Steve Sailer discusses a fashionable problem in an unfashionable way.

Read it. Apparently dogs are smarter in some respects than wolves or chimps. Lord knows it can’t be due to hanging around with us.

Read it. Don’t know why this ought to come as a surprise to anyone.

Read it. Virtual worlds may be more useful than we think.

Read it. Most people think of a church as this building where you go to get preached at. How superficial.

Read it. The issues here are complicated, and raise moral questions with which each of us may one day have to deal.

Read it. Now that is just scary.

Cringely talkes about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs is anywhere close to what one might define as “normal,” but in these procedural things, Gates is a lot more normal than Jobs.

Don’t that just say it all?

Read it. Why people have this fetish about keeping large and heterogeneous “countries” intact has always puzzled me. India, for example, ought to be about 12 separate nations — because it is, these are places with different languages and different cultures. Similarly, Iraq ought to be three separate, more homogeneous states. Everyone would be a lot happier.

Paul Graham. I suspect he’s right.

Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to MIT or Harvard or Stanford must be smart. Even people who hate you for it believe it.

But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite college, how could this be true? We’re talking about a decision made by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on a cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applications submitted by seventeen year olds. And what do they have to go on? An easily gamed standardized test; a short essay telling you what the kid thinks you want to hear; an interview with a random alum; a high school record that’s largely an index of obedience. Who would rely on such a test?

I certainly can’t provide any evidence from my own life to prove him wrong.

Read it. I must confess to being curious as to where the “electronic book” thing is going to wind up.

Mencius Moldbug has, of course, his own unique take on the subject. As always, budget some time for this one.

Tyler Cowan discusses the gold standard.

Read it. Well, that ought to please the tree-huggers.

This would seem to solve all the problems involved in the illegal-immigration issue: Mexicans stay in Mexico and get good-paying jobs, they don’t have to pay California prices so they live better, and Americans get the produce they want. Win-win all the way around.

Of course, the Times, being the Times, has to whine about the potential loss of “supporting” jobs in the U.S. — but I suspect this really reflects the fears of their political patrons regarding loss of tax revenue. There’s nothing to prevent the people in these “supporting” jobs from moving to Mexico, too, and taking advantage of the lower cost of living.

Hey, they could start insisting that the Mexican government start printing everything in English as well as Spanish. Well, it’s only fair.

Read it. I’ve always thought that debit cards took care of that.

Tyler Cowan has his own take on it.

Read it. What, you mean that people betting on stuff is a better predictor than experts? Shocking, I tell you.

Read it. More evidence that evolution isn’t a theory but a fact.

Read it. This is what happens when you let economists eat out.

Read it. The French get with the program — and have difficulties Letting Go.

Read it. An interesting notion — it’ll never happen, but an interesting notion nevertheless.

Mencius Moldbug. For those who listen to modern music, “FT” meand “Financial Times”, the British equivalent of the Wall Street Journal if the Wall Street Journal were run by Democrats.

Although focused on financial markets (which some consider boring), this piece actually has some interesting things to say about life:

If our esteemed professor were actually to establish a prediction market in which people could make actual money by predicting Supreme Court decisions, he could actually pit the best models against the best experts, as selected not by his secretary, but by an adaptive system which rewards success and punishes failure. Heck, if he has a good model, he could actually make some scratch in the game. Maybe he could even detach himself from the Official Tit.

Now how can you resist reading anything written by someone who can write that?

Steve Sailer is always worth reading, not the least because I often agree with him. 😀

I’m not even sure where Huckabee is from. I think it’s that state, you know, the one you drive through to get to that other state.

It’s the one that people do their damnedest to get out of. You’ll notice that neither Bill nor Hillary live there any more. Can’t say that I blame them.

Read it. The concept of PhD economists at GenCon just boggles my mind.

Read it. Nick Gillespie is a wingnut libertarian, so this is a pretty good read.

Read it. The RSS slug for this story reveals the general tone:

What would happen if earth’s most invasive species — humans — were wiped out?

But it’s still worth reading. Unfortunately it doesn’t address the chief effect of humans being wiped out, which is that THERE WOULDN’T BE ANYBODY AROUND TO CARE, including the pain-in-the-ass environmentalists. Honestly, why these people don’t practice their principles and reduce the human impact on the planet by just killing themselves, I don’t know.

