Mark Cuban has an idea. Thanks, Roy.

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This is a great idea, and I hope it comes sooner rather than later.

Everyone involved in software development is familiar with having six or eight (very expensive) 400-page tomes on a particular subject that have to cover the whole of a particular tool (e.g. Integration Services) and so cannot do so in sufficient depth to really help out a developer who is stuck in some petty little quirk of the system. The problem is that there isn’t sufficient market to have a 100-page book devoted to, say, the Lookup Component (and if you don’t understand what that means, then you’ve never worked with Integration Services — not that there’s anything wrong with that….) to justify doing the whole write-and-publish-dead-tree-version process.

But e-books take us completely out of that high-friction world. To expand on the example that Joe used: Imagine a 25-page summary of Integration Services. For somebody seeking a broad overview, that will probably be sufficient — and, being a commercial product, it will be far more readable than the Defense-Department IBM-wannabe corporate tech-writer style of the Books On Line that come with the product.

However … say you wanted to know more about the Data Flow Task. Fine. For a few dollars more, you can buy an expansion of that section, and it will deal with that Task in depth.

And, if you’re really stuck in a problem, for a few dollars more you can get an even deeper treatment that tells you EVERYTHING THERE IS TO BE KNOWN about the Lookup task, including things that Microsoft would rather hide under the rug, preferably written by somebody who’s been bitten by that bug and had to work around it — somebody like Ken Henderson (and I’m not talking about the ball player).

I’d buy it. I don’t know anybody I’ve ever worked with who wouldn’t be delighted to have such a tool available.

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Scroll past the obligatory Palin stuff (pause to appreciate the poster).

The Left (which he calls the “revolution”) is not a unified ideology or agenda at all, but rather a way of seeing the world, and specifically it is an inversion of what normal people call common sense. And this inversion is the sole unifying factor, the one common thread running through the revolution since the 13th and 14th centuries

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Note that nobody is dying to get into Africa. What do they know that you don’t?

TheFatBigot shines a harsh light on the way the Ruling Class deal with “poverty”.

It makes me cringe to hear poverty defined by reference to a given percentage of average national income because there is no principle to it. The average and percentage used are just random choices and can be selected to suit political preconceptions. If we are to find a principle by which to define poverty we have to ask what poverty means in practice and extrapolate a principle from that. Logically there is a prior step, which is to decide whether we mean relative or absolute poverty and I have no doubt that we can only ever talk of relative poverty because it would be to abuse language to define someone with a weekly income of £50 in Britain as not being in poverty simply because such an income would provide very nicely for all their needs if they lived in a mud hut in deepest Africa.

This guy runs a curmudgeonly and well-thought blog. I highly recommend it.

TheFatBigot takes a look at economic stratification.

With food and fuel prices rising by huge amounts we will hear much over the coming months about poverty and it will all concentrate on money. It is quite right that money should feature high on the poverty agenda because most definitions of poverty look at nothing else. My intention is to address the monetary side of poverty in a series of ramblings over the next few weeks, but today I want to challenge the concept that a lack of money is an adequate definition of poverty.

Arnold Kling takes a hard look at an ugly aspect of our society.

How does the liberal elite view the American military? It seems to me that they view the military as a group of basically evil men, inclined to torture and commit war crimes. It would be better if we could do without a military, but they are ok as long as a good guy from the liberal elite is President, selecting their missions and controlling their excesses.

How does the liberal elite view entrepreneurs and business leaders? It seems to me that they view capitalists as a group of basically evil men, inclined to exploit workers and rip off consumers. It would be better if we could do without capitalists, but they are ok as long as good guys from the liberal elite are in power, delegating tasks to markets only when appropriate and regulating capitalists to control their excesses.

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Earlier this year, in response to yet another editorial somewhere where someone insisted that if something has a price of zero, it means that people don’t think it has any value, we pointed out that price and value are two different things. Price isn’t determined by value — it’s determined by the intersection of supply and demand. Value plays into that, by determining what the demand part is.

An excellent discussion of a distinction not commonly understood by the ignorati.

Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

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There is no difference in principle between how government should operate and how a cricket club committee should operate. Government exists to arrange the things that need to be arranged and to provide the facilities which are necessary for the people to be able to live their lives to best advantage. In the same way that cricket club members must pay for club facilities through their annual subscriptions and match fees so the people must pay for government organised facilities through tax. And in the same way that interference by the club committee with the actual playing of the game would be counterproductive, so is undue interference by government in the way we live our lives. What makes a cricket player tick is having a good ground to play on, a team to play with and the opportunity to use his own skills as well as he can.

Excellently put.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

The Chinese Olympic team flagbearer Yao Ming, the enormously tall Houston Rockets center who memorably led the Chinese in during the Opening Ceremonies next to the tiny hero boy who rescued two classmates buried in the recent earthquake, is the product of a more or less arranged marriage between the centers on the Chinese national men’s and women’s basketball teams.

The future, before our very eyes. Unless Islam takes over, of course.

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So much for photographic evidence.

Peggy Noonan reflects on the impact of mobility on American politics.

Mickey Kaus does an exercise in logic.

Yaacov Ben Moshe is brilliant again.

Almost everything you need to know about life you can learn from Marty Feldman.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Network effects are inevitable. It’s not a conspiracy, although, as always, there are paid promoters involved (for example, John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann was a lobbyist for the country of Georgia).

Read it.

Ever wonder how trees grow as tall as they do?

No, neither did I. But it’s an interesting read.

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The most importnt question we have to day is private property. Does stuff belong to the alleged owner, or to the State, with the alleged owner merely a temporary custodian?

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Ordinarily I detest sports metaphors but in this case, dealing with “grade inflation”, it’s very well done.

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Pundits like Thomas Frank deplore the role of interest-group lobbying, but aren’t we all part of some interest group or other?

The New Yorker continues to have some of the finest writing you will find anywhere.

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Over the weekend a crew came round my neighborhood offering to paint house numbers on the curb.  Large bold curb numbers, they pointed out, make it easier for emergency service workers to easily find houses in the dark.  Good arguments.  The price was good too.  Then I noticed my neighbors were having their numbers painted.  So of course, I declined.

I avoid flu shots on the same rationale. If everyone around me has had a flu shot, then I have no one to catch it from.

Steve Sailer gets really odd.

I got the first 31 in a row right for 620 grains of rice, so, morally speaking, I now get to go kick a cat or something.

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Social justice is a term that trips off the tongue of politicians when they are at their most earnest and their most evasive. “What can you do for me?” asks the man of the parliamentary candidate, the candidate looks him in the eye, lowers his voice and says in his most reassuring tone “I will bring you social justice.” Just two words act like Rennies after a vindaloo, all burning is negated and the hope of a good night’s sleep is increased. How can these words have that effect? The answer is simple, because they do not have an established meaning and, therefore, can be interpreted by the listener to mean anything he likes.

A reminder that the fight for the meaning of words is the most important fight there is.

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One consequence of the relaxation of the laws relating to homosexual activity is that we have lost the previous meaning of “unnatural” acts. Indeed, were any newspaper today to describe George Michael’s historical deeds in America as “unnatural” it would be inundated with letters and emails condemning its antediluvian attitude. Homosexuality is no longer “unnatural”. Yet the word is still in the dictionary, it needs a new meaning.

As luck would have it, at almost the same time that George Michael’s closet was opened, so was a new definition of “unnatural”. Today it means “industrial”. I will not linger on the question whether we need to find a new use for “industrial” because my concentration is all on “unnatural”. And how convenient it is that I said concentration because that is the key to the new meaning of today’s mot du jour. I mean, of course, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Being astute people, you might observe that no one has suggested CO2 to be anything other than a naturally occurring gas and you would be right. It is a very clever sleight of hand, you see, we can recognise CO2 as a natural product while implying that some CO2 is unnatural because of the way it is produced.

Read it.

Let this be a lesson to us all.

Tim Blair offers an Australian perspective.

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It’s all about Steve. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

As you know, my basic shtick is that, increasingly, specific government policies tend to matter less than the quantities and qualities of various populations. For example, Hong Kong became prosperous under free trade and laissez-faire, while Singapore became prosperous under protectionism and paternalism.

Thus, immigration policy is more central to the future of America than most of the controversies more welcome in the pages of the New York Times.

