a plate glass window without getting cut all to shit. Ask an ER doctor if you don’t believe me.

3. No, not even Steven Segal can beat six armed opponents with bare hands. Don’t try this at home.

Arnold Kling is always worth reading.

Consider the following definition of freedom: the absence of monopoly.

The absence of monopoly means that you can exercise exit, even if you cannot exercise voice. The presence of monopoly means that, at most, you can exercise voice.

Read it.

You can find anything on the Internet.

Read it.

Don’t believe the surrender-monkeys.

Mencius Moldbug reveals the truth.

UR can deliver this remarkable savings in both time and tuition because, and only because, our “economics” is an entirely different product from the standard academic sausage. We’ve considered changing the word – but this feels hokey. It also conceals our feeling that (a) for most customers, UR’s “economics” is a more than satisfying replacement for 20th-century industrial numerology; and (b) our version is far closer to the original artisanal craft.

Megan McArdle says all that really needs to be said on the subject.

Whether a dish was dreamed up by Mario Batali or the staff at the Cheesecake Factory, preventing people from having it “for their own good” still represents an actual hedonic loss, as well as an actual loss of freedom.  You may think they have some meta-self which will thank you later, but their current self has still had both its liberty and its joy restricted.  Invoking the demon food scientists of agribusiness does not actually relieve you of the obligation to prove that intervening in the liberty of both the customers and the company is morally pressing.

Ultimately, the answer to “what could it hurt”? is that all actions have costs, which you cannot assume away on the grounds that those costs don’t interest you.  But they should interest you, because not least among those costs is the simple fact that the government cannot do everything well.  Making all sorts of changes in the name of obesity means not making others that might be more important, because we have limited political and bureaucratic bandwith.  Do you want obesity intervention, cap and trade, or health care reform?  You may not be able to have any of them.  But you probably can’t have all three.  And if you did, you’d make it more likely that the government would screw all of them up.