Read it. A useful look at the real estate situation, and a good illustration of the general principle that when clever financial people attempt to justify their clever ways of making pots of money for themselves by claiming that it’s “socially useful”, the consequent social pressure quickly redlines that new clever thing and the public eventually gets left holding the bag. (Think “savings and loan fiasco”.)

Tim Blair is dubious. But he has some suggestions nevertheless.

Read it. A trend? Maybe so, maybe not. But not the sort of thing your local small business can indulge in.

Read it. Funny how much better we’re doing now than we were back in AlGore’s Preferred Environment.

Read it. And don’t let the jargon scare you off; it’s explained fairly well, and an interesting notion.

Mencius Moldbug. Need I say more? Budget some time for this one.

Mencius Moldbug is at it again.

Read it.

Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine is a big fan: “Maintaining a virtual office has its drawbacks but so does having to see the goddamned people you work with every goddamn day.” I would have to agree.

Read it. My, how useful.

Read it. Everything bad is good for you.

I’m waiting for somebody to do a study about the anti-evolutionary effects of radical feminism.

Read it. I’ve cited the Dyson article before, making much the same points. I have to join David in being a “humanist” as opposed to “naturalist”.

Read it. Had I know that economists had this much fun, I’d have studied harder.

Read it. Perhaps you didn’t think that non-fiction books had an implicit theology. Well, you’d be wrong, bookstore breath.

I have a copy of Discover Your Inner Economist, and, although I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, I’ve glanced through it and look forward to digging into it at some point in My Copious Free Time.

Read it. More than you ever really wanted to know about Borneo. But the map is cool.

Read it. So the “Yuck!” reaction to homosexuality may have something behind it. (“No, no, we didn’t mean that…!”)

Read it. Aside from misspelling “squeamish”, he presents an interesting question.

Read it. These articles appear infrequently but they are almost always, as advertised, damn interesting.

Mickey Kaus has a great idea.

Better yet, we could have two rounds of primaries. Start with a full roster of non-delegate-selecting ‘beauty contests” in 2007, including in the big states. This would winnow the field. Then, just about the time buyer’s remorse sets in and we wonder if there’s not a better candidate, we could have the second round of real, official, delegate-binding primaries. …The candidates are already campaigning and debating as if its February, so this schedule couldn’t mean that much more work for them. Reporters would love it–they’d get to write about twice as many elections. And the campaigns would probably run out of money, reducing the impact of expensive TV ads! … Win-win-win.

Read it. More inconvenient truth. Who knew that AlGore’s dream of a future is our nightmare of a past?

Thomas Sowell discusses sqeamishness.

Read it. I guess enforcing the law actually works, huh. Whoda thunkit.

Arizona passed employer sanctions with a particular bite. Rather than set up an escalating series of fines, which has been the federal approach, the state opted to put employers out of business. A first offense gets a ten-day suspension of the firm’s business license, which would close the doors during that period. A subsequent offense revokes the business license permanently. Needless to say, that has provided an incentive to business owners to start checking identities through the federal database and terminating anyone who doesn’t clear the system.

Well — there it is. Pick the right fulcrum and you can move the world.

Proponents of federalism often refer to states as laboratories for political experiments. Arizona’s efforts on employer sanctions will prove an interesting test case for employer-based immigration sanctions.

The system works, given a chance.

Read it. Tyler Cowan is apparently an economist even when walking down the street. Not the sort of life I would choose, but it’s no doubt good to have at least one wandering around.

The only time I’ve ever bought a book solely because of its cover, it was Fellowship of the Ring, which I bought because the cover art made me think it was one of Andre Norton’s Witch World series. That worked out rather well.

Read it. An argument worth having. There are a lot of consumption tax fans out there; Bruce Bartlett takes ’em on.

The only good point I can see to a consumption tax is that it puts what you’re paying right in your face.

The bad points all cluster around the fact that it, too, will be a political football like the current tax code, with legislators carving out special favors for their favorite sob-story minority, untill (like the current system) the Crust and the Yobs pay nothing, while the productive middle class shoulders the entire burden.

UR does it again.

A European or American intellectual of 1907 would be shocked and appalled by the society of 2007 in many ways, but I think his general impression would be one of great mental conformity. It’s much easier to find popular opinions of 1907 that have no living parallel in 2007, than the reverse. (Gay rights is the only major innovation I can think of.) The process of memetic extinction is quite advanced.

Read it. I haven’t linked a pure libertarian piece in a while, so this is it.