And he makes a good case for it. I’ve always said that there’s nothing wrong with New York that about a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t cure.

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An interesting perspective. The whole question of how to create a fair and effective examination is one which doesn’t appear to get a lot of serious thought.

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And, if you can, do you realize that you need to get a life?

Mencius Moldbug‘s call to action.

Our problem is democracy. Democracy is a dangerous, malignant form of government which tends to degenerate, sometimes slowly and sometimes with shocking, gut-wrenching speed, into tyranny and chaos. You’ve been taught to worship democracy. This is because you are ruled by democracy. If you were ruled by the Slime Beast of Vega, you would worship the Slime Beast of Vega. (A more earthly comparison is Communism or “people’s democracy,” whose claim to be a more advanced form of its Western cousin was perfectly accurate – if we mean “advanced” in the sense of, say, “advanced leukemia.”)

I’m loving it. (No, wait — that’s McDonalds….)

Read it.

Truest thing you’ll read today.

Steve Sailer takes a hard look at some recent trends in education … and politics.

One theory for why states and cities are raising their high school graduation requirements (Los Angeles now requires passing Algebra II to graduate) is that they are hoping to persuade their dumber students to move somewhere less demanding, and keep people with dumb kids from moving to the state in the first place.

The theory isn’t very plausible, however, because there’s little evidence that California’s politicians and educators are smart enough to understand it.

Read it.

Over the past several years, the highly educated coastal rich have been engaged in a little culture war with the inland corporate rich. This is a war over values, leadership styles and social networks.

Steve Sailer understands the essence.

Spiked

On the other hand, conspiracies do exist, and conspiracies run by very clever people do exist. Where does one draw the line?

Remember: the The Boy Who Cried Wolf did, eventually, see a wolf — and those who ignored him were the losers.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Today, though, I’m fascinated by the credulity of younger, well-educated people toward their elders, and the endurance of their bad old ideas. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, has been dead and gone for years, but the mellifluous old blowhard is still constantly cited by the relatively young as a great thinker whose golden ideas must remain unchallenged by we lesser mortals doomed to live in this age of brass.

Read it.

I believe politicians are the number-one cause of gastro-intestinal disorder. I think this is true because I get gas whenever a politician outlines his or her vision for America, or when they speak to us about morality, or lectures us about patriotism. I think this is because if anyone should refrain addressing such weighty issues, it is a politician – mostly because beyond the fact they’ve convinced some number of back-home voters that they deserve to be an elected official, politicians aren’t qualified to lecture me about any of these things — especially about Patriotism.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

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Is there any convincing evidence that actual Latino voters care as much about illegal immigrant legalization as Latino elected offiicials (or the journalists who cover them)?

Steve Sailer ruminates on some inconvenient truth.

Have you noticed that whenever some writer uses the words “vibrant” or “vibrancy” he is almost guaranteed to be yanking your chain? It’s just like how for so many years the phrase “in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate” always preceded utter bilge.

Whenever I read about “vibrant immigrant neighborhoods,” I wonder exactly which ones has the writer has been to, if any. Come to the vast immigrant neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley and check out the vibrancy: there isn’t any. They’re boring, tacky, and low-brow. There’s no culture beyond the video store. It was like that before, too, but 35 years ago we expected the place to improve a little with time, not regress.

Megan McArdle runs the numbers on the “universal childcare” fantasy.

The basic argument is that we should have highly skilled, quality childcare available for every child under the age of five in America. We should ensure this by paying a high wage and good benefits to those workers.

Let’s unpack this a little.

Turns out that, as with many popular socialist programs, we can’t afford it. But wait, there’s more.

There is something truly odd to me about highly educated people who simultaneously believe that they have something better to do than employ their degree in singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” seventy times a day, and also that there should be a large supply of bright, educated people who choose to do just that.

Megan McArdle brings up a very good point.

I’m hardly the first person to make this observation, but I don’t know why it isn’t noted more often: guns are the only weapon that equalizes strength between attacker and attacked. It’s the only time when men’s greater speed, strength, and longer reach make no difference; if you pull the trigger first, you win.

Read it.

Some people have entirely too much time on their hands.

Read it.

Arnold Kling is always worth reading.